Recommendations based on "Virtual Light"

A novel inspired by the writings of Thomas Mann, including his childhood, his wife Katia, and the times is which they lived -- the First World War, the rise of Hitler, World War II, the Cold War, and exile.

The Glass Bead Game is an ultra-aesthetic game which is played by the scholars, creamed off in childhood and nurtured in elite schools, in the province of Castalia. The Master of the Glass Bead Game, Joseph Knecht, holds the most exalted office in Castalia. He personifies the detachment, serenity and aesthetic vision which reward a life dedicated to perfection of the intellect. But can, indeed should, man live isolated from hunger, family, children, women, in a perfect world where passions are tamed by meditation, where academic discipline and order are paramount? This is Herman Hesse’s great novel. It is a major contribution to contemporary philosophic literature and has a powerful vision of universality, the inner unity of man’s cultural ideals and his search for personal perfection and social responsibility.

THE POSTHUMOUS MASTERWORK FROM “ONE OF THE GREATEST AND MOST INFLUENTIAL MODERN WRITERS” (JAMES WOOD, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW)Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño’s life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his highest achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strangeness, beauty, and scope. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, an American sportswriter, an elusive German novelist, and a teenage student and her widowed, mentally unstable father. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of SantaTeresa—a fictional Juárez—on the U.S.-Mexico border, where hundreds of young factory workers, in the novel as in life, have disappeared.

“[Kurt Vonnegut] strips the flesh from bone and makes you laugh while he does it. . . . There are twenty-five stories here, and each hits a nerve ending.”—The Charlotte ObserverWelcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonnegut’s shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, these superb stories share Vonnegut’s audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.Includes the following stories:“Where I Live”“Harrison Bergeron”“Who Am I This Time?”“Welcome to the Monkey House”“Long Walk to Forever”“The Foster Portfolio”“Miss Temptation”“All the King’s Horses”“Tom Edison’s Shaggy Dog”“New Dictionary”“Next Door”“More Stately Mansions”“The Hyannis Port Story”“D.P.”“Report on the Barnhouse Effect”“The Euphio Question”“Go Back to Your Precious Wife and Son”“Deer in the Works”“The Lie”“Unready to Wear”“The Kid Nobody Could Handle”“The Manned Missiles”“Epicac”“Adam”“Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow”

In this brief, intense, gemlike book, equal parts extended autobiographical essay and prose poem, Joseph Brodsky turns his eye to the seductive and enigmatic city of Venice. A mosaic of forty-eight short chapters―each recalling a specific episode from one of his many visits there (Brodsky spent his winters in Venice for nearly twenty years)―Watermark associatively and brilliantly evokes one city's architectural and atmospheric character.Brodsky writes in Watermark that water “stores our reflections for when we are long gone.” This reissued edition of one of Brodsky’s most important titles, on the occasion of the late Nobel laureate’s eightieth birthday, allows the reader to visit the canals of Brodsky’s Venice and rediscover the reflection of the writer himself.

Open this wordless book and take off on mind-bending visual journeys full of twists, turns, and surprises. Zoom from an Egyptian pyramid to an exotic jungle to a sandy beach. But if you think you know where you are, guess again. For in Istvan Banyai's mysterious landscapes of pictures within pictures, nothing is ever as it seems.

A brilliantly crafted collection of stories from celebrated science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem Trurl and Klaupacius are constructor robots who try to out-invent each other. Over the course of their adventures inThe Cyberiad, they travel to the far corners of the cosmos to take on freelance problem-solving jobs, with dire consequences for their unsuspecting employers. Playfully written, and ranging from the prophetic to the surreal, these stories demonstrate Stanislaw Lem's vast talent and remarkable ability to blend meaning and magic into a wholly entertaining and captivating work.

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil. Twelve enchanting and fantastical stories about the evolution of the universe from the giant of Italian literature, Italo Calvino. His characters - whether human, dinosaur or mollusc - disport themselves among galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms - and have time for a love life. 'A landmark in fiction, the work of a master' - Ursula K Le Guin

"Set in the eighteenth century, it tells the story of Cosimo, a young Italian nobleman who rebels against parental authority by climbing into the trees and remaining there for the rest of his life. He adapts efficiently to an arboreal existence - hunts, sows crops, plays games with earth-bound friends, fights forest fires, solves engineering problems, and even manages to have love affairs. He also has time to read and think. His proposal for 'an Ideal State in the Trees' is acknowledged by Diderot, and Napoleon pays him homage. From his perch in the trees, Cosimo sees the age of Voltaire pass by and a new century dawn. His ending is as graceful and unusual as his life has been"--From back cover.

Prophetic short stories and apocalyptic novels like The Crystal World made J. G. Ballard a foundational figure in the British New Wave. Rejecting the science fiction of rockets and aliens, he explored an inner space of humanity informed by psychiatry and biology and shaped by surrealism. Later in his career, Ballard's combustible plots and violent imagery spurred controversy--even legal action--while his autobiographical 1984 war novel Empire of the Sun brought him fame. D. Harlan Wilson offers the first career-spanning analysis of an author who helped steer SF in new, if startling, directions. Here was a writer committed to moral ambiguity, one who drowned the world and erected a London high-rise doomed to descend into savagery--and coolly picked apart the characters trapped within each story. Wilson also examines Ballard's methods, his influence on cyberpunk, and the ways his fiction operates within the sphere of our larger culture and within SF itself.