David Gilmour

xii, 249 p., p. of plates : 22 cm

"I loved David Gilmour's sleek, potent little memoir, The Film Club. It's so, so wise in the ways of fathers and sons, of movies and movie-goers, of love and loss." --- Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Empire Falls"If all sons had dads like David Gilmour, then Oedipus would be a forgotten legend and Father's Day would be a worldwide film festival."--Sean Wilsey, author of Oh the Glory of It All"David Gilmour is a very unlikely moral guidance counselor: he's broke, more or less unemployed and has two children by two different women. Yet when it looks as though his teenage son is about to go off the rails, he reaches out to him through the only subject he knows anything about: the movies. The result is an object lesson in how fathers should talk to their sons." --Toby Young, author of How to Lose Friends & Alienate People At the start of this brilliantly unconventional family memoir, David Gilmour is an unemployed movie critic trying to convince his fifteen-year-old son Jesse to do his homework. When he realizes Jesse is beginning to view learning as a loathsome chore, he offers his son an unconventional deal: Jesse could drop out of school, not work, not pay rent - but he must watch three movies a week of his father's choosing. Week by week, side by side, father and son watched everything from True Romance to Rosemary's Baby to Showgirls, and films by Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma, Billy Wilder, among others. The movies got them talking about Jesse's life and his own romantic dramas, with mercurial girlfriends, heart-wrenching breakups, and the kind of obsessive yearning usually seen only in movies. Through their film club, father and son discussed girls, music, work, drugs, money, love, and friendship - and their own lives changed in surprising ways.

"By turns comic and moving, [the author] revisits the terrible hurt of a first love, a friend's bizarre dissembling, an island paradise turned strangely grotesque. From a life shaped by Tolstoy, the Beatles, the cult of celebrity, the delusion of drugs, and the vagaries of the literary life, [this novel] presents a dazzling cavalcade of stories that punctuate a life passionately lived and loved"--Jacket.

Als Jesse mit der Schule nicht mehr zurande kommt, erlaubt ihm sein Vater völlig unerwartet, diese abzubrechen - jedoch unter einer Bedingung: Jesse muss sich verpflichten, mit seinem Vater mindestens drei Filme pro Woche anzusehen - von Truffaut über Hitchcock bis hin zu "Basic Instinct". Nachmittage und Abende gemeinsam auf dem Sofa, viel Zeit zum Reden über falsche Freundinnen, die richtigen Fehler, verlorene und gefundene Liebe. Und darüber, wie lebenswichtig Leidenschaft ist. Dieser sehr persönliche und berührende autobiografische Roman schildert eine ungewöhnlich enge Vater-Sohn-Beziehung, in der zwei gleichwertige Persönlichkeiten voneinander lernen und aneinander wachsen.

A Perfect Night to go to China focuses on a man named Roman who has a six year old son. One evening Roman decides to go out for just 15 minutes. However when he returns he finds an empty house and learns that his son has vanished. This story then takes us into Romans life and his struggle to cope with the loss of his son as his whole world continues to fall apart in front of his eyes.

Although best known as author of a singular masterpiece, The Leopard, the Prince of Lampedusa left a rich and varied oeuvre that repays a careful reading. The best and most representative of it is collected in this volume. Places of My Infancy, a childhood memory of the Lampedusa palace in Palermo at the turn of the century, and of the great family mansion inland at Santa Margherita, provides a fascinating background to the princely setting of The Leopard. The text hitherto published had been edited and pruned by the author's widow, and resulted in a somewhat impoverished version. Here the author's original text - with many characters and incidents earlier suppressed - has been fully restored. The story of The Professor and the Siren, a delicious example of Lampedusa's fantasy, and The Blind Kittens (the first chapter of an unfinished novel of bourgeois Sicily that would have formed a pendant to The Leopard) both featured as appendices to Harvill's earlier edition of the great novel. They are included here together with a charming, comic, bitter-sweet story, Joy and the Law. Giuseppe di Lampedusa's knowledge of English literature, which derived from a lifetime's reading as well as from a number of extended visits to Britain as a young man, bore fruit in a series of informal seminars he gave in his later years at Palermo. The plan was to introduce his listeners to English writers from Bede to Aldous Huxley, pausing along the way not only at the great classics but also among the lesser known Restoration poets and Victorian novelists. To this, as also in his shrewd and dynamic appraisal of the French novelist Stendhal, he brought the lucid intellect and warmth of feeling that informs his own deeply Sicilian creative genius.

"Everyone would agree that Darius Halloway was the most civilized of men, a professor of French literature, a connoisseur of ideas and women and wine, a perfect guest at life's dinner party. Darius himself would have especially agreed ... until Emma, waifish and insatiable Emma, leaves her empty clothes hangers rattling in his closet and walks out the door.". "For a little while, it's not so bad. He's in shock. He thinks she will come back. Other women find his melancholy quite compelling, and there are compensations to be had. But then the sparrows of insomnia start picking at the inside of his skull. Life's little aggravating moments suddenly seem to require him to seek direct retaliation. Soon, all his smoothness and cleverness is directed toward wreaking the most elaborate revenge - until the ultimate act of revenge is upon him, and there he is, in the most damning of situations, with his nerves on fire and his heart in his throat ... and finally not thinking of Emma."--BOOK JACKET.