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  Sweet Smell of Success - And...

  Ernest Lehman

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  The screenwriter behind North by Northwest and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? skewers show business in these fifteen tales. 
   
  In Sweet Smell of Success, the main novelette of this collection,Lehman scathingly depicts the dark side of success through the twisted relationship of Sid Wallace, an ambitious publicist, and Harvey Hunsucker, a powerful and vindictive gossip columnist, fashioned after Walter Winchell. As scandals are manufactured and reputations ruined for sport, the story spirals downward toward one last, savage act of revenge. As brutally honest as Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, Sweet Smell of Success is one of the most enduring and provocative stories in the literature of show business. 
   
  In The Comedian, one of America’s most beloved funny men is about to become a television superstar, but a large banana peel awaits him. Meanwhile, the remaining stories dissect the entertainment industry in a way that only Lehman could do . . .  
   
  Both Sweet Smell of Success and The Comedian were adapted for film. Sweet Smell of Success was a 1957 film starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, while The Comedian was a TV movie starring Mickey Rooney and Edmund O’Brien. 
   
  “Sweet Smell of Success is a corrosive valentine to New York, embracing its energy and its clashing ambitions.” —Sam Kashner, Vanity Fair 
   
  “Siddown. Listen to these. They are not Lindy’s cheesecake or long on kisses and schmaltz. But if you like prose pale as a shark’s belly, they do just fine.” —Kirkus Reviews

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  The Sonnets of Michael Angelo...

  Michelangelo Buonarroti

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  Michael Angelo and Campanella represent widely sundered, though almost contemporaneous, moments in the evolution of the Italian genius. Michael Angelo was essentially an artist, living in the prime of the Renaissance. Campanella was a philosopher, born when the Counter-Reformation was doing all it could to blight the free thought of the sixteenth century; and when the modern spirit of exact enquiry, in a few philosophical martyrs, was opening a new stage for European science. The one devoted all his mental energies to the realisation of beauty: the other strove to ascertain truth. The one clung to Ficino's dream of Platonising Christianity: the other constructed for himself a new theology, founded on the conception of God immanent in nature. Michael Angelo expressed the aspirations of a solitary life dedicated to the service of art, at a time when art received the suffrage and the admiration of all Italy. Campanella gave utterance to a spirit, exiled and isolated, misunderstood by those with whom he lived, at a moment when philosophy was hunted down as heresy and imprisoned as treason to the public weal.The marks of this difference in the external and internal circumstances of the two poets might be multiplied indefinitely. Yet they had much in common. Both stood above their age, and in a sense aloof from it. Both approached poetry in the spirit of thinkers bent upon extricating themselves from the trivialities of contemporary literature. The sonnets of both alike are contributions to philosophical poetry in an age when the Italians had lost their ancient manliness and energy. Both were united by the ties of study and affection to the greatest singer of their nation, Dante, at a time when Petrarch, thrice diluted and emasculated, was the Phoebus of academies and coteries.This common antagonism to the degenerate genius of Italian literature is the link which binds Michael Angelo, the veteran giant of the Renaissance, to Campanella, the audacious Titan of the modern age. - Summary by Prefatory note to this volume

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  Primordium

  Lucas Schrader

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  A New Myth for a New Age!Enjoy the origins of the universe from a new perspective, combining aspects of Christian, Norse, Egyptian, and Greek cosmology.*Primordium, Latin for the first beginning and used in Biology to mean the earliest developmental stage for an organic substructure. These same Latin roots are combined to describe the theoretical swamp where life first began, the primordial soup.

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  The Girl Who Cried Diamonds &...

  Rebecca Hirsch Garcia

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  “Bridging tenderness and violence, and brimming with danger and magic, The Girl Who Cried Diamonds will leave you breathless.” — Anuja Varghese, author of Chrysalis
  		 
  “In these 14 hard-edged and unapologetic stories, debut author Garcia tackles topics ranging from human trafficking and drug abuse to eating disorders and middle-age angst, and in no-frills prose, carves out bizarre and palpable realities, breathing strange life into a horde of depressed, deprived, and abused characters.” — Publishers Weekly
  		 
  The boundaries between realist and fabulist, literary and speculative, are shattered in this remarkable debut collection for readers of Carmen Maria Machado, André Alexis, and Angélique Lalonde 
  A girl born in a small, unnamed pueblo is blessed—or cursed—with the ability to produce valuable gems from her bodily fluids. A tired wife and mother escapes the confines of her oppressive life and body by shapeshifting into a cloud. A girl reckons with the death of her father and her changing familial dynamics while slowly, mysteriously losing her physical senses.
  		 
  Infused with keen insight and presented in startling prose, the stories in this dark, magnetic collection by newcomer Rebecca Hirsch Garcia invite the reader into an uncanny world out of step with reality while exploring the personal and interpersonal in a way that is undeniably, distinctly human.

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  Haunted

  G. Ranger Wormser

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  Gwendolin Ranger Wormser was a Victorian writer of weird psychological horror stories.'Haunted' is the eerie tale of a man who was once rescued from the sea and who is obsessed with the belief that one day the sea will come and reclaim his soul. But then he meets the fearless fisherman's daughter, Sally.When Sally's father and brother are caught out at sea with a bad storm approaching, the man knows it is time to return to the sea and rescue them...but he also knows that the cunning and vengeful sea will not let him escape a second time....

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  Kitchen Cat and Other Stories

  Amy Walton

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  These are three stories that will delight your heart and soul.   The little girl Ruth in the first story is very privileged young lady with everything she could wish for except,of course, for companionship. Her mother has passed away and her father is a very busy lawyer who barely notices she is there.  But then Ruth finds a scruffy, skinny and mostly ugly cat; the cat who lives in the kitchen and cellars,hence The Kitchen Cat.  Her attempts to befriend this stray despite insurmountable obstsacles make this story a really heart warming tale.   She does eventually find the best kind of companionship but I won't tell you with who or when.   Sarah's Sunday Out is the tale of a pampered little dog who wants to see the world and finally The Toad in the Hole is the tale of a  somewhat selfish little girl and her lesson in seeing things from anothers' point of view.   All are bitter sweet and all are delightful. You will be glad you listened to them.  I know I'm glad I read them.

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