Hotel Iris

Author : Yoko Ogawa
Publisher : Picador
ISBN 13 : 9781429922685
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Hotel Iris written by Yoko Ogawa and published by Picador. This book was released on 2010-03-30 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tale of twisted love from Yoko Ogawa—author of The Diving Pool and The Housekeeper and the Professor. In a crumbling seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother tends to the off-season customers. When one night they are forced to expel a middle-aged man and a prostitute from their room, Mari finds herself drawn to the man's voice, in what will become the first gesture of a single long seduction. In spite of her provincial surroundings, and her cool but controlling mother, Mari is a sophisticated observer of human desire, and she sees in this man something she has long been looking for. The man is a proud if threadbare translator living on an island off the coast. A widower, there are whispers around town that he may have murdered his wife. Mari begins to visit him on his island, and he soon initiates her into a dark realm of both pain and pleasure, a place in which she finds herself more at ease even than the translator. As Mari's mother begins to close in on the affair, Mari's sense of what is suitable and what is desirable are recklessly engaged. Hotel Iris is a stirring novel about the sometimes violent ways in which we express intimacy and about the untranslatable essence of love.

Author : Yoko Ogawa
Publisher : Picador
ISBN 13 : 1250016177
Total Pages : 174 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Revenge written by Yoko Ogawa and published by Picador. This book was released on 2013-01-29 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It's not just Murakami but also the shadow of Borges that hovers over this mesmerizing book... [and] one may detect a slight bow to the American macabre of E.A. Poe. Ogawa stands on the shoulders of giants, as another saying goes. But this collection may linger in your mind -- it does in mine -- as a delicious, perplexing, absorbing and somehow singular experience." -- Alan Cheuse, NPR Sinister forces collide---and unite a host of desperate characters---in this eerie cycle of interwoven tales from Yoko Ogawa, the critically acclaimed author of The Housekeeper and the Professor. An aspiring writer moves into a new apartment and discovers that her landlady has murdered her husband. Elsewhere, an accomplished surgeon is approached by a cabaret singer, whose beautiful appearance belies the grotesque condition of her heart. And while the surgeon's jealous lover vows to kill him, a violent envy also stirs in the soul of a lonely craftsman. Desire meets with impulse and erupts, attracting the attention of the surgeon's neighbor---who is drawn to a decaying residence that is now home to instruments of human torture. Murderers and mourners, mothers and children, lovers and innocent bystanders---their fates converge in an ominous and darkly beautiful web. Yoko Ogawa's Revenge is a master class in the macabre that will haunt you to the last page. An NPR Best Book of 2013

Author : Yoko Ogawa
Publisher : Picador
ISBN 13 : 1429924950
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.55/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Diving Pool written by Yoko Ogawa and published by Picador. This book was released on 2008-01-22 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major English translation of one of contemporary Japan's bestselling and most celebrated authors From Akutagawa Award-winning author Yoko Ogawa comes a haunting trio of novellas about love, fertility, obsession, and how even the most innocent gestures may contain a hairline crack of cruel intent. A lonely teenage girl falls in love with her foster brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool--a peculiar infatuation that sends unexpected ripples through her life. A young woman records the daily moods of her pregnant sister in a diary, taking meticulous note of a pregnancy that may or may not be a hallucination--but whose hallucination is it, hers or her sister's? A woman nostalgically visits her old college dormitory on the outskirts of Tokyo, a boarding house run by a mysterious triple amputee with one leg. Hauntingly spare, beautiful, and twisted, The Diving Pool is a disquieting and at times darkly humorous collection of novellas about normal people who suddenly discover their own dark possibilities.

Author : Iris Johansen
Publisher : Bantam
ISBN 13 : 0553591673
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.75/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Golden Valkyrie written by Iris Johansen and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2008-07-29 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From #1 New York Times bestselling author Iris Johansen comes a classic tale of opposites attracting—and finding love in the most unexpected places. When P.I. Honey Winston is hired to steal incriminating letters from visiting dignitary Prince Rubinoff, she’s prepared for a dangerous mission that could end her career. But when she blows her cover, she finds that the amused prince is everything the media have made him out to be: part Adonis, part playboy—and irresistibly charismatic. The problem is, the feeling is mutual. Intrigued, the prince is determined to keep his gorgeous young trespasser by his side as long as possible. For he’s never met anyone quite as daring, or breathtaking, as Honey. With the tables turned, Prince Rubinoff has Honey appointed his personal bodyguard. The official reason is an assassination plot. The truth is far more dangerous….

Author : Iris Owens
Publisher : New York Review of Books
ISBN 13 : 1590174100
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.04/5 ( download)

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Download or read book After Claude written by Iris Owens and published by New York Review of Books. This book was released on 2010-11-09 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Harriet is leaving her boyfriend Claude, “the French rat.” That at least is how Harriet sees things, even if it’s Claude who has just asked Harriet to leave his Greenwich Village apartment. Well, one way or another she has no intention of leaving. To the contrary, she will stay and exact revenge—or would have if Claude had not had her unceremoniously evicted. Still, though moved out, Harriet is not about to move on. Not in any way. Girlfriends circle around to patronize and advise, but Harriet only takes offense, and it’s easy to understand why. Because mad and maddening as she may be, Harriet sees past the polite platitudes that everyone else is content to spout and live by. She is an unblinkered, unbuttoned, unrelenting, and above all bitingly funny prophetess of all that is wrong with women’s lives and hearts—until, in a surprise twist, she finds a savior in a dark room at the Chelsea Hotel.

Author : Daniel Simone
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1681774704
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Pierre Hotel Affair: How Eight Gentleman Thieves Orchestrated the Largest Jewel Heist in History written by Daniel Simone and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The startling and sensational true story of the most famous unsolved heist in American history: the theft of $28 million in jewels from the Pierre Hotel. New York City, 1972. Bobby Comfort and Sammy “the Arab” Nalo were highly skilled jewel thieves who specialized in robbing luxury Manhattan hotels. (They once robbed Sophia Loren’s suite, relieving the Italian actress of over $1 million in gems.) With the blessing of the Lucchese crime family, their next plot targeted the posh Pierre Hotel—host to kings and queens, presidents and aldermen, and the wealthiest of the wealthy. Attired in tuxedoes and driven in a limousine, this band of thieves arrived at the Pierre and with perfect timing, they seized the security guards and, in systematically choreographed moves, they swiftly took the night staff—and several unfortunate guests who happened to be roaming around the lobby—as hostages. The deposit boxes inside the vault chamber are plundered and, after the intruders have held the Pierre under siege for almost two hours, the gentlemanly thieves depart in their limousine with a haul of $28 million. But then matters begin to deteriorate. Comfort, Nalo, and their partners begin to double and triple cross one another—two absconding to Europe with the bulk of the booty while three are murdered by their former associates. The authorities immediately suspect Comfort and Nalo of masterminding the Pierre ambush and arrest them, but these veteran criminals keep their mouths shut. To ensure that they are not prosecuted, the Lucchese Family funnels a $500,000 bribe to the presiding judge to quash the charges—and to this day The Pierre Hotel caper remains unsolved. A suspenseful narrative of Mafia intrigue, police corruption, and personal betrayal—which concludes with a poignant love affair—this is the true story of the most famous hotel robbery in American history.

Author : John Bayley
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
ISBN 13 : 1466854243
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Elegy for Iris written by John Bayley and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I was living in a fairy story--the kind with sinister overtones and not always a happy ending--in which a young man loves a beautiful maiden who returns his love but is always disappearing into some unknown and mysterious world, about which she will reveal nothing." So John Bayley describes his life with his wife, Iris Murdoch, one of the greatest contemporary writers in the English-speaking world, revered for her works of philosophy and beloved for her incandescent novels. In Elegy for Iris, Bayley attempts to uncover the real Iris, whose mysterious world took on darker shades as she descended into Alzheimer's disease. Elegy for Iris is a luminous memoir about the beauty of youth and aging, and a celebration of a brilliant life and an undying love.

Author : RaeAnne Thayne
Publisher : Harlequin
ISBN 13 : 0369749707
Total Pages : 349 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Wild Iris Ridge written by RaeAnne Thayne and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2024-04-22 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucy Drake and Brendan Caine have only one thing in common… And it's likely to tear them apart. Because it was Brendan's late wife, Jessie—and Lucy's best friend—who'd brought them together in the first place. And since Jessie's passing, Brendan's been distracted by his two little ones…and the memory of an explosive kiss with Lucy years before his marriage. Still, he'll steer clear of her. She's always been trouble with a capital T. Lucy couldn't wait to shed her small-town roots for the big city. But now that she's back in Hope's Crossing to take care of the Queen Anne home her late aunt has left her, she figures seeing Brendan Caine again is no big deal. After all, she'd managed to resist the handsome fire chief once before, but clearly the embers of their attraction are still smoldering….

Author : Mayako Murai
Publisher : Wayne State University Press
ISBN 13 : 0814339506
Total Pages : 192 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book From Dog Bridegroom to Wolf Girl written by Mayako Murai and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2015-11-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As in the United States, fairy-tale characters, motifs, and patterns (many from the Western canon) have pervaded recent Japanese culture. Like their Western counterparts, these contemporary adaptations tend to have a more female-oriented perspective than traditional tales and feature female characters with independent spirits.In From Dog Bridegroom to Wolf Girl: Contemporary Japanese Fairy-Tale Adaptations in Conversation with the West, Mayako Murai examines the uses of fairy tales in the works of Japanese women writers and artists since the 1990s in the light of Euro-American feminist fairy-tale re-creation and scholarship. After giving a sketch of the history of the reception of European fairy tales in Japan since the late nineteenth century, Murai outlines the development of fairy-tale retellings and criticism in Japan since the 1970s. Chapters that follow examine the uses of fairy-tale intertexts in the works of four contemporary writers and artists that resist and disrupt the dominant fairy-tale discourses in both Japan and the West. Murai considers Tawada Yoko’s reworking of the animal bride and bridegroom tale, Ogawa Yoko’s feminist treatment of the Bluebeard story, Yanagi Miwa’s visual restaging of familiar fairy-tale scenes, and Konoike Tomoko’s visual representations of the motif of the girl’s encounter with the wolf in the woods in different media and contexts. Forty illustrations round out Murai’s criticism, showing how fairy tales have helped artists reconfigure oppositions between male and female, human and animal, and culture and nature. From Dog Bridegroom to Wolf Girl invites readers to trace the threads of the fairy-tale web with eyes that are both transcultural and culturally sensitive in order to unravel the intricate ways in which different traditions intersect and clash in today’s globalising world. Fairy-tale scholars and readers interested in issues of literary and artistic adaptation will enjoy this volume.

Author : Iris Johansen
Publisher : Loveswept
ISBN 13 : 0345546180
Total Pages : 185 pages
Book Rating : 4.80/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Star-Spangled Bride written by Iris Johansen and published by Loveswept. This book was released on 2013-11-11 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this exhilarating novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Iris Johansen, a woman accustomed to living dangerously must rescue the man she’s never forgotten. When cable news mogul Gabe Faulkner is kidnapped by an overseas terrorist group, the last thing he expects is to be rescued by a beautiful woman. Photojournalist Ronnie Dalton claims she risked her neck only to win an Emmy, but Gabe senses there’s more to the story. And though he’s known her for only a few hours, he can’t deny the sizzling chemistry between them—or his overwhelming desire to protect her. Ronnie doesn’t expect Gabe to remember her. She was just a teenager when he saved her life. Now it is Ronnie’s chance to return the favor. Once she accomplishes her mission, she’ll walk away. But when Gabe throws Ronnie onto his getaway helicopter, he inadvertently puts her back in harm’s way. For as soon as they touch down in the United States, she’s going to be deported, or worse . . . unless she marries an American citizen. Gabe is up for the ruse. But he also seems to have other ideas . . . ideas that include thoroughly seducing her. Includes a special message from the editor, as well as excerpts from these Loveswept titles: Mistletoe and Magic, Claimed, and After the Kiss.