Author: Christoph Ransmayr
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802134592
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
A brilliant interweaving of journeys and voyages--geographical, historical, psychological--The Terrors of Ice and Darkness is the riveting account of a narrator obsessed with a certain Josef Mazzini, a young Italian "lost in the arctic winter of 1981" who is himself obsessed with the Imperial Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition of 1873: "At first it was nothing more than a game to try to reduce the circumstances of his disappearance to some sort of explanation, any explanation. But every clue yielded a new unanswered question. Quite involuntarily I found myself taking one step after the other. . . . Cumulus clouds mirrored in a shop window became calving glaciers, patches of old snow in city parks became great floes of ice. The Arctic Ocean lay at my window. Much the same thing must have happened to Mazzini." Painstakingly retracing Mazzini's steps, the narrator simultaneously reconstructs the dramatic and fantastic story of the nineteenth-century journey, using actual letters and diaries of the members of that harrowing expedition. These documents--sometimes surprisingly poetic and moving--combine in the narrator's imagination to evoke as never before the awful beauty of the world's farthest northern reaches. In a novel as crystalline as the polar ice, as penetrating as the arctic cold, Christopher Ransmayr spins an adventure tale both spellbinding and paradoxical in its subversive undermining of conventional notions of heroism and exploration.
The Terrors of Ice and Darkness
Author: Christoph Ransmayr
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802134592
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
A brilliant interweaving of journeys and voyages--geographical, historical, psychological--The Terrors of Ice and Darkness is the riveting account of a narrator obsessed with a certain Josef Mazzini, a young Italian "lost in the arctic winter of 1981" who is himself obsessed with the Imperial Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition of 1873: "At first it was nothing more than a game to try to reduce the circumstances of his disappearance to some sort of explanation, any explanation. But every clue yielded a new unanswered question. Quite involuntarily I found myself taking one step after the other. . . . Cumulus clouds mirrored in a shop window became calving glaciers, patches of old snow in city parks became great floes of ice. The Arctic Ocean lay at my window. Much the same thing must have happened to Mazzini." Painstakingly retracing Mazzini's steps, the narrator simultaneously reconstructs the dramatic and fantastic story of the nineteenth-century journey, using actual letters and diaries of the members of that harrowing expedition. These documents--sometimes surprisingly poetic and moving--combine in the narrator's imagination to evoke as never before the awful beauty of the world's farthest northern reaches. In a novel as crystalline as the polar ice, as penetrating as the arctic cold, Christopher Ransmayr spins an adventure tale both spellbinding and paradoxical in its subversive undermining of conventional notions of heroism and exploration.
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802134592
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
A brilliant interweaving of journeys and voyages--geographical, historical, psychological--The Terrors of Ice and Darkness is the riveting account of a narrator obsessed with a certain Josef Mazzini, a young Italian "lost in the arctic winter of 1981" who is himself obsessed with the Imperial Austro-Hungarian North Pole Expedition of 1873: "At first it was nothing more than a game to try to reduce the circumstances of his disappearance to some sort of explanation, any explanation. But every clue yielded a new unanswered question. Quite involuntarily I found myself taking one step after the other. . . . Cumulus clouds mirrored in a shop window became calving glaciers, patches of old snow in city parks became great floes of ice. The Arctic Ocean lay at my window. Much the same thing must have happened to Mazzini." Painstakingly retracing Mazzini's steps, the narrator simultaneously reconstructs the dramatic and fantastic story of the nineteenth-century journey, using actual letters and diaries of the members of that harrowing expedition. These documents--sometimes surprisingly poetic and moving--combine in the narrator's imagination to evoke as never before the awful beauty of the world's farthest northern reaches. In a novel as crystalline as the polar ice, as penetrating as the arctic cold, Christopher Ransmayr spins an adventure tale both spellbinding and paradoxical in its subversive undermining of conventional notions of heroism and exploration.
The Dog King
Author: Christoph Ransmayr
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307555682
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 369
Book Description
From Christoph Ransmayr, whose brilliant rise to preeminence among the younger generation of writers in the German language was recently crowned when he shared with Salman Rushdie Europe's most prestigious new literary award, the Aristeion Prize--a novel in which fiction and history are forged into a universe of mythic intensity. World War II has ended, but only in the West. Central Europe is slipping back into its agricultural past. The bomb has not yet been dropped--nor will it be for twenty years. The Allies have punished Germany for its war crimes by forcing it to revert to a preindustrial age: power stations, railways, factories, and all the machinery of technology have been destroyed or abandoned and left to decay. Moor is a small quarry town (Mauthausen in the all-too-recent past of real history). The occupying American army has installed a camp survivor, Ambras, to govern the local population. Brave, lonely, hated and feared by his former persecutors, Ambras has returned to Moor only because his Jewish wife died there. Setting up house in a derelict villa surrounded by wild hounds that earn him the nickname the Dog King, he chooses another loner, the village boy Bering, as his bodyguard. Moving away from his family and into the compound, the boy enters a new universe of power, of half-glimpsed ideas, of contact with the forbidden world outside. And he meets the only other person Ambras welcomes, a strange and beautiful orphan girl named Lily who lives and hunts in the hills, who knows where the weapons are hidden and forages in the "free world for the goods the villagers crave. But Bering's new life begins to unravel as he succumbs to a strange eye disease known as Morbus Kitahara, in which the vision gradually darkens and which tends to afflict marksmen and sharpshooters. Only Lily can find help, can offer them all a possible future. The three make a courageous bid to escape, and the account of their flight brings the novel to its extraordinarily gripping and suspenseful climax. Searingly powerful, with a poetic intensity that stays with the reader long after the last page, The Dog King is a modern masterpiece.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307555682
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 369
Book Description
From Christoph Ransmayr, whose brilliant rise to preeminence among the younger generation of writers in the German language was recently crowned when he shared with Salman Rushdie Europe's most prestigious new literary award, the Aristeion Prize--a novel in which fiction and history are forged into a universe of mythic intensity. World War II has ended, but only in the West. Central Europe is slipping back into its agricultural past. The bomb has not yet been dropped--nor will it be for twenty years. The Allies have punished Germany for its war crimes by forcing it to revert to a preindustrial age: power stations, railways, factories, and all the machinery of technology have been destroyed or abandoned and left to decay. Moor is a small quarry town (Mauthausen in the all-too-recent past of real history). The occupying American army has installed a camp survivor, Ambras, to govern the local population. Brave, lonely, hated and feared by his former persecutors, Ambras has returned to Moor only because his Jewish wife died there. Setting up house in a derelict villa surrounded by wild hounds that earn him the nickname the Dog King, he chooses another loner, the village boy Bering, as his bodyguard. Moving away from his family and into the compound, the boy enters a new universe of power, of half-glimpsed ideas, of contact with the forbidden world outside. And he meets the only other person Ambras welcomes, a strange and beautiful orphan girl named Lily who lives and hunts in the hills, who knows where the weapons are hidden and forages in the "free world for the goods the villagers crave. But Bering's new life begins to unravel as he succumbs to a strange eye disease known as Morbus Kitahara, in which the vision gradually darkens and which tends to afflict marksmen and sharpshooters. Only Lily can find help, can offer them all a possible future. The three make a courageous bid to escape, and the account of their flight brings the novel to its extraordinarily gripping and suspenseful climax. Searingly powerful, with a poetic intensity that stays with the reader long after the last page, The Dog King is a modern masterpiece.
The Terror
Author: Dan Simmons
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316003883
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 798
Book Description
The "masterfully chilling" novel that inspired the hit AMC series (Entertainment Weekly). The men on board the HMS Terror — part of the 1845 Franklin Expedition, the first steam-powered vessels ever to search for the legendary Northwest Passage — are entering a second summer in the Arctic Circle without a thaw, stranded in a nightmarish landscape of encroaching ice and darkness. Endlessly cold, they struggle to survive with poisonous rations, a dwindling coal supply, and ships buckling in the grip of crushing ice. But their real enemy is even more terrifying. There is something out there in the frigid darkness: an unseen predator stalking their ship, a monstrous terror clawing to get in. “The best and most unusual historical novel I have read in years.” —Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316003883
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 798
Book Description
The "masterfully chilling" novel that inspired the hit AMC series (Entertainment Weekly). The men on board the HMS Terror — part of the 1845 Franklin Expedition, the first steam-powered vessels ever to search for the legendary Northwest Passage — are entering a second summer in the Arctic Circle without a thaw, stranded in a nightmarish landscape of encroaching ice and darkness. Endlessly cold, they struggle to survive with poisonous rations, a dwindling coal supply, and ships buckling in the grip of crushing ice. But their real enemy is even more terrifying. There is something out there in the frigid darkness: an unseen predator stalking their ship, a monstrous terror clawing to get in. “The best and most unusual historical novel I have read in years.” —Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe
The Third Brother
Author: Nick McDonell
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802142672
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 286
Book Description
A news magazine intern sorts through the chaos of his life and the world around him after his parents' murder-suicide, and his brother's confession and suicide.
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802142672
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 286
Book Description
A news magazine intern sorts through the chaos of his life and the world around him after his parents' murder-suicide, and his brother's confession and suicide.
Atlas of an Anxious Man
Author: Christoph Ransmayr
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780857423146
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
In The Atlas of an Anxious Man, Christoph Ransmayr offers a mesmerizing travel diary--a sprawling tale of earthly wonders seen by a wandering eye. This is an exquisite, lyrically told travel story. Translated by Simon Pare, this unique account follows Ransmayr across the globe: from the shadow of Java's volcanoes to the rapids of the Mekong and Danube Rivers, from the drift ice of the Arctic Circle to Himalayan passes, and on to the disenchanted islands of the South Pacific. Ransmayr begins again and again with, "I saw. . ." recounting to the reader the stories of continents, eras, and landscapes of the soul. Like maps, the episodes come together to become a book of the world--one that charts the life and death, happiness and fate of people bound up in images of breathtaking beauty. "One of the German language's most gifted young novelists."--Library Journal, on The Terrors of Ice and Darkness
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780857423146
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
In The Atlas of an Anxious Man, Christoph Ransmayr offers a mesmerizing travel diary--a sprawling tale of earthly wonders seen by a wandering eye. This is an exquisite, lyrically told travel story. Translated by Simon Pare, this unique account follows Ransmayr across the globe: from the shadow of Java's volcanoes to the rapids of the Mekong and Danube Rivers, from the drift ice of the Arctic Circle to Himalayan passes, and on to the disenchanted islands of the South Pacific. Ransmayr begins again and again with, "I saw. . ." recounting to the reader the stories of continents, eras, and landscapes of the soul. Like maps, the episodes come together to become a book of the world--one that charts the life and death, happiness and fate of people bound up in images of breathtaking beauty. "One of the German language's most gifted young novelists."--Library Journal, on The Terrors of Ice and Darkness
Traces of Trauma in W. G. Sebald and Christoph Ransmayr
Author: Dora Osborne
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351192337
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 354
Book Description
"Both W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) and the Austrian author Christoph Ransmayr (1954-) were born too late to know directly the violence of the Second World War and the Holocaust, but these traumatic events are a persistent presence in their work. In a series of close readings of key prose texts, Dora Osborne examines the different ways in which the traces of a traumatic past mark their narratives. By focusing on the authors' use of visual and topographical tropes, she shows how blind spots and inhospitable places configure signs of past violence, but, ultimately, resist our understanding. Whilst links between the two authors are well-documented, this book offers the first full-length study of Sebald and Ransmayr and their complicated relation to the traumatic traces of National Socialism. Dora Osborne is Lecturer in German at the University of Nottingham."
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351192337
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 354
Book Description
"Both W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) and the Austrian author Christoph Ransmayr (1954-) were born too late to know directly the violence of the Second World War and the Holocaust, but these traumatic events are a persistent presence in their work. In a series of close readings of key prose texts, Dora Osborne examines the different ways in which the traces of a traumatic past mark their narratives. By focusing on the authors' use of visual and topographical tropes, she shows how blind spots and inhospitable places configure signs of past violence, but, ultimately, resist our understanding. Whilst links between the two authors are well-documented, this book offers the first full-length study of Sebald and Ransmayr and their complicated relation to the traumatic traces of National Socialism. Dora Osborne is Lecturer in German at the University of Nottingham."
Hold the Dark: A Novel
Author: William Giraldi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 087140494X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 144
Book Description
Now a Netflix original film starring Alexander Skarsgård, Riley Keough, and Jeffrey Wright At the edge of civilization, nature and evil collide in what “stands out as one of the decade’s best books of its kind” (Alan Cheuse, Boston Globe). Written with “force and precision and grace” (John Wilwol, New York Times Book Review) Hold the Dark is a “taut and unforgettable journey into the heart of darkness” (Dennis Lehane). At the start of another pitiless winter, wolves have taken three children from the remote Alaskan village of Keelut, including the six-year-old son of Medora and Vernon Slone. Wolf expert Russell Core is called in to investigate these killings and discovers an unholy truth harbored by Medora before she disappears. When her husband returns home to discover his boy dead and his wife missing, he begins a maniacal pursuit that cuts a bloody swath across the frozen landscape. With the help of a local police detective, Core attempts to find Medora before her husband does, setting in motion a deadly chain of events in this “chilling, mysterious, and completely engaging novel” (Tim O’Brien) that marks the arrival of a major American writer.
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 087140494X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 144
Book Description
Now a Netflix original film starring Alexander Skarsgård, Riley Keough, and Jeffrey Wright At the edge of civilization, nature and evil collide in what “stands out as one of the decade’s best books of its kind” (Alan Cheuse, Boston Globe). Written with “force and precision and grace” (John Wilwol, New York Times Book Review) Hold the Dark is a “taut and unforgettable journey into the heart of darkness” (Dennis Lehane). At the start of another pitiless winter, wolves have taken three children from the remote Alaskan village of Keelut, including the six-year-old son of Medora and Vernon Slone. Wolf expert Russell Core is called in to investigate these killings and discovers an unholy truth harbored by Medora before she disappears. When her husband returns home to discover his boy dead and his wife missing, he begins a maniacal pursuit that cuts a bloody swath across the frozen landscape. With the help of a local police detective, Core attempts to find Medora before her husband does, setting in motion a deadly chain of events in this “chilling, mysterious, and completely engaging novel” (Tim O’Brien) that marks the arrival of a major American writer.
A Bright Ray of Darkness
Author: Ethan Hawke
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385352395
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
The blistering story of a young man making his Broadway debut in Henry IV just as his marriage implodes—a "witty, wise, and heartfelt novel" (Washington Post) about art and love, fame and heartbreak from the acclaimed actor/writer/director. A bracing meditation on fame and celebrity, and the redemptive, healing power of art; a portrait of the ravages of disappointment and divorce; a poignant consideration of the rites of fatherhood and manhood; a novel soaked in rage and sex, longing and despair; and a passionate love letter to the world of theater, A Bright Ray of Darkness showcases Ethan Hawke's gifts as a novelist as never before. Hawke's narrator is a young man in torment, disgusted with himself after the collapse of his marriage, still half hoping for a reconciliation that would allow him to forgive himself and move on as he clumsily, and sometimes hilariously, tries to manage the wreckage of his personal life with whiskey and sex. What saves him is theater: in particular, the challenge of performing the role of Hotspur in a production of Henry IV under the leadership of a brilliant director, helmed by one of the most electrifying—and narcissistic—Falstaff's of all time. Searing, raw, and utterly transfixing, A Bright Ray of Darkness is a novel about shame and beauty and faith, and the moral power of art.
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385352395
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
The blistering story of a young man making his Broadway debut in Henry IV just as his marriage implodes—a "witty, wise, and heartfelt novel" (Washington Post) about art and love, fame and heartbreak from the acclaimed actor/writer/director. A bracing meditation on fame and celebrity, and the redemptive, healing power of art; a portrait of the ravages of disappointment and divorce; a poignant consideration of the rites of fatherhood and manhood; a novel soaked in rage and sex, longing and despair; and a passionate love letter to the world of theater, A Bright Ray of Darkness showcases Ethan Hawke's gifts as a novelist as never before. Hawke's narrator is a young man in torment, disgusted with himself after the collapse of his marriage, still half hoping for a reconciliation that would allow him to forgive himself and move on as he clumsily, and sometimes hilariously, tries to manage the wreckage of his personal life with whiskey and sex. What saves him is theater: in particular, the challenge of performing the role of Hotspur in a production of Henry IV under the leadership of a brilliant director, helmed by one of the most electrifying—and narcissistic—Falstaff's of all time. Searing, raw, and utterly transfixing, A Bright Ray of Darkness is a novel about shame and beauty and faith, and the moral power of art.
The Girl and the Stars
Author: Mark Lawrence
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1984806009
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386
Book Description
A stunning new epic fantasy series following a young outcast who must fight with everything she has to survive, set in the same world as Red Sister. In the ice, east of the Black Rock, there is a hole into which broken children are thrown. Yaz’s people call it the Pit of the Missing and now it is drawing her in as she has always known it would. To resist the cold, to endure the months of night when even the air itself begins to freeze, requires a special breed. Variation is dangerous, difference is fatal. And Yaz is not the same. Yaz’s difference tears her from the only life she’s ever known, away from her family, from the boy she thought she would spend her days with, and has to carve out a new path for herself in a world whose existence she never suspected. A world full of difference and mystery and danger. Yaz learns that Abeth is older and stranger than she had ever imagined. She learns that her weaknesses are another kind of strength and that the cruel arithmetic of survival that has always governed her people can be challenged.
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1984806009
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386
Book Description
A stunning new epic fantasy series following a young outcast who must fight with everything she has to survive, set in the same world as Red Sister. In the ice, east of the Black Rock, there is a hole into which broken children are thrown. Yaz’s people call it the Pit of the Missing and now it is drawing her in as she has always known it would. To resist the cold, to endure the months of night when even the air itself begins to freeze, requires a special breed. Variation is dangerous, difference is fatal. And Yaz is not the same. Yaz’s difference tears her from the only life she’s ever known, away from her family, from the boy she thought she would spend her days with, and has to carve out a new path for herself in a world whose existence she never suspected. A world full of difference and mystery and danger. Yaz learns that Abeth is older and stranger than she had ever imagined. She learns that her weaknesses are another kind of strength and that the cruel arithmetic of survival that has always governed her people can be challenged.
The Waking Dark
Author: Robin Wasserman
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 0375868771
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 466
Book Description
After a series of suicide-killings and a deadly storm, the residents of the town of Oleander, Kansas, start acting even more strangely than would be expected. Only the five witnesses of the murders retain their sound minds, and they must band together to save the town from whatever has come over it.
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 0375868771
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 466
Book Description
After a series of suicide-killings and a deadly storm, the residents of the town of Oleander, Kansas, start acting even more strangely than would be expected. Only the five witnesses of the murders retain their sound minds, and they must band together to save the town from whatever has come over it.