Ian McEwan's Atonement (Continuum Contemporaries)

Ian Mcewan

The novel opens on a sweltering summer day in 1935 at the Tallis family’s mansion in the Surrey countryside. Thirteen-year-old Briony has written a play in honor of the visit of her adored older brother Leon; other guests include her three young cousins -- refugees from their parent’s marital breakup -- Leon’s friend Paul Marshall, the manufacturer of a chocolate bar called “Amo” that soldiers will be able to carry into war, and Robbie Turner, the son of the family charlady whose brilliantly successful college career has been funded by Mr. Tallis. Jack Tallis is absent from the gathering; he spends most of his time in London at the War Ministry and with his mistress. His wife Emily is a semi-invalid, nursing chronic migraine headaches. Their elder daughter Cecilia is also present; she has just graduated from Cambridge and is at home for the summer, restless and yearning for her life to really begin. Rehearsals for Briony’s play aren’t going well; her cousin Lola has stolen the starring role, the twin boys can’t speak the lines properly, and Briony suddenly realizes that her destiny is to be a novelist, not a dramatist. In the midst of the long hot afternoon, Briony happens to be watching from a window when Cecilia strips off her clothes and plunges into the fountain on the lawn as Robbie looks on. Later that evening, Briony thinks she sees Robbie attacking Cecilia in the library, she reads a note meant for Cecilia, her cousin Lola is sexually assaulted, and she makes an... Lire plus…

David Malcolm

An introduction to the work of one of Britain's most admired fiction writers Understanding Ian McEwan provides a full discussion of the fiction written by one of Britain's most highly regarded novelists and the winner of the 1998 Booker Prize. David Malcolm places Ian McEwan's workadmired by critics for its polished, understated treatment of themes of aberrance and obsessionin the context of British literature's particular dynamism in the last decades of the twentieth century. He also examines McEwan's relationship to feminism, concern with rationalism and science, use of moral perspective, and proclivity toward fragmentation. Malcolm offers close readings of McEwan's early short stories, which he recognizes as traditional and conservative in technique despite their shocking subject matter, and all of McEwan's novels. Employing the third novel, The Child in Time, as the fulcrum for his discussion, Malcolm explores the themes of incest, espionage, moral self-flagellation, sexual fixation, political dysfunction, and personal antipathy evident in the other fiction. Malcolm notes that while critics traditionally view The Child in Time as McEwan's bold step into social engagement and his embrace of a more redemptive view of humanity, the novels Enduring Love and Amsterdam represent a return to the psychologically disturbed, unregenerate world of his pre-1987 writings. Malcolm illumines the continuities obscured by the conventional approach to McEwan's fiction and raises the... Lire plus…

Peter Childs, Peter Childs, Peter Childs

Ian McEwan is one of Britain's most inventive and important contemporary writers. Also adapted as a film, his novel Enduring Love (1997) is a tale of obsession that has both troubled and enthralled readers around the world. Renowned author Peter Childs explores the intricacies of this haunting novel to offer: an accessible introduction to the text and contexts of Enduring Love a critical history, surveying the many interpretations of the text from publication to the present a selection of new and reprinted critical essays on Enduring Love, by Kiernan Ryan, Sean Matthews, Martin Randall, Paul Edwards, Rhiannon Davies and Peter Childs, providing a range of perspectives on the novel and extending the coverage of key critical approaches identified in the survey section cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism suggestions for further reading. Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of Enduring Love and seeking not only a guide to the novel, but a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds it. Lire plus…

James Acheson, Sarah C. E. Ross

These Specially Commissioned Essays, Focusing Largely On Authors Whose First Novels Have Appeared Since 1980, Examine The Work Of More Than 20 Major British Novelists, Including Peter Ackroyd, Martin Amis, Iain M. Banks, Janice Galloway, A.l. Kennedy, Zadie Smith, Irvine Welsh And Jeanette Winterson. Kazuo Ishiguro -- Ian Mcewan -- Irvine Welsh -- Angela Carter -- James Kelman -- Martin Amis -- Abdulrazak Gurnah -- Hanif Kureishi -- Salmon Rushdie -- Caryl Phillips -- Zadie Smith -- Marina Warner -- Pat Barker -- A.l. Kennedy -- Janice Galloway -- Rose Tremain -- A.s. Byatt -- Jeanette Winterson -- Graham Swift -- Julian Barnes -- Peter Ackroyd -- Iain M. Banks -- Jean Francois Lyotard. Edited By James Acheson And Sarah C. E. Ross. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. Lire plus…

William J. Bernstein

“Compact and immensely readable . . . a tour de force. Prepare to be amazed.” — John C. Bogle, Founder and Former CEO, The Vanguard Group “Vital—a cogent, timely journey through the economic history of the modern world.” — Publishers Weekly In The Birth of Plenty , William Bernstein, the bestselling author of The Four Pillars of Investing, presents his provocative, highly acclaimed theory of why prosperity has been the engine of civilization for the last 200 years. This is a fascinating, irresistibly written “big-picture” work that highlights and explains the impact of four elements that when occurring simultaneously, are the fundamental building blocks for human progress: Property rights, which drive creativity Scientific rationalism, which permits the freedom to innovate without fear of retribution; Capital markets, which provide funding for people to pursue their visions; Transportation/communication, which allows for the effective transfer of ideas and products. Meticulously researched, splendidly told, and featuring a new preface and introduction, The Birth of Plenty explains the interplay of the events, philosophies, and related phenomena that were nothing less than the crucible of the modern age. This is one of the rare books that will change how you look at the world. Lire plus…

John F. Monahan

"This book explains how computer software is designed to perform the tasks required for sophisticated statistical analysis. For statisticians, it examines the nitty-gritty computational problems behind statistical methods. For mathematicians and computer scientists, it looks at the application of mathematical tools to statistical problems. The first half of the book offers a basic background in numerical analysis that emphasizes issues important to statisticians. The next several chapters cover a broad array of statistical tools, such as maximum likelihood and nonlinear regression. The author also treats the application of numerical tools; numerical integration and random number generation are explained in a unified manner reflecting complementary views of Monte Carlo methods. Each chapter contains exercises that range from simple questions to research problems. Most of the examples are accompanied by demonstration and source code available in from the author's Web site. New in this second edition are demonstrations coded in R, as well as new sections on linear programming and the Nelder-Mead search algorithm."--Pub. desc. Lire plus…

Kenneth Baxter Wolf; Oxford University Press

## Abstract The unusually high regard with which Saint Francis of Assisi is held has served to insulate him from any real criticism of the kind of sanctity that he embodied: a sanctity based, first and foremost, on his deliberate pursuit of poverty. This book offers a critique of Francis's “holy poverty” by considering its ironic relationship to the ordinary poverty of the poor. While Francis's emphasis on voluntary poverty as the first step toward spiritual regeneration may have opened the door to salvation for wealthy Christians like himself, it effectively precluded the idea that the poor could use their own involuntary poverty as a path to heaven. In marked contrast to Francis's poverty, theirs was more likely to be seen by contemporaries as a symptom of moral turpitude. Moreover, Francis's experiment in poverty had a potentially negative effect on the level of almsgiving directed toward the involuntary poor. Not only did the Franciscan abhorrence of money prevent the friars from assuming any significant role in alleviating urban poverty but their own mendicant lifestyle also put them in direct competition with the other kind of beggars for the charitable donations of the urban elite. Though this work focuses on the idea of “holy poverty” as it appears in the earliest hagiographical accounts of the saint as well as Francis's own writings, its implications for the relationship between poverty as a spiritual discipline and poverty as a socioeconomic affliction extend to... Lire plus…

Mcewan, Ian

A homosexual attempts to lure a man away from his woman. It happens in England after the two men meet in a balloon accident. When the straight man declines the advances, the homosexual begins stalking him, contemplating ways to get rid of the woman. By the author of The Innocent Lire plus…

Mcewan, Ian

A young girl’s imagination runs riot with far-reaching and devastating consequences, in Ian McEwan’s masterpiece of metafiction.On a hot day in the summer of 1934, 13-year-old Briony sees her older sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching is Cecilia’s friend from childhood, Robbie Turner. By the end of that day, the lives of all three will have been changed forever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had not imagined at its start. Briony will have committed a crime for which she will spend the rest of her life trying to atone."Ian McEwan's remarkable new novel Atonement is a love story, a war story and a story about the destructive powers of the imagination...It is, in short, a tour de force ... The novel, supposedly a narrative constructed by one of the characters, stands as a sophisticated rumination on the hazards of fantasy and the chasm between reality and art ... There is nothing self-conscious or mannered about Mr McEwan's writing. Indeed Atonement emerges as the author's most deeply felt novel yet – a novel that takes the glittering narrative pyrotechnics perfected in his last book, Amsterdam, and employs them in the service of a larger, tragic vision." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York TimesIan McEwan is the critically acclaimed author of seventeen books. His first published work, a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the Somerset Maugham Award. His... Lire plus…

Dominic Head

Annotation. In this survey Ian McEwan emerges as one of those rare writers whose works have received both popular and critical acclaim. His novels grace the bestseller lists, and he is well regarded by critics, both as a stylist and as a serious thinker about the function and capacities of narrative fiction. McEwans novels treat issues that are central to our times: politics, and the promotion of vested interests; male violence and the problem of gender relations; science and the limits of rationality; nature and ecology; love and innocence; and the quest for an ethical worldview. Yet he is also an economical stylist: McEwans readers are called upon to attend, not just to the grand themes, but also to the precision of his spare writing. Although McEwans later works are more overtly political, more humane, and more ostentatiously literary than the early work, Dominic Head uncovers the continuity as well as the sense of evolution through the oeuvre. Head makes the case for McEwans prominence - pre-eminence, even - in the canon of contemporary British novelists Lire plus…

Sebastian Groes (Ed.)

Ian McEwan is one of the most significant, and controversial, British novelists working today. His books are both critically - and academically - acclaimed and embraced by readers across the world. Although primarily a novelist, he has also written short stories, television plays, a libretto, a children's book and a film adaptation. Across these many forms his work retains a distinctive character that explores questions of morality, place and history, nationhood, sexuality and gender. Now fully updated for its second edition, this guide brings together a collection of new critical perspectives on McEwan's oeuvre, not only covering the early works and his writing for the screen but also incorporating detailed and original analyses of the later work, including new readings of his latest books, Solar and Sweet Toot h. With an updated and extended guide to further critical reading on McEwan, the book also includes an interview with the author himself, a chronology of his life, work and times and the full text of a lost early McEwan short story. Lire plus…

Mcewan, Ian

A fragile friendship descends into hatred and revenge, in Ian McEwan’s darkly humorous 1998 Booker Prize-winning novel. "(F)unnier than anything McEwan has written before, though just as lethal" (Gabrielle Annan, The New York Review of Books).Gorgeous, feisty Molly Lane had many lovers, among them Clive Linley, Britain’s most famous composer, Vernon Halliday, editor of a respected broadsheet, and Julian Garmony, Foreign Secretary - and tipped to be the next prime minister. When Clive and Vernon meet to pay their last respects to Molly at her funeral, they make a pact that will have unforeseen and profound consequences for everyone concerned."The boiling wit of Amsterdam won't be everyone's cup of tea, but those thirsty for satire will gulp down this little book... McEwan writes the sort of scathing retorts and witty repartee we wish we could think of in the heat of battle. On a broader scale, his portrayal of the symbiotic relationship between politicians and journalists is as damning as it is comic... This is a dark morality tale in the spirit of Evelyn Waugh's best work." - Ron Charles, The Christian Science MonitorIan McEwan is a critically acclaimed author and winner of the 1998 Booker Prize. His collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites, won the 1975 Somerset Maugham Award. His novels include The Child in Time, which won the 1987 Whitbread Novel of the Year Award; The Cement Garden; Enduring Love; Amsterdam, which won the 1998 Booker Prize; Atonement;... Lire plus…

Slade, Heather & Club, Hero

lgli/Heather Slade - Undercover Agent (epub) Lire plus…

Andrew Loomis [Loomis, Andrew]

2021-01-19 Lire plus…

Gwen Knight [Knight, Gwen]

lgli/Gwen Knight - [Cursed Howlidays 02] - Howling for Her Alpha (epub) Lire plus…

Angela Staehling

For anyone who has longed for a garden of their own—whether a city dweller or one with less-than-green thumbs—this is a handy little guide to growing and maintaining houseplants. Cheerful and informative, Happy Houseplants will guide any budding indoor botanist through a bevy of topics, from soil and water to light and fertilizer. With beautiful illustrations accompanying 30 different profiles of plants, from the easygoing Air Plant to the striking Zebra Cactus, this nifty book is the perfect gift for anyone looking to bring a piece of the outdoors inside. Lire plus…