X's bookshelf: all en-US Mon, 07 Apr 2025 04:00:33 -0700 60 X's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Los detectives salvajes 63034
Premios Herralde de Novela y Rómulo Gallegos, ambos por unanimidad.]]> 624 Roberto Bolaño 8433966634 X 0 Abandonado al 50% 4.35 1998 Los detectives salvajes
author: Roberto Bolaño
name: X
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1998
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/07
date added: 2025/04/07
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Abandonado al 50%
]]> Station Eleven 20170404 An audacious, darkly glittering novel set in the eerie days of civilization’s collapse—the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking everything for art and humanity.

Kirsten Raymonde will never forget the night Arthur Leander, the famous Hollywood actor, had a heart attack on stage during a production of King Lear. That was the night when a devastating flu pandemic arrived in the city, and within weeks, civilization as we know it came to an end.

Twenty years later, Kirsten moves between the settlements of the altered world with a small troupe of actors and musicians. They call themselves The Traveling Symphony, and they have dedicated themselves to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who will threaten the tiny band’s existence. And as the story takes off, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, the strange twist of fate that connects them all will be revealed.]]> 333 Emily St. John Mandel 0385353308 X 0 DNF. 25% 4.05 2014 Station Eleven
author: Emily St. John Mandel
name: X
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2014
rating: 0
read at: 2025/04/06
date added: 2025/04/06
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DNF. 25%
]]> La flaqueza del bolchevique 525542 184 Lorenzo Silva 8423327736 X 0 to-read 3.57 1997 La flaqueza del bolchevique
author: Lorenzo Silva
name: X
average rating: 3.57
book published: 1997
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/04/04
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]]> Stay True 59900070 New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art.

In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken--with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity--is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes 'zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn't seem to have a place for either of them.

But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the textbook successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet.

Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends--his memories--Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he's been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.]]> 208 Hua Hsu 0385547773 X 2 4.01 2022 Stay True
author: Hua Hsu
name: X
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2022
rating: 2
read at: 2025/04/03
date added: 2025/04/03
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Pulitzer & National Books Critics Circle awards. Prizes are being devalued.
]]> El cielo prometido 29850759 Una perspectiva completamente nueva de la familia Mercader.

Sinopsis de El cielo prometido:

"¡Dios mío, ese grito!"
Un piolet y un grito desgarrador son los elementos que cargan de dramatismo el instante en el que Ramón Mercader acabó con la vida de Trotsky, una historia condenada a ser reconstruida mil veces, porque se ha convertido en uno de los mitos de nuestro tiempo. Pero ese momento es sólo un episodio más del fascinante devenir de la familia Mercader, narrado aquí como si de una de las grandes odiseas que caracterizan la novela moderna se tratara, y en el que no es Ramón, sino su madre Caridad, quien emerge como la figura principal de esta convulsa crónica del siglo XX.
Nacida en Cuba, Caridad fue una mujer deslumbrante y seductora, cruel y encantadora, perfecto arquetipo del antihéroe clásico, una Lady Macbeth capaz de mover los hilos de la historia. Se casó joven con un miembro de la misma alta burguesía contra la que acabaría combatiendo. Vivió en París, donde participó en la lucha clandestina, luego en Moscú, donde jugaría el rol de una agente doble al servicio del espionaje soviético, y posteriormente en México, al cargo de su misión más personal e importante: lograr que su hijo se fugara de la prisión en la que había sido recluido por su crimen. Compleja y fascinante, Caridad Mercader es el hilo conductor de este libro, a medio camino entre la biografía novelada y el ensayo, por el que se cruzan algunos de los personajes y sucesos más relevantes del último siglo y que nos permite ahondar y reflexionar sobre las paradojas de la condición humana desde las ruinas de la fe y del idealismo.]]> 528 Gregorio Luri 8434423596 X 0 to-read 4.27 2016 El cielo prometido
author: Gregorio Luri
name: X
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2016
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/23
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]]> <![CDATA[Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century]]> 58849 Mystery Train, widely acclaimed as the best book ever written about America as seen through its music, began work on this new book out of a fascination with the Sex Pistols: that scandalous antimusical group, invented in London in 1975 and dead within two years, which sparked the emergence of the culture called punk. "I am an antichrist!" shouted singer Johnny Rotten--where in the world of pop music did that come from? Looking for an answer, with a high sense of the drama of the journey, Marcus takes us down the dark paths of counterhistory, a route of blasphemy, adventure, and surprise.

This is no mere search for cultural antecedents. Instead, what Marcus so brilliantly shows is that various kinds of angry, absolute demands--demands on society, art, and all the governing structures of everyday life--seem to be coded in phrases, images, and actions passed on invisibly, but inevitably, by people quite unaware of each other. Marcus lets us hear strange yet familiar voices: of such heretics as the Brethren of the Free Spirit in medieval Europe and the Ranters in seventeenth-century England; the dadaists in Zurich in 1916 and Berlin in 1918, wearing death masks, chanting glossolalia; one Michel Mourre, who in 1950 took over Easter Mass at Notre-Dame to proclaim the death of God; the Lettrist International and the Situationist International, small groups of Paris--based artists and writers surrounding Guy Debord, who produced blank-screen films, prophetic graffiti, and perhaps the most provocative social criticism of the 1950s and '60s; the rioting students and workers of May '68, scrawling cryptic slogans on city walls and bringing France to a halt; the Sex Pistols in London, recording the savage "Anarchy in the U.K." and "God Save the Queen."

Although the Sex Pistols shape the beginning and the end of the story, Lipstick Traces is not a book about music; it is about a common voice, discovered and transmitted in many forms. Working from scores of previously unexamined and untranslated essays, manifestos, and filmscripts, from old photographs, dada sound poetry, punk songs, collages, and classic texts from Marx to Henri Lefebvre, Marcus takes us deep behind the acknowledged events of our era, into a hidden tradition of moments that would seem imaginary except for the fact that they are real: a tradition of shared utopias, solitary refusals, impossible demands, and unexplained disappearances. Written with grace and force, humor and an insistent sense of tragedy and danger, Lipstick Traces tells a story as disruptive and compelling as the century itself.]]> 512 Greil Marcus 0674535812 X 0 to-read 3.98 1989 Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century
author: Greil Marcus
name: X
average rating: 3.98
book published: 1989
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/15
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]]> Historias del Kronen 1487148 240 José Ãngel Mañas 8423337278 X 3 3.5 3.29 1994 Historias del Kronen
author: José Ãngel Mañas
name: X
average rating: 3.29
book published: 1994
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/01
date added: 2025/03/14
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3.5
]]> <![CDATA[On the Calculation of Volume I]]> 208511270
Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.

The first volume’s gravitational pull―a force inverse to its constriction―has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating.

Solvej Balle’s seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects. As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle’s fiction consists of writing that listens. “Reading her is like being caressed by language itself.â€]]> 160 Solvej Balle 0811237257 X 3 3.90 2020 On the Calculation of Volume I
author: Solvej Balle
name: X
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2025/02/01
date added: 2025/03/14
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]]> <![CDATA[El estado natural de las cosas]]> 30054198
Un hombre se presta a perder una parte de su cuerpo a cambio de unos miles de euros; una mujer ríe en medio de los disturbios sociales que arrasan la ciudad; un pueblo espera con devoción la llegada de un huracán; alguien entierra un testículo en el cementerio de la Almudena; un marido acaba viviendo en el techo...

Son solo algunos de los planteamientos radicales y perversos que encontramos en esta antología de relatos, tan atenta a la fabulación más exigente como a la creación de unas resonancias sentimentales capaces de interpelarnos.

El estado natural de las cosas es una colección de historias donde no solo se pone en tela de juicio lo que entendemos por normalidad, sino también las leyes fundamentales de la física y hasta el buen gusto convencional.

Porque estas siete narraciones de Alejandro Morellón se adscriben al género fantástico, pero lo modulan y deforman para volverlo a su vez denuncia y retrato de los tiempos que nos ha tocado vivir.

El estado natural de las cosas de Alejandro Morellón es el tercer título que el autor Alberto Olmos, editor invitado de Caballo de Troya durante 2016, trae a su colección «El caballo de Alberto».]]> 144 Alejandro Morellón 8415451784 X 2 3.60 2016 El estado natural de las cosas
author: Alejandro Morellón
name: X
average rating: 3.60
book published: 2016
rating: 2
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]]> ´¡³¦Ã©°ù³¦²¹³Ù±ð 152047655
No sabe si está poseída por un demonio o perdiendo la cabeza. En un rincón de su mente no cesa de preguntarse si en realidad no está disfrutando con todo lo que le sucede y eso la aterroriza aún más.]]> 224 Sara Gran 8412564022 X 1 3.78 2003 ´¡³¦Ã©°ù³¦²¹³Ù±ð
author: Sara Gran
name: X
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2003
rating: 1
read at: 2025/03/09
date added: 2025/03/09
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]]> The Nightmare Chronicles 23845
This audiobook also contains the short stories "Underworld," "O Rare and Most Esquisite," "The Rendering Man," "The Fruit of Her Womb," "The Hurting Season," "Chosen," "The Night Before Alec Got Married," "Only Connect," "The Little Mermaid," "Damned if You Do," and "The Ripening Sweetness of Late Afternoon." You can also listen to the acclaimed novelettes, "White Chapel" and "I am Infinite, I Contain Multitudes."]]> 360 Douglas Clegg 084394580X X 0 to-read 3.79 2015 The Nightmare Chronicles
author: Douglas Clegg
name: X
average rating: 3.79
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/06
shelves: to-read
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]]> Exhalation 41160292
In "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate," a portal through time forces a fabric seller in ancient Baghdad to grapple with past mistakes and second chances. In "Exhalation," an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications that are literally universal. In "Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom," the ability to glimpse into alternate universes necessitates a radically new examination of the concepts of choice and free will.

Including stories being published for the first time as well as some of his rare and classic uncollected work, Exhalation is Ted Chiang at his best: profound, sympathetic—revelatory.]]> 368 Ted Chiang X 0 to-read 4.27 2019 Exhalation
author: Ted Chiang
name: X
average rating: 4.27
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/06
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]]> <![CDATA[Stalker: Pícnic extraterrestre]]> 25603210
Con prólogo de Ursula K. Le Guin y posfacio de Borís Strugatski, la novela se presenta en su versión íntegra, libre de censura, y en traducción directa del ruso. Se la considera, junto con Qué difícil es ser dios y El lunes empieza el sábado, la obra cumbre de los hermanos Strugatski, y la fuerza y la crudeza de sus personajes la han convertido en la más popular. Con un desarrollo ágil y seductor, indaga en el extrañamiento más abstracto y hasta en los mecanismos de la búsqueda de la felicidad, y deja una huella profunda e indeleble a su paso.]]> 192 Arkady Strugatsky X 0 to-read 3.91 1972 Stalker: Pícnic extraterrestre
author: Arkady Strugatsky
name: X
average rating: 3.91
book published: 1972
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/06
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]]> Lo que no tiene nombre 17565948
En este libro dedicado a la vida y la muerte de su hijo Daniel, Piedad Bonnett alcanza con las palabras los lugares más extremos de la existencia.

Lo que han dicho otros autores...

«La naturalidad y la extrañeza conviven en sus páginas igual que en su mirada conviven la sequedad de la inteligencia y el latido más intenso de la emoción. Buscar respuestas es sólo un modo de hacerse preguntas, de negociar con las preguntas, de saber cuántas preguntas caben en una obsesión. Es también una forma de seguir cuidando al hijo más allá de la muerte, de defenderlo contra el frío, comprarle ropa nueva, preguntarle por los estudios y por su arte. Aunque no haya ningún sobre en la habitación, todo suicidio es una carta a los seres que se dejan en la vida. El dolor, el amor, los recuerdos, las imaginaciones, los sentimientos de culpa, la conciencia de haber ayudado y la certeza de la enfermedad se mezclan en nuestros ojos al leer esa carta y nos interpelan sobre nuestra propia realidad. Piedad Bonnett ha vivido el duelo en compañía de la literatura. Toda la lucidez y toda la emoción pudorosa que han caracterizado su poesía y su narrativa se condensan aquí. La gran literatura convierte la historia personal en una experiencia humana colectiva. Por eso este libro habla de la fragilidad de cualquier vida, de cualquier mundo en el que pueden desaparecer los oficios y las artes, de cualquier estado que pretenda engañarnos con su estabilidad. Habla también de la necesidad de seguir viviendo». Luis García Montero

«Preguntas que sólo una madre puede hacerse frente al suicidio de un hijo pero con la potencia y el aserto que sólo una gran escritora puede pretender. Preguntas sin respuesta que construirán, otra vez, una única gran pregunta. Y que el lector deberá animarse a pronunciar. Un testimonio demoledor del hecho más doloroso que una mujer puede imaginar para su vida, escrito con la pluma pesada y pudorosa que sólo puede tener quien se sabe vencida por los demonios pero aún nos mira desde los ojos de sus ángeles. Me da terror y me angustia, sentir, entrada por entrada, que este libro es bello, pero eso es: un libro de una belleza notable, ahogada y triste, muda de música, pero tan real como la vida misma». Pablo Ramos

«El dolor de la madre es aquí, por desgracia y también por milagro, tan infinito como el oficio de la escritora. Su doliente serenidad para nombrar lo innombrable, para narrar la peor de las pérdidas, provoca una admiración que es, a partes iguales, de índole personal y estética. “El pensamiento no se acalla�, leemos. Tampoco la literatura, capaz de llegar allí donde la vida nos silencia. Lúcida ante cada palabra que pronuncia en estas páginas de terrible belleza, ante la delicadeza de su herida, Piedad Bonnet nos incorpora conmovedoramente a su familia». Andrés Neuman]]> 130 Piedad Bonnett 958758533X X 4 4.61 2013 Lo que no tiene nombre
author: Piedad Bonnett
name: X
average rating: 4.61
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/06
date added: 2025/03/05
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]]> <![CDATA[Brief Interviews with Hideous Men]]> 6753
Among the stories are 'The Depressed Person', a dazzling and blackly humorous portrayal of a woman's mental state; 'Adult World', which reveals a woman's agonised consideration of her confusing sexual relationship with her husband; and 'Brief Interviews with Hideous Men', a dark, hilarious series of portraits of men whose fear of women renders them grotesque. Wallace's stories present a world where the bizarre and the banal are interwoven and where hideous men appear in many different guises. Thought-provoking and playful, this collection confirms David Foster Wallace as one of the most imaginative young writers around. Wallace delights in leftfield observation, mining the ironic, the surprising and the illuminating from every situation. This collection will delight his growing number of fans, and provide a perfect introduction for new readers.]]> 273 David Foster Wallace 034911188X X 4 3.88 1999 Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
author: David Foster Wallace
name: X
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1999
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/05
date added: 2025/03/04
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]]> Parade 195790675
Midway through his life, an artist begins to paint upside down. Eventually, he paints his wife upside down. He also makes her ugly. The paintings are a great success.

In Paris, a woman is attacked by a stranger in the street. Her attacker flees, but not before turning around to contemplate her victim, like an artist stepping back from a canvas.

When a mother dies, her children confront her the stories she told; the roles she assigned to them; the ways she withheld her love. Her death is a kind of freedom.

An artist takes on a series of pseudonyms to conceal his work from his mother and father. His brother does the opposite. They share the same parents, but they’ve inherited different things.

Parade is a story that confronts and demolishes the conventions of storytelling. It surges past the limits of identity, character, and plot to tell a true story—about art, family, morality, gender, and how we compose ourselves. Rachel Cusk is a writer and visionary like no other, who turns language upside down to show us our world as it really is.]]> 198 Rachel Cusk 0374610045 X 0 to-read 3.55 2024 Parade
author: Rachel Cusk
name: X
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/03/04
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]]> El ruletista 10777282
Mircea Cartarescu hace de una historia breve una parábola universal.]]> 64 Mircea Cărtărescu X 3 4.23 2011 El ruletista
author: Mircea Cărtărescu
name: X
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/03
date added: 2025/03/03
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]]> <![CDATA[Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow]]> 58784475 In this exhilarating novel, two friends—often in love, but never lovers—come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality.

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn't heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.]]> 401 Gabrielle Zevin 0735243344 X 1 Worse than tobacco. 4.12 2022 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
author: Gabrielle Zevin
name: X
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2022
rating: 1
read at: 2025/02/14
date added: 2025/02/14
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Worse than tobacco.
]]> The Nineties 58082714 The Nineties: a wise and funny reckoning with the decade that gave us slacker/grunge irony about the sin of trying too hard, during the greatest shift in human consciousness of any decade in American history.

It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: The Berlin Wall fell and the Twin Towers collapsed. In between, one presidential election was allegedly decided by Ross Perot while another was plausibly decided by Ralph Nader. In the beginning, almost every name and address was listed in a phone book, and everyone answered their landlines because you didn't know who it was. By the end, exposing someone's address was an act of emotional violence, and nobody picked up their new cell phone if they didn't know who it was. The '90s brought about a revolution in the human condition we're still groping to understand. Happily, Chuck Klosterman is more than up to the job.

Beyond epiphenomena like Cop Killer and Titanic and Zima, there were wholesale shifts in how society was perceived: the rise of the internet, pre-9/11 politics, and the paradoxical belief that nothing was more humiliating than trying too hard. Pop culture accelerated without the aid of a machine that remembered everything, generating an odd comfort in never being certain about anything. On a '90s Thursday night, more people watched any random episode of Seinfeld than the finale of Game of Thrones. But nobody thought that was important; if you missed it, you simply missed it. It was the last era that held to the idea of a true, hegemonic mainstream before it all began to fracture, whether you found a home in it or defined yourself against it.

In The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman makes a home in all of it: the film, the music, the sports, the TV, the politics, the changes regarding race and class and sexuality, the yin/yang of Oprah and Alan Greenspan. In perhaps no other book ever written would a sentence like, "The video for 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany" make complete sense. Chuck Klosterman has written a multi-dimensional masterpiece, a work of synthesis so smart and delightful that future historians might well refer to this entire period as Klostermanian.]]> 370 Chuck Klosterman 0735217955 X 0 to-read 3.86 2022 The Nineties
author: Chuck Klosterman
name: X
average rating: 3.86
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/17
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]]> Room to Dream 35224286 Twin Peaks and writer and director of groundbreaking films like Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive - opens up about a lifetime of extraordinary creativity, the friendships he has made along the way and the struggles he has faced - sometimes successful, sometimes not - to bring his projects to fruition.

Part-memoir, part-biography, Room to Dream interweaves Lynch's own reflections on his life with the story of those times, as told by Kristine McKenna, drawing from extensive and explosive interviews with ninety of Lynch's friends, family members, actors, agents, musicians and collaborators. Lynch responds to each recollection and reveals the inner story of the life behind the art.]]> 496 David Lynch 1782118381 X 0 to-read 4.37 2018 Room to Dream
author: David Lynch
name: X
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2018
rating: 0
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date added: 2025/01/17
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]]> Temporada de huracanes 34847511
Una novela cruda y desgarradora en la que el lector quedará envuelto, atrapado por las palabras y la atmósfera de terrible, aunque gozosa, fatalidad.

Un grupo de niños encuentra un cadáver flotando en las aguas turbias de un canal de riego cercano a la ranchería de La Matosa. El cuerpo resulta ser de la Bruja, una mujer que heredó dicho oficio de su madre fallecida, y a quienes los pobladores de esa zona rural respetaban y temían.

Tras el macabro hallazgo, las sospechas y habladurías recaerán sobre un grupo de muchachos del pueblo, a quienes días antes una vecina vio mientras huían de casa de la hechicera, cargando lo que parecía ser un cuerpo inerte.

A partir de ahí, los personajes involucrados en el crimen nos contarán su historia mientras los lectores nos sumergimos en la vida de este lugar acosado por la miseria y el abandono, y donde convergen la violencia del erotismo más oscuro y las sórdidas relaciones de poder.

Otros autores han opinado:

"Un viaje nocturno a las profundidades del alma humana con el estilo más radical de su generación." -Martín Solares-

"Fernanda Melchor no sólo escribe con la potencia rabiosa que le reclaman los temas que ha decidido investigar, sino que en cada página muestra un oído y una agudeza pocas veces vista en nuestra literatura." -Yuri Herrera-]]> 224 Fernanda Melchor 6073152736 X 5 4.20 2017 Temporada de huracanes
author: Fernanda Melchor
name: X
average rating: 4.20
book published: 2017
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/05
date added: 2025/01/04
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]]> La llamada: Un retrato 203982344 Esta es una historia real, llena de aristas y sombras, sobre la condición humana.

A fines de los sesenta, con trece años, la argentina Silvia Labayru era una adolescente tímida, lectora, amante de los animales, entusiasta de John F. Kennedy, hija de una familia de militares que incluía a su padre, miembro de la Fuerza Aérea y piloto civil. A esa edad ingresó en el Colegio Nacional Buenos Aires, una institución pública de gran prestigio, donde entró en contacto con agrupaciones estudiantiles de izquierda y se transformó en una militante aguerrida. En marzo de 1976 se produjo en la Argentina un golpe de Estado que dio comienzo a una dictadura militar. Para entonces, embarazada de cinco meses y con veinte años, Labayru integraba el sector de Inteligencia de la organización Montoneros, un grupo armado de extracción peronista. El 29 de diciembre de 1976 fue secuestrada por militares y trasladada a la ESMA, la Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada, donde funcionaba un centro de detención clandestino en el cual se torturó y asesinó a miles de personas. Allí tuvo a su hija que, una semana más tarde, fue entregada a los abuelos paternos. En la ESMA, Labayru fue torturada, obligada a realizar trabajo esclavo, violada reiteradamente por un oficial y forzada a representar el papel de hermana de Alfredo Astiz, un miembro de la Armada que se había infiltrado en la organización Madres de Plaza de Mayo, un operativo que terminó con tres Madres y dos monjas francesas desaparecidas. La liberaron en junio de 1978 y en el avión rumbo a Madrid, junto a su hija de un año y medio, pensó: «Se acabó el infierno». Pero el infierno no había terminado. Los argentinos en el exilio la repudiaron, acusándola de traidora a raíz de la desaparición de las Madres. Abominada por quienes habían sido sus compañeros de militancia, arropada por unos pocos amigos fieles exiliados en Europa, hizo una vida. Hasta que en 2018 la contactó desde Buenos Aires un hombre que había sido su pareja en los años setenta y, en una secuencia en la que se funden manipulaciones familiares que torcieron el destino, comenzó a urdirse una historia que continúa hasta hoy.

La periodista Leila Guerriero comenzó a entrevistarla en 2021, mientras se esperaba la sentencia del primer juicio por crímenes de violencia sexual cometidos contra mujeres secuestradas durante la dictadura, en el que Labayru era denunciante. A lo largo de casi dos años, habló con sus amigos, sus exparejas, su pareja actual, sus hijos y sus compañeros de cautiverio y de militancia. El resultado es el retrato de una mujer con una historia compleja en la que se amalgaman el amor, el sexo, la violencia, el humor, los hijos, los padres, la infidelidad, la política, los amigos, las mudanzas, y en la que sobrevuela una llamada telefónica que, realizada desde la ESMA el 14 de marzo de 1977, le salvó la vida.]]> 432 Leila Guerriero 8433922068 X 0 to-read 4.47 2024 La llamada: Un retrato
author: Leila Guerriero
name: X
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/28
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]]> Biography of X 60784729 From one of our fiercest stylists, a roaring epic chronicling the life, times, and secrets of a notorious artist.

When X—an iconoclastic artist, writer, and polarizing shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow, wild with grief and refusing everyone’s good advice, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets, betrayals, and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification.

A masterfully constructed literary adventure complete with original images assembled by X’s widow, Biography of X follows a grieving wife seeking to understand the woman who enthralled her. CM traces X’s peripatetic trajectory over decades, from Europe to the ruins of America's divided territories, and through her collaborations and feuds with everyone from Bowie and Waits to Sontag and Acker. And when she finally understands the scope of X’s defining artistic project, CM realizes her wife’s deceptions were far crueler than she imagined.

Pulsing with suspense and intellect while blending nonfiction and fiction, Biography of X is a roaring epic that plumbs the depths of grief, art, and love. In her most ambitious novel yet, Catherine Lacey, one of our most acclaimed literary innovators, pushes her craft to its highest level, introducing us to an unforgettable character who, in her tantalizing mystery, shows us the fallibility of the stories we craft for ourselves.]]> 416 Catherine Lacey X 0 to-read 3.83 2023 Biography of X
author: Catherine Lacey
name: X
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/28
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]]> Un lugar llamado Antaño 537615 245 Olga Tokarczuk 8426412939 X 0 to-read 4.08 1996 Un lugar llamado Antaño
author: Olga Tokarczuk
name: X
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1996
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/21
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]]> Yo fui Johnny Thunders 20738363 288 Carlos Zanón 8490560080 X 0 to-read 3.69 2014 Yo fui Johnny Thunders
author: Carlos Zanón
name: X
average rating: 3.69
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/18
shelves: to-read
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]]> <![CDATA[Taking Back Control?: States and State Systems After Globalism]]> 208896778 Taking back control? States and state systems after globalizationThe era of hyperglobalization once hailed as the 'end of history' was characterised by boundless capitalist expansion. The neoliberal revolution gave rise to a politics of scale aimed at the centralization and unification of states and state the replacement of national with global governance or, in Europe, of the nation-state with a supranational superstate, the European Union.The 'New World Order' proclaimed by the United States in the wake of the Soviet collapse proved to be ungovernable by democratic means. Instead, it was ruled through a combination of technocracy and mercatocracy, failing spectacularly to provide for political stability, social legitimacy and international peace. Marked by a series of economic and institutional crises, hyperglobalization gave rise to various kinds of political countermovements that rebelled against and ultimately stopped the upward transfer of state authority in its tracks.This book analyses the ongoing tug-of-war between the forces of globalism and democracy, of centralization and decentralization, and unification and differentiation of states and state systems, and how they are tied to the advance of global capitalism and the prospects for its social and democratic regulation.Exploring the possibility for states and the societies they govern to take back control over their collective fate, the book is an attempt at a renewed theory of the state in political economy. Inspired by the work of Karl Polanyi and John Maynard Keynes, it discusses the potential outlines of a state system allowing for democratic governance within and peaceful cooperation between sovereign nation-states.]]> 416 Wolfgang Streeck 1839767294 X 0 to-read 4.17 Taking Back Control?: States and State Systems After Globalism
author: Wolfgang Streeck
name: X
average rating: 4.17
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date added: 2024/12/13
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]]> 10:04 20613582 10:04 has enjoyed unlikely literary success, has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal medical condition, and has been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child. In a New York of increasingly frequent superstorms and social unrest, he must reckon with his own mortality and the prospect of fatherhood in a city that might soon be underwater.

A writer whose work Jonathan Franzen has called "hilarious . . . cracklingly intelligent . . . and original in every sentence," Lerner captures what it's like to be alive now, during the twilight of an empire, when the difficulty of imagining a future is changing our relationship to both the present and the past.]]> 256 Ben Lerner 0865478104 X 4 3.78 2014 10:04
author: Ben Lerner
name: X
average rating: 3.78
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/09
date added: 2024/12/09
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]]> Austerlitz 88442 Austerlitz, the internationally acclaimed masterpiece by “one of the most gripping writers imaginable� (The New York Review of Books), is the story of a man’s search for the answer to his life’s central riddle. A small child when he comes to England on a Kindertransport in the summer of 1939, one Jacques Austerlitz is told nothing of his real family by the Welsh Methodist minister and his wife who raise him. When he is a much older man, the fleeting memories return to him, and obeying an instinct he only dimly understands, he follows their trail back to the world he left behind a half century before. There, faced with the void at the heart of twentieth-century Europe, he struggles to rescue his heritage from oblivion.]]> 415 W.G. Sebald 0140297995 X 0 to-read 3.97 2001 Austerlitz
author: W.G. Sebald
name: X
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/12/02
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]]> Taipei 16041828
Taipei is an ode - or lament - to the way we live now. Following Paul from New York, where he comically navigates Manhattan's art and literary scenes, to Taipei, Taiwan, where he confronts his family's roots, we see one relationship fail, while another is born on the internet and blooms into an unexpected wedding in Las Vegas.

From one of this generation's most talked-about and enigmatic writers comes a deeply personal and uncompromising novel about memory, love, and what it means to be alive.]]> 248 Tao Lin 0307950174 X 0 to-read 3.35 2013 Taipei
author: Tao Lin
name: X
average rating: 3.35
book published: 2013
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/30
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]]> <![CDATA[Beautiful World, Where Are You]]> 56597885 356 Sally Rooney 0374602603 X 1 3.53 2021 Beautiful World, Where Are You
author: Sally Rooney
name: X
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2021
rating: 1
read at: 2024/11/30
date added: 2024/11/29
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]]> Drown 531989 Drown, Diaz has harnessed the rhythms of anger and release, frustration and joy, to indelible effect.]]> 208 Junot Díaz 1573226068 X 0 to-read 4.02 1995 Drown
author: Junot Díaz
name: X
average rating: 4.02
book published: 1995
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/11/25
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]]> <![CDATA[Capital in the Twenty First Century]]> 18736925 Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings will transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality.

Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II. The main driver of inequality—the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth—today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, Piketty says, and may do so again.]]> 685 Thomas Piketty 067443000X X 4 4.04 2013 Capital in the Twenty First Century
author: Thomas Piketty
name: X
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2013
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/22
date added: 2024/11/22
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]]> Los girasoles ciegos 119537 160 Alberto Méndez 8433968556 X 3 3.5 4.05 2004 Los girasoles ciegos
author: Alberto Méndez
name: X
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at: 2024/11/11
date added: 2024/11/11
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3.5
]]> El perquè de tot plegat 23129 176 Quim Monzó 8477271054 X 4 3.75 1993 El perquè de tot plegat
author: Quim Monzó
name: X
average rating: 3.75
book published: 1993
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/10/28
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]]> <![CDATA[Singapore: The Air-conditioned Nation. Essays on the Politics of Comfort and Control, 1990-2000]]> 452158 223 Cherian George 981306546X X 0 to-read 4.08 2000 Singapore: The Air-conditioned Nation. Essays on the Politics of Comfort and Control, 1990-2000
author: Cherian George
name: X
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2000
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/23
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]]> Fell 43722 128 Warren Ellis 1582406936 X 0 to-read 4.15 2005 Fell
author: Warren Ellis
name: X
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/15
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]]> <![CDATA[Transmetropolitan, Vol. 1: Back on the Street]]> 22416 72 Warren Ellis 1563894459 X 0 to-read 4.21 1998 Transmetropolitan, Vol. 1: Back on the Street
author: Warren Ellis
name: X
average rating: 4.21
book published: 1998
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/15
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]]> <![CDATA[Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody]]> 53052177
In this probing and intrepid volume, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay document the evolution of the dogma that informs these ideas, from its coarse origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields.

Today this dogma is recognizable as much by its effects, such as cancel culture and social-media dogpiles, as by its tenets, which are all too often embraced as axiomatic in mainstream media: knowledge is a social construct; science and reason are tools of oppression; all human interactions are sites of oppressive power play; and language is dangerous.

As Pluckrose and Lindsay warn, the unchecked proliferation of these anti-Enlightenment beliefs present a threat not only to liberal democracy but also to modernity itself. While acknowledging the need to challenge the complacency of those who think a just society has been fully achieved, Pluckrose and Lindsay break down how this often-radical activist scholarship does far more harm than good, not least to those marginalized communities it claims to champion. They also detail its alarmingly inconsistent and illiberal ethics.

Only through a proper understanding of the evolution of these ideas, they conclude, can those who value science, reason, and consistently liberal ethics successfully challenge this harmful and authoritarian orthodoxy—in the academy, in culture, and beyond.]]> 348 Helen Pluckrose 1634312023 X 0 to-read 4.08 2020 Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
author: Helen Pluckrose
name: X
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2020
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date added: 2024/10/06
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]]> <![CDATA[The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time]]> 75495020
For much of history, societies have violently oppressed ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities. It is no surprise that many who passionately believe in social justice came to believe that members of marginalized groups need to take pride in their identity to resist injustice.

But over the past decades, a healthy appreciation for the culture and heritage of minority groups has transformed into a counterproductive obsession with group identity in all its forms. A new ideology aiming to place each person’s matrix of identities at the center of social, cultural, and political life has quickly become highly influential. It stifles discourse, vilifies mutual influence as cultural appropriation, denies that members of different groups can truly understand one another, and insists that the way governments treat their citizens should depend on the color of their skin.

This, Yascha Mounk argues, is the identity trap. Though those who battle for these ideas are full of good intentions, they will ultimately make it harder to achieve progress toward the genuine equality we desperately need. Mounk has built his acclaimed scholarly career on being one of the first to warn of the risks right-wing populists pose to American democracy. But, he shows, those on the left and center who are stuck in the identity trap are now inadvertent allies to the MAGA movement.

In The Identity Trap, Mounk provides the most ambitious and comprehensive account to date of the origins, consequences, and limitations of so-called “wokeness.� He is the first to show how postmodernism, postcolonialism, and critical race theory forged the “identity synthesis� that conquered many college campuses by 2010. He lays out how a relatively marginal set of ideas came to gain tremendous influence in business, media, and government by 2020. He makes a nuanced philosophical case for why the application of these ideas to areas from education to public policy is proving to be so deeply counterproductive—and why universal, humanist values can best serve the vital goal of true equality. In explaining the huge political and cultural transformations of the past decade, The Identity Trap provides truth and clarity where they are needed most.]]> 414 Yascha Mounk 0593493192 X 0 to-read 4.07 2023 The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time
author: Yascha Mounk
name: X
average rating: 4.07
book published: 2023
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/10/06
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]]> <![CDATA[El amor en los tiempos del cólera]]> 26835720 583 Gabriel García Márquez 607072674X X 4 4.47 1985 El amor en los tiempos del cólera
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: X
average rating: 4.47
book published: 1985
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/09/21
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]]> Cursed Bunny 56648660 Cursed Bunny is a genre-defying collection of short stories by Korean author Bora Chung. Blurring the lines between magical realism, horror, and science-fiction, Chung uses elements of the fantastic and surreal to address the very real horrors and cruelties of patriarchy and capitalism in modern society.

Anton Hur’s translation skilfully captures the way Chung’s prose effortlessly glides from being terrifying to wryly humorous. Winner of a PEN/Heim Grant.]]> 251 Bora Chung 1916277187 X 1 3.77 2017 Cursed Bunny
author: Bora Chung
name: X
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2017
rating: 1
read at: 2024/09/11
date added: 2024/09/10
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]]> La sociedad del cansancio 21954673 80 Byung-Chul Han X 0 to-read 3.84 2010 La sociedad del cansancio
author: Byung-Chul Han
name: X
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/09/03
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]]> This Is Not a Novel 195606 The Barnes & Noble Review

This experimental work is an enthralling amalgamation of anecdotes, aphorisms, and quotations from writers and artists, interspersed with self-reflexive comments by the Writer who has assembled them. As the title implies, this is certainly not a novel -- not in the general sense of the term. And yet a reader who follows the flow will gradually notice certain novelistic conventions insinuating themselves. Writer -- as the narrator refers to himself -- is tired of inventing characters and subjecting them to the rigors of plot development. Instead, historical personages from Dickens to Beethoven recur throughout the book: They re born, create, speak fondly or acidly of their own work and the work of others, and then die. (Death, in fact, is a major concern of Writer.) Works of art interlock and interrelate; diary entries, attributions, and critical comments jostle for position. But what at first appear to be random bits of historical trivia ultimately come together with a narrative logic: a beginning, middle, and end. So while Markson has jettisoned the standard conflict-and-resolution pattern of a novel, he nevertheless fashions a literary journey that gets somewhere. Indeed, the book s conclusion will come as an intensely moving surprise to those who reach it.


Does Writer even exist in a book without characters? the narrator wonders. Passing through a period of aging and self-doubt, Writer looks deeply inside himself over the course of the book and worries about his very purpose. The real question hovering in the margins of this beguiling work is, Why do I write? Many an artist suffers under the burdens of posterity, the sinking feeling that words and works will fade with the passage of time. Eventually, though, this particular Writer answers in a qualified affirmative, for he realizes himself to be the main character in his own life. That which is not a novel, he implies, is life itself; creating art is what the artist does to live. In the end, out of a shared sense of mortality and its frailties and beauties, we can only agree. (Jonathan Cook)

]]> 190 David Markson 1582431337 X 0 to-read 4.03 2001 This Is Not a Novel
author: David Markson
name: X
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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]]> Absalom, Absalom! 373755 316 William Faulkner 0679732187 X 0 to-read 3.97 1936 Absalom, Absalom!
author: William Faulkner
name: X
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1936
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/31
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]]> Canto jo i la muntanya balla 45286062
Canto jo i la muntanya balla és una novel·la en què prenen la paraula dones i homes, fantasmes i dones d’aigua, núvols i bolets, gossos i cabirols que habiten entre Camprodon i Prats de Molló. Una zona d’alta muntanya i fronterera que, més enllà de la llegenda, guarda la memòria de segles de lluita per la supervivència, de persecucions guiades per la ignorància i el fanatisme, de guerres fratricides, però que encarna també una bellesa a la qual no calen gaires adjectius. Un terreny fèrtil per a deixar anar la imaginació i el pensament, les ganes de parlar i d’explicar històries. Un lloc, potser, per a començar de nou; un lloc per a una certa redempció.

4t Premi Llibres Anagrama de Novel·la 2019]]> 192 Irene Solà 8433915681 X 0 to-read 4.33 2019 Canto jo i la muntanya balla
author: Irene Solà
name: X
average rating: 4.33
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/31
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]]> The Lover 275 117 Marguerite Duras X 5 3.79 1984 The Lover
author: Marguerite Duras
name: X
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1984
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/01
date added: 2024/08/31
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]]> Terres mortes 56935397
La mort violenta d’en Joan és l’inici d’aquesta no­vel·la que descabdella la història d’una nissaga maleïda. Ha estat un tret per l’esquena en un ca­salot aïllat on només viu la família. Qui de tots ells ha pogut ser? Era l’únic que ho tenia tot i ara es dessagna en el petit rebost on la mare el va instal·lar després de tres anys d’absència. Quin cor és capaç de proposar que serrin les cames a un fill per tal d’encabir-lo dins la caixa?

Terres mortes és un relat polifònic que des­plega un univers atàvic. Una mare que surt d’un infern per a crear-ne un altre. Un pare a qui ja po­ques coses importen. El fill gran sorrut i rude que tothom tem. Els del mig que malden per trobar el seu lloc encara que sigui lluny. La noia enca­denada a casa per un embaràs no desitjat. I el nen, lluminós i salvatge. Sobre tots ells pesa un origen feréstec, dues morts i un secret. I malgrat tot, en els seus testimonis despunta el brot d’una bondat resistent que prova de sobreviure a la vi­lesa que tot ho empelta.

Núria Bendicho Giró s’estrena amb una histò­ria gòtica que ens fa preguntar-nos si aquells que semblen culpables no són justament els més lliu­res i si no és que tots som víctimes de la mateixa foscor. Una novel·la calidoscòpica que ens inter­roga sobre la naturalesa humana i ens endinsa en un món sòrdid del qual és difícil sortir sense sentir ràbia i compassió.]]> 178 Núria Bendicho Giró 8433942158 X 0 to-read 4.02 2021 Terres mortes
author: Núria Bendicho Giró
name: X
average rating: 4.02
book published: 2021
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/31
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]]> ±Êá±ô±è¾±³Ù´Ç 208944608 50 Ernesto Delgado 849895519X X 0 to-read 3.00 ±Êá±ô±è¾±³Ù´Ç
author: Ernesto Delgado
name: X
average rating: 3.00
book published:
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date added: 2024/08/31
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]]> A Visit from the Goon Squad 7331435
We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city’s demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale. We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life—divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house—and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco’s punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang—who thrived and who faltered—and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie’s catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou’s far-flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall.

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both—and escape the merciless progress of time—in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.]]> 274 Jennifer Egan 0307592839 X 0 to-read 3.70 2010 A Visit from the Goon Squad
author: Jennifer Egan
name: X
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/28
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]]> Dept. of Speculation 17402288
Jenny Offill's heroine, referred to in these pages as simply "the wife," once exchanged love letters with her husband postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes - a colicky baby, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions - the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art.

With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation is a novel to be devoured in a single sitting, though its bracing emotional insights and piercing meditations on despair and love will linger long after the last page.]]> 179 Jenny Offill 0385350813 X 3 3.5 3.76 2014 Dept. of Speculation
author: Jenny Offill
name: X
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/27
date added: 2024/08/27
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3.5
]]> Poesía completa, 1970-2000 297208 Poesía completa de Leopoldo María Panero (Madrid, 1948), el más genial de los poetas españoles de las últimas generaciones.
Integrante de la antología Nueve novísimos, L. M. P. continúa siendo el más genuino de los poetas españoles que "representa el único tabú de su generación y la más auténtica e irreductible marginalidad de la poesía española".
Túa Blesa, profesor de la Universidad de Zaragoza y máximo especialista en la poesía de Panero, ha cuidado esta edición de tal manera que se puede considerar como definitiva.]]> 592 Leopoldo María Panero 8475229891 X 0 to-read 4.35 2001 Poesía completa, 1970-2000
author: Leopoldo María Panero
name: X
average rating: 4.35
book published: 2001
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/21
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]]> Relato de un náufrago 36966331 176 Gabriel García Márquez 8466383808 X 4 3.90 1970 Relato de un náufrago
author: Gabriel García Márquez
name: X
average rating: 3.90
book published: 1970
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/08/19
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]]> Faces in the Crowd 18528038 ]]> 146 Valeria Luiselli 1566893542 X 0 to-read 3.49 2011 Faces in the Crowd
author: Valeria Luiselli
name: X
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/08/11
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]]> Outline 21400742
Beginning with the neighbouring passenger on the flight out and his tales of fast boats and failed marriages, the storytellers talk of their loves and ambitions and pains, their anxieties, their perceptions and daily lives. In the stifling heat and noise of the city the sequence of voice begins to weave a complex human tapestry. The more they talk the more elliptical their listener becomes, as she shapes and directs their accounts until certain themes begin to emerge: the experience of loss, the nature of family life, the difficulty of intimacy and the mystery of creativity itself.

Outline is a novel about writing and talking, about self-effacement and self-expression, about the desire to create and the human art of self-portraiture in which that desire finds its universal form.]]> 249 Rachel Cusk 0571233627 X 3 3.68 2014 Outline
author: Rachel Cusk
name: X
average rating: 3.68
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/09
date added: 2024/08/09
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]]> <![CDATA[The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind]]> 2398547 205 Donella H. Meadows 0876631650 X 4 4.12 The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind
author: Donella H. Meadows
name: X
average rating: 4.12
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2021/02/01
date added: 2024/08/07
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]]> Los enamoramientos 11023952 La última vez que vi a Miguel Desvern o Deverne fue también la última que lo vio su mujer, Luisa, lo cual no dejó de ser extraño y quizá injusto, ya que ella era eso, su mujer, y yo era en cambio una desconocida...»

Así comienza Los enamoramientos, la nueva novela de Javier Marías, consagrado como uno de los mejores novelistas contemporáneos. María Dolz, la narradora y protagonista, sólo supo su nombre «cuando apareció su foto en el periódico, apuñalado y medio descamisado y a punto de convertirse en un muerto: lo último de lo que se debió de dar cuenta fue de que lo acuchillaban por confusión y sin causa».

Con una prosa profunda y cautivadora, esta novela reflexiona sobre el estado de enamoramiento, considerado casi universalmente como algo positivo e incluso redentor a veces, tanto que parece justificar casi todas las cosas: las acciones nobles y desinteresadas, pero también los mayores desmanes y ruindades.

Los enamoramientos es también un libro sobre la impunidad y sobre la horrible fuerza de los hechos; sobre la inconveniencia de que los muertos pudieran volver, por mucho que se los haya llorado y que en apariencia nada se deseara tanto como su regreso, o al menos que siguieran vivos; también sobre la imposibilidad de saber nunca la verdad cabalmente, ni siquiera la de nuestro pensamiento, oscilante y variable siempre.]]> 401 Javier Marías 8420407135 X 2 3.65 2011 Los enamoramientos
author: Javier Marías
name: X
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2011
rating: 2
read at: 2024/08/05
date added: 2024/08/05
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]]> <![CDATA[Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?]]> 7082 244 Philip K. Dick X 5 4.08 1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
author: Philip K. Dick
name: X
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1968
rating: 5
read at: 2017/01/01
date added: 2024/07/24
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]]> House of Leaves 24800
Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story—of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.]]> 710 Mark Z. Danielewski X 5 4.11 2000 House of Leaves
author: Mark Z. Danielewski
name: X
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2000
rating: 5
read at: 2021/06/08
date added: 2024/07/24
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]]> The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle 11275
In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife's missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan's forgotten campaign in Manchuria.

Gripping, prophetic, suffused with comedy and menace, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a tour de force equal in scope to the masterpieces of Mishima and Pynchon.]]> 607 Haruki Murakami 0965341984 X 5 4.16 1994 The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
author: Haruki Murakami
name: X
average rating: 4.16
book published: 1994
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/07/24
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]]> Ventajas de viajar en tren 2021537 148 Antonio Orejudo 8420441732 X 5 4.5 3.57 2001 Ventajas de viajar en tren
author: Antonio Orejudo
name: X
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2001
rating: 5
read at: 2023/10/19
date added: 2024/07/24
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review:
4.5
]]> <![CDATA[Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change]]> 62122504 368 W. David Marx 0593296710 X 0 to-read 3.88 2022 Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change
author: W. David Marx
name: X
average rating: 3.88
book published: 2022
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/07/23
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]]> <![CDATA[El fin del «Homo sovieticus» (Voces de utopía, #5)]]> 28097372 656 Svetlana Alexievich 8416011842 X 3 4.58 2013 El fin del «Homo sovieticus» (Voces de utopía, #5)
author: Svetlana Alexievich
name: X
average rating: 4.58
book published: 2013
rating: 3
read at: 2024/07/15
date added: 2024/07/14
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]]> On Rape 41459219
"It’s time to rethink rape. Centuries of different approaches to rape—as inflicted by men on women—have got us nowhere.

Rape statistics remain intractable: one woman in five will experience sexual violence. Very few rapes find their way into court. The crucial issue is consent, thought by some to be easy to establish and by others impossible.
Sexual assault does not diminish; relations between the sexes do not improve; litigation balloons.

In On Rape Germaine Greer argues there has to be a better way."]]> 42 Germaine Greer X 0 to-read 3.49 2010 On Rape
author: Germaine Greer
name: X
average rating: 3.49
book published: 2010
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/22
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]]> <![CDATA[La derrota de Occidente (Spanish Edition)]]> 213535572
Entre 2016 y 2022, el nihilismo occidental se fusionó con el ucraniano, nacido de la descomposición de la esfera soviética. Juntos, la OTAN y Ucrania se enfrentaron a una Rusia estabilizada, de nuevo una gran potencia, ahora conservadora, tranquilizadora para el resto del mundo que no quiere seguir a Occidente en su aventura. Los dirigentes rusos han decidido tomar han desafiado a la OTAN y han invadido Ucrania.

Recurriendo a los recursos de la economía crítica, la sociología religiosa y la antropología, Emmanuel Todd nos lleva a recorrer el mundo real, de Rusia a Ucrania, de las antiguas democracias populares a Alemania, de Gran Bretaña a Escandinavia y Estados Unidos, sin olvidar al resto de países, cuya elección decidirá, si no lo ha hecho ya, el resultado no sólo de la guerra y sino del mundo por venir.]]> 327 Emmanuel Todd 8446055589 X 0 to-read 4.23 2024 La derrota de Occidente (Spanish Edition)
author: Emmanuel Todd
name: X
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2024
rating: 0
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date added: 2024/06/14
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]]> <![CDATA[Woke: A Guide to Social Justice]]> 43197257 Woke, Titania McGrath demonstrates how everybody can play their part in the pursuit of social justice. As a millennial icon on the forefront of online activism, Titania is uniquely placed to guide her readers through the often bewildering array of terminology and concepts that constitute twenty-first-century 'wokeness'. These new ideas often leave the general public bemused, particularly if they don't read the Guardian.

Being woke is actually much easier than people think. As Titania demonstrates, anyone can be an activist. By simply adding a rainbow flag to your Facebook profile, or calling out an elderly person who doesn't understand what 'non-binary' means, you can change the world for the better. Indeed, social media has now made it possible to show how virtuous you are without having to do anything at all.

Timely and indispensable, Titania's step-by-step guide will help you to become the woke person you need to be in an increasingly progressive world. In a non-patronising manner, Titania will explain why you are wrong about everything and how to become more like her.

]]> 150 Titania McGrath 1472130847 X 0 to-read 3.70 2019 Woke: A Guide to Social Justice
author: Titania McGrath
name: X
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2019
rating: 0
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]]> Tokyo Doesn't Love Us Anymore 718436 272 Ray Loriga 1841955000 X 3 3.83 1999 Tokyo Doesn't Love Us Anymore
author: Ray Loriga
name: X
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1999
rating: 3
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]]> Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 46041199 A fierce international bestseller that launched Korea’s new feminist movement, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 follows one woman’s psychic deterioration in the face of rigid misogyny.

Truly, flawlessly, completely, she became that person.

In a small, tidy apartment on the outskirts of the frenzied metropolis of Seoul lives Kim Jiyoung. A thirtysomething-year-old “millennial everywoman,� she has recently left her white-collar desk job—in order to care for her newborn daughter full-time—as so many Korean women are expected to do. But she quickly begins to exhibit strange symptoms that alarm her husband, parents, and in-laws: Jiyoung impersonates the voices of other women—alive and even dead, both known and unknown to her. As she plunges deeper into this psychosis, her discomfited husband sends her to a male psychiatrist.

In a chilling, eerily truncated third-person voice, Jiyoung’s entire life is recounted to the psychiatrist—a narrative infused with disparate elements of frustration, perseverance, and submission. Born in 1982 and given the most common name for Korean baby girls, Jiyoung quickly becomes the unfavored sister to her princeling little brother. Always, her behavior is policed by the male figures around her—from the elementary school teachers who enforce strict uniforms for girls, to the coworkers who install a hidden camera in the women’s restroom and post their photos online. In her father’s eyes, it is Jiyoung’s fault that men harass her late at night; in her husband’s eyes, it is Jiyoung’s duty to forsake her career to take care of him and their child—to put them first.

Jiyoung’s painfully common life is juxtaposed against a backdrop of an advancing Korea, as it abandons “family planning� birth control policies and passes new legislation against gender discrimination. But can her doctor flawlessly, completely cure her, or even discover what truly ails her?

Rendered in minimalist yet lacerating prose, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 sits at the center of our global #MeToo movement and announces the arrival of writer of international significance]]> 163 Cho Nam-Joo 1631496700 X 3 4.17 2016 Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982
author: Cho Nam-Joo
name: X
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2016
rating: 3
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]]> <![CDATA[Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst]]> 31170723 Why do we do the things we do?

More than a decade in the making, this game-changing book is Robert Sapolsky's genre-shattering attempt to answer that question as fully as perhaps only he could, looking at it from every angle. Sapolsky's storytelling concept is delightful but it also has a powerful intrinsic logic: he starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its evolutionary legacy.

And so the first category of explanation is the neurobiological one. A behavior occurs—whether an example of humans at our best, worst, or somewhere in between. What went on in a person's brain a second before the behavior happened? Then Sapolsky pulls out to a slightly larger field of vision, a little earlier in time: What sight, sound, or smell caused the nervous system to produce that behavior? And then, what hormones acted hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual is to the stimuli that triggered the nervous system? By now he has increased our field of vision so that we are thinking about neurobiology and the sensory world of our environment and endocrinology in trying to explain what happened.

Sapolsky keeps going: How was that behavior influenced by structural changes in the nervous system over the preceding months, by that person's adolescence, childhood, fetal life, and then back to his or her genetic makeup? Finally, he expands the view to encompass factors larger than one individual. How did culture shape that individual's group, what ecological factors millennia old formed that culture? And on and on, back to evolutionary factors millions of years old.

The result is one of the most dazzling tours d'horizon of the science of human behavior ever attempted, a majestic synthesis that harvests cutting-edge research across a range of disciplines to provide a subtle and nuanced perspective on why we ultimately do the things we do ... for good and for ill. Sapolsky builds on this understanding to wrestle with some of our deepest and thorniest questions relating to tribalism and xenophobia, hierarchy and competition, morality and free will, and war and peace. Wise, humane, often very funny, Behave is a towering achievement, powerfully humanizing, and downright heroic in its own right.]]> 790 Robert M. Sapolsky 1594205078 X 0 to-read 4.40 2017 Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
author: Robert M. Sapolsky
name: X
average rating: 4.40
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]]> Pensar lo que más les duele 52268287 548 Adriano Erriguel 841816204X X 0 to-read 4.38 Pensar lo que más les duele
author: Adriano Erriguel
name: X
average rating: 4.38
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rating: 0
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date added: 2024/05/13
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]]> <![CDATA[Entender la politíca: Una guía para novatos]]> 172870260 312 Pablo Simón 8419191760 X 0 to-read 3.98 Entender la politíca: Una guía para novatos
author: Pablo Simón
name: X
average rating: 3.98
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date added: 2024/05/01
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]]> Never Let Me Go 6334
Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it’s only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.

Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.]]> 288 Kazuo Ishiguro 1400078776 X 0 to-read 3.85 2005 Never Let Me Go
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: X
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2005
rating: 0
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]]> Lo peor de todo 855286
Lo peor de todo es una novela ya clásica de nuestras letras, un referente para toda una generación que encontró en la claridad y en las rotundas imágenes de Ray Loriga que la tristeza puede ser algo conmovedor.]]> 127 Ray Loriga 8401423538 X 4 3.48 1992 Lo peor de todo
author: Ray Loriga
name: X
average rating: 3.48
book published: 1992
rating: 4
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date added: 2024/04/30
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]]> <![CDATA[Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New Directions in Critical Theory, 17)]]> 30089750
Drawing on a vast and diverse archive in theory, testimony, and image and on such thinkers as Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and others, the intellectual historian Enzo Traverso explores the varying nature of left melancholy as it has manifested in a feeling of guilt for not sufficiently challenging authority, in a fear of surrendering in disarray and resignation, in mourning the human costs of the past, and in a sense of failure for not realizing utopian aspirations. Yet hidden within this melancholic tradition are the resources for a renewed challenge to prevailing regimes of historicity, a passion that has the power to reignite the dialectic of revolutionary thought.]]> 312 Enzo Traverso 0231179421 X 3 3.94 2016 Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New Directions in Critical Theory, 17)
author: Enzo Traverso
name: X
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2024/04/29
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]]> In the Distance 34381330
At first, it was a contest, but in time the beasts understood that, with an embrace and the slightest push, they had to lie down on their side and stay until Håkan got up. He did this each time he thought he spied someone on the circular horizon. Had Håkan and his animals ever been spotted, the distant travelers would have taken the vanishing silhouettes for a mirage. But there were no such travelers—the moving shadows he saw almost every day in the distance were illusions. With the double intention of getting away from the trail and the cold, he had traveled south for days.

Hernán Díaz is the author of Borges, Between History and Eternity (Bloomsbury 2012), managing editor of RHM, and associate director of the Hispanic Institute at Columbia University. He lives in New York.]]> 256 Hernan Diaz 1566894883 X 0 to-read 4.12 2017 In the Distance
author: Hernan Diaz
name: X
average rating: 4.12
book published: 2017
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]]> <![CDATA[The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1)]]> 20518872 472 Liu Cixin X 2 4.08 2006 The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1)
author: Liu Cixin
name: X
average rating: 4.08
book published: 2006
rating: 2
read at: 2024/04/16
date added: 2024/04/16
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]]> <![CDATA[The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming]]> 41552709
This is only a preview of the changes to come. And they are coming fast. Without a revolution in how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth could become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.

In his travelogue of our near future, David Wallace-Wells brings into stark relief the climate troubles that await--food shortages, refugee emergencies, and other crises that will reshape the globe. But the world will be remade by warming in more profound ways as well, transforming our politics, our culture, our relationship to technology, and our sense of history. It will be all-encompassing, shaping and distorting nearly every aspect of human life as it is lived today.

Like An Inconvenient Truth and Silent Spring before it, The Uninhabitable Earth is both a meditation on the devastation we have brought upon ourselves and an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation.]]> 310 David Wallace-Wells 0525576703 X 0 to-read 4.00 2019 The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
author: David Wallace-Wells
name: X
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2019
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]]> <![CDATA[The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium (Volume 1)]]> 654788
ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý Three distinctive features of the book are the attempts to dissociate the present European Left from Marxism, the presentation of this Left as something that developed independently of the fall of the Soviet empire, and the emphasis on the specifically American roots of the European Left. Gottfried examines the multicultural orientation of this Left and concludes that it has little or nothing to do with Marxism as an economic-historical theory. It does, however, owe a great deal to American social engineering and pluralist ideology and to the spread of American thought and political culture to Europe.ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý

ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý American culture and American political reform have foreshadowed related developments in Europe by years or even whole decades. Contrary to the impression that the United States has taken antibourgeois attitudes from Europeans, the author argues exactly the opposite. Since the end of World War II, Europe has lived in the shadow of an American empire that has affected the Old World, including its self-described anti-Americans. Gottfried believes that this influence goes back to who reads or watches whom more than to economic and military disparities. It is the awareness of American cultural as well as material dominance that fuels the anti-Americanism that is particularly strong on the European Left. That part of the European spectrum has, however, reproduced in a more extreme form what began as an American leap into multiculturalism. Hostility toward America, however, can be transformed quickly into extreme affection for the United States, which occurred during the Clinton administration and during the international efforts to bring a multicultural society to the Balkans.

ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý Clearly written and well conceived, The Strange Death of Marxism will be of special interest to political scientists, historians of contemporary Europe, and those critical of multicultural trends, particularly among Euro-American conservatives.]]> 166 Paul Edward Gottfried 0826215971 X 0 to-read 4.18 2005 The Strange Death of Marxism: The European Left in the New Millennium (Volume 1)
author: Paul Edward Gottfried
name: X
average rating: 4.18
book published: 2005
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date added: 2024/03/17
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]]> <![CDATA[Forth and Back: Translation, Dirty Realism, and the Spanish Novel (1975�1995)]]> 16221907
Forth and Back illustrates that literary movements do not unilaterally spread; rather, those that flourish take root in fertile soil and are transformed in their travel by the desires, creative choices, and practical constraints of their differing producers and consumers. It is precisely in the crossing of these currents that plots thicken. The translation of dirty realism, its reception in Spain, and its cultural legacy as appropriated by the young Spanish writers, serve to interrogate a perceived U.S. hegemony. If Spanish realismo sucio has been said to be symptomatic of the globalization of literature, Forth and Back argues that the Spanish works in question posed a subtle reaffirmation of Spanish literature’s strong ties to realist fiction, a gesture of continuity in a decade that seemed to presence the undoing of much of Spain’s “Spanish-ness.� Ultimately, this project asks an ambitious pair of questions at the heart of human how do we “read� each other, quite literally, across geography and language? How do we construct others and ourselves vis-à-vis those readings?]]> 192 Cintia Santana 161148460X X 5 5.00 2012 Forth and Back: Translation, Dirty Realism, and the Spanish Novel (1975–1995)
author: Cintia Santana
name: X
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2012
rating: 5
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date added: 2024/03/14
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]]> <![CDATA[Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet]]> 178628338
The internet of today is a far cry from its early promise of a decentralized, democratic network of innovation, connection, and freedom. In the past decade, it has fallen almost entirely under the control of a very small group of companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook. In Read Write Own, tech visionary Chris Dixon argues that the dream of an open network for fostering creativity and entrepreneurship doesn’t have to die and can, in fact, be saved with blockchain networks. He separates this movement, which aims to provide a solid foundation for everything from social networks to artificial intelligence to virtual worlds, from cryptocurrency speculation —a distinction he calls “the computer vs. the casino.�
Ìý
With lucid and compelling prose� drawing from a 25-year career in the software industry—Dixon shows how the internet has undergone three distinct eras, bringing us to the critical moment we’re in today. The first was the “read� era, in which early networks democratized information. In the “read-write� era, corporate networks democratized publishing. We are now in the midst of the “read-write-own� era, sometimes called web3, in which blockchain networks are granting power and economic benefits to communities of users, not just corporations.
Ìý
Read Write Own is a must-read for anyone—internet users, business leaders, creators, entrepreneurs—who wants to understand where we’ve been and where we’re going. It provides a vision for a better internet and a playbook to navigate and build the future.]]> 320 Chris Dixon 0593731387 X 4 3.89 Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet
author: Chris Dixon
name: X
average rating: 3.89
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rating: 4
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]]> <![CDATA[The Small States Club: How Small Smart States Can Save the World]]> 199407039
Drawing on his deep experience as a scientist, businessman, diplomat and head of state, Sarkissian offers captivating portraits of small states, from Africa to Europe to Asia, that have overcome seemingly insuperable odds to establish themselves as oases of political stability, cultural tolerance, technological innovation, financial prudence and scientific research. Sarkissian returns to the uncertain beginnings of these small states to demystify their improbable rise. Along the way, he introduces us to a cast of tenacious leaders with a knack for converting crisis into opportunity.
Widely regarded as the most respected Armenian leader on the world stage, Sarkissian ends with a poignant homage to his motherland. Part memoir, part manifesto, it is a stirring insight into the world's oldest Christian country, which is at once an ancient civilization, a small state and a global nation.]]> 272 Armen Sarkissian 1787389405 X 3 3.52 The Small States Club: How Small Smart States Can Save the World
author: Armen Sarkissian
name: X
average rating: 3.52
book published:
rating: 3
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date added: 2024/01/25
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]]> CAPITAL EROTICO 22403283 In this bold and controversial book, Hakim explores the applications and significance of erotic capital, challenging the disapproval meted out to women and men who use sex appeal to get ahead in life. Social scientists have paid little serious attention to these modes of personal empowerment, despite overwhelming evidence of their importance. In "Erotic Capital," Hakim marshals a trove of research to show that rather than degrading those who employ it, erotic capital represents a powerful and potentially equalizing tool--one that we scorn only to our own detriment.

]]> 368 Catherine Hakim 6073123973 X 0 to-read 3.50 2011 CAPITAL EROTICO
author: Catherine Hakim
name: X
average rating: 3.50
book published: 2011
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/12/04
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]]> <![CDATA[Petrocalipsis: Crisis energética global y cómo (no) la vamos a solucionar]]> 55457446
Petrocalipsis es un análisis crudo y claro de las posibles alternativas a nuestro sistema energético actual. Frente al triunfalismo que muchas veces exhiben las noticias sobre la futura utilización de nuevas fuentes energéticas, el libro plantea con concisión por qué no funcionan ni funcionarán cada una de las falsas soluciones que se han venido discutiendo durante las últimas dos décadas. No hay soluciones sencillas ni atajos al dilema que plantea la transición energética, doblemente necesaria no solo por el impacto ambiental de los combustibles fósiles, sino también por un factor a menudo ignorado: su próxima escasez.]]> 216 Antonio Turiel X 0 to-read 4.24 2020 Petrocalipsis: Crisis energética global y cómo (no) la vamos a solucionar
author: Antonio Turiel
name: X
average rating: 4.24
book published: 2020
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/30
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]]> Pedro Páramo 38787
As one enters Juan Rulfo's legendary novel, one follows a dusty road to a town of death. Time shifts from one consciousness to another in a hypnotic flow of dreams, desires, and memories, a world of ghosts dominated by the figure of Pedro Páramo - lover, overlord, murderer.

Rulfo's extraordinary mix of sensory images, violent passions, and unfathomable mysteries has been a profound influence on a whole generation of Latin American writers, including Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Gabriel García Márquez. To read Pedro Páramo today is as overwhelming an experience as when it was first published in Mexico back in 1955.]]> 124 Juan Rulfo 0802133908 X 4 4.06 1955 Pedro Páramo
author: Juan Rulfo
name: X
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1955
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/20
date added: 2023/11/20
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]]> <![CDATA[Modernidad líquida (Spanish Edition)]]> 26284683 322 Zygmunt Bauman 6071629721 X 0 to-read 4.03 1999 Modernidad líquida (Spanish Edition)
author: Zygmunt Bauman
name: X
average rating: 4.03
book published: 1999
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/11/10
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]]> <![CDATA[La industria del Holocausto. Reflexiones sobre la explotación del sufrimiento judío (Cuestiones de antagonismo nº 72) (Spanish Edition)]]> 24740193 231 Norman G. Finkelstein 844603929X X 4 4.04 2000 La industria del Holocausto. Reflexiones sobre la explotación del sufrimiento judío (Cuestiones de antagonismo nº 72) (Spanish Edition)
author: Norman G. Finkelstein
name: X
average rating: 4.04
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2023/11/01
date added: 2023/10/31
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]]> Los asquerosos 41587567 221 Santiago Lorenzo 8417059997 X 1 3.82 2018 Los asquerosos
author: Santiago Lorenzo
name: X
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2018
rating: 1
read at: 2023/10/25
date added: 2023/10/24
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Una auténtica proeza ganar no sé cuántos premios con esta bazofia. No sé qué pasa últimamente con la literatura española (o con los que deciden quién gana).
]]> Solenoide 35850901 Solenoide se perciben los ecos de Borges, Pynchon, Swift y Kafka, resonancias que recorren las entradas del diario de un escritor cuya carrera ha naufragado y decidió refugiarse en un puesto de profesor de rumano en un instituto. Un día compra una casa con forma de barco, ideada por el inventor de un solenoide, que contiene una extraña máquina: un sillón de dentista equipado con un tablero de mandos. Es en esa etapa cuando entabla una relación más estrecha con una profesora, quien forma parte de los piquetistas, una secta mística que de noche recorre los cementerios y la morgue. Recorriendo las grises calles de una Bucarest alucinada, tan asfixiante clima terminará ocasionando al escritor una serie de alucinaciones que descorrerán el último velo a la realidad y le hará encarar la verdad.]]> 800 Mircea Cărtărescu 8416542996 X 0 to-read 4.37 2015 Solenoide
author: Mircea Cărtărescu
name: X
average rating: 4.37
book published: 2015
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/18
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]]> <![CDATA[El peso del tiempo: Relato del relevo generacional en España (Spanish Edition)]]> 199585203 Unrevelador e¾±²Ôé»å¾±³Ù´Çrecorridopornuestras»å¾±²Ôá³¾¾±³¦²¹²õ±è´Ç±ôí³Ù¾±³¦²¹²õ,desde laTransición hasta hoy, conelfocoen laidea degeneración yen lahuella queestaimprimeen sutiempo.

Desde hace una década vivimos la lenta despedida de la gran generación de la posguerra, la que protagonizó la Transición y que ha ocupado todos los ámbitos de poder (político, económico, cultural, mediático) durante los últimos cuarenta años.

Esta generación está siendo sustituida por los hijos y las hijas de la democracia. Es un cambio de personas, pero sobre todo de tiempo, del tiempo impreso en cada uno de nosotros. Es un cambio de valores, jerarquías y ritmos vitales. Es un cambio de experiencias vividas que transforma nuestra conducta y nuestra visión del mundo y de su funcionamiento. Y esto, a su vez, impacta de lleno en la política, en la relación de los individuos con ésta y en el papel que juega en la vida colectiva.

Estamos entrando en un mundo nuevo, que ha dejado atrás la seguridad y la lentitud para abrazar el cambio constante y la aceleración como valores dominantes de nuestra sociedad. Este es el tiempo del yo, un yo impaciente que circula por un escenario fragmentado y en medio de una gran confusión. Para aprender a manejarse en él, es preciso entenderlo, y para ello no hay mejor guía que este libro.]]> 283 Oriol Bartomeus 8419642266 X 0 to-read 3.69 El peso del tiempo: Relato del relevo generacional en España (Spanish Edition)
author: Oriol Bartomeus
name: X
average rating: 3.69
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rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/14
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]]> Un amor 55170929
La Escapa, con el monte de El Glauco siempre presente, terminará adquiriendo una personalidad propia, oprimente y confusa, que enfrentará a Nat no solo con sus vecinos, sino también consigo misma y sus propios fracasos. Llena de silencios y equívocos, de prejuicios y sobrentendidos, de tabús y transgresiones, Un amor aborda, de manera implícita pero constante, el asunto del lenguaje no como forma de comunicación sino de exclusión y diferencia.

Sara Mesa vuelve a confrontar al lector con los límites de su propia moral en una obra ambiciosa, arriesgada y sólida en la que, como si de una tragedia griega se tratara, las pulsiones más insospechadas de sus protagonistas van emergiendo poco a poco mientras, de forma paralela, la comunidad construye su chivo expiatorio.]]> 143 Sara Mesa 8433941712 X 1 3.57 2020 Un amor
author: Sara Mesa
name: X
average rating: 3.57
book published: 2020
rating: 1
read at: 2023/10/10
date added: 2023/10/09
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Una de esas raras ocasiones en que una obra se queda contigo tiempo después de acabarla, y no puedes dejar de pensar "hace tiempo que no leía un truño tan descomunal".
]]> Ordesa 52623709 It seemed to me the state of my soul was a blurry memory of something that had occurred in a place in northern Spain called Ordesa, a place full of mountains.

The #1 international bestselling phenomenon--a profound and riveting story of love, loss, and memory.

A man at a crossroads in the middle of his life considers the place where he's from, and where his parents have recently died. In the face of enormous personal tumult, he sits down to write. What follows is an audacious chronicle of his childhood and an unsparing account of his life's trials, failures, and triumphs that becomes a moving look at what family gives and takes away.

With the intimacy of a diarist, he reckons with the ghosts of his parents and the current specters of his divorce, his children, his career, and his addictions. In unswervingly honest prose, Vilas explores his identity after great loss--what is a person without a marriage or without parents? What is a person when faced with memories alone? Already an acclaimed poet and novelist in Spain, Vilas takes his work to a whole new level with this autobiographical novel; critics have called it "a work of art able to cauterize pain."

Elegiac and searching, Ordesa is a meditation on loss and a powerful exploration of a person who is both extraordinary and utterly ordinary--at once singular and representing us all--who transforms a time of crisis into something beautiful and redemptive.]]> 304 Manuel Vilas 0593084047 X 3 3.5 3.55 2018 Ordesa
author: Manuel Vilas
name: X
average rating: 3.55
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2023/10/06
date added: 2023/10/06
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3.5
]]> On Liberty 385228 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780140432077

Published in 1859, John Stuart Mill's On Liberty presented one of the most eloquent defenses of individual freedom in nineteenth-century social and political philosophy and is today perhaps the most widely-read liberal argument in support of the value of liberty. Mill's passionate advocacy of spontaneity, individuality, and diversity, along with his contempt for compulsory uniformity and the despotism of popular opinion, has attracted both admiration and condemnation.]]> 187 John Stuart Mill X 0 to-read 3.95 1859 On Liberty
author: John Stuart Mill
name: X
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1859
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/06
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]]> The Age of Reason 1031803 The Age of Reason represents the results of years of study and reflection by Thomas Paine on the place of religion in society.

Paine wrote: "Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst; every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in; but this attempts to stride beyond the grave, and seeks to pursue us into eternity."

The cool rationale of Paine's The Age of Reason influenced religious thinking throughout the world; and its pervasive influence continues to the present day.]]> 180 Thomas Paine 1595479104 X 0 to-read 4.11 1794 The Age of Reason
author: Thomas Paine
name: X
average rating: 4.11
book published: 1794
rating: 0
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]]> Areopagitica 421280 85 John Milton 0543959856 X 0 to-read 3.86 1644 Areopagitica
author: John Milton
name: X
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1644
rating: 0
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]]> Junky 23940 Naked Lunch, an unknown William S. Burroughs wrote Junky, his first novel. It is a candid eye-witness account of times and places that are now long gone, an unvarnished field report from the American post-war underground. Unafraid to portray himself in 1953 as a confirmed member of two socially-despised under classes (a narcotics addict and a homosexual), Burroughs was writing as a trained anthropologist when he unapologetically described a way of life - in New York, New Orleans, and Mexico City - that by the 1940's was already demonized by the artificial anti-drug hysteria of an opportunistic bureaucracy and a cynical, prostrate media. For this fiftieth-anniversary edition, eminent Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris has painstakingly recreated the author's original text, word by word, from archival typescripts and places the book's contents against a lively historical background in a comprehensive introduction. Here as well, for the first time, are Burroughs' own unpublished introduction and an entire omitted chapter, along with many "lost" passages, as well as auxiliary texts by Allen Ginsberg and others.]]> 166 William S. Burroughs 0142003166 X 0 to-read 3.87 1953 Junky
author: William S. Burroughs
name: X
average rating: 3.87
book published: 1953
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/01
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]]> Coin Locker Babies 14289
Abandoned at birth in adjacent train station lockers, two troubled boys spend their youth in an orphanage and with foster parents on a semi-deserted island before finally setting off for the city to find and destroy the women who first rejected them. Both are drawn to an area of freaks and hustlers called Toxitown. One becomes a bisexual rock singer, star of this exotic demimonde, while the other, a pole vaulter, seeks his revenge in the company of his girlfriend, Anemone, a model who has converted her condominium into a tropical swamp for her pet crocodile.

Together and apart, their journey from a hot metal box to a stunning, savage climax is a brutal funhouse ride through the eerie landscape of late-twentieth-century Japan.

]]> 393 Ryū Murakami 4770028962 X 0 to-read 3.82 1980 Coin Locker Babies
author: Ryū Murakami
name: X
average rating: 3.82
book published: 1980
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/01
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]]> Vurt (Vurt, #1) 17401136
Take a trip in a stranger’s head. Travel rain-shot streets with a gang of hip malcontents, hooked on the most powerful drug you can imagine. Yet Vurt feathers are not for the weak. As the mysterious Game Cat says, ‘Be careful, be very careful�. But Scribble isn’t listening. He has to find his lost love. His journey is a mission to find Curious Yellow, the ultimate, perhaps even mythical Vurt feather. As the most powerful narcotic of all, Scribble must be prepared to leave his current reality behind.

This edition also includes three additional short stories by Noon.]]> 368 Jeff Noon 0230768806 X 0 to-read 4.09 1993 Vurt (Vurt, #1)
author: Jeff Noon
name: X
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1993
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/01
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]]> The City & the City 4703581
Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own. This is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a shift in perception, a seeing of the unseen. His destination is Beszel’s equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the rich and vibrant city of Ul Qoma. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, and struggling with his own transition, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of rabid nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them and those they care about more than their lives.

What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities.

Casting shades of Kafka and Philip K. Dick, Raymond Chandler and 1984, The City & the City is a murder mystery taken to dazzling metaphysical and artistic heights.]]> 312 China Miéville 0345497511 X 0 to-read 3.90 2009 The City & the City
author: China Miéville
name: X
average rating: 3.90
book published: 2009
rating: 0
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]]> Delirio 7956421 BOOKS IN SPANISH 342 Laura Restrepo 9707311282 X 0 to-read 3.51 2004 Delirio
author: Laura Restrepo
name: X
average rating: 3.51
book published: 2004
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/01
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]]> El hambre 23158491
Para entenderlo, para contarlo, Martín Caparrós viajó por la India, Bangladesh, Níger, Kenia, Sudán, Madagascar, Argentina, Estados Unidos, España. Allí encontró a quienes, por distintas razones -sequías, pobreza extrema, guerras, marginación-, sufren hambre. El Hambre está hecho de sus historias, y las historias de quienes trabajan en condiciones muy precarias para paliarla, y las de quienes especulan con los alimentos y hambrean a tanta gente. El Hambre intenta, sobre todo, descubrir los mecanismos que hacen que casi mil millones de personas no coman lo que necesitan. ¿Un producto ineludible del orden mundial? ¿El fruto de la pereza y el retraso? ¿Negocio de unos pocos? ¿Un problema en vías de solución? ¿El fracaso de una civilización?

El Hambre es un libro incómodo y apasionado, una crónica que piensa y un ensayo que cuenta y un panfleto que denuncia el apremio de una vergüenza sostenida y busca formas de terminar con ella]]> 616 Martín Caparrós X 0 to-read 4.48 2014 El hambre
author: Martín Caparrós
name: X
average rating: 4.48
book published: 2014
rating: 0
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]]> Crematorio 3413970 424 Rafael Chirbes 8433971565 X 0 to-read 3.83 2007 Crematorio
author: Rafael Chirbes
name: X
average rating: 3.83
book published: 2007
rating: 0
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date added: 2023/10/01
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]]>