The Grand Babylon Hotel is an exclusive London establishment, and American millionaire Theodore Racksole, visiting the hotel with his spirited 23-year-old daughter Nella, decides to buy the place. What he hasn't counted on is having to deal with a criminal conspiracy whose purposes are not at all clear, and events take an unexpected turn as Theodore and Nella play detective. Replete with evil villains, physical dangers, and secret passages, The Grand Babylon Hotel is a mesmerizing thriller that will be enjoyed by mystery lovers everywhere.
A wry, unvarnished chronicle of a career in the rare book trade during its last Golden Age When Gary Goodman wandered into a run-down, used-book shop that was going out of business in East St. Paul in 1982, he had no idea the visit would change his life. He walked in as a psychiatric counselor and walked out as the store’s new owner. In The Last Bookseller Goodman describes his sometimes desperate, sometimes hilarious career as a used and rare book dealer in Minnesota—the early struggles, the travels to estate sales and book fairs, the remarkable finds, and the bibliophiles, forgers, book thieves, and book hoarders he met along the way. Here we meet the infamous St. Paul Book Bandit, Stephen Blumberg, who stole 24,000 rare books worth more than fifty million dollars; John Jenkins, the Texas rare book dealer who (probably) was murdered while standing in the middle of the Colorado River; and the eccentric Melvin McCosh, who filled his dilapidated Lake Minnetonka mansion with half a million books. In 1990, with a couple of partners, Goodman opened St. Croix Antiquarian Books in Stillwater, one of the Twin Cities region’s most venerable bookshops until it closed in 2017. This store became so successful and inspired so many other booksellers to move to town that Richard Booth, founder of the “book town” movement in Hay-on-Wye in Wales, declared Stillwater the First Book Town in North America. The internet changed the book business forever, and Goodman details how, after 2000, the internet made stores like his obsolete. In the 1990s, the Twin Cities had nearly fifty secondhand bookshops; today, there are fewer than ten. As both a memoir and a history of booksellers and book scouts, criminals and collectors, The Last Bookseller offers an ultimately poignant account of the used and rare book business during its final Golden Age.
Vital Signs offers both a compelling reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century novel and a methodological challenge to literary historians. Rejecting theories that equate realism with representation, Lawrence Rothfield argues that literary history forms a subset of the history of discourses and their attendant practices. He shows how clinical medicine provided Balzac, Flaubert, Eliot, and others with narrative strategies, epistemological assumptions, and models of professional authority. He also traces the linkages between medicine's eventual decline in scientific and social status and realism's displacement by naturalism, detective fiction, and modernism.
This carefully crafted ebook: "Clayhanger (Unabridged)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. This ebook is a series of novels by Arnold Bennett, published between 1910 and 1918. Though the series is commonly referred to as a "trilogy", it actually consists of four books; the first three novels were released in one single volume as The Clayhanger Family in 1925. Edwin Clayhanger is the central figure in this portrayal of Victorian lower-middle-class society. As a shy young man, Edwin is bullied by his father, Darius, but he succeeds in developing his interests in spite of a restrictive environment. One of Edwin's interests is Hilda Lessways, a young woman from Staffordshire. Hilda proves to be independent and enigmatic, while Edwin proves that there are many ways to view love. Enoch Arnold Bennett (1867—1931), British novelist, playwright, critic, and essayist whose major works form an important link between the English novel and the mainstream of European realism. He also worked in other fields such as journalism, propaganda and film.
Winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best First Novel "There was one copy going round our school like contraband. I read it in one sitting ... I'd never read a book about anyone remotely like me before."-- Zadie Smith "My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost..." The hero of Hanif Kureishi's debut novel is dreamy teenager Karim, desperate to escape suburban South London and experience the forbidden fruits which the 1970s seem to offer. When the unlikely opportunity of a life in the theatre announces itself, Karim starts to win the sort of attention he has been craving - albeit with some rude and raucous results. With the publication of Buddha of Suburbia, Hanif Kureishi landed into the literary landscape as a distinct new voice and a fearless taboo-breaking writer. The novel inspired a ground-breaking BBC series featuring a soundtrack by David Bowie.
Stories in the Travelman Short Stories series take the reader to places of mystery, fantasy, horror, romance, and corners of the universe yet unexplored. In turn, readers take them on the bus or subway, slip them into briefcases and lunchboxes, and send them from Jersey to Juneau. Each classic or original short story is printed on one sheet of paper and folded like a map. This makes it simple to read while commuting, convenient to carry when not, and easy to give or send to a friend. A paper envelope is provided for mailing or gift-giving, and both are packaged in a dear plastic envelope for display. The cost is not much more than a greeting card.
