Illywhacker

Illywhacker PDF Author: Peter Carey
Publisher: Penguin Group Australia
ISBN: 174348433X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 912

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Book Description
Herbert Badgery is vagabond and charlatan, aviator and car salesman, seducer and patriarch. He might very well be the embodiment of Australia’s national character, especially in its fondness for tall stories and questionable history. As this charming scoundrel traverses the continent and a century’s worth of outlandish encounters – not least with a genteel dowager fending off madness with an electric belt, and a ravishing young girl with a dangerous fondness for rooftop trysts – one truth emerges. Herbert Badgery may in fact be the king of all con men.

Illywhacker

Illywhacker PDF Author: Peter Carey
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307764257
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1119

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Book Description
In Australian slang, an illywhacker is a country fair con man, an unprincipled seller of fake diamonds and dubious tonics. And Herbert Badgery, the 139-year-old narrator of Peter Carey's uproarious novel, may be the king of them all. Vagabond and charlatan, aviator and car salesman, seducer and patriarch, Badgery is a walking embodiment of the Australian national character—espcially of its proclivity for tall stories and barefaced lies. As Carey follows this charming scoundrel across a continent and a century, he creates a crazy quilt of outlandish encounters, with characters that include a genteel dowager who fends off madness with an electric belt and a ravishing young girl with a dangerous fondness for rooftop trysts. Boldly inventive, irresistibly odd, Illywhacker is further proof that Peter Carey is one of the most enchanting writers at work in any hemisphere.

Illywhacker

Illywhacker PDF Author: Peter Carey
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571267092
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 902

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Book Description
An illywhacker is a confidence trickster, and Herbert Badgery, the 139-year-old narrator of this dazzling comic novel, may be the king of them all. Vagabond and charlatan, aviator and car salesman, seducer and patriarch, Badgery travels across the Australian continent and a century in a picaresque novel full of outlandish encounters and dangerous characters. Overflowing with magic, jokes and inventions, Illywhacker is a contemporary classic.

Parrot and Olivier in America

Parrot and Olivier in America PDF Author: Peter Carey
Publisher: Random House Canada
ISBN: 0307358364
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 516

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Book Description
From the two-time Booker Prize-winning author: an irrepressible, audacious, trenchantly funny new novel set in the 19th century and inspired in part by the life of Alexis de Tocqueville. With dazzling exuberance and all the richness of characterization, story, and language that we have come to expect from this superlative writer, Peter Carey explores the birth of democracy, the limits of friendship and whether people really can remake themselves in a New World. The two men at the heart of the novel couldn't be any more different: Olivier is the son of French aristocrats who (barely) survived the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerate English printer. But when young Parrot is separated from his father (after a stupendous conflagration at a house of forgery) he runs into the powerful embrace of a one-armed marquis who will be his conduit - like it or not - into a life as closely (mis)allied with Olivier's as if they were connected by blood. And when Olivier sets sail for America - ostensibly to make a study of the American penal system, but more precisely to save his neck from the latest guillotineurs - Parrot, unable to loosen the Marquis's grip, is there too: as spy, scribe, comptroller, protector, foe and foil. As the narrative unfurls, shifting between the perspectives of Olivier and Parrot, between their picaresque adventures apart and together, in love and politics, prisons and finance, homelands and brave new lands - a most unlikely friendship begins to take hold.

Fabulating Beauty

Fabulating Beauty PDF Author: Andreas Gaile
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042019565
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 475

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Book Description
Peter Carey is one of Australia's finest creative writers, much admired by both literary critics and a worldwide reading public. While academia has been quick to see his fictions as exemplars of postcolonial and postmodern writing strategies, his general readership has been captivated by his deadpan sense of humour, his quirky characters, the outlandish settings and the grotesqueries of his intricate plots. After three decades of prolific writing and multiple award-winning, Carey stands out in the world of Australian letters as designated heir to Patrick White. Fabulating Beauty pays tribute to Carey's literary achievement. It brings together the voices of many of the most renowned Carey critics in twenty essays (sixteen commissioned especially for this volume), an interview with the author, as well as the most extensive bibliography of Carey criticism to date. The studies represent a wide range of current perspectives on the writer's fictions. Contributors focus on issues as diverse as the writer's biography; his use of architectural metaphors; his interrogation of narrative structures such as myths and cultural master-plots; intertextual strategies; concepts of sacredness and references to the Christian tradition; and his strategies of rewriting history. Amidst predictions of the imminent death of 'postist' theory, the essays all attest to the ongoing relevance of the critical parameters framed by postmodernism and postcolonialism.

True History of the Kelly Gang

True History of the Kelly Gang PDF Author: Peter Carey
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307368653
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
SOONTO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE The international bestseller, Booker Prize winner, and winner of the 2001 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. Out of 19th century Australia rides a hero of his people and a man for all nations: Ned Kelly, the son of poor Irish immigrants, viewed by the authorities as a thief (especially of horses) and, as a cold-blooded killer. To the people, though, he was a patriot hounded unfairly by rich English landlords and their stooges. In the end, Kelly and his so-called gang (his younger brother and two friends) led a massive police manhunt on a wild goose chase that lasted twenty months, in which Ned’s talents as a bushman were augmented by bank robberies and the support of nearly everyone not in a uniform. His one demand – for which he would have surrendered himself was his jailed mother’s freedom. Executed by hanging more than a century ago, speaking as if from the grave, Kelly still resonates as the most potent legend in the land down under.

Peter Carey

Peter Carey PDF Author: Mary Ellen Snodgrass
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786455721
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
Peter Carey, writer of such celebrated works as Oscar and Lucinda, True History of the Kelly Gang, and His Illegal Self, is one of Australia's most critically acclaimed novelists. Deeply concerned with South Pacific culture, especially the lives of its most downtrodden citizens, Carey uses popular art as a tool for raising the consciousness of readers. This book provides an introduction to the author's life, as well as a guided overview of his body of work. Designed for the fan and scholar alike, this text features an alphabetized, fully-annotated listing of major terms in the Carey canon, including fictional characters, motifs, historical events, and themes. Additional features include a listing of headwords, a Carey history, 44 reading and writing topics, and bibliographies of primary and secondary sources. A comprehensive index is included.

Theft: A Love Story

Theft: A Love Story PDF Author: Peter Carey
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571267114
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Narrated by the twin voices of the artist Butcher Bones, and his 'damaged two-hundred-and-twenty-pound brother' Hugh, Theft: A Love Story once again displays Peter Carey's extraordinary flair for language. Ranging from the rural wilds of Australia to Manhattan via Tokyo, it is a brilliant and moving exploration of art, fraud, friendship and redemption.

Oscar and Lucinda

Oscar and Lucinda PDF Author: Peter Carey
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571267130
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
Peter Carey's novel of the undeclared love between clergyman Oscar Hopkins and the heiress Lucinda Leplastrier is both a moving and beautiful love story and a historical tour de force set in Victorian times. Made for each other, the two are gamblers - one obsessive, the other compulsive - incapable of winning at the game of love.Oscar and Lucinda is now available as a Faber Modern Classics edition.

Bliss

Bliss PDF Author: Peter Carey
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307787222
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
For thirty-nine years Harry Joy has been the quintessential good guy. But one morning Harry has a heart attack on his suburban front lawn, and, for the space of nine minutes, he becomes a dead guy. And although he is resuscitated, he will never be the same. For, as Peter Carey makes abundantly clear in this darkly funny novel, death is sometimes a necessary prelude to real life. Part The Wizard of Oz, part Dante's Inferno, and part Australian Book of the Dead, Bliss is a triumph of uninhibited storytelling from a writer of extravagan gifts.

Fat Man in History

Fat Man in History PDF Author: Peter Carey
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307764273
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
If, in some post-Marxist utopia, obesity were declared counterrevolutionary, how would a houseful of fat men strike back? If it were possible to win a new body by lottery, what kind of people would choose ugliness? If two gun-toting thugs decided to take over a business -- and run it through sheer terror -- how far would their methods take them? These are the questions that Peter Carey, author of The Tax Inspector and Oscar and Lucinda, brilliantly explores in this collection of stories. Exquisitely written and thoroughly envisioned, the tales in The Fat Man in History reach beyond their arresting premises to utter deep and often frightening truths about our brightest and darkest selves.