Penguin Books

"Set in Rome, The Time of Indifference tells a deceptively simple story. Five characters are cast loose on the sea of modern life - obsessed with what they want, what they feel they are owed, the wrongs that have been done them, their loneliness. The intrigues of these family members and lovers serve to expose the hollow core of bourgeois society in the early twentieth century, and what Moravia destroys forever in this pitiless novel is the illusion that a world of ever-growing material comfort can ever feed the human soul."--BOOK JACKET.

"Religion and the religious life from the second to the fourth century A.D. when the gods of Olympus lost their dominion and Christianity, with the conversion of Constantine, triumphed in the Mediterranean world"--Jacket subtitle.

A chronicle of the love affairs of a beautiful but wayward upper-class English girl in a skating community in the English countryside.

A social history of London from the Early Middle Ages to the present which also serves as a comprehensive guide to its buildings and treasures.

286p. ; 18 cm

When ancient bones and something resembling an unexploded bomb are found on a London building site, the military and scientists are baffled. As further astounding discoveries are made, the renowned Professor Quatermass begins to unravel a terrifying thread of chaos and terror ...

The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as “perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning. . . . [It] can also be seen in a much larger context. It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book’s arguments.” Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners. Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jane Jacobs’s tour de force is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities. It remains sensible, knowledgeable, readable, and indispensable.

When a young English woman, a half-Jewish Catholic convert, insists upon crossing over from Israel into Jordan, she sets off a series of bizarre situations.

Mysterious showers of meteorites lead Professor Quatermass on a trail to a factory in a deserted village. What awaits him is a worldwide conspiracy that threatens to take over the planet and turn its human population into zombies ...

Someone Like You is a collection of short stories by Roald Dahl. It was published in 1953 by Alfred Knopf. The 18 stories featured are: [Taste]( [Lamb to the Slaughter]( [Man from the South]( [The Soldier]( [My Lady Love, My Dove]( [Dip in the Pool]( [Galloping Foxley]( [Skin]( [Poison]( [Wish]( [Neck]( [Sound Machine]( [Nunc Dimittis]( [Great Automatic Grammatizator]( Claud's Dog - [Ratcatcher]( - [Rummins]( - [Mr Hoddy]( - [Mr Feasey]( ([source](

Stephen Dedalus grows up in Dublin, feeling different from the other boys. His childhood and adolescence are shaped by bullying, his father's weaknesses and the growing realization that in order to make his way in the world he must reject a conventional life and boecome an artist. Penguin Popular Classics are the perfect introduction to the world-famous Penguin Classics series — which encompasses the best books ever written, from Homer's Odyssey to Orwell's 1984 and everything in between.

It started with fireballs raining down from the sky and crashing into the oceans' deeps. Then ships began sinking mysteriously and later 'sea tanks' emerged from the deeps to claim people . . .For journalists Mike and Phyllis Watson, what at first appears to be a curiosity becomes a global calamity. Helpless, they watch as humanity struggles to survive now that water – one of the compounds upon which life depends – is turned against them. Finally, sea levels begin their inexorable rise . . .The Kraken Wakes is a brilliant novel of how humankind responds to the threat of its own extinction and, ultimately, asks what we are prepared to do in order to survive.

Amazon.com Review In this sweeping historical narrative, Barbara Tuchman writes of the cataclysmic 14th century, when the energies of medieval Europe were devoted to fighting internecine wars and warding off the plague. Some medieval thinkers viewed these disasters as divine punishment for mortal wrongs; others, more practically, viewed them as opportunities to accumulate wealth and power. One of the latter, whose life informs much of Tuchman's book, was the French nobleman Enguerrand de Coucy, who enjoyed the opulence and elegance of the courtly tradition while ruthlessly exploiting the peasants under his thrall. Tuchman looks into such events as the Hundred Years War, the collapse of the medieval church, and the rise of various heresies, pogroms, and other events that caused medieval Europeans to wonder what they had done to deserve such horrors.

A series of short stories connected by a moral, hardworking, compassionate family that moves into a rural California valley and, while meaning well, pretty much destroys the lives of the characters in each story. Fascinating read that pits eccentric, creative diversity against the American ”moral" ideal.

"Solzhenitsyn's open letter to the fourth Soviet Writers' Congress": p. 197-202.