Private investigator Philip Marlowe is 42 years old and does not exercise. His sport is chess yet he does not play against anybody. He just replays games of chess masters and solves chess puzzles. His brushes with danger and death he just narrates matter-of-factly. In one scene a rich, powerful, mean-spirited guy comes to his office. After some tough guy dialogue Marlowe slugs the visitor which made the latter double up in pain while his bodyguard--certainly armed--is just outside. When Marlowe later meets the bodyguard he insults him on his face. Yet they left Marlowe unharmed. Marlowe...
Plath's only novel, but a famous one, with strong elements of autobiography. It is 1953, and Esther Greenwood has just arrived in New York City: she and eleven others have won a contest, the prize being one month of employment at a famous fashion magazine. But afterwards, depression sets in... Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. Born in Boston, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College at the University of Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a poet and writer. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956, and they...
On the surface, the novel is a love story between the protagonist American Jake Barnes—a man whose war wound has made him impotent—and the promiscuous divorcée Lady Brett Ashley. Brett's affair with Robert Cohn causes Jake to be upset and break off his friendship with Cohn; her seduction of the 19-year-old matador Romero causes Jake to lose his good reputation among the Spaniards in Pamplona. Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was an American writer of novels and short stories. Born in Chicago, he was grew up in the prosperous suburb of Oak Park. Excelling in English at school, he became a junior...
2015 Reprint of the Original Edition of 1929. "A Room of One's Own" is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published in 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers of and characters in fiction, the manuscript for the delivery of the series of lectures, titled "Women and Fiction", and hence the essay, are considered non-fiction. The essay is generally seen as a feminist text, and is noted in its argument for both a...
Detective-story master Dashiell Hammett gives us yet another unforgettable read in Red Harvest: When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty--even if that meant taking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain....
Mere Christianity is C.S. Lewis's forceful and accessible doctrine of Christian belief. First heard as informal radio broadcasts and then published as three separate books - The Case for Christianity, Christian Behavior, and Beyond Personality - Mere Christianity brings together what Lewis saw as the fundamental truths of the religion. Rejecting the boundaries that divide Christianity's many denominations, C.S. Lewis finds a common ground on which all those who have Christian faith can stand together, proving that "at the centre of each there is something, or a Someone, who against all...
The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis is a classic masterpiece of religious satire that entertains readers with its sly and ironic portrayal of human life and foibles from the vantage point of Screwtape, a highly placed assistant to "Our Father Below." At once wildly comic, deadly serious, and strikingly original, C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters is the most engaging account of temptation—and triumph over it—ever written....
Thomas Stearns Eliot, better know as T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) was an American poet and dramatist. He exercised a strong influence on Anglo-American culture from the 1920s until late in the twentieth century. English poetry was revitalised through his experimentation. He threw out the old and created his own style. The publication of Four Quartets led to his recognition as the greatest living English poet and man of letters, and in 1948 he was awarded both the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature.--Encyclopaedia Britannica....
For two decades, self-taught mathematician Henry E. Dudeney wrote a puzzle page, "Perplexities," for The Strand Magazine. Martin Gardner, longtime editor of Scientific American's mathematical games column, hailed Dudeney as "England's greatest maker of puzzles," unsurpassed in the quantity and quality of his inventions. This compilation of Dudeney's long-inaccessible challenges attests to the puzzle-maker's gift for creating witty and compelling conundrums. This treasury of intriguing puzzles begins with a selection of arithmetical and algebraical problems, including challenges involving...
Years in the making, Sarah J. Maas's #1 New York Times bestselling Throne of Glass series draws to an epic, unforgettable conclusion. Aelin Galathynius's journey from slave to king's assassin to the queen of a once-great kingdom reaches its heart-rending finale as war erupts across her world. . . Aelin has risked everything to save her people-but at a tremendous cost. Locked within an iron coffin by the Queen of the Fae, Aelin must draw upon her fiery will as she endures months of torture. Aware that yielding to Maeve will doom those she loves keeps her from breaking, though her resolve...
