Engelstalig

A compendium of the greatest thoughts, greatest minds and greatest books - listed in accessible and concise form - from one of the world's greatest scholars.

In April 1992 a twenty-four-year-old from the Washington, D.C., suburbs named Chris McCandless walked into the Alaska wilderness below Mt. McKinley with a small-caliber rifle and a ten-pound bag of rice. Four months later, his emaciated corpse was found at his campsite by a moose hunter. How McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild.

When Meredith bumps into her old school friend Rachel Hunter at the Chelsea Flower Show, she is shocked to discover that she was the first wife of her companion, Chief Inspector Markby. But the meeting is not the only surprise - before the afternoon is out, Markby has a death on his hands.

Few readers have failed to be charmed by the witty and independent spirit of Elizabeth Bennet. Her early determination to dislike Mr. Darcy - who is quite the most handsome and eligible bachelor in the whole of English literature - is a misjudgement only matched in folly by Darcy's arrogant pride. Their first impressions give way to truer feelings in a comedy profoundly concerned with happiness and how it might be achieved. Vivien Jones, in her new introduction to this Penguin Classics edition, shows how their romance is inseparable from the important social and political debates of Austen's time, and describes Pride and Prejudice as 'One of the most perfect, most pleasurable and most subtle - and therefore, perhaps, most dangerously persuasive - of romantic love stories.'.

The fiftieth anniversary edition of the essay that is now recognized as the first major work of feminist art theory—published together with author Linda Nochlin’s reflections three decades later.

Many scholars have called Linda Nochlin’s seminal essay on women artists the first real attempt at a feminist history of art. In her revolutionary essay, Nochlin refused to answer the question of why there had been no great women artists on its own corrupted terms, and instead, she dismantled the very concept of greatness, unraveling the basic assumptions that created the male-centric genius in art.

With unparalleled insight and wit, Nochlin questioned the acceptance of a white male viewpoint in art history. And future freedom, as she saw it, requires women to leap into the unknown and risk demolishing the art world’s institutions in order to rebuild them anew.

In this stand-alone anniversary edition, Nochlin’s essay is published alongside its reappraisal, Thirty Years After. Written in an era of thriving feminist theory, as well as queer theory, race, and postcolonial studies, Thirty Years After is a striking reflection on the emergence of a whole new canon. With reference to Joan Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, and many more, Nochlin diagnoses the state of women and art with unmatched precision and verve. Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? has become a slogan and rallying cry that resonates across culture and society. In the 2020s, Nochlin’s message could not be more urgent: as she put it in 2015, “There is still a long way to go.”

In the near future bees are extinct, until five unconnected individuals, in different parts of the world, are stung. Immediately snatched up by ominous figures in hazmat suits, interrogated separately in neutral Ikea-like chambers, and then released as 15- minute celebrities, into a world driven by the internet!

In those days in the early Sixties we were not women yet but girls. This was, without irony, perceived as our advantage. So begins I'll Take You There, an astonishingly intimate and unsparing self-portrait of a nameless young student who, though, gifted with a penetrating intelligence, is drastically inclined to obsession. Funny, mordant, and compulsive, Anellia (as she sometimes calls herself) falls passionately in love with a brilliant yet elusive black philosophy student. But she is tested most severely by a figure out of her past she'd long believed dead. Pitiless in exposing the follies of the time (the bizarre sisterhood of sororities, the self-lacerating extremes of the intellectual life), I'll Take You There is a dramatic revelation of the risks -- and curious rewards -- of the obsessive personality as well as a testament to the stubborn strength of a certain type of contemporary female intellectual.

In a retelling of an ancient Celtic myth about Angus, the god of love, youth, and beauty and a trickster who turns one's romantic dreams upside down, five young men named Angus parallel the god's story as they search for true love.

It has never occurred to Precious Ramotswe that there might be disadvantages to being the best-known lady detective in Botswana. But when she receives a threatening anonymous letter, she is compelled to reconsider her unconquerable belief in a kind world and good neighbours. While she ponders the identity of the letter-writer Mma Ramotswe has a further set of problems to solve, both professional and personal. There is an adopted child's poignant search for her true family, and Mr J. L. B. Matekoni's pursuit of an expensive miracle for their own foster daughter Motholeli. With these latest developments on Tlokweng Road, Alexander McCall Smith reveals with all his brilliant storytelling skill that there are very few troubles that cannot be solved with kindness, and very few dry seasons that do not end with welcome rain.

Typography, the art of designing printed words, was once the domain of an elite few artists but has become an area with which millions of people engage daily. The widespread usage of digital devices from laptops to tablets and smart phones which are used for written communications means that we are regularly asked to make decisions about the fonts, sizes, and layouts we use in our writing. This broadening engagement with the field of typography has led to a perceptible shift from debates about legibility and technicalities to conversations about which fonts best reflect the writer's personality or style.

In this Very Short Introduction, Paul Luna offers a broad definition of typography as design for reading, whether in print or on screens, where a set of visual choices are taken to make a written message more accessible, more easily transmitted, more significant, or more attractive. Considering the development of letterforms and the shapes of letter we use, Luna discusses the history behind our modern day letters and fonts, before considering the issues behind key typographic decisions, and the differences between printed and on-screen typography. Presenting any piece of typography as a fundamental design choice, Luna introduces the options available today, and explores the reasons why key typographic decisions are made.

ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Beginning with his bestselling debut, Flight of the Old Dog, ex-Air Force captain Dale Brown has redefined the modern military thriller. Now, in his New York Times bestseller Storming Heaven, Brown brings back the heroic Coast Guard admiral Ian Hardcastle in a tale of covert warfare that will leave reader hanging on the edge of their seats.

The acclaimed story of a timeless place that one day wakes up to find itself in the jaws of history: An exuberant mixture of history and romance, written with a wit that is incandescent (Los Angeles Times Book Review).

The place is the Greek island of Cephallonia, where gods once dabbled in the affairs of men and the local saint periodically rises from his sarcophagus to cure the mad. Then the tide of World War II rolls onto the island's shores in the form of the conquering Italian army.

Caught in the occupation are Pelagia, a willful, beautiful young woman, and the two suitors vying for her love: Mandras, a gentle fisherman turned ruthless guerilla, and the charming, mandolin-playing Captain Corelli, a reluctant officer of the Italian garrison on the island. Rich with loyalties and betrayals, and set against a landscape where the factual blends seamlessly with the fantastic, Corelli's Mandolin is a passionate novel as rich in ideas as it is genuinely moving.

The epic finale of the Latin American trilogy following The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts and Senior Vivo and the Coca Lord

While the economy of his small South American country collapses, President Veracruz joins his improbable populace of ex-soldiers, former guerrillas, unfrocked priests and reformed - though by no means inactive - whores, in a bizarre search for sexual fulfillment.

But for Cardinal Guzman, a man tormented by his own private daemons, their stupendous, hedonistic fiestas represent the epicentre of all heresies.Heresies that must be challenged with a horrifying new inquisition destined to climax in a spectacular confrontation...

An extraordinary feat of imagination... a sensuous, often farcical and ultimately optimistic argument for spiritual sanity - Time Out

with 50 illustrations

A broken kitchen appliance leads Bobbie Kaplowitz -- a single mother of a six-year-old son -- to a new understanding of love and life in the title story of In Case We're Separated, Alice Mattison's family chronicle of interrelated stories.

Spanning the twentieth century, In Case We're Separated looks at a family of Jewish immigrants in the 1920s and 1930s, and follows their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren as they all lead urban, emotionally turbulent lives against the backdrop of political assassinations, the Vietnam War, and the AIDS epidemic.

The title story, which appeared in Best American Short Stories 2002, begins with Bobbie in 1954 Brooklyn. Subsequent stories deal with Bobbie's son, Bradley, a gay man living outside Boston with his partner and playing detective after a cousin's girlfriend is assaulted at knifepoint.

Other stories concern two sisters: one is an editor, always trying to figure out just how Jewish she is, always trying to get through to her troubled sister. The sister, a would-be suicide during the 1960s and 1970s, reappears as a shaky Prozac miracle, helping others and scrambling to hold on to happiness in her middle-aged life. The sisters keep looking for the right man, and the next-to-the-last story includes a midlife wedding and the gathering of what remains of this varied clan.

The sisters' aunt Sylvia appears and reappears throughout the book. She's a schoolteacher who always knows what's best for everyone; later, she's a middle-aged woman still trying to hold on to hope -- and looking for her next affair -- despite an aging mother, an unhappy son, and the election of Ronald Reagan. Later still, with failing eyesight, she hangs on to dignity in her own old age, not wanting to ask her busy, professional daughter whether her shoes match.

Alice Mattison's recent novel The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman was called "quietly splendid" by the New York Times. The Los Angeles Times has called her a writer's writer. In In Case We're Separated, Mattison's gift for storytelling and ability to create rich, multidimentional characters prove, once again, that she is a master of her craft.

The hero of the novel is Charles-Victor Peniel, called Night-of-Amber,  whose lonely and angry childhood eventually lands him in Paris at the time of the May '68 riots. There, Charles-Victor becomes involved with a band of dangerous companions, and in a whirlwind situation that spins uncontrollably into sadism and murder.

Over landscapes ranging from northern California and the urban Southwest to the hills of eastern Kentucky and the Caribbean island of St Lucia, Barbara Kingsolver tells stories of hope, momentary joy and powerful endurance. In every setting her characters are bound by a strong sense of place and the compelling ties of love and family history: a child accepts the impossible responsibility of remembering her Cherokee great-grandmother's dying culture; a quietly dissolving couple must fight ghosts of past expectations to reach one another; a tough Mexican American woman finds herself in jail because of her commitment to a family legacy of 'doing the right thing.' With disarming honesty - at times comic but often heartrending - Barbara Kingsolver creates a world of love and possibility into which the reader is irresistibly drawn.

Shortlisted for the Folio Prize 2014

Longlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction

Reno mounts her motorcycle and sets a collision course for New York.

In 1977 the city is alive with art, sensuality and danger. She falls in with a bohemian clique colonising downtown and the lines between reality and performance begin to bleed.

A passionate affair with the scion of an Italian tyre empire carries Reno to Milan, where she is swept along by the radical left and drawn into a spiral of violence and betrayal.

The Flamethrowers is an audacious novel that explores the perplexing allure of femininity, fakery and fear. In Reno we encounter a heroine like no other.

Best Books of the Year in Guardian, New York Times, The Times, Observer, Financial Times, New Yorker, Telegraph, Slate, Oprah, Vogue, Time, Scotsman and Evening Standard

Shortlisted for the National Book Awards 2013

From the author of The Italian Teacher, this acclaimed debut novel set in Rome follows the topsy-turvy lives of the denizens of an English language newspaper.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY 
Janet Maslin, The New York Times • The Economist • NPR • Slate • The Christian Science Monitor • Financial Times • The Plain Dealer • Minneapolis Star Tribune • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Kansas City Star • The Globe and Mail • Publishers Weekly
 
Look in the back of the book for a conversation between Tom Rachman and Malcolm Gladwell

Fifty years and many changes have ensued since the paper was founded by an enigmatic millionaire, and now, amid the stained carpeting and dingy office furniture, the staff’s personal dramas seem far more important than the daily headlines. Kathleen, the imperious editor in chief, is smarting from a betrayal in her open marriage; Arthur, the lazy obituary writer, is transformed by a personal tragedy; Abby, the embattled financial officer, discovers that her job cuts and her love life are intertwined in a most unexpected way. Out in the field, a veteran Paris freelancer goes to desperate lengths for his next byline, while the new Cairo stringer is mercilessly manipulated by an outrageous war correspondent with an outsize ego. And in the shadows is the isolated young publisher who pays more attention to his prized basset hound, Schopenhauer, than to the fate of his family’s quirky newspaper.

As the era of print news gives way to the Internet age and this imperfect crew stumbles toward an uncertain future, the paper’s rich history is revealed, including the surprising truth about its founder’s intentions.

Spirited, moving, and highly original, The Imperfectionists will establish Tom Rachman as one of our most perceptive, assured literary talents.

In Fruitful, Roiphe tells the intimate, turbulent, compelling story of raising her own children in the gap between motherhood and feminism - and makes an eloquent plea for a new agenda. Roiphe s life is a perfect microcosm of change in the American family over the past thirty years. Married and a mother in her early twenties, she soon became a divorced single parent, raising her young daughter on her own. Remarriage and new motherhood brought great joy but also the complications of combining families and raising stepchildren. With heartbreaking candor, she details the difficult adaptations and painful rebellions that haunt a parent's conscience. Through it all, Roiphe keenly felt feminism's discomfort with the question of motherhood. Allowing the conservative right to co-opt the issue of family, feminism has sometimes overlooked the very real emotional and economic needs of mother just trying to make it through the day. Here, Roiphe crafts a unique pro-feminist/pro-family position that calls for fruitful dialogue on quality childcare, on including men as full partners in parenting, on defining family in ways that allow everyone to thrive.

Alice, a young editor working in New York, meets Ezra Blazer, a famous, much older writer, and they begin an affair. Yet with nearly fifty years between them, what draws them together, and how does it work. In its provocative, playful, and at times creepy depiction of their relationship, Asymmetry illuminates the attractions of knowledge, of intellectual prowess, of self-assurance; and those of youth, of flowering, of naivety and intellectual promise. Interrupting and interacting with their story is that of Amar, an Iraqi-American economist held at Heathrow on his way to visit his brother in Kurdistan, whose detention gives him cause to reflect on the course of his life. Asymmetry is an extraordinary study of the power plays between young and old, West and Middle East, luck and talent, fairness and injustice, and the personal and the political. It is also an inventive, utterly contemporary and dazzling debut that will charm, delight and disarm.

When Lolitawas first published in 1955 it created a sensation and established Nabokov as one of the most original prose writers of the twentieth century. This annotated edition, a revised and considerably expanded version of the 1970 edition, does full justice to the textual riches of Lolita, illuminating the elaborate verbal textures and showing how they contribute to the novel's overall meaning.

"This novel centres around eight hours in the life of the Author (unnamed), a man in his forties, a literary celebrity, who is in Tel Aviv on a stifling hot night to give a reading. Bored, he looks for distraction - and finds copy. In his head he conjures up the life stories of the people he meets, not least Ricky, an equally bored but seductive waitress. Later, even as the reading from his new book is underway, and the obligatory inane questions have come and gone ('Why do you write?' 'What is it like to be famous?' 'Do you write with a pen or on a computer?'), he weaves stories round the audience and the panel." "Afterwards, the Author invites the professional reader who took part for a drink before walking her home; but she lives opposite and declines, and he wanders off into the dark. Later he returns, climbs the many flights of stairs to her flat, where she lives alone with her cat ... Or does he? The reader never quite knows where reality ends and invention begins in this --

A selection of George Orwell's prescient, clear-eyed and stimulating writing on the subjects of truth and lies. With an introduction by Alan Johnson.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two equals four. If that is granted, all else follows.

This selection of George Orwell’s writing, from both his novels and non-fiction, gathers together his thoughts on the subject of truth. It ranges from discussion of personal honesty and morality, to freedom of speech and political propaganda. Orwell’s unique clarity of thought and illuminating scepticism provide the perfect defence against our post-truth world of fake news and confusion.

The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.

Includes an introduction by Alan Johnson and passages from Burmese Days, The Road to Wigan Pier, Coming Up for Air, The Lion and the Unicorn, Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwells letters, war-time diary, criticism and essays including Fascism and Democracy, Culture and Democracy, Looking Back on the Spanish War, As I Please, Notes on Nationalism, The Prevention of Literature, Politics and the English Language and Why I Write.

With Leap, Terry Tempest Williams, award-winning author of Refuge, offers a sustained meditation on passion, faith, and creativity-based upon her transcendental encounter with Hieronymus Bosch's medieval masterpiece The Garden of Delights.

Williams examines this vibrant landscape with unprecedented acuity, recognizing parallels between the artist's prophetic vision and her own personal experiences as a Mormon and a naturalist. Searing in its spiritual, intellectual, and emotional courage, Williams's divine journey enables her to realize the full extent of her faith and through her exquisite imagination opens our eyes to the splendor of the world.

All the stories in Tales of the Night take place on the night of the 19th March 1929. All show different facets of love -love as violence, love as redemption, as suffering, as wisdom. Each has as a theme a particular discipline- mathematics, dance, law, visual arts, medicine, drama and astronomy. A young mathematician is led to an understanding of Europe's 19th century Scramble for Africa by a meeting with a fellow train passenger who reveals himself to be Joseph Conrad. A respected judge confesses his love for a young homosexual who he has convicted of immorality. A small, insular town is ravaged by a smallpox epidemic. Set in the Congo, on a small sailing boat off Lisbon, in the Baltic archipelago and in the author's native Denmark, these intricate and surprising stories, powerfully but wonderfully influenced by the work of Karen Blixen, amount to a rich and rewarding book.

Introduction and Notes by David Blair. University of Kent at Canterbury.

It is 1757. Across north-eastern America the armies of Britain and France struggle for ascendancy. Their conflict, however, overlays older struggles between nations of native Americans for possession of the same lands and between the native peoples and white colonisers. Through these layers of conflict Cooper threads a thrilling narrative, in which Cora and Alice Munro, daughters of a British commander on the front line of the colonial war, attempt to join their father. Thwarted by Magua, the sinister 'Indian runner', they find help in the person of Hawkeye, the white woodsman, and his companions, the Mohican Chingachgook and Uncas, his son, the last of his tribe.

Cooper's novel is full of vivid incident- pursuits through wild terrain, skirmishes, treachery and brutality- but reflects also on the interaction between the colonists and the native peoples. Through the character of Hawkeye, Cooper raises lasting questions about the practises of the American frontier and the eclipse of the indigenous cultures.