The Line of Beauty

Author: Alan Hollinghurst
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 159691808X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 450

Book Description
Winner of the Man Booker Prize Named a Best Book of the Century by The New York Times Book Review International Bestseller From acclaimed author Alan Hollinghurst, a sweeping novel about class, sex, and money during four extraordinary years of change and tragedy. In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby-whom Nick had idolized at Oxford-and Catherine, who is highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions. As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black man who works as a clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this is a major work by one of our finest writers.

The Folding Star

Author: Alan Hollinghurst
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1596918101
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 450

Book Description
The 1995 Booker Prize finalist. Alan Hollinghurst's hypnotic and exquisitely written novel tells the story of Edward Manners, a disaffected 33-year-old who leaves England to earn his living as a language tutor in a Flemish city. Almost immediately he falls in love with one of his pupils, but can only console himself with other, illicit affairs. With this novel, Hollinghurst exposes us fearlessly to the consequences of unfulfillable, annihilating desire.

Bitter Fruit

Author: Achmat Dangor
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802199712
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Book Description
A Man Booker Prize finalist. “[A] deeply unsettling novel about the new South Africa . . . The people and their stories are unforgettable” (Booklist, starred review). With the publication of Kafka’s Curse, Achmat Dangor established himself as an utterly singular voice in South African fiction. His new novel, a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the IMPAC-Dublin Literary Award, is a clear-eyed, witty, yet deeply serious look at South Africa’s political history and its damaging legacy in the lives of those who live there. The last time Silas Ali encountered Lt. Du Boise, Silas was locked in the back of a police van and the lieutenant was conducting a vicious assault on Silas’s wife, Lydia, in revenge for her husband’s participation in Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. When Silas sees Du Boise by chance twenty years later, as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is about to deliver its report, crimes from the past erupt into the present, splintering the Alis’ fragile peace. Meanwhile Silas and Lydia’s son, Mikey, a thoroughly contemporary young hip-hop lothario, contends in unforeseen ways with his parents’ pasts. “In the vein of J.M. Coetzee’s novels, but from the perspective of black South Africans,” Bitter Fruit is a harrowing story of a brittle family on the crossroads of history and a fearless skewering of the pieties of revolutionary movements (Publishers Weekly). “A haunting story of a family disintegrating, wonderfully authentic . . . its progress like slow dancing.” —The Independent “Bitter Fruit has a shocking ability to surprise the reader with the persistence of racial feeling in South Africa.” —The Guardian

The Stranger's Child

Author: Alan Hollinghurst
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 1447203984
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 506

Book Description
A century-spanning saga about a love triangle that spawns a myth, and a family mystery, across generations. With an introduction by Anthony Quinn. The Stranger's Child was a Sunday Times Novel of the Year. In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge friend Cecil Valance, a charismatic young poet, to visit his family home. The weekend will be one of excitements and confusions for everyone, but it is on George’s sixteen-year-old sister Daphne that it will have the most lasting impact. As the decades pass, Daphne and those around her endure startling changes in fortune and circumstance and, as reputations rise and fall, the events of that long-ago summer become part of a legendary story. Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, The Stranger’s Child is Hollinghurst’s masterly exploration of English culture, taste and attitudes. Epic in sweep, it intimately portrays a luminous but changing world and the ways memory – and myth – can be built and broken. It is a powerful and utterly absorbing modern classic.

The Seduction of Curves

Author: Allan McRobie
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691175330
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 168

Book Description
In this large-format book, lavishly illustrated in color throughout, Allan McRobie takes the reader on an alluring exploration of the beautiful curves that shape our world--from our bodies to Salvador Dalí's paintings and the space-time fabric of the universe itself. The book focuses on seven curves--the fold, cusp, swallowtail, and butterfly, plus the hyperbolic, elliptical, and parabolic "umbilics"--and describes the surprising origins of their taxonomy in the catastrophe theory of mathematician René Thom.

The Swimming-Pool Library

Author: Alan Hollinghurst
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030780660X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 413

Book Description
The dazzling first novel from the best-selling, Booker Prize-Winning author of The Line of Beauty and The Sparsholt Affair. An enthralling, darkly erotic novel of homosexuality before the scourge of AIDS; an elegy, possessed of chilling clarity, for ways of life that can no longer be lived with impunity. The Swimming-Pool Library focuses on the friendship of two men: William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and Lord Nantwich, an elderly man searching for someone to write his biography and inherit his traditions.

Line of Beauty

Author: Richard Pini
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781933865874
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The term "line of beauty" describes, in one sense, a certain way of arranging lines and shapes in a drawing or painting to suggest motion, dynamic balance and grace. But in a deeper sense it can also speak to the visionary spirit that drives the creation of a piece of artwork. Whatever that spirit is, Wendy Pini demonstrates that she has had it from the moment she was delivered into this world. Given up for adoption at birth, she has been on a quest ever since for those things most of us take for granted--family, tribe and community. The search has taught her about love and loss and, above all, the power that comes from hearts and minds united in a single dream. Taking inspiration from diverse sources both Western and Eastern--animation, comics, mythology, classic illustration and more--Wendy has developed a unique blend of stylistic opposites, seamlessly mingling the light and airy qualities of Japanese manga with the weighty power of American superhero comics. Whether engaged in her ongoing fantasy saga Elfquest or interpreting other writers' words for a magazine cover, she brings both the inner and outer "line of beauty" to her work. Every composition embraces the energy of the search and the peace of reaching the goal. This book provides a comprehensive look at rare material from Wendy's two Beauty and the Beast graphic novels, her Galaxy and If magazine covers and interior art, and preproduction art from the animated The Lord of the Rings film. It highlights ambitious projects such as Masque of the Red Death and Law and Chaos, includes exquisite art from the Land of Myth series of prints, and much more. The highest quality of reproduction is made possible through direct access to the original art or the best original source material, which has been made available from the Pini archives.

The Analysis of Beauty

Author: William Hogarth
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aesthetics
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Book Description

Madeleine Is Sleeping

Author: Sarah Shun-lien Bynum
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374602158
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Book Description
A National Book Award Finalist, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum's enchanting and inventive first novel is a groundbreaking, contemporary classic When a girl falls into a mysterious, impenetrable sleep, the borders between her provincial French village and the peculiar, beguiling realm of her dreams begin to disappear: A fat woman sprouts delicate wings and takes flight; a failed photographer stumbles into the role of pornographer; a beautiful young wife grows to resemble her husband's viol. Madeleine, the dreamer, travels in their midst, trying to make sense of her own metamorphosis. She leaves home, joins a gypsy circus, and falls into an unexpected triangle of desire and love. Embracing the earthy and the ethereal, the comical and the poignant, Madeleine Is Sleeping is part fairy tale, part coming-of-age story, and above all, an adventure in the discovery of art, sexuality, community, and the self.

On Beauty

Author: Zadie Smith
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101218118
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Book Description
Winner of the 2006 Orange Prize for fiction, another bestselling masterwork from the celebrated author of Swing Time and White Teeth "In this sharp, engaging satire, beauty's only skin-deep, but funny cuts to the bone." —Kirkus Reviews Having hit bestseller lists from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle, this wise, hilarious novel reminds us why Zadie Smith has rocketed to literary stardom. On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith's reputation as a major literary talent.