Monumental Propaganda

Monumental Propaganda

Author: Vladimir Voinovich

Publisher: Knopf

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 0307426939

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From Vladimir Voinovich, one of the great satirists of contemporary Russian literature, comes a new comic novel about the absurdity of politics and the place of the individual in the sweep of human events. Monumental Propaganda, Voinovich’s first novel in twelve years, centers on Aglaya Stepanovna Revkina, a true believer in Stalin, who finds herself bewildered and beleaguered in the relative openness of the Khrushchev era. She believes her greatest achievement was to have browbeaten her community into building an iron statue of the supreme leader, which she moves into her apartment after his death. And despite the ebb and flow of political ideology in her provincial town, she stubbornly, and at all costs, centers her life on her private icon. Voinovich’s humanely comic vision has never been sharper than it is in this hilarious but deeply moving tale–equally all-seeing about Stalinism, the era of Khrushchev, and glasnost in the final years of Soviet rule. The New York Times Book Review called his classic work, The Life & Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, “a masterpiece of a new form–socialist surrealism . . . the Soviet Catch-22 written by a latter-day Gogol." In Monumental Propaganda we have the welcome return of a truly singular voice in world literature.


The Critics' Review

The Critics' Review

Author: Charles E. Miller

Publisher: Xlibris Corporation

Published: 2010-06-08

Total Pages: 495

ISBN-13: 1453507124

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I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie

I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie

Author: Roger Ebert

Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing

Published: 2013-07-30

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0740792482

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The Pulitzer Prize–winning film critics offers up more reviews of horrible films. Roger Ebert awards at least two out of four stars to most of the more than 150 movies he reviews each year. But when the noted film critic does pan a movie, the result is a humorous, scathing critique far more entertaining than the movie itself. I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie is a collection of more than 200 of Ebert’s most biting and entertaining reviews of films receiving a mere star or less from the only film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize. Ebert has no patience for these atrocious movies and minces no words in skewering the offenders. Witness: Armageddon * (1998)—The movie is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense, and the human desire to be entertained. No matter what they’re charging to get in, it’s worth more to get out. The Beverly Hillbillies * (1993)—Imagine the dumbest half-hour sitcom you’ve ever seen, spin it out to ninety-three minutes by making it even more thin and shallow, and you have this movie. It’s appalling. North no stars (1994)—I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it. Police Academy no stars (1984)—It’s so bad, maybe you should pool your money and draw straws and send one of the guys off to rent it so that in the future, whenever you think you’re sitting through a bad comedy, he could shake his head, chuckle tolerantly, and explain that you don't know what bad is. Dear God * (1996)—Dear God is the kind of movie where you walk out repeating the title, but not with a smile. The movies reviewed within I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie are motion pictures you’ll want to distance yourself from, but Roger Ebert’s creative and comical musings on those films make for a book no movie fan should miss.


Lake Success

Lake Success

Author: Gary Shteyngart

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2018-09-04

Total Pages: 333

ISBN-13: 0812997425

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“Spectacular.”—NPR • “Uproariously funny.”—The Boston Globe • “An artistic triumph.”—San Francisco Chronicle • “A novel in which comedy and pathos are exquisitely balanced.”—The Washington Post • “Shteyngart’s best book.”—The Seattle Times The bestselling author of Super Sad True Love Story returns with a biting, brilliant, emotionally resonant novel very much of our times. NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE AND MAUREEN CORRIGAN, NPR’S FRESH AIR AND NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • NPR • The Washington Post • O: The Oprah Magazine • Mother Jones • Glamour • Library Journal • Kirkus Reviews • Newsday • Pamela Paul, KQED • Financial Times • The Globe and Mail Narcissistic, hilariously self-deluded, and divorced from the real world as most of us know it, hedge-fund manager Barry Cohen oversees $2.4 billion in assets. Deeply stressed by an SEC investigation and by his three-year-old son’s diagnosis of autism, he flees New York on a Greyhound bus in search of a simpler, more romantic life with his old college sweetheart. Meanwhile, his super-smart wife, Seema—a driven first-generation American who craved the picture-perfect life that comes with wealth—has her own demons to face. How these two flawed characters navigate the Shteyngartian chaos of their own making is at the heart of this piercing exploration, a poignant tale of familial longing and an unsentimental ode to America. LONGLISTED FOR THE CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN FICTION “The fuel and oxygen of immigrant literature—movement, exile, nostalgia, cultural disorientation—are what fire the pistons of this trenchant and panoramic novel. . . . [It is] a novel so pungent, so frisky and so intent on probing the dissonances and delusions—both individual and collective—that grip this strange land getting stranger.”—The New York Times Book Review “Shteyngart, perhaps more than any American writer of his generation, is a natural. He is light, stinging, insolent and melancholy. . . . The wit and the immigrant’s sense of heartbreak—he was born in Russia—just seem to pour from him. The idea of riding along behind Shteyngart as he glides across America in the early age of Trump is a propitious one. He doesn’t disappoint.”—The New York Times


Film

Film

Author: Geoff Andrew

Publisher:

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13:

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This book takes an accessible approach to the movies: an era-by-era survey with a personal angle. This lively, compact history of film offers the most direct experience of the great movies of the 20th century to be found between covers. The book is divided into 10 chapters, each dedicated to a specific time and place in cinema history. Each is written by an eminent critic (or critics) with specialist knowledge, and consists of an introductory overview, followed by a personal selection of 15 of their favourite films. Their pick gives the reader an enormously varied selection; old favourites such as "King Kong" and "The Hustler" are found alongside rarities that have previously been the private domain of the experts. Each film is described and dissected in a self-contained essay that covers who made it and why, its artistic features and matters of technical interest, and the broader context in which it was made. Most important of all, each critic discusses his or her personal reasons for choosing it. Vividly written and lavishly illustrated with stills from the films, this book brings 100 years of film history to life.S.


The Favourite Game

The Favourite Game

Author: Leonard Cohen

Publisher: Emblem Editions

Published: 2011-11-16

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1551995018

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In this unforgettable novel, Leonard Cohen boldly etches the youth and early manhood of Lawrence Breavman, only son of an old Jewish family in Montreal. Life for Breavman is made up of dazzling colour—a series of motion pictures fed through a high-speed projector: the half-understood death of his father; the adult games of love and war, with their infinite capacity for fantasy and cruelty; his secret experiments with hypnotism; the night-long adventures with Krantz, his beloved comrade and confidant. Later, achieving literary fame as a college student, Breavman does penance through manual labour, but ultimately flees to New York. And although he has loved the bodies of many women, it is only when he meets Shell, whom he awakens to her own beauty, that he discovers the totality of love and its demands, and comes to terms with the sacrifices he must make.