Recommendations based on "M Train"

Middlesex is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides--the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl."I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver's license...records my first name simply as Cal."So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.

How do we see the world around us? "The Penguin on Design" series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever. Susan Sontag's groundbreaking critique of photography asks forceful questions about the moral and aesthetic issues surrounding this art form. Photographs are everywhere. They have the power to shock, idealize or seduce, they create a sense of nostalgia and act as a memorial, and they can be used as evidence against us or to identify us. In six incisive essays, Sontag examines the ways in which we use these omnipresent images to manufacture a sense of reality and authority in our lives.

Paperback. Pub Date :2011-11-10 Pages: 300 Language: English Publisher: HarperCollins UK A ruthless and unflinching examination of American life in the late 1960s. from the author of The Year of Magical Thinking.Somewhere out beyond Hollywood. hollowed- out actress Maria Wyeth's life plays out in a numbing routine of perpetual freeway driving.Anaesthetized to pain and pleasure. she is seemingly unaffected by her fraught personal history.In her early thirties. divorced from her husband. dislocated from friends. and somehow detached from her past and future. Wyeth epitomises a generation made ill by too much freedom.Set beyond good and evil - literally in Los Angeles and the barren wastescapes of the Mojave desert. and figuratively in the landscapes of a broken spirit - Play It As It Lays is an immaculately wrought vision of Californian culture on the cusp of the 1970s.Three d...

“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled” -- so opens John Berger’s revolutionary million-copy bestseller on how to look at artJohn Berger's Ways of Seeing is one of the most stimulating and the most influential books on art in any language. First published in 1972, it was based on the BBC television series about which the Sunday Times critic commented: "This is an eye-opener in more ways than one: by concentrating on how we look at paintings . . . he will almost certainly change the way you look at pictures." By now he has.

The National Book Award–winning author of Year of the Monkey, Just Kids, and M Train offers a rare, intimate account of her own creative process“Devotion is short enough to devour at one enjoyable sitting and thought-provoking enough to deserve re-reading.”—Suzi Feay, Financial Times“Devotion shows rather than tells what it means to give a life to writing.”—Katherine Cooper, HyperallergicA work of creative brilliance may seem like magic—its source a mystery, its impact unexpectedly stirring. How does an artist accomplish such an achievement, connecting deeply with an audience never met? In this groundbreaking book, one of our culture’s beloved artists offers a detailed account of her own creative process, inspirations, and unexpected connections.Patti Smith, a National Book Award–winning author, first presents an original and beautifully crafted tale of obsession—a young skater who lives for her art, a possessive collector who ruthlessly seeks his prize, a relationship forged of need both craven and exalted. She then takes us on a second journey, exploring the sources of her story. We travel through the South of France to Camus’s house, and visit the garden of the great publisher Gallimard, where the ghosts of Mishima, Nabokov, and Genet mingle. Smith tracks down Simone Weil’s grave in a lonely cemetery, hours from London, and winds through the nameless Paris streets of Patrick Modiano’s novels. Whether writing in a café or on a train, Smith generously opens her notebooks and lets us glimpse the alchemy of her art and craft in this arresting and original book.The Why I Write series is based on the Windham–Campbell Lectures, delivered annually to commemorate the awarding of the Donald Windham–Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes at Yale University.

E. M. Forster's meticulously observed drama of class warfare exploring the conflict inherent within English society—the inspiration for the award-winning two-part play The Inheritance, now on Broadway"Only connect..." A chance acquaintance brings together the preposterous bourgeois Wilcox family and the clever, cultured and idealistic Schlegel sisters. As clear-eyed Margaret develops a friendship with Mrs Wilcox, the impetuous Helen brings into their midst a young bank clerk named Leonard Bast, who lives at the edge of poverty and ruin. When Mrs Wilcox dies, her family discovers that she wants to leave her country home, Howards End, to Margaret. Thus as Forster sets in motion a chain of events that will entangle three different families, he brilliantly portrays their aspirations to personal and social harmony. David Lodge's introduction provides an absorbing and eloquent overture to the 1910 novel that established Forster's reputation as an important writer, and that he himself later referred to as "my best novel." This edition also contains a note on the text, suggestions for further reading, and explanatory notes.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

A novel of loss and love. The author has also written Sexing the Cherry and Oranges are Not the Only Fruit which won the 1985 Whitbread Prize and was later adapted as an award-winning BBC dramatization. Her book The Passion won the 1987 John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize.

Evocative and superbly erotic, Little Birds is a powerful journey into the mysterious world of sex and sensuality. From the beach towns of Normandy to the streets of New Orleans, these thirteen vignettes introduce us to a covetous French painter, a sleepless wanderer of the night, a guitar-playing gypsy, and a host of others who yearn for and dive into the turbulent depths of romantic experience.

Piercing the shadows of the naked stage was a single shaft of rosy limelight, and in the centre of this was a girl: the most marvellous girl - I knew it at once! - that I had ever seen. A saucy, sensuous and multi-layered historical romance, Tipping the Velvet follows the glittering career of Nan King - oyster girl turned music-hall star turned rent boy turned East End 'tom'. It launched the career of one of Britain's most exciting and successful writers. `One of the best storytellers alive today' - Independent. Sarah Waters has written five subsequent bestselling novels, all of which have been filmed or are currently in production and she has received critical and popular acclaim and prize shortlists. She was awarded the Stonewall Writer of the Decade in 2016. Tipping the Velvet was adapted by Andrew Davies and filmed by Sally Head Productions for the BBC

An Observer Best Debut of the Year A Granta Best Young British Novelist 'I loved this book' JULIA ARMFIELD 'Exhilarating' MONICA HEISEY 'Astonishing' ANDREA LAWLOR 'Should be on everyone's summer reading list' iNEWS 'Scorching ... One of our favourite reads' TIME OUT A Guardian Essential Summer Read A sensual debut novel of the forbidden love between a young woman and a headmaster's wife, unfolding across a single heatwave summer. In an elite English boarding school where the girls kiss the marble statue of the famous dead author who used to walk the halls, a young Australian woman arrives to take up the antiquated role of 'matron'. There she meets Mrs S, the headmaster's wife, a woman who is her polar opposite: assured, sophisticated, a paragon of femininity. Over the course of a long, restless heatwave, the matron finds herself irresistibly drawn ever closer into the older woman's world with their unspoken desire blooming into an illicit affair of electric intensity. But, as the summer begins to fade, both know that a choice must finally be made. 'Desire crackles through these pages like fire' TELEGRAPH 'Wildly sexy ... I kept forgetting to exhale' CHARLOTTE MENDELSON 'There's nothing else like it out there' THE TIMES 'Compulsively readable ... beautiful, brilliant' OBSERVER 'Moody, generous and brilliant' JESSIE BURTON 'Rare and thrilling' SARAH WINMAN