The Kindly Ones[ THE KINDLY ONES ] By Littell, Jonathan ( Author )Feb-02-2010 Paperback

Kindly Ones

Literature & Fiction

Jonathan Littell

Literary

Vintage Books USA

Bad Voltage

The Livewires-\nHigh-tech lowlifes, bio-enhanced delinquents, or doped-out street kids, they've learned to survive in riot-torn future Paris, playing simulated war games in the fall-out shelters beneath the city. Soaring high and fast on gravfield skimboots, they head straight into the heart of violence and terror, then out and down to the safety of the tunnels to party until it's time to run again.\nBut for Lynx, a half-breed orphan of the Race Riots and founder of the Livewires, the allure of the streets loses its addictive power when he meets an Uptown heiress and discovers a life of madness and decadence too frightening to believe. Livewires and Uptowners clash in a cybernetic battle where sadistic revenge reigns, and Lynx struggles to free himself from a world that is slowly claiming his soul.\nWritten in English

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Fantasy

Orbit

his thick and engrossing volume aims to be an insider's look on the entrails of the machinery of death put in place by Nazi Germany in World War II in the east from 1941 through the demise of the 3rd Reich. The point of view and adventures of a former SS officer (Dr. Max Aue) seem at first sight merely technical artifacts to allow the reader the details of several aspects of the Nazi era and the author's thorough knowledge and research of specifics of the period. These range from the bureaucratic struggles and turf wars within the different power spheres within the Nazi regime, the role of police units in the east behind the front lines, Wehrmacht-SS disputes, the military operations in the Caucasus, the linguistic and migratory histories of the Caucasian peoples, the Red Army rampage in East Prussia and the bombing of the Reich, the debauchery in the closing days of the war, music and homosexuality through nazi ideology, the question of how far did society know or wish to know about the atrocities, among many other topics. The most striking aspect in the treatment of these issues is, however, the dark veil of Nazi ideology. The narrative seems to seek the proof that Nazism permeated almost every endeavor of military and social life in World War II Germany, and it succeeds doing so. In parallel to these quasi-historical narratives flows the personal life of Dr. Aue. In these episodes the grip of the author is somewhat less convincing and blunter, implying that deep personal psychological disturbances have had to be at the root of the Nazi evil. The closing paragraph in the book provides a sharp and dramatic ending, putting treachery to the human spirit as the final driver of Nazi ideology.

Les Bienveillantes (French Edition)

French & European Pubns

The Kindly Ones: Part B (Library)

Translated by Charlotte Mandell

Read by Grover Gardner

United States

Blackstone Audiobooks, Inc.

Francis Bacon was one of the iconic figures of modern art, a painter who transformed the way we see and experience the human body. Mirroring Bacon's famous triptychs, Jonathan Littell's three essays engage with the artist's contorted figures and portraits, his screaming popes and apes, his flanks of beef and his umbrellas. In 'A Day at the Prado', Littell analyses Bacon's painting in light of Velazquez and Goya - two artists who deeply influenced him. In 'The Grammar of Francis Bacon', the artist's portraits of his lover George Dyer before and after his suicide in 1971 provide a key to the hidden correspondences between the figures he painted. Littell then, in 'The True Image', looks at the history of icon painting and photography before returning to Bacon, questioning the very meaning of truth in art. Erudite and deeply personal, Jonathan Littell's exegesis on the work of a major twentieth-century artist seeks to lay bare the sinews of Francis Bacon's tormented art. Jonathan Littell usually writes in French. Triptych was written in English, and this is its first English-language publication.

Triptych

Arts & Photography

Notting Hill Editions

The Prix Goncourtwinning author of the scandalous The Kindly Ones returns with four new novellas that offer startlingly fresh depictions of age-old obsessions: sex and love, desiring and gazing, and the memories that take a lifetime to process. In The Fata Morgana Books, Littell crafts unique narrative voices by letting sensual feelings take the fore, whether the slippery promise of silk underwear, the dizzy intensity of abstract art, the languid torpor of a French beach, the shock of a bull’s goring horn, or the warmth of a fondled breast. The connections between events are left obscure, yet these novellas are as striking as a gust of frigid air, presenting a skewed reality in which the reader is drawn forward to figure out who, or what, is telling the story, and why. Narrated by what may be hermaphrodites or ghosts, wanders or wonders, Littell’s masterful, effortless sentences carry these stories that illuminate the shadowy depths of solitude, reflection, longing, and lust."In Quarters" is a Proustian ghost story, or maybe a memory, or a dream. Narrated by a man who may or may not exist, it follows him through a sprawling mansion where he cares for a sick child, though he has forgotten whether or not the boy is his, while stealing food from other's plates and having sex with a beautiful young woman. When he travels to a provincial city, the young woman reappearsor does she? Repeated brushes with shadowy men with umbrellas offer a hint of menace that forms the backbone of this strange tale."Story About Nothing" follows a man who cannot remember his birthday "or even the sign under which I was born" as he experiences transgenderism, a pornographic tape given to him by a mysterious stranger, and a Hemingway-esque series of bullfights under the hot Spanish sun. As Littell takes his narrator through a series of affairs, each more ephemeral then the last, it becomes clear that this is a story about the transience of sex, the way that desire evaporates in satiation and then reappears when two strangers share a long look over a strong drink. Anchored by striking imagesa lime sorbet, children diving off of high rocksLittell's tale becomes a trip through desire that is not soon forgotten.Commanding in spite of their vagueness, beguilingly easy to read but full of depth and mystery, these novellas explore the in-between spaces: between thoughts, between bodies, between hungers and their satisfactions, between eyes and the things they look at.

The Fata Morgana Books

Two Lines Press

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Books by Jonathan Littell