Shaun Whiteside
Author
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pub. Date
2019
Language
English
Formats
Description
Michel Houellebecq's Serotonin is a caustic, frightening, hilarious, raunchy, offensive, and politically incorrect novel about the decline of Europe, Western civilization, and humanity in general.
Deeply depressed by his romantic and professional failures, the aging hedonist and agricultural engineer Florent-Claude Labrouste feels he is "dying of sadness." He hates his young girlfriend, and the feeling is almost certainly mutual;
Author
Language
English
Description
"The Nazi regime preached an ideology of physical, mental, and moral purity. But as Norman Ohler reveals in this gripping new history, the Third Reich was saturated with drugs. On the eve of World War II, Germany was a pharmaceutical powerhouse, and companies such as Merck and Bayer cooked up cocaine, opiates, and, most of all, methamphetamines, to be consumed by everyone from factory workers to housewives to millions of German soldiers. In fact,...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"A revelatory history of the transformational decade after World War II when Germany raised itself out of the ashes of defeat, turned away from fascism, and reckoned with the corruption of its soul, and the horrors of the Holocaust"--
The years 1945 to 1955 were a raw, wild decade that found many Germans politically, economically, and morally bankrupt. Victorious Allied forces occupied the four zones that make up present-day Germany. More than half...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
One of Italy’s brightest literary lights reinvents travel writing with a seductive, intoxicating celebration of the magical saltwater city
“Venice is a fish,” writes Tiziano Scarpa. “It’s like a vast sole stretched out against the deep. How did this marvelous beast make its way up the Adriatic and fetch up here, of all places?” Paying homage to his native city in a lyrical and evocative style, he guides...
“Venice is a fish,” writes Tiziano Scarpa. “It’s like a vast sole stretched out against the deep. How did this marvelous beast make its way up the Adriatic and fetch up here, of all places?” Paying homage to his native city in a lyrical and evocative style, he guides...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"The lunacy of the final months of World War II, as experienced by a young German soldier. Distant, silent, often drunk, Walter Urban is a difficult man to have as a father. But his son -- the narrator of this slim, harrowing novel -- is curious about Walter's experiences during World War II, and so makes him a present of a blank notebook in which to write down his memories. Walter dies, however, leaving nothing but the barest skeleton of a story...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"In this sensuous and moving memoir, a young man forms a powerful connection with deer while living alone in the woods for seven years. Geoffroy Delorme does not fit in the human world. As a boy, he dreams of transforming into a fox so he can escape into the forest. As he gets older, he disappears into the woods at night, drawn to the rhythms of animal life. One night, an encounter with a deer changes his life: from then on, he knows he wants to live...
7) Sorry
Author
Pub. Date
2011
Language
English
Formats
Description
Kris, Tamara, Wolf, and Frauke are four young friends with too much time on their hands and one big idea: an agency called Sorry. Unfair dismissals, the wrongly accused, jilted lovers: everyone has a price and the Sorry team will find out what that is. It's as simple as that. The idea catches on like wildfire and the quartet are soon raking in the cash, doing the emotional dirty work for fat cats, businessmen, and the romantically challenged. But...
Author
Publisher
Melville House
Language
English
Formats
Description
International Bestseller: This “absolute gem of a book” offers a month-by-month account of the year before World War I—one of the most exciting times in the 20th century (The Observer).
“A sexy, comic and occasionally heartbreaking soap opera” for history buffs interested in 20th-century art, music, and literature (Washington Post).
It was the year Henry Ford first put a...
“A sexy, comic and occasionally heartbreaking soap opera” for history buffs interested in 20th-century art, music, and literature (Washington Post).
It was the year Henry Ford first put a...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"A singular man in the history of modern art, betrayed by Vichy, is the subject of this riveting family memoir On September 20, 1940, one of the most famous European art dealers disembarked in New York, one of hundreds of Jewish refugees fleeing Vichy France. Leaving behind his beloved Paris gallery, Paul Rosenberg had managed to save his family, but his paintings--modern masterpieces by Cézanne, Monet, Sisley, and others--were not so fortunate....
11) Time is a killer
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"In the summer of 2016, Clotilde is spending her vacation in Corsica with her husband Franck and her teenage daughter Valentine. It is the first time she has been back to the island since the car accident in which her parents and her brother were killed decades earlier. She was in the car too, but miraculously escaped with her life ... When a mysterious letter signed "Palma"--Clotilde's mother--arrives, the truth about her family, her parents' death,...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"From the author of the "wonderfully ingenious" (Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review) novel After the Crash, a thrilling tale of a murder that takes place in Claude Monet's garden and the mystery that surrounds it. Giverny, France. During the day, the town is the home of the famous artist Claude Monet and the gardens where he painted his Water Lilies. But once the tourists have gone, there is a darker side to the peaceful French village....
13) Lea
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
From the author of the international bestseller Night Train to Lisbon, a riveting novel about a father's boundless love for his daughter as her obsessive desire to become a concert violinist drives them both to the brink of destruction.
14) Brother of sleep
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
The story of Elias Alder, a 19th Century German peasant who could not read music, but could hear and could imitate every sound in the world. He learned to play the organ and his concert--to which he arrived barefoot--was a sensation. Too gifted for his station, he committed suicide by not sleeping.
15) The weekend
Author
Language
English
Description
Reuniting in a secluded country home after decades apart, a group of old friends and lovers exchange clandestine judgments on their divergent paths and celebrate the pardon of one of their number, a convicted murderer and terrorist.
16) The wall
Author
Series
New Directions paperbook volume 1537
Language
English
Formats
Description
"While vacationing in a hunting lodge in the Austrian mountains, a middle-aged woman awakens one morning to find herself separated from the rest of the world by an invisible wall. With a cat, a dog, and a cow as her sole companions, she learns how to survive and cope with her loneliness. Allegorical yet deeply personal and absorbing, The Wall is at once a critique of modern civilization, a nuanced and loving portrait of a relationship between a woman...
Author
Publisher
Penguin Press
Pub. Date
2023.
Language
English
Description
"A soaring intellectual narrative starring the radical, brilliant, and provocative philosophers Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, and Ayn Rand by the critically acclaimed author of Time of the Magicians, Wolfram Eilenberger. The period from 1933 to 1943 was one of the darkest and most chaotic in human history, as the Second World War unfolded with unthinkable cruelty. It was also a crucial decade in the dramatic, intersecting lives of...
Author
Publisher
Penguin Press
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
"A grand narrative of the intertwining lives of Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Ernst Cassirer, major philosophers whose ideas shaped the twentieth century The year is 1919. The horror of the First World War is still fresh for the protagonists of Time of the Magicians, each of whom finds himself at a crucial juncture. Benjamin, whose life is characterized by false starts and unfinished projects, is trying to flee his overbearing...
19) The last dragon
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Struggling to survive in a post apocalyptic world after his village is destroyed, Yorsh, the earth's last elf, must embark on a perilous quest to decipher a powerful prophecy and find the last dragon, who holds the key to saving the world from the Dark Age that has begun.
Author
Publisher
Bloomsbury Continuum
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Description
"A startling account of corruption and hypocrisy at the heart of the Vatican. In the Closet of the Vatican exposes the rot at the heart of the Vatican and the Roman Catholic Church today. This brilliant piece of investigative writing is based on four years' authoritative research, including extensive interviews with those in power. The celibacy of priests, the condemnation of the use of contraceptives, countless cases of sexual abuse, the resignation...