Comedy of Human Life, Vol. 7
10 best books like Comedy of Human Life, Vol. 7 (Honoré de Balzac): Rickshaw Boy, Headlong Hall, Röda rummet, A Hundred Million Francs, Novel on Yellow Paper (Revived Modern Classic), Selected Poems, GB84, Afternoon Men, Clayhanger, Personality
| Author | Lao She |
| ISBN | 0061436925 |
A beautiful new translation of beloved Chinese author Lao She's masterpiece of social realism, about the misadventures of a poor Beijing rickshaw driver
First published in China in 1937, Rickshaw Boy is the story of Xiangzi, an honest and serious country boy who works as a rickshaw puller...
| Author | Thomas Love Peacock |
| ISBN | 1406908452 |
Excerpt: ...mould, and covering the whole with an elegant stratum of turf. Squire Headlong caught with avidity at this suggestion; and, as he had always a store of gunpowder in the house, for the accommodation of himself and his shooting visitors, and for the supply of a small battery of cannon, which...
Röda rummet utkom hösten 1879 och inleds med det bevingade voltaireska mottot om det obehagliga i att bli hängd i tysthet. Romanen uppmärksammades omedelbart för sin djärva, friska samtidssatir och blev August Strindbergs stora och hett åtrådda litterära framgång som med ens öppnade...
| Author | Paul Berna |
| ISBN | 0370009428 |
4.5 stars. A gang of French children have a favourite game. One of them owns what must be an old rocking horse or carousel horse that has been welded onto a chassis with three wheels. The horse having lost it's head does not lessen the children's enjoyment at all, they spend their days riding their horse...
| Author | Stevie Smith |
| ISBN | 0811212394 |
Sometimes it's not what a book is about that keeps me reading, but how it's written. The trouble is, it's much harder to talk about how a book is written than to simply tell what it's about.
About, about. There are a lot of 'abouts' in the beginning of this review, aren't there? But 'about' is a word...
| Author | Charles Baudelaire |
| ISBN | 0140446249 |
The poems of Charles Baudelaire are filled with explicit and unsettling imagery, depicting with intensity every day subjects ignored by French literary conventions of his time. 'Tableaux parisiens' portrays the brutal life of Paris's thieves, drunkards and prostitutes amid the debris of factories...
| Author | David Peace |
| ISBN | 0571221742 |
David Peace makes a powerful, angry, ominous, and forbidding monument of a novel of the ’84 UK Miner’s strike (which was an equivalent labor defeat to the ’85 Pan Am strike, but more violent and filled with drama.). If you aren’t in the right frame of mind, this frantic and wonderful read might...
| Author | Anthony Powell |
| ISBN | 1557132844 |
Afternoon Men follows the trivial encounters and idle pastimes of the social set through William Atwater. With a glee in upending pretense that rivals the works of Max Beerbohm and Evelyn Waugh, Powell attacks artistic pretension, aristocratic jadedness, and the dark side of the glamorous life.Afternoon...
| Author | Arnold Bennett |
| ISBN | 0140009973 |
Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) was a British writer. He went to work for his father but was unhappy working for his father and earning very little money. The theme of parental miserliness occurs in his works. At 21 he went to London to clerk for a solicitor. He then began working for a magazine called Women....
| Author | Andrew O'Hagan |
| ISBN | 0156029677 |
Growing up on the Scottish Isle of Bute, Maria Tambini is a young girl with dreams of escape from her Italian immigrant family. When her amazing singing voice wins her a talent show at the tender age of thirteen, she is whisked off to London and instant stardom.
But even as Maria is celebrating...
| Author | Stan Barstow |
| ISBN | 0140016694 |
All about love, lust, and loneliness, the book introduces Vic Brown, a young working-class Yorkshireman. Vic is attracted to the beautiful but demanding Ingrid, and as their relationship grows and changes, he comes to terms the hard way with adult life and what it really means to love. The influence...
| Author | Julian Maclaren-Ross |
| ISBN | 0141187115 |
An interesting novel set in 1939 in the months before the start of war. It opens a window of an England now mostly disappeared; landladies, jobs easy to get and lots of smoking!!. However the themes of love and loss are eternal. The shadow of war is ever present. The main character isn't likeable but the...
The north of England in the 1950s, Arthur (not that other great Northern bellower given to us by Alan Sillitoe) wants out of the flat on your back, working yourself to death, working class lifestyle that he was born in to and the only way he can see to escape is through excelling at sport. He's got some physicality...
In Hanky Park, near Salford, Harry and Sally Hardcastle grow up in a society preoccupied with grinding poverty, exploited by bookies and pawnbrokers, bullied by petty officials and living in constant fear of the dole queue and the Means Test. His love affair with a local girl ends in a shotgun marriage,...
| Author | Philip Larkin |
| ISBN | 0571106927 |
Philip Larkin in Oxford, 1943
Philip Larkin opens A Girl in Winter with a chapter, three paragraphs long, in which he describes England during World War II, suffering through a stormy winter, its people trying to carry on daily life through numbness and deprivation:
[The snow]...
| Author | Vassilis Vassilikos |
| ISBN | 0345017560 |
Perhaps this is one book where the material is subversive enough that I understand why there are elements in this world who would like to see this banned. And for that reason, also for the reason that I came across this novel by virtue of seeing the list of 1000 novels that people should read in their lifetime...
| Author | Wallace Fowlie |
| ISBN | 0486264432 |
"The selections are good and the translations are excellent." ― Germaine Brée, New York University
Drawn from two centuries of French literature, these superb selections by ten great writers span a wide variety of styles, philosophies, and literary creeds. The stories reflect not only the...
| Author | Leo Tolstoy |
| ISBN | 0452253020 |
Renowned Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) had an abiding interest in children and children's literature. He started a school for peasant children on his family's estate, and later founded another, experimental school with the motto, "Come when you like, leave when you like." Fascinated...
| Author | Pierre Corneille |
| ISBN | 1419142542 |
Pierre Corneille was a 17th century dramatist who produced plays over a 40 year span. Along with Moliere and Racine he is considered to be the founder of French tragedy. He is best known for El Cid which was a 1636 tragic/comedy. Written in 1641 Polyeucte was based on the life of the martyr Saint Polyeuctus....
| Author | Émile Zola |
| ISBN | 2070417247 |
Then the Chief of the Detective Force told the whole story: how Detective Mondesir, on being warned by a secret agent that the Anarchist Salvat was in a tavern at Montmartre, had reached it just as the bird had flown; then how chance had again set him in presence of Salvat at a hundred paces or so from the tavern,...
| Author | Roger Peyrefitte |
| ISBN | 2277110175 |
Les Amitiés Particulières est un roman écrit en 1943 par Roger Peyrefitte, paru chez Jean Vigneau en 1944, probablement son œuvre la plus connue aujourd'hui, pour laquelle il a remporté le prix Renaudot l'année suivante en raison de la guerre. Largement autobiographique, le roman traite d'une...
| Author | Alexandre Dumas |
| ISBN | 1600961150 |
Memoirs of a Physician begins where Joseph Balsamo left off as all Paris panics after a fireworks display goes awry and Andrée is almost crushed to death beneath the mob. Andrée's brother Phillip desperately searches for her and is feared dead - until she is returned unharmed to her family by the mysterious...
| Author | Marcel Pagnol |
| ISBN | 2877065162 |
Un modeste professeur, honn�te, na�f et m�pris�, se trouve embauch� par un conseiller municipal v�reux qui veut l'utiliser comme pr�te-nom...
Topaze, cr�� en 1928, est le premier succ�s th��tral de Pagnol. C'est sa grande com�die de caract�res, la plus...
Outsider/Plague/Fall/Exile & the Kingdom (Collected Fiction)
| Author | Albert Camus |
| ISBN | 0241901103 |
Două romane celebre conţine această carte, alături de o serie de mici bijuterii narative, numite povestiri, toate ale unui autor care i-a fermecat până şi pe sfincşii care acordă premiul Nobel... Străinul descrie o crimă şi goliciunea omului în faţa unei situaţii absurde. Ciuma...
