The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Author: Milan Kundera
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063290642
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Book Description
“Far more than a conventional novel. It is a meditation on life, on the erotic, on the nature of men and women and love . . . full of telling details, truths large and small, to which just about every reader will respond.” — People In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera tells the story of two couples, a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing, and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel "the unbearable lightness of being" not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine. This magnificent novel is a story of passion and politics, infidelity and ideas, and encompasses the extremes of comedy and tragedy, illuminating all aspects of human existence.

The Lightness of Being

Author: Frank Wilczek
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0786731680
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

Book Description
A Nobel-prize winning physicist takes on the essential question: what are we made of? Our understanding of nature's deepest reality has changed radically, but almost without our noticing, over the past twenty-five years. Transcending the clash of older ideas about matter and space, acclaimed physicist Frank Wilczek explains a remarkable new discovery: matter is built from almost weightless units, and pure energy is the ultimate source of mass. He calls it "The Lightness of Being." Space is no mere container, empty and passive. It is a dynamic Grid-a modern ether- and its spontaneous activity creates and destroys particles. This new understanding of mass explains the puzzling feebleness of gravity, and a gorgeous unification of all the forces comes sharply into focus.The Lightness of Being is the first book to explore the implications of these revolutionary ideas about mass, energy, and the nature of "empty space." In it, Wilczek masterfully presents new perspectives on our incredible universe and envisions a new golden age of fundamental physics.

Slowness

Author: Milan Kundera
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063290758
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Book Description
"Irresistible. . . . Slowness is an ode to sensuous leisure, to the enjoyment of pleasure rather than just the search for it." — Mirabella Milan Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, an opera buffa, Slowness is also the first of this author's fictional works to have been written in French. Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than two hundred years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic. Underlying this libertine fantasy is a profound meditation on contemporary life: about the secret bond between slowness and memory, about the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. And about "dancers" possessed by the passion to be seen, for whom life is merely a perpetual show emptied of every intimacy and every joy.

Pog

Author: Padraig Kenny
Publisher: Chicken House
ISBN: 1912626012
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 196

Book Description
'One of a kind. Utterly fantastic.' Eoin Colfer on Tin David and Penny's strange new home is surrounded by forest. It's the childhood home of their mother, who's recently died. But other creatures live here ... magical creatures, like tiny, hairy Pog. He's one of the First Folk, protecting the boundary between the worlds. As the children explore, they discover monsters slipping through from the place on the other side of the cellar door. Meanwhile, David is drawn into the woods by something darker, which insists there's a way he can bring his mother back ...

Unbearable Lightness

Author: Portia de Rossi
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1849835276
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
"I didn't decide to become anorexic. It snuck up on me disguised as a healthy diet, a professional attitude. Although there was a certain glamour to anorexics, I didn't want to be one. I just wanted to excel in dieting. And weighing in at 80 pounds on 300 calories a day, I was the best little dieter there ever was." In scalding prose, Portia de Rossi reveals the pain and illness that haunted her for decades. She alternately starved herself and binged, putting her life in danger and lying to herself and everyone around her about the depth of her illness. From her lowest point, Portia began the painful climb back to health and happiness, ultimately falling head over heels in love with Ellen DeGeneres. In this remarkable and landmark book, she tells a story that inspires hope and nourishes the spirit.

The Lightness of Hands

Author: Jeff Garvin
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062382918
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Book Description
A quirky and heartfelt coming-of-age story about a teen girl with bipolar II who signs her failed magician father up to perform his legendary but failed illusion on live TV in order to make enough money to pay for the medications they need—from the author of Symptoms of Being Human. Perfect for fans of Adi Alsaid, David Arnold, and Arvin Ahmadi. Sixteen-year-old Ellie Dante is desperate for something in her life to finally go right. Her father was a famous stage magician until he attempted an epic illusion on live TV—and failed. Now Ellie lives with her dad in a beat-up RV, attending high school online and performing with him at birthday parties and bars across the Midwest to make ends meet. But when the gigs dry up, their insurance lapses, leaving Dad’s heart condition unchecked and forcing Ellie to battle her bipolar II disorder without medication. Then Ellie receives a call from a famous magic duo, who offer fifteen thousand dollars and a shot at redemption: they want her father to perform the illusion that wrecked his career—on their live TV special, which shoots in Los Angeles in ten days. Ellie knows her dad will refuse—but she takes the deal anyway, then lies to persuade him to head west. With the help of her online-only best friend and an unusual guy she teams up with along the way, Ellie makes a plan to stage his comeback. But when her lie is exposed, she’ll have to confront her illness and her choices head-on to save her father—and herself.

Together We Will Go

Author: J. Michael Straczynski
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 198214260X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Book Description
The Breakfast Club meets The Silver Linings Playbook in this powerful, provocative, and heartfelt novel about twelve endearing strangers who come together to make the most of their final days, from New York Times bestselling and award-winning author J. Michael Straczynski. Mark Antonelli, a failed young writer looking down the barrel at thirty, is planning a cross-country road trip. He buys a beat-up old tour bus. He hires a young army vet to drive it. He puts out an ad for others to join him along the way. But this will be a road trip like no other: His passengers are all fellow disheartened souls who have decided that this will be their final journey—upon arrival in San Francisco, they will find a cliff with an amazing view of the ocean at sunset, hit the gas, and drive out of this world. The unlikely companions include a young woman with a chronic pain sensory disorder and another who was relentlessly bullied at school for her size; a bipolar, party-loving neo-hippie; a gentle coder with a literal hole in his heart and blue skin; and a poet dreaming of a better world beyond this one. We get to know them through access to their texts, emails, voicemails, and the daily journal entries they write as the price of admission for this trip. By turns tragic, funny, quirky, charming, and deeply moving, Together We Will Go explores the decisions that brings these characters together, and the relationships that grow between them, with some discovering love and affection for the first time. But as they cross state lines and complications to the initial plan arise, it becomes clear that this is a novel as much about the will to live as the choice to end it. The final, unforgettable moments as they hurtle toward the decisions awaiting them will be remembered for a lifetime.

Immortality

Author: Milan Kundera
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060932384
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 370

Book Description
Milan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnes becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera's supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose; to explore thoroughly the great, themes of existence.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Author: Milan Kundera
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0063290693
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
"An absolutely dazzling entertainment. . . . Arousing on every level—political, erotic, intellectual, and above all, humorous." —Newsweek "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting calls itself a novel, although it is part fairy tale, part literary criticism, part political tract, part musicology, and part autobiography. It can call itself whatever it wants to, because the whole is genius." —New York Times Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth

Author: Malcolm Pryce
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408809028
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Book Description
There is nothing unusual about the barrel-organ man who walks into private detective Louie Knight's office. Apart from the fact that he has lost his memory. And his monkey is a former astronaut. And he is carrying a suitcase that he is too terrified to open. And he wants a murder investigated. The only thing unusual about the murder is that it took place a hundred years ago. And needs solving by the following week. Louie is too smart to take on such a case but also too broke to turn it down. Soon he is lost in a labyrinth of intrigue and terror, tormented at every turn by a gallery of mad nuns, gangsters and waifs, and haunted by the loss of his girlfriend, Myfanwy, who has disappeared after being fed drugged raspberry ripple ...