Inspired by Dostoyevsky's short story, The Double tells the story of Simon, a timid man, scratching out an isolated existence in an indifferent world. He is overlooked at work, scorned by his mother, and ignored by the woman of his dreams. He feels powerless to change any of these things. The arrival of a new co-worker, James, serves to upset the balance. James is both Simon's exact physical double and his opposite - confident, charismatic and good with women. To Simon's horror, James slowly starts taking over his life.
Every man has his dark side . . . Spero Lucas confronts his own in the most explosive thriller yet from one of America's best-loved crime writers. The job seems simple enough: retrieve the valuable painting -- "The Double" -- Grace Kinkaid's ex-boyfriend stole from her. It's the sort of thing Spero Lucas specializes in: finding what's missing, and doing it quietly. But Grace wants more. She wants Lucas to find the man who humiliated her -- a violent career criminal with a small gang of brutal thugs at his beck and call. Lucas is a man who knows how to get what he wants, whether it's a thief on the run -- or a married woman. In the midst of a steamy, passionate love affair that he knows can't last, in pursuit of a dangerous man who will stop at nothing to get what he wants, Lucas is forced to decide what kind of man he is -- and how far he'll go to get what he wants.
A “wonderfully twisted meditation on identity and individuality” from a Nobel Prize–winning author who pushes fiction to its very limits (The Boston Globe). As this novel by the author of Blindness and All the Names begins, Tertuliano Máximo Afonso is a divorced, depressed history teacher. To lift his spirits, a colleague suggests he rent a certain video. Tertuliano watches the film, unimpressed. But during the night, when he is awakened by noise, he finds the VCR replaying the video and watches in astonishment as a man who looks exactly like him—or, more specifically, exactly like he did five years earlier, mustachioed and fuller in the face—appears on the screen. Against his own better judgment, Tertuliano decides to pursue his double. As he roots out the man’s identity, what begins as a whimsical chase becomes a probing investigation into what makes us human. Can we be reduced to our outward appearance, rather than the sum of our experiences? The inspiration for the film Enemy starring Jake Gyllenhaal and directed by Denis Villeneuve, The Double is a timeless novel from a writer John Updike described in The New Yorker as “like Faulkner, so confident of his resources and ultimate destination that he can bring any impossibility to life by hurling words at it.” “It’s tempting to think of [The Double] as his masterpiece.” —The New York Times Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa
What really happens when you meet your doppelganger? Well, if you are "dangerously antisocial" and your double is charming, well-liked and has the social skills that you lack, then they take over your life by pretending to be you! Dostoevsky’s novella 'The Double' follows the life of Golyadkin, a low-level official who is a dangerous sociopath. After a misadventure at a birthday party, Golyadkin has a chance meeting with Golyadkin Junior – his double who looks just like him. The theme of the doppelgänger runs potent in the story, together with universal ones like depression, sorrow, alienation, and social injustice. The only solution for the protagonist is the asylum, where his mind can finally be at piece. A sardonic, Gogolian tale of absurdity and social criticism that is proven to be a great read. Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) was a famous Russian writer of novels, short stories, and essays. A connoisseur of the troubled human psyche and the relationships between the individuals, Dostoevsky’s oeuvre covers a large area of subjects: politics, religion, social issues, philosophy, and the uncharted realms of the psychological. There have been at least 30 film and TV adaptations of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1866 novel “Crime and Punishment” with probably the most popular being the British BBC TV series starring John Simm as Raskolnikov and Ian McDiarmid as Porfiry Petrovich. “The Idiot” has also been adapted for films and TV, as has “Demons” and “The Brothers Karamazov".
With keen psychological insight far ahead if its time, leading to wide misinterpretation among critics upon its first publication in 1846, Dostoevsky’s second novel is now recognized as one of his most important works and one that inspired literally hundreds of imitations. Unhappy with the negative reception for The Double. Dostoevsky re-wrote his original version of 1846 fifteen years later. Dostoevsky wrote, “This revision, provided with an introduction, will be the equivalent of a new novel. They will finally see what The Double is…In a word, I’m challenging everybody to a battle…Why should I lose a superb idea, a great type in its social importance, which I was the first to discover and of which I was the herald.†?
From the world's leading authority on Bob Dylan comes the definitive biography that promises to transform our understanding of the man and musician—thanks to early access to Dylan's never-before-studied archives. In 2016 Bob Dylan sold his personal archive to the George Kaiser Foundation in Tulsa, Oklahoma, reportedly for $22 million. As the boxes started to arrive, the Foundation asked Clinton Heylin—author of the acclaimed Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades and 'perhaps the world's authority on all things Dylan' (Rolling Stone)—to assess the material they had been given. What he found in Tulsa—as well as what he gleaned from other papers he had recently been given access to by Sony and the Dylan office—so changed his understanding of the artist, especially of his creative process, that he became convinced that a whole new biography was needed. It turns out that much of what previous biographers—Dylan himself included—have said is wrong. With fresh and revealing information on every page A Restless, Hungry Feeling tells the story of Dylan's meteoric rise to fame: his arrival in early 1961 in New York, where he is embraced by the folk scene; his elevation to spokesman of a generation whose protest songs provide the soundtrack for the burgeoning Civil Rights movement; his alleged betrayal when he 'goes electric' at Newport in 1965; his subsequent controversial world tour with a rock 'n' roll band; and the recording of his three undisputed electric masterpieces: Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. At the peak of his fame in July 1966 he reportedly crashes his motorbike in Woodstock, upstate New York, and disappears from public view. When he re-emerges, he looks different, his voice sounds different, his songs are different. Clinton Heylin's meticulously researched, all-encompassing and consistently revelatory account of these fascinating early years is the closest we will ever get to a definitive life of an artist who has been the lodestar of popular culture for six decades.
In this book Richard Ayoade - actor, writer, director, and amateur dentist - reflects on his cinematic legacy as only he can: in conversation with himself. Over ten brilliantly insightful and often erotic interviews, Ayoade examines himself fully and without mercy, leading a breathless investigation into this once-in-a-generation visionary. Only Ayoade can appreciate Ayoade's unique methodology. Only Ayoade can recognise Ayoade's talent. Only Ayoade can withstand Ayoade's peculiar scent. Only Ayoade can truly get inside Ayoade. They have called their book Ayoade on Ayoade: A Cinematic Odyssey. Take the journey, and your life will never be the same again. Ayoade on Ayoade captures the director in his own words: pompous, vain, angry and very, very funny.
A groundbreaking examination of the “double” in modern and contemporary art From ancient mythology to contemporary cinema, the motif of the double—which repeats, duplicates, mirrors, inverts, splits, and reenacts—has captured our imaginations, both attracting and repelling us. The Double examines this essential concept through the lens of art, from modernism to contemporary practice—from the paired paintings of Henri Matisse and Arshile Gorky, to the double line works of Piet Mondrian and Marlow Moss, to Eva Hesse’s One More Than One, Lorna Simpson’s Two Necklines, Roni Horn’s Pair Objects, and Rashid Johnson’s The New Negro Escapist Social and Athletic Club (Emmett). James Meyer’s survey text explores four modes of doubling: Seeing Double through repetition; Reversal, the inversion or mirroring of an image or form; Dilemma, the staging of an absurd or impossible choice; and the Divided and Doubled Self (split and shadowed selves, personae, fraternal doubles, and pairs). Thought-provoking essays by leading scholars Julia Bryan-Wilson, Tom Gunning, W.J.T. Mitchell, Hillel Schwartz, Shawn Michelle Smith, and Andrew Solomon discuss a host of topics, including the ontology and ethics of the double, the double and psychoanalysis, double consciousness, the doppelgänger in silent cinema, and the queer double. Richly illustrated throughout, The Double is a multifaceted exploration of an enduring theme in art, from painting and sculpture to photography, film, video, and performance. Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Exhibition Schedule National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC July 10–October 31, 2022
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the bestselling author of The Flight Attendant, here is a gripping psychological novel of obsession and consequence. When Laurel Estabrook is attacked while riding her bicycle through Vermont’s back roads, her life is forever changed. Formerly outgoing, Laurel withdraws into her photography, spending all her free time at a homeless shelter. There she meets Bobbie Crocker, a man with a history of mental illness and a box of photographs that he won’t let anyone see. When Bobbie dies, Laurel discovers a deeply hidden secret–a story that leads her far from her old life, and into a cat-and-mouse game with pursuers who claim they want to save her. In a tale that travels between the Roaring Twenties and the twenty-first century, between Jay Gatsby’s Long Island and rural New England, bestselling author Chris Bohjalian has written an extraordinary novel. Look for Chris Bohjalian's new novel, The Lioness!
