A daring yet moving evocation of the last moments for a father and his children on top of the World Trade Centre on September 11th. 'The only way to know what took place in the restaurant on the 107th Floor of the North Tower, World Trade Center on September 11th 2001 is to invent it.' Weaving fact and fiction, empathy and dark humour, autobiography and intellect, Windows on the World dares to confront the terrifying image that has come to define our world, the image onto which we project our fears, our compassion, our anger, our incomprehension. Beigbeder is a fierce, furious, infuriating chronicler of human iniquity and human suffering Frederic Beigbeder was born in 1965 and lives in Paris. He works as a publisher, literary critic and broadcaster. NB Frederic has an acute accent on each 'e'

Windows on the World

Literature & Fiction

Beigbeder, Frédéric

Frank Wynne

Humor & Satire

Harper-perennial

Sweeny's honour

London: Coronet Books, 1974

Michel Renault is a human void. Following the death of the father he barely knew, he endures his civil ser- vice job while eking out an existence of prepackaged pleasure, hollow friendships, TV dinners, and pornography. On a group holiday in Thailand, however, he meets the shyly compelling Valérie, who soon pursues an agenda that Michel himself could never have thought possible: his own humanization. Back in Paris, they plunge into an affair that strays into S&amp;M, public sex, and partner swapping, even as they devise a scheme to save Valérie’s ailing travel company by capitalizing on the only trade Michel has seen flourish in the Third World. Before long, he quits his job, and their business model for “sex tourism” is gradually implemented. But when they return to Thailand, where Michel’s philosophy will be put into practice, he discovers that sex is neither the most consuming nor dangerous of passions . . . From a suburbanized West crippled by hate crime to an East subsumed by materialism, Michel Houellebecq explores—with characteristic provocativeness, but also with surprising tenderness—the emotions that seem most resilient to any influence: love and hate. Platform is, as Anita Brookner has written, “a brilliant novel, casting a prescient eye on the abuses and inequalities that lead to wider trouble.”

Platform

Michel Houellebecq

Literary

KNOPF

Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote

Ahmadou Kourouma's remarkable novel is narrated by Bingo, a West African sora - storyteller and king's fool. Over the course of five nights he tells the life story of Koyaga, President and Dictator of the Gulf Coast. Orphaned at the age of seven, Koyaga grows up to be a terrible hunter; he fights mythical beasts, and is a shape-shifter, capable of changing himself into beasts and birds. He fights in the French colonial armies, in Vietnam and Algeria, but on his return he mounts a coup and becomes ruler and dictator of the Gulf Coast. For thirty years he runs a corrupt but 'clean' state, surviving repeated assassination attempts and gaining support and investment from abroad. But when the 'First World' decides it no longer want to support dictatorships and call for democracy, he needs another ruse to maintain himself in power... Part magic, part history, part savage satire, Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote is nothing less than a history of post-colonial Africa itself.

Waiting For The Wild Beasts To Vote

Kourouma, Ahmadou

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

William Heinemann, Ltd.

I Was Vermeer

In 1945, a small-time Dutch art dealer was arrested for selling a forgery of a priceless national treasure - a painting by Vermeer - to Hitler's right-hand man. The charge was treason, the only possible sentence death. And yet Han van Meegeren languished in his dank prison cell, incapable of uttering the words that would set him free: 'I am a forger.' This riveting account of greed, hubris, excess, treason and fine art is the story of a failed artist and the greatest forger of all time, who executed a swindle which earned him the equivalent of fifty million dollars and the acclaim of the very critics who had mocked him.

History

Bloomsbury Paperbacks

Thomas Ruff (b. 1958), known for his deadpan portraits and gorgeous views of the night sky and architecture, is one of Germany's leading contemporary artist/photographers. Among his recent work is an exploration of the internet, that parallel visual universe teeming with sexuality of every flavor and variety. He gathers from that virtual playground erotic and often pornographic photographs that he subsequently manipulates in his computer, making beautiful--and disturbing--artwork from visual material that, for better or worse, is probably more abundant than any other type of image in our world today. 
The pictures, which are graphic and abstract at the same time, are accompanied by an excerpt from a forthcoming novel by controversial French writer Michel Houellebecq, whose work is similarly influenced by the sex industry. Reviewing the series in the Village Voice, Jerry Saltz wrote: "Ruff may think these images are analytic or objective, but they're also sweetly, luxuriantly visual...Sex slips into something ravishingly, optically comfortable, and these everyday, off-world images morph into parapaintings from the Planet Love."

Thomas Ruff Nudes

Arts & Photography

Thomas Ruff

Individual Artists

Harry N. Abrams

In his new work, Michel Houellebecq combines erotic provocation with a terrifying vision of a world teetering between satiety and fanaticism, to create one of the most shocking, hypnotic, and intelligent novels in years. In his early forties, Michel Renault skims through his days with as little human contact as possible. But following his father’s death he takes a group holiday to Thailand where he meets a travel agent—the shyly compelling Valérie—who begins to bring this half-dead man to life with sex of escalating intensity and audacity. Arcing with dreamlike swiftness from Paris to Pattaya Beach and from sex clubs to a terrorist massacre, Platform is a brilliant, apocalyptic masterpiece by a man who is widely regarded as one of the world’s most original and daring writers.

Contemporary

Vintage

Without translation, we would be living in provinces bordering on silence' George Steiner. It is impossible to overstate the influence world literatures have had in defining each other. No culture exists in isolation; all writers are part of the intertwining braid of literature. Found In Translation brings together one hundred glittering diamonds of world literature, celebrating not only the original texts themselves but also the art of translation. From Azerbijan to Uzbekistan, by way of China and Bengal, Suriname and Slovenia, some of the greatest voices of world literature come together in a thunderous chorus. If the authors include Nobel Prize winners, some of the translators are equally famous - here, Saul Bellow translates Isaac Beshevis Singer, D.H. Lawrence and Edith Wharton translate classic Italian short stories, and Victoria Hislop has taken her first venture into translation with the only short story written by Constantine P. Cavafy. This exciting, original and brilliantly varied collection of stories takes the reader literally on a journey, exploring the best short stories the globe has to offer.

Found In Translation

Short Stories & Anthologies

Apollo, Head of Zeus

LGBTQ writing from ancient times to yesterday selected by award-winning translator Frank Wynne. 
Drawing together writing from Catullus to Sappho, from Arthur Rimbaud to Anne Lister and Armistead Maupin, translator Frank Wynne has collected eighty of the finest works representing queer love by LGBTQ authors. 
These pieces straddle the spectrum of queer experience, from Verlaine's sonnet in praise of his lover's anus and Emily Dickinson's exhortation of a woman's beauty, to Alison Bechdel's graphic novel of her coming out, Juno Dawson's reflections on gender and Oscar Wilde's 'De Profundis'. 
With stories, poems, extracts and scenes from countries the world over, Queer is an unabashed and unapologetic anthology, which gives voice to those often silenced.

Queer: A Collection of LGBTQ Writing from Ancient Times to Yesterday

Head of Zeus

To ja bylem Vermeerem

Rebis

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Books by Frank Wynne