Classics for Pleasure

Classics for Pleasure PDF Author: Michael Dirda
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156033855
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
In these delightful essays, Pulitzer Prize winner Dirda introduces nearly 90 of the world's most entertaining books, covering masterpieces of fantasy, science fiction, horror, adventure, epics, history, and children's literature.

Classics for Pleasure

Classics for Pleasure PDF Author: Michael Dirda
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156033855
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
In these delightful essays, Pulitzer Prize winner Dirda introduces nearly 90 of the world's most entertaining books, covering masterpieces of fantasy, science fiction, horror, adventure, epics, history, and children's literature.

Pleasure

Pleasure PDF Author: Gabriele D'Annunzio
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143106740
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Putting the sex back in Pleasure, here is the first new English translation since the Victorian era of the great Italian masterpiece of sensuality and seduction Like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Andrea Sperelli lives his life as a work of art, seeking beauty and flouting the rules of morality and social interaction along the way. In his aristocratic circles in Rome, he is a serial seducer. But there are two women who command his special regard: the beautiful young widow Elena, and the pure, virgin-like Maria. In Andrea’s pursuit of the exalted heights of extreme pleasure, he plays them against each other, spinning a sadistic web of lust and deceit. This new translation of D’Annunzio’s masterpiece, the first in more than one hundred years, restores what was considered too offensive to be included in the 1898 translation—some of the very scenes that are key to the novel’s status as a landmark of literary decadence. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures

An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures PDF Author: Clarice Lispector
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811230678
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
Now in paperback, a romantic love story by the great Brazilian writer Lóri, a primary school teacher, is isolated and nervous, comfortable with children but unable to connect to adults. When she meets Ulisses, a professor of philosophy, an opportunity opens: a chance to escape the shipwreck of introspection and embrace the love, including the sexual love, of a man. Her attempt, as Sheila Heti writes in her afterword, is not only “to love and to be loved,” but also “to be worthy of life itself.” Published in 1968, An Apprenticeship is Clarice Lispector’s attempt to reinvent herself following the exhausting effort of her metaphysical masterpiece The Passion According to G. H. Here, in this unconventional love story, she explores the ways in which people try to bridge the gaps between them, and the result, unusual in her work, surprised many readers and became a bestseller. Some appreciated its accessibility; others denounced it as sexist or superficial. To both admirers and critics, the olympian Clarice gave a typically elliptical answer: “I humanized myself,” she said. “The book reflects that.”

Frontiers of Pleasure

Frontiers of Pleasure PDF Author: Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019979832X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Frontiers of Pleasure presents critical issues regarding Greek conceptions of aesthetic response while questioning influential modern notions of the aesthetic. Despite a recent rebirth of interest in the field of aesthetics, no extensive discussion of this fundamental topic has hitherto been available.

Browsings

Browsings PDF Author: Michael Dirda
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1605988456
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda has been hailed as "the best-read person in America" (The Paris Review) and "the best book critic in America" (The New York Observer). His latest volume collects fifty of his witty and wide-ranging reflections on a life in literature. Reaching from the classics to the post-moderns, his allusions dance from Samuel Johnson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and M. F. K. Fisher to Marilynne Robinson, Hunter S. Thompson, and David Foster Wallace. Dirda's topics are equally diverse: literary pets, the lost art of cursive writing, book inscriptions, the pleasures of science fiction conventions, author photographs, novelists in old age, Oberlin College, a year in Marseille, writer's block, and much more. As admirers of his earlier books will expect, there are annotated lists galore—of perfect book titles, great adventure novels, favorite words, books about books, and beloved children's classics, as well as a revealing peek at the titles Michael keeps on his own nightstand.Funny and erudite, Browsings is a celebration of the reading life, a fan's notes, and the perfect gift for any booklover.

On the Basis of Morality

On the Basis of Morality PDF Author: Arthur Schopenhauer
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
ISBN: 1624668496
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This edition originally published by Berghahn Books. Schopenhauer's treatise on ethics is presented here in E. F. J. Payne’s definitive translation, based on the Hubscher edition (Wiesbaden, 1946-1950). This edition includes an Introduction by David Cartwright, a translator’s preface, biographical note, selected bibliography, and an index. For convenient reference to passages in Kant's work discussed by Schopenhauer, Academy edition numbers have been added.

Bound to Please

Bound to Please PDF Author: Michael Dirda
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393057577
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 566

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Book Description
A showcase of one hundred of the world's most significant books offers the author's introductory essays on such writers as James Boswell, Colette, and Joseph Roth, and includes explorations of a range of genres and specific works.

Lost in a Book

Lost in a Book PDF Author: V. Nell
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300041156
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Examines the social forces that have shaped reading, discusses the nature of reading skills, and suggests connections between reading and dreaming and hypnotic trance

Big Book of Beginner's Piano Classics

Big Book of Beginner's Piano Classics PDF Author: Bergerac
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486466159
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 142

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Book Description
Eighty-three popular piano classics arranged for the beginning student are accompanied by a short history of each piece and advice on playing each arrangement.5NjBwBT

Why I Read

Why I Read PDF Author: Wendy Lesser
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 0374709815
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
"Wendy Lesser's extraordinary alertness, intelligence, and curiosity have made her one of America's most significant cultural critics," writes Stephen Greenblatt. In Why I Read, Lesser draws on a lifetime of pleasure reading and decades of editing one of the most distinguished literary magazines in the country, The Threepenny Review, to describe her love of literature. As Lesser writes in her prologue, "Reading can result in boredom or transcendence, rage or enthusiasm, depression or hilarity, empathy or contempt, depending on who you are and what the book is and how your life is shaping up at the moment you encounter it." Here the reader will discover a definition of literature that is as broad as it is broad-minded. In addition to novels and stories, Lesser explores plays, poems, and essays along with mysteries, science fiction, and memoirs. As she examines these works from such perspectives as "Character and Plot," "Novelty," "Grandeur and Intimacy," and "Authority," Why I Read sparks an overwhelming desire to put aside quotidian tasks in favor of reading. Lesser's passion for this pursuit resonates on every page, whether she is discussing the book as a physical object or a particular work's influence. "Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different," she writes. "It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present, and it can help you realize that your present will someday be someone else's past. This may be disheartening, but it can also be strangely consoling at times." A book in the spirit of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Elizabeth Hardwick's A View of My Own, Why I Read is iconoclastic, conversational, and full of insight. It will delight those who are already avid readers as well as neophytes in search of sheer literary fun.