Empfehlungen basierend auf "A Bit of Singing and Dancing"

Updike is Adam Begley’s masterful, much-anticipated biography of one of the most celebrated figures in American literature: Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike—a candid, intimate, and richly detailed look at his life and work.In this magisterial biography, Adam Begley offers an illuminating portrait of John Updike, the acclaimed novelist, poet, short-story writer, and critic who saw himself as a literary spy in small-town and suburban America, who dedicated himself to the task of transcribing “middleness with all its grits, bumps and anonymities.”Updike explores the stages of the writer’s pilgrim’s progress: his beloved home turf of Berks County, Pennsylvania; his escape to Harvard; his brief, busy working life as the golden boy at The New Yorker; his family years in suburban Ipswich, Massachusetts; his extensive travel abroad; and his retreat to another Massachusetts town, Beverly Farms, where he remained until his death in 2009. Drawing from in-depth research as well as interviews with the writer’s colleagues, friends, and family, Begley explores how Updike’s fiction was shaped by his tumultuous personal life—including his enduring religious faith, his two marriages, and his first-hand experience of the “adulterous society” he was credited with exposing in the bestselling Couples.With a sharp critical sensibility that lends depth and originality to his analysis, Begley probes Updike’s best-loved works—from Pigeon Feathers to The Witches of Eastwick to the Rabbit tetralogy—and reveals a surprising and deeply complex character fraught with contradictions: a kind man with a vicious wit, a gregarious charmer who was ruthlessly competitive, a private person compelled to spill his secrets on the printed page. Updike offers an admiring yet balanced look at this national treasure, a master whose writing continues to resonate like no one else’s.

Lemony Snicket's work is filled with bitter truths, like: 'It is always cruel to laugh at people, of course, although sometimes if they are wearing an ugly hat it is hard to control yourself.' Or: 'It is very easy to say that the important thing is to try your best, but if you are in real trouble the most important thing is not trying your best, but getting to safety.'For all of life's ups and downs, its celebrations and its sorrows, here is a book to commemorate it all – especially for those not fully soothed by chicken soup. Witty and irreverent, Horseradish is a book with universal appeal, a delightful vehicle to introduce Snicket's uproariously unhappy observations to a crowd not yet familiar with the Baudelaires' misadventures.

"Maupin's San Francisco saga careens beautifully on." —New York Times Book Review The fourth novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin’s best-selling San Francisco saga. When an ordinary househusband and his ambitious wife decide to start a family, they discover there’s more to making a baby than meets the eye. Help arrives in the form of a grieving gay neighbor, a visiting monarch, and the dashing young lieutenant who defects from her yacht. Bittersweet and profoundly affecting, Babycakes was the first piece of fiction to acknowledge the arrival of AIDS.

Wodehouse died before finishing this novel, first published in 1977. Containing the bare-bones narrative and dialogue of the first 16 chapters, its story keeps to the Blandings formula: a pretty niece brought to the castle to separate her from an "impossible" (ie poor) suitor in London.

A RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK 'An affectionate and revealing account … Funny, sad, real, rueful.' The Times 'Warm, rambling and self-aware' Guardian The long-awaited, rambling, tender, and very funny memoir from Adam Buxton Ramble /?ramb(?)l/ Verb 1. walk for pleasure in the countryside. 'Dr Buckles and Rosie the dog love rambling in the countryside.' 2. talk or write at length in a confused or inconsequential way. 'Adam rambles on about lots of consequential, compelling and personal matters in his tender, insightful, hilarious and totally unconfused memoir, Ramble Book.' Ramble Book is about parenthood, boarding school trauma, arguing with your partner, bad parties, confrontations on trains, friendship, wanting to fit in, growing up in the 80s, dead dads, teenage sexual anxiety, failed artistic endeavours, being a David Bowie fan; and how everything you read, watch and listen to as a child forms a part of the adult you become. It's also a book about the joys of going off topic and letting your mind wander. And it's about a short, hairy, frequently confused man called Adam Buxton.

'A beautifully observed and sympathetic tour of modern Britain that runs on the tracks of our years.' David Quantick 'Charming...The accounts will make any fan of railways want to experience these delights for themselves.' - The Independent All aboard for a one-of-a-kind journey by train to some of the most obscure parts of Britain On the 200th birthday of the world's first passenger-carrying railway, Nige Tassell sets out to ride Britain's railway network all the way to its lesser-travelled-to corners, its seldom-visited outposts. From Wick to Penzance and many points in between, he stays on until the end of the line. He is the last man sitting. The sixteen final destinations he visits offer sixteen different stories. By delving into their histories, by speaking to their people and by having a good old-fashioned nose around, Tassell reveals much about places that rarely have light cast upon them - from ferry ports to abandoned resorts, from tiny hamlets to towns being reclaimed by the sea. It's a journey that takes in Harry Potter, Muhammad Ali, goths, Alan Bennett, Vera Brittain, Viz comic, Alex Horne, Nigel Farage. Vikings, John Betjeman, Aneurin Bevan, Tyson Fury, Charlotte Rampling's dad and the weepy judge from The Great Pottery Throwdown. All human life is here. So grab yourself a window seat for an odyssey that tells us much about Britain today. All aboard, all aboard.

Lines up David Lodge's trio of comic novels that revolve around the University of Rummidge and the lives of its role-swapping academics. David Lodge exposes the dizzy pursuit of knowledge - literary, commercial, romantic and erotic - with unparalleled wit and insight.

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.

ýWitty and effortlessly fluid. His books are laugh-out-loud funny.ýýArabella Weir Three sparkling volumes featuring that most effervescent of peers, Trederick, fifth Earl of Ickenham Perhaps it is due to the fact that his wife Jane keeps a watchful eye on him for much of the time, but when Lord Ickenham breaks free he becomes pure dynamite and bumps-a-daisy as billy-o. These three stories, ýUncle Fred in the Springtimeý, ýUncle Dynamiteý and ýCocktail Timeý, will vouch for that. Foiling a plot to relieve Lord Emsworth of his beloved prize pig, the Empress; arranging a little match-making for his love-lorn nephew Pongo Twistleton; knocking off Sir Raymond Bastableýs topper with a Brazil nut: there really are, as Uncle Fred himself admits, ýno limits, literally none, to what I can accomplish in the springtimeý.

Britain's looniest war hero completes the third volume of the Milligan memoirs. The nineteenth battery forge into Tunis, cocksure and carefree. They climb on aqueduct with no trousers on (the battery that is; the aqueduct was very well-dressed). Five hundred gunners try to dance with two girls and an old French matron... up there in Valhalla, Monty's laughing fit to burst.