From outside appearances Cheryl Miller had the perfect life. At five feet eight inches tall, blonde hair, blue-green eyes and a beautiful body, she was blessed with good looks. Her job was fulfilling, challenging, and lucrative. She owned a fabulous home and drove an expensive sports car. The only thing missing was the true love of a good man. Most men, she'd learned, were intimidated by her independence. While on vacation, she met a handsome, dynamic, and charming man. Could it be that she had...
Sean Lock stars in a surreal comedy masterpiece set in a heavily-bugged London tower block'Minor-key masterpiece' The TelegraphFirst broadcast on BBC Radio 4, these classic cult comedies sparked a critically-acclaimed BBC TV show that ran for two series between 2002 and 2003. Starring the much-missed Sean Lock, these tower block tales revolve around a sardonic misanthrope who, despite his best efforts, can't seem to keep the world at bay. Holed up in his flat in Elderberry House, he's constantly...
The Mouse That Roared (Beaver Books) (The Grand Fenwick, #1)
by Leonard Wibberley
In the caveat to this irreverent and hilarious satire, Clay Reynolds writes, "No poet writing today could be this lucky, this tragic, this infamous. Indeed, it wouldn't be tolerated." No, one will have to admit, it wouldn't. Offered in the same vein as Jane Smiley's Moo and Richard Russo's Straight Man, Reynolds's Ars Poetica explores the life of a modern-day Don Juan, a hedonistically ambitious poetaster of our own times, a self-styled Lothario, but, as the tragicomedy ultimately reveals, a man...
Eugénie Grandet (Scenes de la Vie de Province, #2) (Petits Classiques Larousse Texte Integral, #88)
by Honore de Balzac
Depicting the fatal clash between material desires and the liberating power of human passions, Honore de Balzac's Eugenie Grandet is translated with an introduction by M.A. Crawford in Penguin Classics. In a gloomy house in provincial Saumur, the miser Grandet lives with his wife and daughter, Eugenie, whose lives are stifled and overshadowed by his obsession with gold. Guarding his piles of glittering treasures and his only child equally closely, he will let no one near them. But when the arri...
A dark classic of Russia's silver age, this blackly funny novel recounts a schoolteacher's descent into sadism, arson and murder.Mad, lascivious, sadistic and ridiculous, the provincial schoolteacher Peredonov torments his students and has hallucinatory fantasies about acts of savagery and degradation, yet to everyone else he is an upstanding member of society. As he pursues the idea of marrying to gain promotion, he descends into paranoia, sexual perversion, arson, torture and murder. Sologub's...
Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (New Canadian Library S.) (New Canadian Library)
by Stephen Leacock
Of the many books by Canada’s most celebrated humorist, none has received more acclaim than his brilliant, caustic treatment of the glittering rich who gather at the Mausoleum Club on Plutoria Avenue. Today, Leacock’s pointed satire of the privileged class, and their social abuses and pretences, retains every ounce of its freshness and bite. An undisputed comic masterpiece, Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich reveals a depth of compassionate criticism rare in Leacock’s writings.
In the vein of the classic Johnny Cash: The Life, this groundbreaking work explores the wild life and extraordinary musical career of "the definitive country singer of the last half century" (New York Times), who influenced, among others, Bob Dylan, Buck Owens, Emmylou Harris, John Fogerty, George Strait, Alan Jackson, and Garth Brooks. In a masterful biography laden with new revelations, veteran country music journalist/historian Rich Kienzle offers a definitive, full-bodied portrait of legend...