Graveyard of Bitter Oranges
Graveyard of Bitter Oranges

Author: Josef Winkler

Publisher:

Published: 2015-11-05

Total Pages: 486

ISBN-13: 9781940625140

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In 1979, Josef Winkler appeared on the literary horizon as if from nowhere, collecting numerous honors and the praise of the most prominent critical voices in Germany and Austria. Throughout the 1980s, he chronicled the malevolence, dissipation, and unregenerate Nazism endemic to Austrian village life in an increasingly trenchant and hallucinatory series of novels. At the decade's end, fearing the silence that always lurks over the writer's shoulder, he abandoned the Hell of Austria for Rome: not to flee, but to come closer to the darkness. There, he passes his days and nights among the junkies, rent boys, gypsies, and transsexuals who congregate around Stazione Termini and Piazza dei Cinquecento, as well as in the graveyards and churches, where his blasphemous reveries render the most hallowed rituals obscene. Traveling south to Naples and Palermo, he writes down his nightmares and recollections and all that he sees and reads, engaged, like Rimbaud, in a rational derangement of the senses, but one whose aim is a ruthless condemnation of church and state and the misery they sow in the lives of the downtrodden. Equal parts memoir, dream journal, and scandal sheet, the novel is, in the author's words, a cage drawn around the horror. Writing here is an act of commemoration and redemption, a gathering of the bones of the forgotten dead and those outcast and spit on by society, their consecration in art, and their final repatriation to the book's titular graveyard.

When the Time Comes
When the Time Comes

Author: Josef Winkler

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 9781940625010

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In the years before the Second World War, a man throws a statue of the crucified Christ over a waterfall. Later, in Hitler's trenches, he loses his arms to an enemy grenade. The blasphemer, screaming in agony, presided over by Satan, who pours a cup of gall into his open mouth, is portrayed amid the flames of Hell in a painting by the parish priest that is mounted on a calvary where the two streets in the cross-shaped village meet. Thus begins When the Time Comes, Josef Winkler's chronicle of life in rural Austria written in the form of a necrology, tracing the benighted destiny of a community through its suicides and the tragic deaths that befall it, punctuated by the invocation of the bone-cooker whose viscous brew is painted on the faces of the work horses and the haunting stanzas of Baudelaire's "Litanies of Satan." In a hypnotic, incantatory prose reminiscent at times of Homer, at times of the Catholic liturgy, at times of the naming of the generations in the book of Genesis, When the Time Comes is a ruthless dissection of the pastoral novel, laying bare the corruption that lies in its heart. Writing in the vein of his compatriots Peter Handke, and Elfriede Jelinek, but perhaps going further in his relentlessness and aesthetic radicalism, Josef Winkler is one of the most significant European authors working today.

Bitter Oranges
Bitter Oranges

Author: D. Patrick Georges

Publisher: Xlibris Corporation

Published: 2009-07-06

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 1462802761

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Many men dream of living out their James Bond fantasy, the screen version: exotic travel, adventure, hot women, and icy martinis shaken not stirred. Reality proves different when an innocent quest for a simpler, more spiritual life turns into a nightmare as two seekers, ordinary Americans, stumble across the path of the covert operations of two world powers and become unwilling spies. This book takes the reader from where the author’s previous book Smarter than Snakes left off. Accused by the woman he loves of using and betraying her and haunted by secret agents of the shadow government, the damned hero of the story seeks sanctuary off the gringo trail in Saudi Arabia. There, under the guidance of a top American lobbyist working for a Saudi billionaire, he assesses his options and opts to move to Greece under an assumed name. Thinking he is safe from the murderous secret agents of the shadow government that operates under the façade of democracy, equality, human rights and other myths, he resumes his quest for a more spiritual life that leads only to wild goose chases. He finds comfort in the arms of a woman whom he considers the true love of his life, but his world comes crashing down when secret agents of this shadow government mistakenly assassinate her instead of him. Crushed and guilt-ridden, he seeks the help of the powerful American lobbyist who helped him in Saudi Arabia. Thanks to his extensive list of contacts, the lobbyist facilitates the protagonist’s escape to a remote island, an Eden-like setting but without fickle Eves and venomous Serpents. The cold, hard facts to back up the truths that hold this work together and the lavish descriptions of the hero’s experience of such spectacular events as hitching a ride on a billionaire’s floating palace, staying at the first seven-star all-suite hotel, flying on the Concorde, touring Greek locations and attending unusual ceremonies and rites in Scotland, Spanish Africa and Papua New Guinea, make for a rich, riveting story that holds one's interest through to the very end. NOTE: This book contains strong intellectual material that may be disturbing to some religious believers. Reader discretion is advised.

Bitter Orange
Bitter Orange

Author: Claire Fuller

Publisher: Tin House Books

Published: 2018-10-09

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1947793160

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An NPR Best Book of the Year "Unsettling and eerie, Bitter Orange is an ideal chiller." —Time Magazine From the author of Our Endless Numbered Days and Swimming Lessons, Bitter Orange is a seductive psychological portrait, a keyhole into the dangers of longing and how far a woman might go to escape her past. From the attic of Lyntons, a dilapidated English country mansion, Frances Jellico sees them—Cara first: dark and beautiful, then Peter: striking and serious. The couple is spending the summer of 1969 in the rooms below hers while Frances is researching the architecture in the surrounding gardens. But she’s distracted. Beneath a floorboard in her bathroom, she finds a peephole that gives her access to her neighbors' private lives. To Frances’s surprise, Cara and Peter are keen to get to know her. It is the first occasion she has had anybody to call a friend, and before long they are spending every day together: eating lavish dinners, drinking bottle after bottle of wine, and smoking cigarettes until the ash piles up on the crumbling furniture. Frances is dazzled. But as the hot summer rolls lazily on, it becomes clear that not everything is right between Cara and Peter. The stories that Cara tells don’t quite add up, and as Frances becomes increasingly entangled in the lives of the glamorous, hedonistic couple, the boundaries between truth and lies, right and wrong, begin to blur. Amid the decadence, a small crime brings on a bigger one: a crime so terrible that it will brand their lives forever.

One Thousand & One
One Thousand & One

Author: KARI. HUKKILA

Publisher: Contra Mundum Press

Published: 2023-12-31

Total Pages: 34

ISBN-13: 1940625629

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Kari Hukkila’s One Thousand & One is a philosophical, essayistic novel about catastrophes, both natural and man-made, about humans’ ability to respond to catastrophes by thinking or, at the very least, simply managing to survive. Hukkila’s novel is a cornucopia of micro-histories, digressions, and a broad gallery of characters ranging from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to an Ethiopian refugee in Rome. One Thousand & One begins when a large birch tree falls on a cabin near the Russian border in eastern Finland, leaving the narrator unable to concentrate on a writing project he has been at work on. He decides then to take up an invitation to Rome, where his lifelong friend has lived since abandoning a life in philosophy. In Hukkila’s novel, Scheherazade’s survival by continuing to tell stories is reimagined as survival by continuing to think, a continued thought activity, often taken to extremes, the preservation of humanity in an inhumane world. In David Hackston’s eloquent translation, Hukkila’s musical, meandering, thought-provoking prose is full of savage, ironic, and luminous humor, remaining uncompromisingly alive until the final sentence. One Thousand & One is the first in a projected series of five novels. Upon its release in Finland in 2016 it was said to bear “all the hallmarks of a classic.”

A Father
A Father

Author: Sibylle Lacan

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2019-06-11

Total Pages: 101

ISBN-13: 0262039311

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The daughter of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan tries to make sense of her relationship with her father. “When I was born, my father was already no longer there.” Sibylle Lacan's memoir of her father, the influential French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, is told through fragmentary, elliptical episodes, and describes a figure who had defined himself to her as much by his absence as by his presence. Sibylle was the second daughter and unhappy last child of Lacan's first marriage: the fruit of despair (“some will say of desire, but I do not believe them”). Lacan abandoned his old family for a new one: a new partner, Sylvia Bataille (the wife of Georges Bataille), and another daughter, born a few months after Sibylle. For years, this daughter, Judith, was the only publicly recognized child of Lacan—even if, due to French law, she lacked his name. In one sense, then, A Father presents the voice of one who, while bearing his name, had been erased. If Jacques Lacan had described the word as a “presence made of absence,” Sibylle Lacan here turns to the language of the memoir as a means of piecing together the presence of a man who had entered her life in absence, and in his passing, finished in it. In its interplay of absence, naming, and the despair engendered by both, A Father ultimately poses an essential question: what is a father? This first-person account offers both a riposte and a complement to the concept (and the name) of the father as Lacan had defined him in his work, and raises difficult issues about the influence biography can have on theory—and vice versa—and the sometimes yawning divide that can open up between theory and the lives we lead.

The Truth Machine
The Truth Machine

Author: Paul Vigna

Publisher: Picador

Published: 2019-03-05

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 1250304172

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"Views differ on bitcoin, but few doubt the transformative potential of Blockchain technology. The Truth Machine is the best book so far on what has happened and what may come along. It demands the attention of anyone concerned with our economic future." —Lawrence H. Summers, Charles W. Eliot University Professor and President Emeritus at Harvard, Former Treasury Secretary From Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna, the authors of The Age of Cryptocurrency, comes the definitive work on the Internet’s Next Big Thing: The Blockchain. Big banks have grown bigger and more entrenched. Privacy exists only until the next hack. Credit card fraud is a fact of life. Many of the “legacy systems” once designed to make our lives easier and our economy more efficient are no longer up to the task. Yet there is a way past all this—a new kind of operating system with the potential to revolutionize vast swaths of our economy: the blockchain. In The Truth Machine, Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna demystify the blockchain and explain why it can restore personal control over our data, assets, and identities; grant billions of excluded people access to the global economy; and shift the balance of power to revive society’s faith in itself. They reveal the disruption it promises for industries including finance, tech, legal, and shipping. Casey and Vigna expose the challenge of replacing trusted (and not-so-trusted) institutions on which we’ve relied for centuries with a radical model that bypasses them. The Truth Machine reveals the empowerment possible when self-interested middlemen give way to the transparency of the blockchain, while highlighting the job losses, assertion of special interests, and threat to social cohesion that will accompany this shift. With the same balanced perspective they brought to The Age of Cryptocurrency, Casey and Vigna show why we all must care about the path that blockchain technology takes—moving humanity forward, not backward.

Closing Melodies
Closing Melodies

Author: Rainer J. Hanshe

Publisher: Contra Mundum Press

Published: 2023-10-15

Total Pages: 106

ISBN-13: 1940625521

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As the 19th century comes to a close, Friedrich Nietzsche and Vincent van Gogh unknowingly traverse proximate geographical terrain, nearly circling one another like close but distant stars as the philosopher wanders between Nizza, Sils Maria, and Torino, and the painter wanders between Paris, Arles, and Saint-Rémy. In the midst of their philosophical and artistic pursuits, simultaneously, the Eiffel Tower, symbol of artistic progress and industrialization, begins to rise in Paris amidst clamors of protest and praise. ​ Through intertwining letters written to (& sometimes by) friends, family, and others, the philosopher and painter are brought into ever-greater proximity as we witness their daily personal and artistic struggles. Woven between and interrupting this panoply of voices are a series of intervals, short illuminating blasts, like a camera’s exploding flash powder, of artistic, scientific, political, and other events spanning 1888 to 1890, drawing Nietzsche and Van Gogh in and out of the wider expanses of history. ​ As construction of the Eiffel Tower comes to completion in Paris and Elisabeth Förster, the sister of the philosopher of the will to power, tries to found a utopic race colony in South America, the lives of Nietzsche and Van Gogh come to their terrible denouements. Her brother now a full-fledged zombie, the former queen of Nueva Germania seizes the reins of his living corpse and rides him into the future. ​ With no deus ex machina in sight, and none possible, WWI and the terrors and the beauties of the 20th century crack the horizon.

The Heart's Invisible Furies
The Heart's Invisible Furies

Author: John Boyne

Publisher: Hogarth

Published: 2017-08-22

Total Pages: 647

ISBN-13: 1524760803

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Named Book of the Month Club's Book of the Year, 2017 Selected one of New York Times Readers’ Favorite Books of 2017 Winner of the 2018 Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award From the beloved New York Times bestselling author of The Boy In the Striped Pajamas, a sweeping, heartfelt saga about the course of one man's life, beginning and ending in post-war Ireland Cyril Avery is not a real Avery -- or at least, that's what his adoptive parents tell him. And he never will be. But if he isn't a real Avery, then who is he? Born out of wedlock to a teenage girl cast out from her rural Irish community and adopted by a well-to-do if eccentric Dublin couple via the intervention of a hunchbacked Redemptorist nun, Cyril is adrift in the world, anchored only tenuously by his heartfelt friendship with the infinitely more glamourous and dangerous Julian Woodbead. At the mercy of fortune and coincidence, he will spend a lifetime coming to know himself and where he came from - and over his many years, will struggle to discover an identity, a home, a country, and much more. In this, Boyne's most transcendent work to date, we are shown the story of Ireland from the 1940s to today through the eyes of one ordinary man. The Heart's Invisible Furies is a novel to make you laugh and cry while reminding us all of the redemptive power of the human spirit.