Author: Robert Harris Publisher: ISBN: 9781529160321 Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
1660. Colonel Edward Whalley and his son-in-law, Colonel William Goffe, cross the Atlantic. Having been found guilty of high treason for the murder of Charles the I, they are wanted and on the run. A reward hangs over their heads - for their capture, dead or alive. In London, Richard Nayler, secretary of the regicide committee of the Privy Council, is tasked with tracking down the fugitives. He'll stop at nothing until the two men are brought to justice. Act of Oblivion is an epic journey across continents, and a chase like no other.[Bokinfo].
Author: Bernadette Meyler Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 1501739409 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 411
Book Description
From Gerald Ford's preemptive pardon of Richard Nixon and Donald Trump's claims that as president he could pardon himself to the posthumous royal pardon of Alan Turing, the power of the pardon has a powerful hold on the political and cultural imagination. In Theaters of Pardoning, Bernadette Meyler traces the roots of contemporary understandings of pardoning to tragicomic "theaters of pardoning" in the drama and politics of seventeenth-century England. Shifts in how pardoning was represented on the stage and discussed in political tracts and in Parliament reflected the transition from a more monarchical and judgment-focused form of the concept to an increasingly parliamentary and legislative vision of sovereignty. Meyler shows that on the English stage, individual pardons of revenge subtly transformed into more sweeping pardons of revolution, from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, where a series of final pardons interrupts what might otherwise have been a cycle of revenge, to later works like John Ford's The Laws of Candy and Philip Massinger's The Bondman, in which the exercise of mercy prevents the overturn of the state itself. In the political arena, the pardon as a right of kingship evolved into a legal concept, culminating in the idea of a general amnesty, the "Act of Oblivion," for actions taken during the English Civil War. Reconceiving pardoning as law-giving effectively displaced sovereignty from king to legislature, a shift that continues to attract suspicion about the exercise of pardoning. Only by breaking the connection between pardoning and sovereignty that was cemented in seventeenth-century England, Meyler concludes, can we reinvigorate the pardon as a democratic practice.
Author: Maja Haderlap Publisher: Archipelago ISBN: 0914671472 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 308
Book Description
Haderlap is an accomplished poet, and that lyricism leaves clear traces on this ravishing debut, which won the prestigious Bachmann Prize in 2011. The descriptions are sensual, and the unusual similes and metaphors occasionally change perspective unexpectedly. Angel of Oblivion deals with harrowing subjects - murder, torture, persecution and discrimination of an ethnic minority - in intricate and lyrical prose. The novel tells the story of a family from the Slovenian minority in Austria. The first-person narrator starts off with her childhood memories of rural life, in a community anchored in the past. Yet behind this rural idyll, an unresolved conflict is smouldering. At first, the child wonders about the border to Yugoslavia, which runs not far away from her home. Then gradually the stories that the adults tell at every opportunity start to make sense. All the locals are scarred by the war. Her grandfather, we find out, was a partisan fighting the Nazis from forest hideouts. Her grandmother was arrested and survived Ravensbrück. As the narrator grows older, she finds out more. Through conversations at family gatherings and long nights talking to her grandmother, she learns that her father was arrested by the Austrian police and tortured - at the age of ten - to extract information on the whereabouts of his father. Her grandmother lost her foster-daughter and many friends and relatives in Ravensbrück and only escaped the gas chamber by hiding inside the camp itself. The narrator begins to notice the frequent suicides and violent deaths in her home region, and she develops an eye for how the Slovenians are treated by the majority of German-speaking Austrians. As an adult, the narrator becomes politicised and openly criticises the way in which Austria deals with the war and its own Nazi past. In the closing section, she visits Ravensbrück and finds it strangely lifeless - realising that her personal memories of her grandmother are stronger. Illuminating an almost forgotten chapter of European history and the European present, the book deals with family dynamics scarred by war and torture - a dominant grandmother, a long-suffering mother, a violent father who loves his children but is impossible to live with. And interwoven with this is compelling reflection on storytelling: the narrator hoping to rid herself of the emotional burden of her past and to tell stories on behalf of those who cannot.
Author: Robert Harris Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0307957950 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
At the nexus of high finance and sophisticated computer programming, a terrifying future may be unfolding even now. Dr. Alex Hoffmann’s name is carefully guarded from the general public, but within the secretive inner circles of the ultrarich he is a legend. He has developed a revolutionary form of artificial intelligence that predicts movements in the financial markets with uncanny accuracy. His hedge fund, based in Geneva, makes billions. But one morning before dawn, a sinister intruder breaches the elaborate security of his lakeside mansion, and so begins a waking nightmare of paranoia and violence as Hoffmann attempts, with increasing desperation, to discover who is trying to destroy him. Fiendishly smart and suspenseful, The Fear Index gives us a searing glimpse into an all-too-recognizable world of greed and panic. It is a novel that forces us to confront the question of what it means to be human—and it is Robert Harris’s most spellbinding and audacious novel to date.
Author: Sergei Lebedev Publisher: New Vessel Press ISBN: 1939931290 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 300
Book Description
This acclaimed twenty-first–century Russian novel is “a Dantean descent” into the abandoned Soviet gulags, written “with a clear poetic sensibility” (The Wall Street Journal). In Sergei Lebedev’s debut novel, an unnamed young man travels to the vast wastelands of the Far North to uncover the truth about a mysterious neighbor who once saved his life, and whom he knows only as Grandfather II. What he finds among the forgotten mines and decrepit barracks of former gulags is a world relegated to oblivion, where it is easier to ignore both the victims and the executioners than to come to terms with a terrible past. This disturbing tale evokes the great and ruined beauty of a land where man and machine work in tandem with nature to destroy millions of lives during the Soviet century. Emerging from today’s Russia, where the ills of the past are being forcefully erased from public memory, this masterful novel is an epic literary act of bearing witness, attempting to rescue history from the brink of oblivion. A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Novel of the Year “Not since Alexander Solzhenitsyn has Russia had a writer as obsessed as Sergei Lebedev with that country’s history or the traces it has left on the collective consciousness . . . The best of Russia’s younger generation of writers.” ―The New York Review of Books
Author: Peter Worthy Publisher: Elder Signs Press ISBN: 9780977987665 Category : Horror tales, American Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
The first volume in a comprehensive set of weird fiction and poetry focused on one of the genre's most mysterious and intriguing figures, the King in Yellow, features works by Richard L. Tierney, William Laughlin, Mark McLaughlin, Joseph S. Pulver Sr., John Tynes, Will Murray, G. Warlock Vance, Ann K. Schwader, Roger Johnson, Robert M. Price, and others.
Author: Robert Harris Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0525656707 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 303
Book Description
From the internationally best-selling author of Fatherland and the Cicero Trilogy--a chilling and dark new thriller unlike anything Robert Harris has done before. 1468. A young priest, Christopher Fairfax, arrives in a remote Exmoor village to conduct the funeral of his predecessor. The land around is strewn with ancient artefacts--coins, fragments of glass, human bones--which the old parson used to collect. Did his obsession with the past lead to his death? Fairfax becomes determined to discover the truth. Over the course of the next six days, everything he believes--about himself, his faith, and the history of his world--will be tested to destruction.
Author: Harry J. Maihafer Publisher: Potomac Books ISBN: Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 264
Book Description
"On Saturday, January 14, 1950, at 6:18 P.M., Cadet Richard Cox left his room at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to go to dinner with an unidentified visitor. The man was supposedly someone Cox had known when they served in an intelligence unit in Germany. Cox never returned. In 1957, Richard Cox was declared legally dead, and the files were closed. It was as if he had vanished off the face of the earth." "Then in 1985, thirty-five years after Cox's disappearance, a retired history teacher named Marshall Jacobs decided to pursue the mystery as a research project. Through the Freedom of Information Act, he obtained voluminous once-secret files from the Army and FBI. Jacobs plunged into a labyrinthine search - and what began as a hobby became an obsession. He traveled the country interviewing witnesses from the Florida Keys to the Pacific Northwest. What he discovered were tales of murder, intrigue, and cover-up. It took more than seven years, but Jacobs eventually found the one witness who enabled him to bring the case to closure." "In Oblivion, Harry J. Maihafer tell the enthralling story of Jacob's search for Richard Cox. Its startling climax is one that readers will long remember."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author: Maurice Blanchot Publisher: U of Nebraska Press ISBN: 9780803261570 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 116
Book Description
"Another of Blanchot's almost-fictions . . . throwing into deliciously baffling high relief the enigmatic condition of a man and woman alone in a sparsely furnished hotel room who try to remember what has happened to bring them there as they apprehensively await whatever will happen next. Their reserved confusion and quiet desperation eventually impress upon them (and us) the realization that imagination (or, if you will, writing) can create reality -- and offer the paradoxical solace that seems to rest at the heart of Blanchot's writing: the sense that even language that expresses meaninglessness can't help but contain and, therefore, convey meaning." -- Kirkus. "This absolutely first-rate translation will not only make Blanchot accessible to many new readers but will also encourage Blanchot scholars and students to reconsider everything they thought they knew about L'Attente l'oubli. . . . This book should be required reading, period." -- Choice. "Awaiting Oblivion is one of [Blanchot's] crowning works . . . a penetrating reflection upon human nature, language, and literature.""--Translation Review. ""Blanchot is a terrifying writer.""--Review of Contemporary Fiction. Maurice Blanchot has been for a half century one of France's leading authors of fiction and theory. Two of his most ambitious nonfiction works, The Space of Literature and The Writing of the Disaster, are also available from the University of Nebraska Press, as is The Most High, his third novel. John Gregg is the author of Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression.
Author: Paul Batchelor Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd ISBN: 1800172001 Category : Poetry Languages : en Pages : 144
Book Description
The 'Acts of Oblivion' were a series of seventeenth-century laws enacted by both Parliamentarian and Royalist factions. Whatever their ends — pardoning revolutionary deeds, or expunging revolutionary speech from the record — they forced the people to forget. Against such injunctions, Paul Batchelor's poems rebel. This long-awaited second collection, The Acts of Oblivion, listens in on some of England's lost futures, such as those offered by radical but sidelined figures in the English Civil War, or by the deliberately destroyed mining communities of North East England, remembered here with bitter, illuminating force. The book also collects the acclaimed individual poems 'Brother Coal' and 'A Form of Words', alongside visions of the underworld as imagined by Homer, Lucian, Lucan, Ovid, and Dante. Intensely characterized, and novelistic in their detail and in their grasp of national catastrophes, the poems in The Acts of Oblivion vindicate Andrew McNeillie's description of Batchelor as 'the most accomplished poet of his generation'. Batchelor's first book, The Sinking Road (2008) was shortlisted for the Jerwood-Aldeburgh Best First Collection Prize. He has also published a chapbook, The Love Darg (2014), and edited a collection of essays, Reading Barry MacSweeney (2013). He has won an Eric Gregory Award, The Times Stephen Spender Prize for Translation, and the Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition. His poems and translations have appeared in several anthologies and in Granta, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, Poetry, PN Review, Poetry Review, The Times, and the Times Literary Supplement.
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Author: Robert Harris
Author: Bernadette Meyler
Author: Maja Haderlap
Author: Robert Harris
Author: Sergei Lebedev
Author: Peter Worthy
Author: Robert Harris
Author: Harry J. Maihafer
Author: Maurice Blanchot
Author: Paul Batchelor