Empfehlungen basierend auf "Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction"

My part of Ireland had a poet at one time, a poor ragged fellow whom no respectable person whom no respectable person would be seen talking to, but he left doors open as he passed. A delightful autobiographical novel from one of Ireland's best-loved writers Time hardly mattered in the village of Mucker, the birthplace of poet and writer Patrick Kavanagh. Full of wry humour, Kavanagh's unsentimental and evocative account of his Irish rural upbringing describes a patriarchal society surviving on the edge of poverty, sustained by the land and an insatiable love of gossip. There are tales of schoolboy skirmishes, blackberrying and night-time salmon-poaching; of country-weddings and fairs, of political banditry and religious pilgrimages; and of farm-work in the fields and kicking mares. Kavanagh's experiences inspired him to write poetry which immortalized a fast-disappearing way of life and brought him recognition as one of Ireland's great poets.

If puritanism is, as H.L. Mencken once said, the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy, then this glorious, monumental collection by one of England's most popular humorists is a puritan's nightmare. Focusing primarily on the 19th and 20th century, but with material dating back to Columbus, Frank Muir has packed this volume with enough joy and laughter to sink the Mayflower.The range of comic material is amazing--from the gentle, charming comedy of manners, to biting satire, to outrageous parody. There are excerpts from the novels of Jane Austen, P.G. Wodehouse and Mark Twain, complete short stories by O. Henry and Frank O'Connor, classic tall tales from Australia (including one by "Banjo" Patterson, who also wrote "Waltzing Matilda"), passages from Groucho Marx's correspondence with Warner Brothers, newspaper columns written by Art Buchwald and Myles na Gopaleen (the novelist Flann O'Brien), a selection of Samuel Johnson's comic definitions, plus a sprinkling of egregious puns, witty sayings, and even the clever names of stores (such as the New York restaurant "Just for the Halibut" and the London beauty parlor "Curl Up and Dye"). Muir has gathered work from over two hundred writers and from every English-speaking country. Virtually all of your favorites are here: Jonathan Swift, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Laurence Sterne, Anita Loos, Ring Lardner, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, S.J. Perelman, Damon Runyon, Fran Lebowitz, Joseph Heller, Evelyn Waugh, Garrison Keilor, Erma Bombeck, Tom Wolfe, and countless others. In addition, there are comic pieces from writers you wouldn't expect to find--such as Thomas Hardy or Lawrence Durrell--and many many writers you may not have discovered yet, such as Jerome K. Jerome or Daisy Ashford (who wrote an unintentionally hysterical novel at age nine, which she published in her thirties).Frank Muir is one of Britain's best-loved humorists, the host of a highly popular television show and the prolific author of dozens of hilarious books, including the best-selling The Frank Muir Book. Here he provides not only a painfully funny collection, but also generous introductions to each writer, which are comic gems in themselves. Except for the occasional puritan, this is a book that everyone will enjoy.

A no-holds-barred biography of the great poet and sexual rebel, who could “give the dead a voice, make them sing” (Hilton Als, The New Yorker).Thom Gunn was not a confessional poet, and he withheld much, but inseparable from his rigorous, formal poetry was a ravenous, acute experience of life and death.Raised in Kent, England, and educated at Cambridge, Gunn found a home in San Francisco, where he documented the city’s queerness, the hippie mentality (and drug use) of the sixties, and the tragedy and catastrophic impact of the AIDS crisis in the eighties and beyond. As Jeremy Lybarger wrote in The New Republic, the author of Moly and The Man with Night Sweats was “an agile poet who renovated tradition to accommodate the rude litter of modernity.” Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life chronicles, for the first time, the largely undocumented life of this revolutionary poet. Michael Nott, a coeditor of The Letters of Thom Gunn, draws on letters, diaries, notebooks, interviews, and Gunn’s poetry to create a portrait as vital as the man himself.Nott writes with insight and intimacy about the great sweep of Gunn’s life: his traditional childhood in England; his mother’s suicide; the mind-opening education he received at Cambridge, reading Shakespeare and John Donne; his decades in San Francisco and with his life partner, Mike Kitay; and his visceral experience of sex, drugs, and loss. Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life is a long-awaited, landmark study of one of England and America’s most innovative poets.

The originality, concentrated power and "fierce indignation" of his satirical writing have earned Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) a reputation as the greatest prose satirist in English language.Gulliver's Travels is, of course, his world-renowned masterpiece in the genre; however, Swift wrote other, shorter works that also offer excellent evidence of his inspired lampoonery. Perhaps the most famous of these is "A Modest Proposal," in which he straight-facedly suggests that Ireland could solve its hunger problems by using its children for food. Also included in this collection are "The Battle of the Books," "A Meditation upon a Broomstick," "A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit," and "An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity in England." This inexpensive edition will certainly be welcomed by teachers and students of English literature, but its appeal extends to any reader who delights in watching a master satirist wield words as weapons.

Prequel to the best-selling phenomenon Trainspotting, this exhilarating and moving novel shows how Welsh’s colorful miscreants first went wrong. Marked by Irvine Welsh’s scabrous humor and raw Scottish vernacular, Skagboys transports us to 1980s Edinburgh, where the Trainspotting crew is just getting started. Mark Renton has it all: the first in his family to attend university, he has a pretty girlfriend and a great social life. But when economic uncertainties and family problems intervene, Rent succumbs to the defeatism―not to mention the drug use―that has taken hold in Edinburgh’s tougher quarters. His friends are responding according to personality. Laid off, Spud Murphy is paralyzed in the face of long-term unemployment. Sick Boy, supreme manipulator of the opposite sex, is scamming and hustling for money and drugs. And meanwhile, psycho Franco Begbie is scaring the hell out of everyone. Darkly humorous, Skagboys gives a gritty and gripping portrait of a time, not unlike ours, when money was scarce, unemployment was high, and drugs seemed the answer.

"A celebration of Tim Curry's life's work -- including the iconic Dr. Frank-N-Further in "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" -- and a testament to his profound impact on the entertainment industry as we know it today, There are few stars in Hollywood today that can boast the kind of resume Emmy award-winning actor Tim Curry has built over the past five decades. From his breakout role as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" to his iconic depiction as the sadistic clown Pennywise in It to his critically acclaimed role as the original King Arthur in both the Broadway and West End versions of Spamalot, Curry redefined what it meant to be a "character actor," potraying heroes and villains alike with complexity, nuance, and a genuine understanding of human darkness. He's had dozens of roles across movies, tv shows, and musicals; lent his instantly recognizable voice to dozens of voice roles, audiobooks, and videogames; and he's changed the lives of countless fans in the process. Now, in his memoir, Curry takes readers behind-the-scenes of his rise to fame from his early beginnings as a military BRAT with difficult family dynamics, to his formative years in boarding school and university, to the moment when he hit the stage for the first time. He goes in-depth about what it was like to work on some of the most emblematic works of the 20th century, constantly switching between a camera and a live audience. He also explores the voicework that defined his later career and provided him with a chance to pivot after surviving a catastrophic stroke in 2012 that nearly took his life. With the upcoming 50th anniversary of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" and the 40th anniversary of Clue, there's never been a better time for Tim to share his story with the world"-- Provided by publisher.

Sam the Lion runs the pool-hall, the picture house and the all-night café. Coach Popper whips his boys with towels and once took a shot at one when he disturbed his hunting. Billy wouldn't know better than to sweep his broom all the way to the town limits if no one stopped him. And teenage friends Sonny and Duane have nothing better to do than drift towards the adult world, with its temptations of sex and confusions of love. The basis for a classic film, The Last Picture Show is both extremely funny and deeply profound. And, with the eccentrically peopled Thalia, Texas, Larry McMurtry made a small town that feels as real as any you've ever walked around. Famously filmed by Peter Bogdanovich in 1971 with Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd. With a new introduction by Mary Karr.

For more than two decades, Terry Pratchett has been regaling readers with tales of Discworld—a flat world balanced on the backs of four elephants, which are standing on the back of a giant turtle, flying through space. It is a world populated by ineffectual wizards and sharp-as-tacks witches, by tired policemen and devious dictators, by reformed thieves and vampires who have sworn to drink no blood. It is a world that is vastly different from our own . . . except when it isn't. Now, in The Wit and Wisdom of Discworld, various nuggets of Pratchett's witty commentary and sagacious observations have been compiled by Pratchett expert Stephen Briggs, a man who, they say, knows even more about Discworld than Terry Pratchett. Within these pages, you'll find musings on: Interior decorating: "It's a fact known throughout the universes that no matter how carefully the colors are chosen, institutional decor ends up as either vomit green, unmentionable brown, nicotine yellow, or surgical appliance pink. By some little-understood process of sympathetic resonance, corridors painted in those colors always smell slightly of boiled cabbage—even if no cabbage is ever cooked in the vicinity." (Equal Rites) Travel: "Any seasoned traveler soon learns to avoid anything wished on them as a 'regional speciality,' because all the term means is that the dish is so unpleasant the people living everywhere else will bite off their own legs rather than eat it. But hosts still press it upon distant guests anyway: 'Go on, have the dog's head stuffed with macerated cabbage and pork noses—it's a regional speciality.'" (The Last Continent) Young men: "And then there was the young male walk. At least women swung only their hips. Young men swung everything, from the shoulders down. You have to try to occupy a lot of space. It makes you look bigger, like a tomcat fluffing his tail. The boys tried to walk big in self-defense against all those other big boys out there. I'm bad, I'm fierce, I'm cool, I'd like a pint of shandy and me mam wants me home by nine." (Monstrous Regiment) Class: "'Old money' meant that it had been made so long ago that the black deeds that had originally filled the coffers were now historically irrelevant. Funny, that; a brigand for a father was something you kept quiet about, but a slave-taking pirate for a great-great-great-grandfather was something to boast of over the port. Time turned the evil bastards into rogues, and rogue was a word with a twinkle in its eye and nothing to be ashamed of." (Making Money) . . . and more! Culled from all the Discworld novels, The Wit and Wisdom of Discworld confirms Pratchett's place in the pantheon of great satirists and proves why the Chicago Tribune has praised his Discworld as "entertaining and gloriously funny . . . an accomplishment nothing short of magical."

Anthony Powell’s universally acclaimed epic A Dance to the Music of Time offers a matchless panorama of twentieth-century London. Now, for the first time in decades, readers in the United States can read the books of Dance as they were originally published—as twelve individual novels—but with a twenty-first-century twist: they’re available only as e-books. As volume six, The Kindly Ones (1962), opens, rumblings from Germany recall memories of Nick Jenkins’s boyhood and his father’s service in World War I; it seems clear that all too soon, uniforms will be back in fashion. The looming threat throws the ordinary doings of life into stark relief, as Nick and his friends continue to negotiate the pitfalls of adult life. Moreland’s marriage founders, Peter Templer’s wife—his second—is clearly going mad, and Widmerpool is, disturbingly, gaining prominence in the business world even as he angles for power in the coming conflict. War, with all its deaths and disruptions, is on the way.  "Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. His admirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."--Chicago Tribune "A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."--Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times "One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."--Naomi Bliven, New Yorker   “The most brilliant and penetrating novelist we have.”--Kingsley Amis

Adrian Mole faces the same agonies which life sets before most adolescents: troubles with girls, school, parents, and an uncaring world. The difference, though, between young Master Mole and his peers is that this British lad keeps a diary -- an earnest chronicle of longing and disaster that has convulsed more than five million readers since its two-volume initial publication. From teenaged Adrian's obsession with intellectuality after understanding "nearly every word" of a Malcolm Muggeridge broadcast to his anguished adoration of a lovely, mercurial schoolmate, from his view of his parents' constantly creaking relationship to his heartfelt but hilarious attempts at cathartic verse, here is an outrageous triumph of deadpan, and deadly accurate, satire. ABBA, Princess Di's wedding, street punks. Monty Python, the Falklands campaign -- all the cultural pageantry of a keenly observed era marches past the unique perspective of Sue Townsend's brilliant comic creation: A. Mole, the unforgettable lad whose self-absorption only gets funnier as his life becomes more desperate.Adrian Mole faces the same agonies which life sets before most adolescents: troubles with girls, school, parents, and an uncaring world. The difference, though, between young Master Mole and his peers is that this British lad keeps a diary--an earnest chronicle of longing and disaster that has convulsed more than five million readers since its two-volume initial publication. From teenaged Adrian's obsession with intellectuality after understanding "nearly every word" of a Malcolm Muggeridge broadcast to his anguished adoration of a lovely, mercurial schoolmate, from his view of his parents' constantly creaking relationship to his heartfelt but hilarious attempts at cathartic verse, here is an outrageous triumph of deadpan, and deadly accurate, satire. ABBA, Princess Di's wedding, street punks, Monty Python, the Falklands campaign--all the cultural pageantry of a keenly observed era marches past the unique perspective of Sue Townsend's brilliant comic creation: A. Mole, the unforgettable lad whose self-absorption only gets funnier as his life becomes more desperate.