Documents Concerning Rubashov the Gambler PDF Download

Author: Carl-Johan Vallgren
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448113741
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
St Petersburg, 1899. Obsessive gambler Rubashov has played every game in town. Now on New Year's Eve, he finds himself on the brink of ruin, and decides to make a bid for the ultimate rush, the biggest gamble ever, to challenge the Devil to a game of poker. Rubashov loses. His punishment is not to go straight to Hell (Hell is full and has been for years), instead he is condemned to immortality. And so begins a monumental trip through Europe, as Rubashov encounters some of the twentieth century's most notorious characters.

Author: Carl-Johan Vallgren
Publisher: Arrow
ISBN: 9780099498247
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
"St Petersburg, 1899. Obsessive gambler Rubashov has played every game in town. Now on New Year's Eve, he finds himself on the brink of ruin, and decides to make a bid for the ultimate rush, the biggest gamble ever, to challenge the Devil to a poker game. The Devil accepts the invitation and unsurprisingly Rubashov loses. However, the price is not straight to hell as he expected (hell is full and has been for years), the punishment is immortality. Rubashov has great difficulty coming to terms with his ever-lasting life; he now sees no end to what is already a miserable existence. Unsuccessful suicide attempts lead him to take up Russian roulette, but before long the money is piling up and he has amassed a small fortune, enabling him to embark on a very different way of life... In this bizarre trip through Europe, Rubashov encounters some of the twentieth century's most notorious characters. Vallgren s bizarre picaresque tale is destined to stand alongside The Master and Margarita as a genre classic, and for fans of The Horrific Suffering of the Mind-reading Monster Hercules Barefoot..., Rubashov s adventures will be sheer delight."

Author: Karl Siegfried Guthke
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1571139745
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
A groundbreaking study examining major literary treatments of the idea of earthly immortality, throwing into relief fascinating instances of human self-awareness over the past three hundred years.

Author: Europa
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781857435146
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 678

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A comprehensive guide to the people and organizations involved in the world of popular music.

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Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bibliography
Languages : en
Pages : 1952

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Category : English imprints
Languages : en
Pages : 84

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Author: Carl-Johan Vallgren
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1605989134
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
Nella and her brother Robert live a difficult life with their mother and father in a small town on the west coast of Sweden. Robert is bullied at school, and Nella has to resort to debt and petty crime to pay off his tormentors. When she turns to her friend Tommy for help, her suspicions are aroused by the mysterious comings and goings of his brothers at their dilapidated boat house. But when she uncovers the reason behind their enigmatic behavior, her life is opened to the realities of a mindboggling secret. The Merman is a dark and haunting novel about sibling love and betrayal—and about what happens when the mundane collides with the strange and beautiful.

Author: Michael Scammell
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1588369013
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 737

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Book Description
From award-winning author Michael Scammell comes a monumental achievement: the first authorized biography of Arthur Koestler, one of the most influential and controversial intellectuals of the twentieth century. Over a decade in the making, and based on new research and full access to its subject’s papers, Koestler is the definitive account of this fascinating and polarizing figure. Though best known as the creator of the classic anti-Communist novel Darkness at Noon, Koestler is here revealed as much more–a man whose personal life was as astonishing as his literary accomplishments. Koestler portrays the anguished youth of a boy raised in Budapest by a possessive and mercurial mother and an erratic father, marked for life by a forced operation performed without anesthesia when he was five, growing up feeling unloved and unprotected. Here is the young man whose experience of anti-Semitism and devotion to Zionism provoked him to move to Palestine; the foreign correspondent who risked his life from the North Pole to Franco’s Spain, where he was imprisoned and sentenced to death; the committed Communist for whom the brutal truth of Stalin’s show trials inspired the superb and angry novel that became an instant classic in 1940. Scammell also provides new details of Koestler’s amazing World War II adventures, including his escape from occupied France by joining the Foreign Legion and his bluffing his way illegally to England, where his controversial novel Arrival and Departure, published in 1943, was the first to portray Hitler’s Final Solution. Without sentimentality, Scammell explores Koestler’s turbulent private life: his drug use, his manic depression, the frenetic womanizing that doomed his three marriages and led to an accusation of rape that posthumously tainted his reputation, and his startling suicide while fatally ill in 1983–an act shared by his healthy third wife, Cynthia–rendered unforgettably as part of his dark and disturbing legacy. Featuring cameos of famous friends and colleagues including Langston Hughes, George Orwell, and Albert Camus, Koestler gives a full account of the author’s voluminous writings, making the case that the autobiographies and essays are fit to stand beside Darkness at Noon as works of lasting literary value. Koestler adds up to an indelible portrait of this brilliant, unpredictable, and talented writer, once memorably described as “one third blackguard, one third lunatic, and one third genius.”

Author: Carl-Johan Vallgren
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060842148
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Horrific Sufferings of the Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot is the picaresque fable of the love that grows between the mute, telepathic human monstrosity Hercules and the beautiful Henriette—a love that will entwine their fates forever. Author Carl-Johan Vallgren creates an unforgettable cast of grotesqueries in a magical and atmospheric tour of nineteenth-century Europe—from the bordello, where Hercules is born, to the squalor of the asylum, where he finds only pain, to the sinister grandeur of the Jesuit monasteries in which he finds both shelter and peril, to the phantasmagoria of the freak show with which he travels. A moving, uplifting, at times dark and macabre tale of social oppression, official corruption, religious persecution, and unwavering devotion, it is a story that enchants and surprises . . . and leaves one wide-eyed with wonder, like a small child at his first carnival.

Author: Arthur Koestler
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141394544
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Book Description
Arthur Koestler's extraordinary history of humanity's changing vision of the universe In this masterly synthesis, Arthur Koestler cuts through the sterile distinction between 'sciences' and 'humanities' to bring to life the whole history of cosmology from the Babylonians to Newton. He shows how the tragic split between science and religion arose and how, in particular, the modern world-view replaced the medieval world-view in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. He also provides vivid and judicious pen-portraits of a string of great scientists and makes clear the role that political bias and unconscious prejudice played in their creativity.