Author: James Hawes
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448137411
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Book Description
Take four ne'er-do-wells: a 28-year-old ex-public schoolboy who can't bear the idea of setting down; Suzy the Black Widow, who has a deliciously flat stomach and drives like she's breathing through the carbs; Brady the Reservoir Dogs fetishist; and Chico the fat Portuguese waiter. Add some plastic guns, the IRA and a white Merc with fins and you have a plan. What plan? The plan to walk into Michael Winner's private bank and walk out with half a million quid. Fast, clever, stylish, funny and utterly compulsive, this is a first novel with everything.
A White Merc With Fins
Author: James Hawes
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448137411
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Book Description
Take four ne'er-do-wells: a 28-year-old ex-public schoolboy who can't bear the idea of setting down; Suzy the Black Widow, who has a deliciously flat stomach and drives like she's breathing through the carbs; Brady the Reservoir Dogs fetishist; and Chico the fat Portuguese waiter. Add some plastic guns, the IRA and a white Merc with fins and you have a plan. What plan? The plan to walk into Michael Winner's private bank and walk out with half a million quid. Fast, clever, stylish, funny and utterly compulsive, this is a first novel with everything.
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448137411
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290
Book Description
Take four ne'er-do-wells: a 28-year-old ex-public schoolboy who can't bear the idea of setting down; Suzy the Black Widow, who has a deliciously flat stomach and drives like she's breathing through the carbs; Brady the Reservoir Dogs fetishist; and Chico the fat Portuguese waiter. Add some plastic guns, the IRA and a white Merc with fins and you have a plan. What plan? The plan to walk into Michael Winner's private bank and walk out with half a million quid. Fast, clever, stylish, funny and utterly compulsive, this is a first novel with everything.
A White Merc with Fins
Author: James Hawes
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
Take four ne'er-do-wells: a 28-year-old ex-public schoolboy who can't bear the idea of setting down; Suzy the Black Widow, who has a deliciously flat stomach and drives like she's breathing through the carbs; Brady the Reservoir Dogs fetishist; and Chico the fat Portuguese waiter. Add some plastic guns, the IRA and a white Merc with fins and you have a plan. What plan? The plan to walk into Michael Winner's private bank and walk out with half a million quid. Fast, clever, stylish, funny and utterly compulsive, this is a first novel with everything.
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
Take four ne'er-do-wells: a 28-year-old ex-public schoolboy who can't bear the idea of setting down; Suzy the Black Widow, who has a deliciously flat stomach and drives like she's breathing through the carbs; Brady the Reservoir Dogs fetishist; and Chico the fat Portuguese waiter. Add some plastic guns, the IRA and a white Merc with fins and you have a plan. What plan? The plan to walk into Michael Winner's private bank and walk out with half a million quid. Fast, clever, stylish, funny and utterly compulsive, this is a first novel with everything.
My Little Armalite
Author: James Hawes
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0099513250
Category : Black humor
Languages : en
Pages : 370
Book Description
John Goode is a leftie lecturer who just wants to give his beloved wife and kids a normal life. You know: north London, good schools, nice neighbours, sash windows... yes, you know. But who can afford that kind of normal these days? Goode can only daydream of becoming a television academic, or else of a bloody great economic crash that would make his job worth something again. So when he stumbles on a long-buried assault rifle whilst planting plum-trees for his children, he soon begins to wonder if this might be just the tool to seriously renegociate his family's future...
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0099513250
Category : Black humor
Languages : en
Pages : 370
Book Description
John Goode is a leftie lecturer who just wants to give his beloved wife and kids a normal life. You know: north London, good schools, nice neighbours, sash windows... yes, you know. But who can afford that kind of normal these days? Goode can only daydream of becoming a television academic, or else of a bloody great economic crash that would make his job worth something again. So when he stumbles on a long-buried assault rifle whilst planting plum-trees for his children, he soon begins to wonder if this might be just the tool to seriously renegociate his family's future...
Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life
Author: James Hawes
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1429988835
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Book Description
Everybody knows the face of Franz Kafka, whether they have read any of his works or not. And that brooding face carries instant images: bleak and threatening visions of an inescapable bureaucracy, nightmarish transformations, uncanny predictions of the Holocaust. But while Kafka's genius is beyond question, the image of a mysterious, sickly, shadowy figure who was scarcely known in his own lifetime bears no resemblance to the historical reality. Franz Kafka was a popular and well-connected millionaire's son who enjoyed good-time girls, brothels, and expensive porn, who landed a highly desirable state job that pulled in at least $90,000 a year in today's dollars for a six-hour day, who remained a loyal member of Prague's German-speaking Imperial elite right to the end, and whose work was backed by a powerful literary clique. Here are some of the prevalent Kafka myths: *Kafka was the archetypal genius neglected in his lifetime. *Kafka was lonely. *Kafka was stuck in a dead-end job, struggling to find time to write. *Kafka was tormented by fear of sex. *Kafka was unbendingly honest about himself to the women in his life – too honest. *Kafka had a terrible, domineering father who had no understanding of his son's needs. *Kafka's style is mysterious and opaque. *Kafka takes us into bizarre worlds. James Hawes wants to tear down the critical walls which generations of gatekeepers---scholars, biographers, and tourist guides---have built up around Franz Kafka, giving us back the real man and the real significance of his splendid works. And he'll take no prisoners in the process.
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1429988835
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Book Description
Everybody knows the face of Franz Kafka, whether they have read any of his works or not. And that brooding face carries instant images: bleak and threatening visions of an inescapable bureaucracy, nightmarish transformations, uncanny predictions of the Holocaust. But while Kafka's genius is beyond question, the image of a mysterious, sickly, shadowy figure who was scarcely known in his own lifetime bears no resemblance to the historical reality. Franz Kafka was a popular and well-connected millionaire's son who enjoyed good-time girls, brothels, and expensive porn, who landed a highly desirable state job that pulled in at least $90,000 a year in today's dollars for a six-hour day, who remained a loyal member of Prague's German-speaking Imperial elite right to the end, and whose work was backed by a powerful literary clique. Here are some of the prevalent Kafka myths: *Kafka was the archetypal genius neglected in his lifetime. *Kafka was lonely. *Kafka was stuck in a dead-end job, struggling to find time to write. *Kafka was tormented by fear of sex. *Kafka was unbendingly honest about himself to the women in his life – too honest. *Kafka had a terrible, domineering father who had no understanding of his son's needs. *Kafka's style is mysterious and opaque. *Kafka takes us into bizarre worlds. James Hawes wants to tear down the critical walls which generations of gatekeepers---scholars, biographers, and tourist guides---have built up around Franz Kafka, giving us back the real man and the real significance of his splendid works. And he'll take no prisoners in the process.
Holden's Performance
Author: Murray Bail
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 125012896X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 377
Book Description
Holden's Performance by award-winning author Murray Bail is the story of Holden Shadbolt, a guileless and matter-of-fact innocent as he passes through the cities and landscape of Australia. His reassuring silent presence and photographic memory make him useful to men of power and women who appear to need his protection. He is surrounded by larger than life figures whose exploits and adventures Holden follows—ex-Corporal Frank 'Bloodnut' McBee, the scrap dealer who woos his mother; his uncle Vern, a shortsighted proofreader who likes facts and eating newspaper with is breakfast cereal; and the crippled artist Harriet, whose twists and curves appeal to Holden as he holds to his own unswervingly straight lines.
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 125012896X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 377
Book Description
Holden's Performance by award-winning author Murray Bail is the story of Holden Shadbolt, a guileless and matter-of-fact innocent as he passes through the cities and landscape of Australia. His reassuring silent presence and photographic memory make him useful to men of power and women who appear to need his protection. He is surrounded by larger than life figures whose exploits and adventures Holden follows—ex-Corporal Frank 'Bloodnut' McBee, the scrap dealer who woos his mother; his uncle Vern, a shortsighted proofreader who likes facts and eating newspaper with is breakfast cereal; and the crippled artist Harriet, whose twists and curves appeal to Holden as he holds to his own unswervingly straight lines.
Headlong
Author: Michael Frayn
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312267469
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 356
Book Description
Academic Martin Clay is asked by a boorish country squire to assess his paintings. Clay spots what he suspects is a Bruegel and so begins a tale of lies and concealment as he schemes to separate the painting from its owner.
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312267469
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 356
Book Description
Academic Martin Clay is asked by a boorish country squire to assess his paintings. Clay spots what he suspects is a Bruegel and so begins a tale of lies and concealment as he schemes to separate the painting from its owner.
Excavating Kafka
Author: James Hawes
Publisher: Quercus Books
ISBN: 9781849161640
Category : Novelists, Austrian
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Kafka's features, and that dreaded word, Kafkaesque, are known to millions who have never read serious literature. Generations of academics and critics have maintained the image of Franz Kafka as a tortured seer whose works defy interpretation. In Excavating Kafka James Hawes reveals the truth that lies beneath the image of a middle-European Nostradamus with a typographically irresistible name. The real Franz Kafka was no angst-ridden paranoid but a well-groomed young man-about-town who frequented brothels, had regular sex with a penniless-but-pretty girl and subscribed to upmarket pornography (published by the very man who published Kafka's first stories). Excavating Kafka debunks a number of key facets of the Kafka-Myth, including the idea that Kafka was the archetypal genius neglected in his lifetime; that he was stuck in a dead-end job and struggling to find time to write; that he was tormented by fear of sex; that he had a uniquely terrible, domineering father who had no understanding of his son's needs; that his literature is mysterious and opaque; that he constructs fantasy-worlds in which innocent everymen live in fear of mysterious and totalitarian powers-that-be. Written with the panache of a supremely gifted comic writer, Excavating Kafka is an engaging and involving reassessment of a major figure of literary modernism that will be welcomed and enjoyed by students of Kafka and by general readers alike.
Publisher: Quercus Books
ISBN: 9781849161640
Category : Novelists, Austrian
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Kafka's features, and that dreaded word, Kafkaesque, are known to millions who have never read serious literature. Generations of academics and critics have maintained the image of Franz Kafka as a tortured seer whose works defy interpretation. In Excavating Kafka James Hawes reveals the truth that lies beneath the image of a middle-European Nostradamus with a typographically irresistible name. The real Franz Kafka was no angst-ridden paranoid but a well-groomed young man-about-town who frequented brothels, had regular sex with a penniless-but-pretty girl and subscribed to upmarket pornography (published by the very man who published Kafka's first stories). Excavating Kafka debunks a number of key facets of the Kafka-Myth, including the idea that Kafka was the archetypal genius neglected in his lifetime; that he was stuck in a dead-end job and struggling to find time to write; that he was tormented by fear of sex; that he had a uniquely terrible, domineering father who had no understanding of his son's needs; that his literature is mysterious and opaque; that he constructs fantasy-worlds in which innocent everymen live in fear of mysterious and totalitarian powers-that-be. Written with the panache of a supremely gifted comic writer, Excavating Kafka is an engaging and involving reassessment of a major figure of literary modernism that will be welcomed and enjoyed by students of Kafka and by general readers alike.
Speak for England
Author: James Hawes
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0099470179
Category : Airplane crash survival
Languages : en
Pages : 354
Book Description
A reluctant competitor on a reality TV show, Brian Marley is all alone in a jungle and about to die. However, when trying to find his way out of the tropical maze, he stumbles across a civilization created by the survivors of a plane crash years before - is this an Englishman's vision of heaven?
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0099470179
Category : Airplane crash survival
Languages : en
Pages : 354
Book Description
A reluctant competitor on a reality TV show, Brian Marley is all alone in a jungle and about to die. However, when trying to find his way out of the tropical maze, he stumbles across a civilization created by the survivors of a plane crash years before - is this an Englishman's vision of heaven?
Englanders and Huns
Author: James Hawes
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0857205307
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 595
Book Description
A completely fresh look at the culture clash between Britain and Germany that all but destroyed Europe. Half a century before 1914, most Britons saw the Germans as poor and rather comical cousins - and most Germans looked up to the British as their natural mentors. Over the next five decades, each came to think that the other simply had to be confronted - in Europe, in Africa, in the Pacific and at last in the deadly race to cover the North Sea with dreadnoughts. But why? Why did so many Britons come to see in Germany everything that was fearful and abhorrent? Why did so many Germans come to see any German who called dobbel fohltwhile playing Das Lawn Tennisas the dupe of a global conspiracy? Packed with long-forgotten stories such as the murder of Queen Victoria's cook in Bohn, the disaster to Germany's ironclads under the White Cliffs, bizarre early colonial clashes and the precise, dark moment when Anglophobia begat modern anti-Semitism, this is the fifty-year saga of the tragic, and often tragicomic, delusions and miscalculations that led to the defining cataclysm of our times - the breaking of empires and the womb of horrors, the Great War. Richly illustrated with the words and pictures that formed our ancestors' disastrous opinions, it will forever change the telling of this fateful tale.
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0857205307
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 595
Book Description
A completely fresh look at the culture clash between Britain and Germany that all but destroyed Europe. Half a century before 1914, most Britons saw the Germans as poor and rather comical cousins - and most Germans looked up to the British as their natural mentors. Over the next five decades, each came to think that the other simply had to be confronted - in Europe, in Africa, in the Pacific and at last in the deadly race to cover the North Sea with dreadnoughts. But why? Why did so many Britons come to see in Germany everything that was fearful and abhorrent? Why did so many Germans come to see any German who called dobbel fohltwhile playing Das Lawn Tennisas the dupe of a global conspiracy? Packed with long-forgotten stories such as the murder of Queen Victoria's cook in Bohn, the disaster to Germany's ironclads under the White Cliffs, bizarre early colonial clashes and the precise, dark moment when Anglophobia begat modern anti-Semitism, this is the fifty-year saga of the tragic, and often tragicomic, delusions and miscalculations that led to the defining cataclysm of our times - the breaking of empires and the womb of horrors, the Great War. Richly illustrated with the words and pictures that formed our ancestors' disastrous opinions, it will forever change the telling of this fateful tale.
Speak For England
Author: James Hawes
Publisher: Anchor Canada
ISBN: 0385672586
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354
Book Description
Brian Marley should be counting his winnings as victor of Britain’s ultimate reality TV show. Instead, he’s stranded on a jungle island after a helicopter crash wipes out the television crew. His ill-fated luck takes a turn when he falls from a precarious cliff and lands in a lost world. Awaking in a village founded by survivors of a 1958 airplane crash, Brian discovers an idyllic community modeled after pre-Sixties England and overseen by the stern but judicious Headmaster. But when he uncovers the Headmaster’s methods of survival, the village’s quaint idealism proves to be founded on something far more sinister. With rescue imminent, Brian finds himself at the center of a clash between English cultures separated by fifty years of history. Satirical and insightful, Speak for England explores the changing world by asking whether it ever really changes at all.
Publisher: Anchor Canada
ISBN: 0385672586
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354
Book Description
Brian Marley should be counting his winnings as victor of Britain’s ultimate reality TV show. Instead, he’s stranded on a jungle island after a helicopter crash wipes out the television crew. His ill-fated luck takes a turn when he falls from a precarious cliff and lands in a lost world. Awaking in a village founded by survivors of a 1958 airplane crash, Brian discovers an idyllic community modeled after pre-Sixties England and overseen by the stern but judicious Headmaster. But when he uncovers the Headmaster’s methods of survival, the village’s quaint idealism proves to be founded on something far more sinister. With rescue imminent, Brian finds himself at the center of a clash between English cultures separated by fifty years of history. Satirical and insightful, Speak for England explores the changing world by asking whether it ever really changes at all.