Зарубежная литература - Страница 857
Любимый автор пользователей TikTok, более 435 млн упоминаний.
«Трудно признать, что браку пришел конец, когда любовь еще не ушла. Люди привыкли считать, что брак заканчивается только с утратой любви. Когда на место счастья приходит злость.
Но мы с Грэмом не злимся друг на друга. Мы просто стали другими.
Мы с Грэмом так давно смотрим в противоположные стороны, что я даже не могу вспомнить, какие у него глаза, когда он внутри меня.
Зато уверена, что он помнит, как выглядит каждый волосок на моем затылке, когда я отворачиваюсь от него по ночам».
Совершенной любви Квинн и Грэмма угрожает их несовершенный брак.
Они познакомились при сложных обстоятельствах. Драматичное, но красивое начало. Сейчас же близится конец. Что может спасти их отношения?
Квинн уверена, что должна забеременеть. Но ее уверенность становится и тем, что ведет их брак к концу.
Сколько секретов, недосказанностей и боли могут скрывать друг от друга любящие люди? И обратим ли этот процесс?
«Восхитительный, но и буквально выворачивающий наизнанку роман. Убедительная история о том, как ожидания счастливой жизни не оправдываются… и что с этим делать». – Library Journal
«Душераздирающе… Еще один потрясающий роман от Колин Гувер». – Bustle
«Пронзительная история любви». – Booklist
«Совершенное изображение несовершенного брака». – Kirkus
Колин Гувер – троекратная обладательница премии Goodreads Choice Award в номинации «Любовный роман». Автор бестселлеров «Уродливая любовь» и многих других. Ее произведения переведены на множество языков и постоянно попадают в списки бестселлеров по версии New York Times и Amazon.com. Сильные, эмоциональные истории Колин Гувер покорили сердца миллионов читательниц по всему миру, ведь они посвящены лучшему чувству на земле.
Description
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is one of Mark Twain’s most enduring novels. During a stay at a modern-day English castle, the narrator meets a mysterious stranger. The stranger, Hank Morgan, is an engineer from Connecticut, and proceeds to weave a satirical, biting, and hilarious tale of how he traveled back in time to find himself in the court of the legendary King Arthur. There he uses his modern-day knowledge to convince the locals that he’s a powerful magician. As the book progresses, Hank modernizes—and Americanizes—the lives of the locals.
Twain’s talent for humor and satire are on full display in Yankee, and he doesn’t waste the opportunity to use Hank as a mouthpiece for his views on things like politics, capitalism, and justice. Many consider it to be his best work.
Description
The Last of the Mohicans is one of the most famous tales of pioneer American adventure. Set during the French and Indian War, Mohicans tells the tale of the journey of two daughters to meet their father, a colonel, at Fort William Henry. The road is long and dangerous, and they, along with their American and Native guides, encounter adventure at each step.
Mohicans is actually the second book in a pentalogy, the Leatherstocking Tales pentalogy. While the pentalogy saw success in its time, today Mohicans is by far the best-known of the books.
Description
Madame Bovary, often ranked among the greatest novels of all time, is Flaubert’s first novel, and considered to be both his masterpiece and one of the most influential works in literary history, with authors from Henry James to Proust to Nabokov heaping it with praise.
The novel tells the story of Emma Bovary, a commoner wife of a country doctor, and her attempts to escape the drudgery of day-to-day mediocrity by engaging in adulterous affairs and overspending on luxuries. She remains unsatisfied even though her husband adores her and they want for little, and her shallowness eventually leads to their ruin.
The story was first serialized in Revue de Paris, where prosecutors tried to have it censored for obscenity, arguing that not only is the story immoral, but that realism as a literary style is an offence against art and decency. The trial only served to increase the story’s fame, and when it was published as a single novel it quickly became a bestseller.
The novel is groundbreaking in its emphasis on the psychological and emotional lives of its characters. Literature up to then had mostly focusing on the external events that make characters react, instead of focusing on the internal thought processes of those characters. Madame Bovary changed that forever. It was also revolutionary in its criticism of the middle class, which at the time was a still-new social class vying for elbow room between the working poor and hereditary aristocracy. Flaubert critiqued the middle class as being ambitious, shallow, greedy, materialistic, and totally without culture; Emma’s burning desire to reach even higher social strata, contrasted against that satisfaction being fundamentally denied to her by her middle-class nature, is an early echo of Marx’s theory of alienation in industrial societies.
Today Madame Bovary, with its careful but charming description of the banality of everyday life, is considered the first great example of literary realism in fiction novels. Eleanor Marx-Aveling’s translation, though over a hundred years old, is remarkably fresh and smooth, and is a pleasure even for modern readers.
Description
Don Quixote is a novel that doesn’t need much introduction. Not only is it widely considered the greatest Spanish literary work of all time, one of the greatest literary works in history, and a cornerstone of the Western literary canon, it’s also considered one of the first—if not the first—modern novels.
This Standard Ebooks edition is believed to be the first ebook edition of Don Quixote to feature a full transcription of translator John Ormsby’s nearly 1,000 footnotes. Ormsby as an annotator deftly explains obscure passages, gives background on the life and times of 1600s Spain, references decisions from other contemporary translators, and doesn’t hold back from sharing his views on the genius—and flaws—of Cervantes’ greatest work.
The story is of the eponymous Don Quixote, a country noble who, in his old age, reads too many chivalric romances and goes mad. After convincing his grubby servant, Sancho Panza, to join him as his squire, he embarks on an absurd and comic quest to do good and right wrongs.
Today Don Quixote’s two volumes are published as a single work, but their publication came ten years apart. Cervantes saw great success with the publication of his first volume, and appeared to have little desire to write a second volume until a different author wrote a spurious, inferior sequel. This kicked Cervantes into gear and he wrote volume two, a more serious and philosophical volume than the largely comic first volume.
Despite being written in 1605 and translated in 1885, Don Quixote contains a surprising amount of slapstick laughs—even for the modern reader—and narrative devices still seen in today’s fiction, including meta-narratives, frame narratives, and metafiction. Many scenes (like Quixote’s attack on the windmills) and characters (like Sancho Panza and Lothario) are so famous that they’re ingrained in our collective culture.
Description
Three Men in a Boat is one of the most popular English travelogues, having never been out of print since its publication in 1889 and causing its publisher to comment, “I cannot imagine what becomes of all the copies of that book I issue. I often think the public must eat them.”
The novel itself is a brisk, light-hearted, and funny account of a two-week boating holiday taken by three friends up the Thames river. Jerome is a sort of everyman narrator, and even the stodgiest reader can sympathize with at least some of the situations and conundrums he and his friends find themselves in during their adventure.
Interspersed between comic moments are slightly more serious descriptions of the picturesque villages and landscape the friends explore, making Three Men in a Boat not just a comic novel but an actual account of the life, times, and land of late 19th century greater London.
Description
H. G. Wells’ classic tale of alien invasion has to this day never been out of print. Like many works of the era, it was originally published as a serial—though the publisher, Pearson’s Magazine, demanded to know the ending before committing to publication.
The War of the Worlds, with its matter-of-fact narrative style and deft mixture of contemporary science and fictionalized interstellar war machines, became an instant hit. Its themes of colonialism, social Darwinism, good and evil, and total war still resonate with modern-day readers, so much so that it’s been continuously adapted for screen, radio, television, comics, and print.
Description
Little Women is the classic coming-of-age tale of four sisters on their journey to adulthood. Though today it’s considered a classic, Little Women almost wasn’t written: Alcott wanted to publish a collection of short stories instead, but her publisher and her father pressed her to write a book that would appeal to a wide audience of young girls.
The first volume was written quickly and published in 1868; it was a huge success, and Alcott composed volume 2 just as quickly and published it in 1869. By her own account she didn’t enjoy writing them, and both she and her publisher agreed the first few chapters were dull—it almost goes without saying they were pleasantly shocked at the positive reception the volumes received.
By 1927 it had been acknowledged as one of the most widely-read novels of the era, and remains widely read today.
Description
The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu, first published in the UK as The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, is the first novel to introduce the inimitable Fu-Manchu, famous not just for his moustache, but for being a nigh-unstoppable criminal mastermind and part of the “Yellow Peril.” This novel is a collection of previously-published short stories, slightly re-written by Rohmer to form a cohesive whole.
The narrator, Dr. Petrie, is a sort of Watson to Nayland Smith’s Holmes; but Smith resembles more of a James Bond than a Sherlock Holmes as the two barrel through action scenes and near-death scenarios planned by Fu-Manchu, a master scientist, chemist, and poisoner.
This novel was one of the first to popularize the trope of the “mysterious Chinaman,” an element that later became so clichéd that Ronald Knox, the famous detective story writer, declared that “no Chinaman must figure” in good detective stories.
The casual racism evident in the characters and events is a symptom of the xenophobic climate in the UK at the time, which was precipitated by many things—the Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion, Chinese immigration, and other fears. Despite that racism, the plot remains fast-paced and engaging, and is lent a modern air by Fu-Manchu’s role as an early prototype for a Bond supervillain.
Description
The Mysterious Island tells the tale of five Americans who, in an attempt to escape the Civil War, pilot a hot-air balloon and find themselves crashed on a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific. Verne had been greatly influenced by works like Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson, and that influence shines brightly in this novel of engineering ingenuity and adventure. Verne imparts the escapees with such over-the-top cleverness and so many luckily-placed resources that modern readers might find the extent to which they tame the island comical. Despite that, the island contains genuine mysteries for the adventurers to solve.
The standard translation of The Mysterious Island was produced in 1875, and is credited to W. H. G. Kingston. Despite its popularity, it’s widely criticized for abridging and Bowlderizing important parts of the text. The translation presented here, produced by Stephen W. White in 1876, is considered a much more accurate translation, despite it also abridging some portions.