Empfehlungen basierend auf "The Bee Sting: A Novel"

One of The New Yorker's "Books We Loved in 2017"“Arbitrary Stupid Goal is a completely riveting world―when I looked up from its pages regular life seemed boring and safe and modern like one big iPhone. This book captures not just a lost New York but a whole lost way of life.” ―Miranda JulyIn Arbitrary Stupid Goal, Tamara Shopsin takes the reader on a pointillist time-travel trip to the Greenwich Village of her bohemian 1970s childhood, a funky, tight-knit small town in the big city, long before Sex and the City tours and luxury condos. The center of Tamara’s universe is Shopsin’s, her family’s legendary greasy spoon, aka “The Store,” run by her inimitable dad, Kenny―a loquacious, contrary, huge-hearted man who, aside from dishing up New York’s best egg salad on rye, is Village sheriff, philosopher, and fixer all at once. All comers find a place at Shopsin’s table and feast on Kenny’s tall tales and trenchant advice along with the incomparable chili con carne.Filled with clever illustrations and witty, nostalgic photographs and graphics, and told in a sly, elliptical narrative that is both hilarious and endearing, Arbitrary Stupid Goal is an offbeat memory-book mosaic about the secrets of living an unconventional life, which is becoming a forgotten art.

The amazingly insightful, funny and brilliant record of Michael Palin's prime years as a member of the famed comedic group, Monty Python.Michael Palin has kept a diary since newly married in the late 1960s. This volume of his diaries reveals how Python emerged and triumphed, how he, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, the two Terrys---Jones and Gilliam---and Eric Idle came together and changed the face of British comedy.But this is but only part of Palin's story. Here is his growing family, his home in a north London Victorian terrace, which grows as he buys the house next door and then a second at the bottom of the garden; here, too, is his solo effort---as an actor, in Three Men in a Boat, his writing endeavours (often in partnership with Terry Jones) that produces Ripping Yarns and even a pantomime.Meanwhile Monty Python refuses to go away: the hugely successful movies that follow the TV (his account of the making of both The Holy Grail and the Life of Brian movies are page-turners), the at times extraordinary goings-on of the many powerful personalities who coalesced to form the Python team, the fight to prevent an American TV network from bleeping out the best jokes on U.S. transmission, and much more---all this makes for funny and riveting reading.The birth and childhood of his three children, his father's growing disability, learning to cope as a young man with celebrity, his friendship with George Harrison, and all the trials of a peripatetic life are also essential ingredients of these diaries. A perceptive and funny chronicle, the diaries are a rich portrait of a fascinating period."A wealth of fascinating stuff about Monty Python."---The Independent (UK)

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice: There’s no right way to keep a diary, but if there’s an entertaining way, David Sedaris seems to have mastered it.If it’s navel-gazing you’re after, you’ve come to the wrong place; ditto treacly self-examination. Rather, his observations turn outward: a fight between two men on a bus, a fight between two men on the street, pedestrians being whacked over the head or gathering to watch as a man considers leaping to his death. There’s a dirty joke shared at a book signing, then a dirtier one told at a dinner party—lots of jokes here. Plenty of laughs.These diaries remind you that you once really hated George W. Bush, and that not too long ago, Donald Trump was just a harmless laughingstock, at least on French TV. Time marches on, and Sedaris, at his desk or on planes, in hotel dining rooms and odd Japanese inns, records it. The entries here reflect an ever-changing background—new administrations, new restrictions on speech and conduct. What you can say at the start of the book, you can’t by the end. At its best, A Carnival of Snackery is a sort of sampler: the bitter and the sweet. Some entries are just what you wanted. Others you might want to spit discreetly into a napkin.

‘The finest book ever written about England and the English’ Stuart Maconie ‘J. B. Priestley is one of our literary icons of the 20th Century and it is time that we all became re-acquainted with his genius.’ Dame Judi Dench Three years before George Orwell made his expedition to the far and frozen North in The Road to Wigan Pier, celebrated writer and broadcaster JB Priestley cast his net wider, in a book subtitled ‘a Rambling but Truthful Account of What One Man Saw and Heard and Felt and Thought During a Journey Through England During the Autumn of the Year 1933.’ Appearing first in 1934, it was a huge and immediate success. Today, it still stands as a timeless classic: warm-hearted, intensely patriotic and profound. An account of his journey through England – from Southampton to the Black Country, to the North East and Newcastle, to Norwich and home – English Journey is funny and tender. But it is also a forensic reading of a changing England and a call to arms as passionate as anything in Orwell’s bleak masterpiece. Moreover, it both captured and catalysed the public mood of its time. In capturing and describing an English landscape and people hitherto unseen, writing scathingly about vested interests and underlining the dignity of working people, Priestley influenced the thinking and attitudes of an entire generation and helped formulate a public consensus for change that led to the birth of the welfare state. Prophetic and as relevant today as it was nearly ninety years ago, English Journey is an elegant and readable love letter to a country Priestley finds unfathomable.

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. The third volume, The Acceptance World (1955), opens with Nick Jenkins, in his late twenties, beginning to make his way in the world of letters: working for a publisher, writing on his own, and establishing connections across the literary landscape. At the same time, he is making his way in love, as a surprise meeting with an old friend’s sister blossoms into an affair. Meanwhile, friends are diving into marriage and careers, and the patterns of life’s dance are starting to take shape—even as the future steps remain shadowy. "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

In 1934, the people of Inishmaan learn that the Hollywood director Robert Flaherty is coming to the neighboring island to film a documentary. No one is more excited than Cripple Billy, an unloved boy whose chief occupation has been grazing at cows and yearning for a girl who wants no part of him. For Billy is determined to cross the sea and audition for the Yank. And as news of his audacity ripples through his rumor-starved community, The Cripple of Inishmaan becomes a merciless portrayal of a world so comically cramped and mean-spirited that hope is an affront to its order.

Welcome back to Clarkson's Farm.At the end of Jeremy's first year in the tractor's driving seat, Diddly Squat farm rewarded him with a profit of just £144. So, while he's the first to admit that he's still only a 'trainee farmer'*, there is clearly still work to be done.Because while he's mastered the art of moaning about nearly everything, some of the other attributes required of a successful farmer prove more of a challenge. Who knew, for instance, that loading a grain trailer was more demanding than flying an Apache gunship? That cows were more dangerous than motor-racing? Or that it would have been easier to get planning permission build a nuclear power station than to turn an old barn into a farm restaurant?But if the council planning department and the local red trouser brigade seem determine to frustrate his schemes at every turn, at least he's got Lisa, Kaleb, Cheerful Charlie and Gerald, his dry-stone-walling Head of Security to see him through. And cold beer brewed with spring barley harvested from Diddly Squat's own fields ...Life on Clarkson's Farm may not always go according to plan. There may not always be one. But there's not a day goes by when Jeremy can't say 'I've done a thing' and mean it ...* generous, in Kaleb's view____________PRAISE FOR DIDDLY SQUAT'Clarkson has done more for farmers in one series than Countryfile achieved in 30 years'James Rebanks, author of A Shepherd's Life'Clarkson has showcased the passion, humour and personalities of the people who work throughout the year to grow the nation's food ... and brought an understanding of many of the issues faced by farmers to the British public'National Farmers Union'A deserving Farming Champion of the Year'Farmers Weekly'I don't know anything about farming. It's like David Attenborough doing jet-skiing, or Nicholas Witchell saying, "I'm going to be a cage fighter'"Jeremy Clarkson

Ken Kesey's bracing, inslightful novel about the meaning of madness and the value of self-reliance, and the inspiration for the new Netflix original series RatchedBoisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is the seminal novel of the 1960s that has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy’s heroic attempt to do battle with the awesome powers that keep them all imprisoned.

Sam Bagshott, son of the late Boko Bagshott, had been at Blandings Castle only a short while, but long enough to know that anyone enjoying its hospitality must get the occasional shock. Sam braced himself as the possibilities flitted through his mind. The house was on fire? The Empress of Blandings had taken to the bottle again? Constable Evans had arrived with a search warrant? There was a wide area of speculation, and he was prepared for bad news in any form. In any form, that is to say, except the one in which it came.

Welcome back to Clarkson's farm. At the end of Jeremy's first year, Diddly Squat farm rewarded him with profits of e144. And while he's mastered the art of moaning, challenges still abound. Who knew loading a trailer was more demanding than flying a gunship? That cows were more dangerous than motor-racing? Or that it's easier to get planning permission for a nuclear power station than turning an old barn into a restaurant? Life on Clarkson's farm may not always go according to plan. But not a day goes by when Jeremy can't say 'I've done a thing' and mean it...