Daisy's Pushkin Duel
Daisy's Pushkin Duel

Author: Nick Aaron

Publisher: Another Imprint Publishers

Published: 2021-11-14

Total Pages: 124

ISBN-13:

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In 1949 Daisy Hayes had a patient more or less her own age, Odile Speed, with whom she had a good rapport at once, and who told her about a strange kind of duel, interrupted for many years, from a short story by Pushkin. Then on Christmas Eve of 1952 our blind sleuth extraordinaire stumbled on the scene of a murder just being committed. She bumped into the culprit and the victim died in her arms. The police interrogated her at once. But soon it became clear that the testimony of a blind witness was bound to be worthless in a court of law, the results of the coroner’s inquest were inconclusive at best, and it seemed that the murderer, whoever he was, would get away scot-free. It was only in 1986, during a stay in Zermatt with her old friend Beatrice, that Daisy was confronted again with this ‘cold case’. She then experienced first-hand what it is like to fight your own version of a ‘Pushkin duel’ to the bitter end.

Berlin Fall
Berlin Fall

Author: Nick Aaron

Publisher: Another Imprint Publishers

Published: 2021-11-10

Total Pages: 147

ISBN-13:

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While treating a patient in the fall of 1972, Daisy managed to winkle out of him that he worked for MI6. Then she blabbed about a planned visit to East Berlin with her friend Margery, who was a chemistry researcher at King’s College. Back at the office, the man asked his spooks to do some background checks. It turned out that without even knowing it his blind physiotherapist and her chum had an indirect connection to a high-ranking communist party boss… Meanwhile, in East Berlin, clever operatives of the GDR secret services realized that Margery must know some pretty vital scientific secrets. They decided to put Hans Konradi on the case during the visit of the two Englishwomen to Ost. Young Hans was not an agent, just a charming student with fluent English who could easily be pressured into spying for his country. But Hans had an agenda of his own, and ‘Operation Berlin Fall’ did not turn out the way the spymasters on both sides of the Wall had envisioned. “Nick Aaron tries his hand at a spy mystery but the result is more like an unintended comedy with a tragic love story thrown in. Failure can be entertaining, however, and who needs another pompous spy opera?” - The Weekly Banner

D for Daisy
D for Daisy

Author: Nick Aaron

Publisher: Another Imprint Publishers

Published: 2018-05-25

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13:

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The murder victim's wife was blind World War II. During the attacks on Berlin in the winter of 1943-44, wave after wave of British bombers swept over northern Europe and dropped their lethal loads on the German capital. A fair percentage of the bombers would fail to return from these 'ops', and RAF planners calculated the life expectancy of the airmen in weeks rather than months. Therefore it did not seem strange when a Lancaster named D-Daisy landed at its base in England after a bombing run, and a member of the crew was found dead. However, one person soon came to the conclusion that this man had been murdered. And the person who discovered this happened to be blind since birth. Her name was Daisy and she was the victim’s wife. She was very blonde and very pretty; also very young. That's why no one would listen to her. So she had to find the killer on her own

To See Paris and Die
To See Paris and Die

Author: Eleonory Gilburd

Publisher: Belknap Press

Published: 2018-12-28

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 0674980719

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A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year Winner of the AATSEEL Prize for Best Book in Cultural Studies Winner of the Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies Winner of the Marshall D. Shulman Book Prize Winner of the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize The Soviet Union was a notoriously closed society until Stalin’s death in 1953. Then, in the mid-1950s, a torrent of Western novels, films, and paintings invaded Soviet streets and homes, acquiring heightened emotional significance. To See Paris and Die is a history of this momentous opening to the West. At the heart of this history is a process of translation, in which Western figures took on Soviet roles: Pablo Picasso as a political rabble-rouser; Rockwell Kent as a quintessential American painter; Erich Maria Remarque and Ernest Hemingway as teachers of love and courage under fire; J. D. Salinger and Giuseppe De Santis as saviors from Soviet clichés. Imported novels challenged fundamental tenets of Soviet ethics, while modernist paintings tested deep-seated notions of culture. Western films were eroticized even before viewers took their seats. The drama of cultural exchange and translation encompassed discovery as well as loss. Eleonory Gilburd explores the pleasure, longing, humiliation, and anger that Soviet citizens felt as they found themselves in the midst of this cross-cultural encounter. The main protagonists of To See Paris and Die are small-town teachers daydreaming of faraway places, college students vicariously discovering a wider world, and factory engineers striving for self-improvement. They invested Western imports with political and personal significance, transforming foreign texts into intimate belongings. With the end of the Soviet Union, the Soviet West disappeared from the cultural map. Gilburd’s history reveals how domesticated Western imports defined the last three decades of the Soviet Union, as well as its death and afterlife.

A Book of Secrets
A Book of Secrets

Author: Michael Holroyd

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2011-08-02

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1429969210

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A Time Magazine Top 10 Nonfiction book of 2011 A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction title for 2011 On a hill above the Italian village of Ravello sits the Villa Cimbrone, a place of fantasy and make-believe. The characters that move through Michael Holroyd's new book are destined never to meet, yet the Villa Cimbrone unites them all. A Book of Secrets is a treasure trove of hidden lives, uncelebrated achievements, and family mysteries. With grace and tender imagination, Holroyd brings a company of unknown women into the light. From Alice Keppel, the mistress of both the second Lord Grimthorpe and the Prince of Wales; to Eve Fairfax, a muse of Auguste Rodin; to the novelist Violet Trefusis, the lover of Vita Sackville-West—these women are always on the periphery of the respectable world. Also on the margins is the elusive biographer, who on occasion turns an appraising eye upon himself as part of his investigations in the maze of biography. In A Book of Secrets, Holroyd gives voice to fragile human connections and the mystery of place.

Gogol's Head
Gogol's Head

Author: U. R. Bowie

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2017-07-15

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9781548244149

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Replete with Gogolian absurdity and high comedy, GOGOL'S HEAD features Nikolai Gogol himself in semi-fictional scenes; the book is written in a parody of Gogol's own style. In June, 1931, the body of Nikolai Gogol, great writer of the Russian land, was exhumed at the Danilov Monastery in Moscow, where Gogol's remains had rested since his death in 1852. When the coffin was opened the head was missing. Or was it? What about other myths? Was the body turned on its side, or upside down; were there scratch marks on the underside of the coffin lid? In his lifetime Gogol's contemporaries sought incessantly to figure out this inscrutable man. They never could, so they made up stories about him. GOGOL'S HEAD examines the implications of one such story. It tells the tale of the missing head's fate. Mixing in details from the life of the writer to create a hybrid work-a blend of biography and fiction-the book introduces one Adrian Lee Nule: a graduate student in Russian literature and a Gogolian character in his own right. Researcher Nule pursues the head in its new life, as pawn in the evil machinations of Joseph Stalin, then strives to consummate the mystical third finding of the great master's head.

How to Be Brave
How to Be Brave

Author: Daisy May Johnson

Publisher: Henry Holt and Company (BYR)

Published: 2021-07-06

Total Pages: 413

ISBN-13: 1250796091

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Daisy May Johnson's How to Be Brave is a delightfully zany yet heartwarming middle-grade novel about a young girl who bands together with her boarding school friends to find her missing mother. Calla North and her mother Elizabeth live a quiet but happy life together. Elizabeth happens to be the world's leading expert on ducks—but unfortunately, being an expert on ducks doesn't always pay the bills (no pun intended). When Elizabeth is offered a well-paid research trip to the Amazon, it's an opportunity too good to miss. But while her mother’s off exploring, Calla winds up at boarding school. No adventures are likely to find her there—or so she thinks. Then Calla receives the terrible news that her mother's plane has gone missing. Can Calla, her friends, and a motley crew of nuns defeat an evil new headmistress and find Elizabeth before it’s too late?