Penguin Classics's "101 Best Books Ever Written"
Streetwise George and his big, childlike friend Lennie are drifters, searching for work in the fields and valleys of California.
The Best Crazies Ever Writen
1. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
Made famous by Jack Nicholson's unforgettable performance in the cult film of the same name. Is McMurphy mad or just rebelling against the system? Hilarious mental ward antics lead inexorably to a tragic ending.
2. The Diary Of A Madman - Nikolai Gogol
A very funny and disturbing exploration of one man's inner conflict and ensuing insanity.
3. Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
The stunning prequel to Jane Eyre, set in the lush, beguiling landscape of Jamaica. Vicious rumours and her husband's increasing demands drive Antoinette slowly to the brink of madness.
4. Crime And Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Raskolnikov coldly murders a greedy old pawnbroker in the slums of St Petersburg and finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. Only Sonya, a downtrodden prostitute, can offer the chance of redemption.
5. Notes From Underground - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Alienated from society and paralysed by a sense of his own insignificance, the anonymous narrator tells the story of his tortured life with bitter sarcasm.
The Best Sex Ever Writen
1. Story Of The Eye - Georges Bataille
In this explicit fantasy, the young male narrator and his lovers embark on a sexual quest involving sadism, torture, orgies, madness and defilement.
2. A Spy In The House Of Love - Anas Nin
Beautiful, bored and bourgeoise, Sabina leads a double life inspired by her relentless desire for brief encounters with near-strangers.
3. Lady Chatterley's Lover - D. H. Lawrence
Lady Chatterley feels trapped in her sexless marriage to the invalid Sir Clifford. Unable to fulfil his wife emotionally or physically, Clifford encourages her to have a liaison with a man of their own class. But Connie is attracted instead to her husband's gamekeeper…
4. Venus In Furs - Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Sometimes there are no limits to what you'll do for the person you love. From the first moment Severin sees Wanda, draped in furs, her beauty, and her cruelty captivate him. Their games become ever more risky and dangerous…
5. The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
At the Tabard Inn in Southwark, a group of pilgrims assemble, including an unscrupulous Pardoner, a noble-minded Knight, a ribald Miller, the lusty Wife of Bath and Chaucer himself. As they set out on their journey towards the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury, each character agrees to tell a tale…
The Best Villains Ever Writen
1. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The murder of brutal landowner Fyodor Karamazov changes the lives of his sons irrevocably. As the ensuing investigation and trial reveal the true identity of the murderer the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil blur, and everyone's faith in humanity is tested.
2. Heart Of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
Updated for the cinema as Apocalypse Now, Marlow's tale of his journey up the Congo is dominated by the distant but fascinating figure of Kurtz; worshipped and feared by invaders and natives alike. Marlow's interest turns to obsession and leads him to a terrible fate…
3. Diamonds Are Forever - Ian Fleming
James Bond is on one of his toughest assignments: to infiltrate a diamond-smuggling pipeline that stretches from South Africa to America. The woman he's using to do it - Tiffany Case, a cool, devil-may-care blonde - could lead him into even more trouble…
4. The Master And Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
The devil comes to Moscow wearing a fancy suit. With his disorderly band of accomplices - including a demonic, gun-toting tomcat - he immediately begins to create havoc…
5. The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad
Behind the faade of a Soho shop selling dubious merchandise lives Verloc with his wife Winnie, her mother and her retarded brother, Stevie. Verloc is an overweight, indolent anarchist who conceals his political activities under a veneer of domesticity and family life.
The Best Lovers Ever Writen
1. A Room With A View - E. M. Forster
Lucy Honeychurch's 'undeveloped heart' is awakened by her experiences in Italy and by her encounter with the unconventional George Emerson…
2. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bront
Cathy's desire for Heathcliff leads to betrayal and terrible revenge. A gripping tale of how love can transgress authority, convention, even death. And how desire can kill.
3. Don Juan - Lord Byron
Beginning with Don Juan's illicit love affair at the age of sixteen in his native Spain and his subsequent exile to Italy. Following a dramatic shipwreck, Don Juan's exploits take him to Greece, where he is sold as a slave, and to Russia, where he becomes a favourite of the Empress Catherine…
4. Love In A Cold Climate - Nancy Mitford
For Fanny Logan, it is a simple matter of falling for a good man and marrying him. It is a different matter, however, for ice-cold Polly Hampton…
5. Cat On A Hot Tin Roof - Tennessee Williams
One hot summer night in the house of the Mississippi Delta's richest cotton planter, a family imprisoned by the past is torn apart by the revelations of feelings of lust, greed and envy…
The Best Heroes Ever Writen
1. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Dickens describes one boy growing up in a world which is by turns magical, fearful and grimly realistic…
2. Middlemarch - George Eliot
George Eliot's most ambitious novel is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. At its heart, Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfilment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon…
3. She - H. Rider Haggard
On his twenty-fifth birthday, Leo Vincey opens the casket his father left to him. It contains a letter telling the legend of a white sorceress who rules an African tribe and of his father's quest to find this remote race…
4. The Fight - Norman Mailer
The Fight focuses on the 1975 World Heavyweight Boxing Championship in Kinshasa, Zaire where the legendary Muhammad Ali met George Foreman in the ring…
5. No Easy Walk To Freedom - Nelson Mandela
After twenty-seven years in prison, Nelson Mandela finally walked free in February 1990. This collection of his articles, speeches, letters from underground and the transcripts from his trials vividly demonstrates the charisma and determination of a towering figure in the struggle for racial equality in South Africa…
The Best Tearjerkers Ever Writen
1. Of Mice And Men - John Steinbeck
Streetwise George and his big, childlike friend Lennie are drifters, searching for work in the fields and valleys of California. They have nothing except the clothes on their backs, and a hope that one day they'll find a place of their own and live the American dream…
2. The Age Of Innocence - Edith Wharton
Will Newland Archer play it safe? Or will he risk everything - his marriage, his place in society, his future - for a mysterious woman?
3. Notre-Dame De Paris - Victor Hugo
In the vaulted Gothic towers of Notre-Dame lives Quasimodo, the hunchbacked bell ringer. Mocked and shunned for his appearance, he is pitied only by Esmeralda, a beautiful gypsy dancer to whom he becomes completely devoted…
4. Jude The Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Jude meets and falls in love with Sue Bridehead, a sensitive, freethinking 'New Woman'. Refusing to marry merely for the sake of religious convention, Jude and Sue decide instead to live together, but they are shunned by society and poverty soon threatens to ruin them.
5. The Old Curiosity Shop - Charles Dickens
Little Nell Trent lives in the quiet gloom of the old curiosity shop with her ailing grandfather, for whom she cares with selfless devotion. But when they are unable to pay their debts to the loathsome Quilp, the shop is seized and they are forced to flee, thrown into a shadowy world in which there seems to be no safe haven.
The Best Spine-Tinglers Ever Writen
1. The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
Everyone has a dark side. Dr Jekyll has discovered the ultimate drug, a chemical that can turn him into something else. Suddenly, he can unleash his deepest cruelties in the guise of the sinister Hyde. But soon he will discover that his double life comes at a hideous price.
2. Dracula - Bram Stoker
When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula with the purchase of a London house, he makes horrifying discoveries about his client and his castle…
3. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Victor Frankenstein is obsessed with the secret of resurrecting the dead. But when he makes a new 'man' out of plundered corpses, his hideous creation fills him with disgust…
4. The Castle Of Otranto - Horace Walpole
The eerie architecture of the castle and its adjacent monastery, the guilty secrets and unlawful desires of its inhabitants, and the supernatural happenings have inspired writers from Ann Radcliffe and Bram Stoker, to Daphne du Maurier and Stephen King.
5. The Turn Of The Screw - Henry James
A young governess is sent off to a country house to take charge of two orphaned children. She finds a pleasant house and a kind housekeeper, while the children are beautiful and charming. But she soon begins to feel the presence of intense evil.
The Best Minxes Ever Writen
1.Vanity Fair - William Thackeray
No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder…
2. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, fastidious college professor. He also likes little girls. And none more so than Lolita, who he'll do anything to possess. Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is he all of these?
3. Baby Doll - Tennessee Williams
Archie Lee's teenage bride is driving him to distraction, as she has refused to consummate their marriage until the day of her twentieth birthday. Enter wily Sicilian Silva Vaccaro, Archie's rival both in the cotton business and for the fluffy affections of flirtatious Baby Doll…
4. Breakfast At Tiffany's - Truman Capote
It's New York in the 1940s, where the martinis flow from cocktail-hour to breakfast at Tiffany's. And nice girls don't, except, of course, Holly Golightly, who is pursued by Mafia gangsters and playboy millionaires…
5. Emma - Jane Austen
Beautiful, clever, rich - and single - Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage, although nothing delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. However, her carefully laid plans soon unravel and have consequences that she never expected.
The Best Journeys Ever Writen
1. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
On the Road swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat.
2. The Odyssey - Homer
Confronted by natural and supernatural threats - shipwrecks, battles, monsters and the implacable enmity of the sea-god Poseidon - Odysseus must test his bravery and native cunning to the full if he is to reach his homeland safely and overcome the obstacles that, even there, await him.
3. The Grapes Of Wrath - John Steinbeck
The story of the Joad family, who, like thousands of others, have travelled west in search of the Promised Land. Their story is one of false hopes, thwarted desires and broken dreams.
4.Three Men In A Boat - Jerome K. Jerome
Martyrs to hypochondria and general seediness, J. and his friends George and Harris decide that a jaunt up the Thames would suit them to a 'T'. But when they set off, they can hardly predict the troubles that lie ahead…
5. Alice In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
In Wonderland and the back-to-front Looking-Glass Kingdom, order is turned upside-down: a baby turns into a pig; time is abandoned at a tea party; and a chaotic game of chess makes a 7-year-old a Queen.
The Best Decadence Ever Writen
1. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gatsby: young, handsome, fabulously rich, always seems alone in the crowd, watching and waiting, though no one knows what for. Beneath the shimmering surface of his life he is hiding a secret, a silent longing that can never be fulfilled…
2. Vile Bodies - Evelyn Waugh
The Bright Young Things of 'twenties Mayfair, with their paradoxical mix of innocence and sophistication, exercise their inventive minds and vile bodies in every kind of capricious escapade…
3. The Picture Of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty. Influenced by his friend Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life …
4. The Beautiful And Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Anthony and Gloria are young, rich and alive and they intend to inherit the earth. But as money becomes tight, their marriage becomes impossible. And with their inheritance still distant, they must grow up and face reality; they may be beautiful but they are also damned.
5. Against Nature - J. K. Huysmans
Des Esseintes is a decadent, ailing aristocrat who retreats to an isolated villa where he indulges his taste for luxury and excess…
The Best Rebels Ever Writen
1. The Autobiography Of Malcolm X - Malcolm X
From hustling, drug addiction and armed violence in America's black ghettos Malcolm X turned, in a dramatic prison conversion, to the puritanical fervour of the Black Muslims…
2. The Outsider - Albert Camus
Meursault will not lie. Unmoved by his mother's death, he refuses to satisfy the feelings of others by pretending grief. At the end of the funeral, he returns to his simple, bachelor existence in sun-bleached Algiers. Until he is involved in a violent murder and placed on trial…
3. Animal Farm - George Orwell
When the downtrodden animals of Manor Farm overthrow their master Mr Jones and take over the farm themselves, they imagine it is the beginning of a life of freedom and equality…
4. The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
One of the most influential pieces of political propaganda ever written, The Communist Manifesto is a summary of the whole Marxist vision of history and is the foundation document of the Marxist movement…
5. Les Misrables - Victor Hugo
A tale of injustice, heroism and love. Jean Valjean, an escaped convict is determined to put his criminal past behind him. But his attempts to become a respected member of the community are constantly put under threat…
The Best Sci-Fi Ever Writen
1. The Time Machine - H. G. Wells
When a Victorian scientist propels himself into the year 802,701 AD, he is initially delighted to find that suffering has been replaced by beauty, contentment and peace. But everything is not as it seems …
2. The Man In The High Castle - Philip K. Dick
Imagine the world if the Allies had lost the Second World War... Philip K. Dick trips the switches of our minds with his vision of the world as it might have been …
3. The Invisible Man - H. G. Wells
With his face swaddled in bandages, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses and his hands covered even indoors, Griffin - the new guest at The Coach and Horses - is at first assumed to be a shy accident-victim. But the true reason for his disguise is far more chilling…
4. The Day Of The Triffids - John Wyndham
With civilization in chaos, the triffids - huge, venomous, large-rooted plants able to 'walk', feeding on human flesh - can have their day…
5. We - Yevgeny Zamyatin
Recognized as the inspiration for George Orwell's 1984, We tells the story of the minutely organized United State, where all citizens are not individuals but only he-Numbers and she-Numbers existing in identical glass apartments...
The Best Violence Ever Writen
1. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
In this nightmare vision of a not-too-distant future, fifteen-year-old Alex and his three friends rob, rape, torture and murder - for fun. Alex is jailed for his vicious crimes and the State undertakes to reform him - but how and at what cost?
2. Hell's Angels - Hunter S. Thompson
With 'long hair in the wind, beards and bandanas flapping, earrings, chain whips … and Harleys flashing chrome', the Hell's Angels erupted into 1960s America, paralysing whole towns with fear...
3. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
From the tranquil lanes of London, Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton are all drawn against their will to the vengeful, bloodstained streets of Paris at the height of the Reign of Terror and soon fall under the lethal shadow of La Guillotine.
4. Another Country - James Baldwin
The story of the suicide of jazz-musician Rufus Scott and the friends who search for an understanding of his life and death, discovering uncomfortable truths about themselves along the way.
5. In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
Reconstructs the murder in 1959 of a Kansas farmer, his wife and both their children. Capote's study of the killings and subsequent investigation explores the circumstances surrounding this terrible crime and the effect it had on those involved…
The Best Highs Ever Writen
1. Junky - William S. Burroughs
This is the junk equation, the way in which heroin redefines the addict's world. Burroughs's cult classic is a raw, semi-autobiographical account of drug addiction, which outraged America and influenced generations of writers to come…
2. The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
The Moonstone, a yellow diamond looted from an Indian temple and believed to bring bad luck to its owner, is bequeathed to Rachel Verinder on her eighteenth birthday…
3. Confessions Of An English Opium Eater - Thomas De Quincey
Thomas De Quincey consumed large daily quantities of laudanum and this autobiography of addiction hauntingly describes his surreal visions and hallucinatory nocturnal wanderings through London…
4. The Subterraneans - Jack Kerouac
Leo Percepied, aspiring writer and self-styled freewheeling bum, gravitates to the subterraneans, impoverished intellectuals who haunt the bars of San Francisco. One of them is Mardou Fox, part Negro, part Cherokee, beautiful and a little crazy…
5. Monsieur Monde Vanishes - Georges Simenon
Wealthy, respectable and apparently content, Monsieur Monde is a pillar of the Parisian bourgeoisie. One day he simply vanishes…
The Best Subversion Ever Writen
1. 1984 - George Orwell
Newspeak, Doublethink, Big Brother, The Thought Police - Orwell's world-famous novel coined new and potent words of warning for us all. One of the most brilliant satires on totalitarianism and the power-hungry ever written.
2. The Monkey Wrench Gang - Edward Abbey
The construction of the colossal Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River spurs an oddball quartet of eco-activists to join forces in a noble cause. A Vietnam veteran who loves booze, guns and the great outdoors, a billboard burning doctor, a feminist revolutionary and a polygamist riverboat guide…
3. The Prince - Niccol Machiavelli
The Prince shocked Europe on publication with its ruthless tactics for gaining absolute power and its abandonment of conventional morality.
4. Bound For Glory - Woody Guthrie
Bound for Glory is the funny, cynical and earthy autobiography of Woody Guthrie, the father of American folk music. He tells of his childhood running wild in an Oklahoma oil-boom town, the tragedies that struck his family and of his life on the open road during the Great Depression…
5. Death Of A Salesman - Arthur Miller
A painful examination of American life and consumerism. Opening on Broadway the following year, Miller's extraordinary masterpiece changed the course of modern theatre.
The Best Crimes Ever Writen
1. Maigret And The Ghost - Georges Simenon
Inspector Lognon - a plain-clothes detective with a reputation for misfortune - is shot in the street with the word 'ghost' on his lips. It soon emerges that he spent the night in the apartment of a beautiful young woman, who has since vanished…
2.The Woman In White - Wilkie Collins
Walter Hartright's chance midnight encounter with a mysterious woman in white is to change his life…
3.The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
Raymond Chandler created the fast-talking, trouble seeking Californian private eye Philip Marlowe for his first great novel The Big Sleep in 1939.
4. A Study In Scarlet - Arthur Conan Doyle
When a body is discovered in a bloodstained room in Brixton, the only clues are a wedding ring, a gold watch, a pocket edition of Boccaccio's Decameron, and a woman's name scrawled in blood on the wall…
5. The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan
Adventurer Richard Hannay has just returned from South Africa and is thoroughly bored with his London life - until a murder is committed in his flat, just days after the victim had warned him of an assassination plot that could bring Britain to the brink of war…
The Best Adultery Ever Writen
1. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Emma Bovary is beautiful and bored, trapped in her marriage to a mediocre doctor and stifled by the banality of provincial life. She longs for passion and seeks escape in fantasies of high romance, in voracious spending and, eventually, in adultery.
2. Thrse Raquin - Emile Zola
In a dingy apartment on the Passage du Pont Neuf in Paris, Thrse Raquin is trapped in a loveless marriage to her sickly cousin Camille. The numbing tedium of her life is suddenly shattered when she embarks on a turbulent affair with her husband's earthy friend Laurent…
3. Les Liaisons Dangereuses - Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
Two aristocrats and former lovers embark on a sophisticated game of seduction and manipulation to bring amusement to their jaded existences.
4. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Set in the harsh Puritan community of seventeenth-century Boston, this is the tale of an adulterous entanglement that results in an illegitimate birth and scandal…
5. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina's affair with Count Vronsky scandalizes society and family alike and soon brings jealously, bitterness and self-destruction in its wake…
The Best Debauchery Ever Writen
1. I, Claudius - Robert Graves
Despised for his weakness and regarded by his family as little more than a stammering fool, the nobleman Claudius quietly survives the intrigues, bloody purges and mounting cruelty of the imperial Roman dynasties…
2. Hangover Square - Patrick Hamilton
London 1939, and in the grimy publands of Earls Court, George Harvey Bone is pursuing a helpless infatuation with Netta who is cool, contemptuous and hopelessly desirable to George. George is adrift in hell, until something goes click in his head and he realizes that he must kill her.
3. The Beggar's Opera - John Gay
The tale of Peachum, thief-taker and informer, conspiring to send the dashing and promiscuous highwayman Macheath to the gallows, became the theatrical sensation of the eighteenth century.
4. The Twelve Caesars - Suetonius
As private secretary to the Emperor Hadrian, Suetonius gained access to the imperial archives and used them (along with carefully gathered eye-witness accounts) to produce one of the most colourful biographical works in history.
5. Guys And Dolls - Damon Runyon
Sky Masterson and Nathan Detroit will make a bet on just about anything. Even the seduction of a pretty woman, new to the neighbourhood
The Best Action Ever Writen
1. Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
When Jim Hawkins sets off as cabin boy on the Hispaniola, he looks forward to searching for buried treasure. But he doesn't know what else awaits him…
2. The Iliad - Homer
The story of the darkest episode in the Trojan War. Achilles, the greatest warrior-champion of the Greeks, refuses to fight after being humiliated by his leader Agamemnon. But when the Trojan Hector kills Achilles's close friend Patroclus, he storms back into battle to take revenge…
3. The Count Of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and becomes determined not only to escape but to unearth the treasure.
4. From Russia With Love - Ian Fleming
James Bond is a marked man. SMERSH - the Russian organization dedicated to wiping out foreign spies - has targeted him for elimination. Fiendish Colonel Rosa Klebb and her top assassin lay a sting for Bond in Istanbul - and they have the perfect bait in the irresistible Tatiana Romanova.
5. War And Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Begins in 1805 in the crowded and gossip-filled rooms of a St Petersburg party and follows the fortunes of the aristocratic Bolkonsky and Rostov families as Napoleon's armies sweep through Europe, culminating in the French invasion of Russia in 1812 and Napoleon's defeat…
The Best Laughs Ever Writen
1. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Flora Poste, expensively, athletically and lengthily educated, descends on her relatives at Cold Comfort Farm. There are plenty of them - Judith, alone in her grief; Amos, called by God; Seth, smouldering with sex; Elfine, who needs a little polish; and, of course, Great Aunt Ada Doom…
2. Diary Of A Nobody - George and Weedon Grossmith
Try as he might, Mr Pooter cannot avoid life's embarrassing mishaps. An immortal comic character and a superb satire on the snobberies of middle-class suburbia…
3. The Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens
The hilarious adventures of the poet Snodgrass, the lover Tupman, the sportsman Winkle and, above all, those of that quintessentially English Quixote, Mr Pickwick, and his cockney Sancho Panza, Sam Weller…
4. Scoop - Evelyn Waugh
Lord Copper, newspaper magnate and proprietor of the Daily Beast, has always prided himself on his intuitive flair for spotting ace reporters. That is not to say he has not made the odd blunder…
5. Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
A moderately successful future in the History Department beckons Jim. As long as he can survive a madrigal-singing weekend at Professor Welch's, deliver a lecture on 'Merrie England' and resist Christine, the hopelessly desirable girlfriend of Welch's awful son Bertrand.
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истории из жизни.мелкие обрывки памяти ~:
Музыкально-философские системы античного мира
Если богослужебное пение есть результат исполнения Закона, данного Богом, то музыка есть результат следования закону естества, или закону природы, тварному закону. Богослужебное пение звучит там, где исполняется Закон Божий, а музыка звучит там, где исполняется закон природный. Но ведь как бы ни была извращена природа преступлением человека, все равно она есть творение Божие и, познавая ее, человек может познать и Бога.
