'Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of my tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.' Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, frustrated college professor. In love with his landlady's twelve-year-old daughter Lolita, he'll do anything to possess her. Unable and unwilling to stop himself, he is prepared to commit any crime to get what he wants.
Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is he all of these?
Originally written in 1952 but not published till 1985, Queer is an enigma - both an unflinching autobiographical self-portrait and a coruscatingly political novel, Burroughs' only realist love story and a montage of comic-grotesque fantasies that paved the way for his masterpiece, Naked Lunch. Set in Mexico City during the early fifties, Queer follows William Lee's hopeless pursuit of desire from bar to bar in the American expatriate scene. As Lee breaks down, the trademark Burroughsian voice emerges; a maniacal mix of self-lacerating humor and the Ugly American at his ugliest. A haunting tale of possession and exorcism, Queer is also a novel with a history of secrets, as this new edition reveals.
Those who inhabit Last Exit to Brooklyn are unforgettable: Harry, the strike leader, who during his weeks of power discovers something of his true nature; Tralala, who rejects the only love she is offered and sinks swiftly to the lowest level of prostitution; Georgette, the 'hip queer' with pathetic aspirations to culture; Abraham, the 'cool ass' black stud, with his girls, his 'bigass' Cadillac, and his undernourished family; the debris of American civilisation, for whom the author ultimately makes us feel a profound compassion. Last Exit to Brooklyn was found obscene at the Old Bailey in November 1967, a decision which was reversed by a historic Appeal Court judgement in July 1968. Now this 'honest and terrible book', as Anthony Burgess describes it in his Introduction to this new edition, can take its rightful place as one of the major books of our time.
En 1959 est publié à Paris Le Festin nu, qui révèle le talent scandaleux de William Burroughs. À l'origine, le manuscrit s'intitulait Interzone. Le Festin nu était le résultat d'un choix parmi le millier de pages d'un matériau que Burroughs répartit ensuite entre La Machine molle, Le ticket qui explosa et Nova Express. Restaient les 175 pages du manuscrit original qui n'ont été retrouvées qu'en 1984. Celles-ci nous permettent de reconstituer la genèse d'un des chefs-d'oeuvre de la littérature du XXe siècle. Ces fragments narratifs, ces lettres inachevées où l'écrivain américain dévoile à son ami Allen Ginsberg les progrès de son cheminement labyrinthique, ces « routines » où domine la figure grise et énigmatique de son double, William Lee, représentent la manifestation la plus pure de l'esprit de Burroughs et sa volonté de faire de l'écriture un moyen d'exploration transgressif des régions mentales encore inexplorées et dangereuses.
The town in this tale is Galloway, Massachusetts, birthplace of the five sons and three daughters of the Martin family in the early 1900s. The city is New York, the heaving melting pot which lures them all in search of futures and identity.
Rejected by the man she loves when he discovers that her father will disinherit her if they marry, Catherine Sloper again meets Morris Townsend after the death of her forbidding and domineering parent
Accompanying Sherlock Holmes to an ill-omened house in south London, Dr Watson is startled to find a dead man whose face is contorted in a rictus of horror. There is no mark of violence on the body yet a single word is written on the wall in blood. Dr Watson is as baffled as the police, but Holmes soon uncovers a trail of murder and lost love.
Newland Archer saw little to envy in the marriages of his friends, yet he prided himself that in May Welland he had found the companion of his needstender and impressionable, with equal purity of mind and manners. The engagement was announced discreetly, but all of New York society was soon privy to this most perfect match, a union of families and circumstances cemented by affection. Enter Countess Olenska, a woman of quick wit sharpened by experience, not afraid to flout convention and determined to find freedom in divorce. Against his judgment, Newland is drawn to the socially ostracized Ellen Olenska, who opens his eyes and has the power to make him feel. He knows that in sweettempered May, he can expect stability and the steadying comfort of duty. But what new worlds could he discover with Ellen? Written with elegance and wry precision, Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prizewinning masterpiece is a tragic love story and a powerful homily about the perils of a perfect marriage.Commentary by William Lyon Phelps and E. M. ForsterFrom the Trade Paperback edition.
Dealing with one day in Dublin, 16th June 1904, this book centres around Stephen Dedalus, the hero of "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man". Various chapters correspond to episodes of Homer's "Odyssey" and the style employs certain techniques, including stream of consciousness and parody.
"Dubliners" brings us moments from the lives of the men and women who inhabit James Joyce's Dublin, from truants, seducers, gossips and politicians to sentimental aunts, cunical patriots and struggling musicians. it is a gromy city full of cynicism and disappointment, yet with moments of rare epiphany that bring people and their hopes vividly to life.
Jim has fallen into a job at one of the new red brick universities. A moderately successful future beckons as long as Jim can survive a madrigal-singing weekend, deliver a lecture on "merrie England" and resist Christine, the girlfriend of Professor Welch's son, Bertrand.
Henry wotton est un dandy qui use et abuse de tous les plaisirs illicites : sexe, drogue, alcool, et bons mots.
Dans le studio de son ami (et ex-amant) basil hallward, vidéaste très en vogue, il rencontre dorian gray, un jeune homme d'une grande beauté. il se propose de l'initier à toute une vie de débauche... dorian se laisse tenter, tout en faisant le voeu de garder la fraîcheur et l'innocence de la jeunesse. mais il y a le sida et ses ravages... dorian est le portrait de dorian gray d'oscar wilde transposé un siècle plus tard.
Wilde racontait la déchéance du xixe siècle finissant, will self, lui, raconte la lente dérive du londres décadent des années 80 et 90. dans ces variations sur un mythe, il dépeint, avec le cynisme et l'humour qu'on lui connaît, une fin de siècle désormais révolue.
Alex Leamas is tired. It's the 1960s, he's been out in the cold for years, spying in Berlin for his British masters, and has seen too many good agents murdered for their troubles. Now Control wants to bring him in at last - but only after one final assignment.
He must travel deep into the heart of Communist Germany and betray his country, a job that he will do with his usual cynical professionalism. But when George Smiley tries to help a young woman Leamas has befriended, Leamas's mission may prove to be the worst thing he could ever have done.
In le Carré's breakthrough work of 1963, the spy story is reborn as a gritty and terrible tale of men who are caught up in politics beyond their imagining.
A dense yellow miasma swirls in the streets of London as Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson accompany a beautiful young woman to a sinister assignation. For Mary Marston has received several large pearls - one a year for the last six years - and now a mystery letter telling her she is a wronged woman.
Lady Constance Chatterley is trapped in a loveless marriage to a man who is impotent. Oppressed by her dreary life, she is drawn to Mellors the gamekeeper. Breaking out against the constraints of society she yields to her instinctive desire for him and discovers the transforming power of physical love which leads them both towards fulfillment.
After eighteen years as a political prisoner in the Bastille the aging Dr Manette is finally released and reunited with his daughter in England. There two very different men, Charles Darnay, an exiled French aristocrat, and Sydney Carton, a disreputable but brilliant English lawyer, become enmeshed through their love for Lucie Manette.
When Isabel Archer, a young American woman, arrives in Europe, she sees the world as "a place of brightness". She turns aside from suitors who offer her their wealth and devotion to follow her own path. But that way leads to disillusionment and Isabel has to make her final choice.
'Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard. I am a lover of America...' So speaks the mysterious stranger at a Lahore cafe as dusk settles. Invited to join him for tea, you learn his name and what led this speaker of immaculate English to seek you out.
