
The Mandarins (French: Les Mandarins) is a 1954 roman-à-clef by Simone de Beauvoir. Beauvoir was awarded the Prix Goncourt prize in 1954 for The Mandarins.
The book follows the personal lives of a close-knit group of French intellectuals
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This volume of collected essays is both a long overdue and welcome addition to the Capote revival. It's arranged chronologically—from a short 1946 piece on New Orleans, written when Capote was 22, to a brief appreciation of Willa Cather he wrote the
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Banished for promiscuity, Tieta returns to the seaside village of Agreste after twenty-six years. Thinking she is now a rich, respectable widow, her mercenary family welcomes her with open arms. But Tieta is forced to reveal her true identity in
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Buzzati’s greatest success would be in the genre of the short story, the form in which he really excelled. The anthology Sessanta racconti (Sixty Stories) winning him the prestigious Strega prize in 1958.
With certain peculiarity or extravagance,
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"Seventy-seven-year-old Utsugi, a retired businessman, is the protagonist and diarist of this book. Various aches and pains plague him, but his spirits are buoyed by a growing erotic obsession with his daughter-in-law, Satsuko, a former nightclub
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First published in 1932, "Journey to the End of the Night" is regarded as Céline's masterpiece. It is told in the first person and is based on his own experiences during the First World War; in French colonial Africa; in the USA - where
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Mrs Dalloway (published on 14 May 1925) is a novel by Virginia Woolf that details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in post-World War I England. It is one of Woolf's best-known novels.
Created from two short stories, "Mrs Dalloway in Bond
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The Grapes of Wrath is a novel published in 1939 and written by John Steinbeck, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on the Joads, a poor family of
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The Rainbow is a 1915 novel by the British author D. H. Lawrence. It follows the stories of three generations of the Brangwen family, particularly focusing on the sexual dynamics of, and relations between, the characters.
Lawrence's frank treatment
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Reading Jorge Luis Borges is an experience akin to having the top of one's head removed for repairs. First comes the unfamiliar breeze tickling your cerebral cortex; then disorientation, even mild discomfort; and finally, the sense that the world
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"Cakes and Ale" (1930) tells about the life of Edward Driffield in whom the contemporaries of the writer easily recognize another great English writer - Thomas Hardy. Somerset Maugham fills the story with splendid dialogues and charming wit, typical
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“After Many a Summer Dies the Swan” was published in 1939 under the title “After Many a Summer”. Later in the same year, the novel was republished under its current title, taken from Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem
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"The way of a Serpent" tells the story of a farmer family in a poverty-stricken region in the northern parts of Sweden in the nineteenth century. The family formerly owned its land, but had to sell it cheap during a succession of years of famine.
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The novel begins when Henry Pulling, a conventional and uncharming bank manager who has taken early retirement, meets his septuagenarian Aunt Augusta for the first time in over fifty years at his mother's funeral. Despite having little in common,
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