The Anna Karenina Fix PDF Download

Author: Viv Groskop
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1683353447
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

View

Book Description
“In this hilarious, candid, and thought-provoking memoir, [Groskop] explains how she used lessons from Russian classics to understand herself better.” —Gretchen Rubin, #1 New York Times–bestselling author As Viv Groskop knows from personal experience, everything that has ever happened to a person has already happened in the Russian classics: from not being sure what to do with your life (Anna Karenina), to being hopelessly in love with someone who doesn’t love you back (Turgenev’s A Month in the Country), or being socially anxious about your appearance (all of Chekhov’s work). In The Anna Karenina Fix, a sort of literary self-help memoir, Groskop mines these and other works, as well as the lives of their celebrated creators, and her own experiences as a student of Russian, to answer the question “How should you live your life?” This is a charming and fiercely intelligent book, a love letter to Russian literature and an exploration of the answers these writers found to life’s questions. “[Groskop is] a delight, a reader’s reader whose professional and personal experiences have allowed her to write the kind of book that not only is complete unto itself, but makes you want to head to the library and revisit or discover the great works she loves.” —The Washington Post “Learn how to hack life nineteenth-century Russian style! You’ll totally be like Anna Karenina without getting (spoiler alert) run over by a train!” —Gary Shteyngart, New York Times-bestselling author “For anyone intimidated by Russia’s daunting literary heritage, this humorous yet thoughtful introduction will serve as the perfect entrée.” —Publishers Weekly

Author: Viv Groskop
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1683357973
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 251

View

Book Description
“Groskop skillfully juggles memoir, biography, philosophy, and literary criticism to create a delightful tour through some of French literature’s greats.” —Madeline Miller, New York Times–bestselling author Like many people the world over, Viv Groskop wishes she was a little more French. A writer, comedian, and journalist, Groskop studied the language obsessively starting at age 11, and spent every vacation in France, desperate to escape her Englishness and to have some French chic rub off on her. In Au Revoir, Tristesse, Groskop mixes literary history and memoir to explore how the classics of French literature can infuse our lives with joie de vivre and teach us how to say goodbye to sadness. From the frothy hedonism of Colette and the wit of Cyrano de Bergerac to the intoxicating universe of Marguerite Duras and the heady passions of Les Liaisons dangereuses, this is a love letter to great French writers. With chapters on Marcel Proust, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Albert Camus, and of course Françoise Sagan, this is a delectable read for book lovers everywhere. “Ms. Groskop is a skilled raconteuse who brings people—and the page—to life. She writes with a self-deprecating appreciation of the Frenchman or -woman manqué(e) that lurks in us all. You don’t have to be a savant to enjoy this book . . . Au Revoir, Tristesse will make a witty, seductive companion.” —The Wall Street Journal “Groskop’s combination of her own memories, what the novels meant to her at different stages in her life, her description of the authors, along with her description of the novels, will have readers eagerly turning the book’s pages.” —Forbes

Author: Carmen Boullosa
Publisher: Coffee House Press
ISBN: 1566895855
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 145

View

Book Description
Russia, 1905. Behind the gates of the Karenin Palace, Sergei, son of Anna Karenina, meets Tolstoy in his dreams and finds reminders of his mother everywhere: the almost-living portrait that the Tsar intends to acquire and the opium-infused manuscripts she wrote just before her death, one of which opens a trapdoor to a wild feminist fairytale. Across the city, Clementine, an anarchist seamstress, and Father Gapón, the charismatic leader of the proletariat, tip the country ever closer to revolution. Boullosa lifts the voices of coachmen, sailors, maids, and seamstresses in this playful, polyphonic, and subversive revision of the Russian revolution, told through the lens of Tolstoy’s most beloved work.

Author: Leo Tolstoy
Publisher: Sheba Blake Publishing Corp.
ISBN: 1222379945
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 2395

View

Book Description
Acclaimed by many as the world's greatest novel, Anna Karenina provides a vast panorama of contemporary life in Russia and of humanity in general. In it Tolstoy uses his intense imaginative insight to create some of the most memorable characters in all of literature. Anna is a sophisticated woman who abandons her empty existence as the wife of Karenin and turns to Count Vronsky to fulfil her passionate nature - with tragic consequences. Levin is a reflection of Tolstoy himself, often expressing the author's own views and convictions. Throughout, Tolstoy points no moral, merely inviting us not to judge but to watch. As Rosemary Edmonds comments, 'He leaves the shifting patterns of the kaleidoscope to bring home the meaning of the brooding words following the title, 'Vengeance is mine, and I will repay. As part of our mission to publish great works of literary fiction and nonfiction, Sheba Blake Publishing Corp. is extremely dedicated to bringing to the forefront the amazing works of long dead and truly talented authors.

Author: Mikhail Bulgakov
Publisher: Rosetta Books
ISBN: 0795348398
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 448

View

Book Description
Satan, Judas, a Soviet writer, and a talking black cat named Behemoth populate this satire, “a classic of twentieth-century fiction” (The New York Times). In 1930s Moscow, Satan decides to pay the good people of the Soviet Union a visit. In old Jerusalem, the fateful meeting of Pilate and Yeshua and the murder of Judas in the garden of Gethsemane unfold. At the intersection of fantasy and realism, satire and unflinching emotional truths, Mikhail Bulgakov’s classic The Master and Margarita eloquently lampoons every aspect of Soviet life under Stalin’s regime, from politics to art to religion, while interrogating the complexities between good and evil, innocence and guilt, and freedom and oppression. Spanning from Moscow to Biblical Jerusalem, a vibrant cast of characters—a “magician” who is actually the devil in disguise, a giant cat, a witch, a fanged assassin—sow mayhem and madness wherever they go, mocking artists, intellectuals, and politicians alike. In and out of the fray weaves a man known only as the Master, a writer demoralized by government censorship, and his mysterious lover, Margarita. Burned in 1928 by the author and restarted in 1930, The Master and Margarita was Bulgakov’s last completed creative work before his death. It remained unpublished until 1966—and went on to become one of the most well-regarded works of Russian literature of the twentieth century, adapted or referenced in film, television, radio, comic strips, theater productions, music, and opera.

Author: Donna Tussing Orwin
Publisher: Simply Charly
ISBN: 1943657319
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 124

View

Book Description
“This is a little gem, the best introduction to Tolstoy I have ever encountered, and it is more than that. The most accomplished scholar will find important new insights, the sort that one immediately recognizes as both true and profound. Orwin brings Tolstoy to life as a person and as a writer, and she also shows beautifully how the two are linked. The discussions of Tolstoy's views on psychology and the nature of art are especially illuminating.” —Gary Saul Morson, Lawrence B. Dumas Professor of the Arts and Humanities and Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Northwestern University Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was born at Yasnaya Polyana, his ancestral estate located about 120 miles from Moscow. While he would live and travel in other places over the years, he always considered this family residence in the Russian heartland as his home. His lifelong quest for truth and meaning began while he was a university student. Subsequent experiences as an artillery officer in the Caucasian and Crimean Wars, and time spent in St. Petersburg and Europe, broadened his perspective and profoundly influenced him. In Simply Tolstoy, Professor Donna Tussing Orwin traces the author’s profound journey of discovery and explains how he mined his tumultuous inner life to create his great works, including War and Peace, Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilych. She shows how these books, both fiction and nonfiction, are not autobiographical in the conventional sense, but function as snapshots of Tolstoy’s state of mind at specific points in his life. The story she tells is, inevitably, intertwined with the story of Russia, a country also in constant search of its identity. Mixing biography, literary analysis, and history, Simply Tolstoy is a satisfying read for those already familiar with the author’s work, as well as an accessible and thoroughly engaging introduction to a literary giant who was also a tireless and uncompromising seeker of truth.

Author: Vivek Wadhwa
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN: 1523095857
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 257

View

Book Description
“Technology is a great servant but a terrible master. This is the most important book ever written about one of the most significant aspects of our lives—the consequences of our addiction to online technology and how we can liberate ourselves and our children from it.” —Dean Ornish, M.D. Founder & President, Preventive Medicine Research Institute, Clinical Professor of Medicine, UCSF, Author, The Spectrum Technology: your master, or your friend? Do you feel ruled by your smartphone and enslaved by your e-mail or social-network activities? Digital technology is making us miserable, say bestselling authors and former tech executives Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever. We've become a tribe of tech addicts—and it's not entirely our fault. Taking advantage of vulnerabilities in human brain function, tech companies entice us to overdose on technology interaction. This damages our lives, work, families, and friendships. Swipe-driven dating apps train us to evaluate people like products, diminishing our relationships. At work, we e-mail on average 77 times a day, ruining our concentration. At home, light from our screens is contributing to epidemic sleep deprivation. But we can reclaim our lives without dismissing technology. The authors explain how to avoid getting hooked on tech and how to define and control the roles that tech is playing and could play in our lives. And they provide a guide to technological and personal tools for regaining control. This readable book turns personal observation into a handy action guide to adapting to our new reality of omnipresent technology.

Author: Jill Alexander Essbaum
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0812997549
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 365

View

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, THE HUFFINGTON POST, AND SHELF AWARENESS • “In Hausfrau, Anna Karenina goes Fifty Shades with a side of Madame Bovary.”—Time “A debut novel about Anna, a bored housewife who, like her Tolstoyan namesake, throws herself into a psychosexual journey of self-discovery and tragedy.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Sexy and insightful, this gorgeously written novel opens a window into one woman’s desperate soul.”—People Anna was a good wife, mostly. For readers of The Girl on the Train and The Woman Upstairs comes a striking debut novel of marriage, fidelity, sex, and morality, featuring a fascinating heroine who struggles to live a life with meaning. Anna Benz, an American in her late thirties, lives with her Swiss husband, Bruno—a banker—and their three young children in a postcard-perfect suburb of Zürich. Though she leads a comfortable, well-appointed life, Anna is falling apart inside. Adrift and increasingly unable to connect with the emotionally unavailable Bruno or even with her own thoughts and feelings, Anna tries to rouse herself with new experiences: German language classes, Jungian analysis, and a series of sexual affairs she enters with an ease that surprises even her. But Anna can’t easily extract herself from these affairs. When she wants to end them, she finds it’s difficult. Tensions escalate, and her lies start to spin out of control. Having crossed a moral threshold, Anna will discover where a woman goes when there is no going back. Intimate, intense, and written with the precision of a Swiss Army knife, Jill Alexander Essbaum’s debut novel is an unforgettable story of marriage, fidelity, sex, morality, and most especially self. Navigating the lines between lust and love, guilt and shame, excuses and reasons, Anna Benz is an electrifying heroine whose passions and choices readers will debate with recognition and fury. Her story reveals, with honesty and great beauty, how we create ourselves and how we lose ourselves and the sometimes disastrous choices we make to find ourselves. Praise for Hausfrau “Elegant . . . There is much to admire in Essbaum’s intricately constructed, meticulously composed novel, including its virtuosic intercutting of past and present.”—Chicago Tribune “For a first novelist, Essbaum is extraordinary because she is a poet. Her language is meticulous and resonant and daring.”—NPR’s Weekend Edition “We’re in literary territory as familiar as Anna’s name, but Essbaum makes it fresh with sharp prose and psychological insight.”—San Francisco Chronicle “This marvelously quiet book is psychologically complex and deeply intimate. . . . One of the smartest novels in recent memory.”—The Dallas Morning News “Essbaum’s poignant, shocking debut novel rivets.”—Us Weekly “A powerful, lyrical novel . . . Hausfrau boasts taut pacing and melodrama, but also a fully realized heroine as love-hateable as Emma Bovary.”—The Huffington Post “Imagine Tom Perrotta’s American nowheresvilles swapped out for a tidy Zürich suburb, sprinkled liberally with sharp riffs on Swiss-German grammar and European hypocrisy.”—New York

Author: Sara Wheeler
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 1524748021
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 304

View

Book Description
With the writers of the golden age as her guides—Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gogol, and Turgenev, among others—Sara Wheeler searches for a Russia not in the news, traveling from rinsed northwestern beet fields and the Far Eastern Arctic tundra to the cauldron of nationalities, religions, and languages in the Caucasus. Bypassing major cities as much as possible, she goes instead to the places associated with the country’s literary masters. Wheeler weaves these writers’ lives and works around their historical homes, giving us rich portraits of the many diverse Russias from which these writers spoke. Illustrated with both historical images and contemporary snapshots of the people and places that shaped her journey, Mud and Stars gives us timely, witty, and deeply personal insights into Russia, then and now. One of Smithsonian’s Ten Best Travel Books of the Year

Author: Alex Christofi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472964705
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 257

View

Book Description
'A daring and mesmerizing twist on the art of biography' – Douglas Smith, author of Rasputin: The Biography 'Anyone who loves [Dostoevsky's] novels will be fascinated by this book' – Sue Prideaux, author of I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche Dostoevsky's life was marked by brilliance and brutality. Sentenced to death as a young revolutionary, he survived mock execution and Siberian exile to live through a time of seismic change in Russia, eventually being accepted into the Tsar's inner circle. He had three great love affairs, each overshadowed by debilitating epilepsy and addiction to gambling. Somehow, amidst all this, he found time to write short stories, journalism and novels such as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, works now recognised as among the finest ever written. In Dostoevsky in Love Alex Christofi weaves carefully chosen excerpts of the author's work with the historical context to form an illuminating and often surprising whole. The result is a novelistic life that immerses the reader in a grand vista of Dostoevsky's world: from the Siberian prison camp to the gambling halls of Europe; from the dank prison cells of the Tsar's fortress to the refined salons of St Petersburg. Along the way, Christofi relates the stories of the three women whose lives were so deeply intertwined with Dostoevsky's: the consumptive widow Maria; the impetuous Polina who had visions of assassinating the Tsar; and the faithful stenographer Anna, who did so much to secure his literary legacy. Reading between the lines of his fiction, Christofi reconstructs the memoir Dostoevsky might have written had life – and literary stardom – not intervened. He gives us a new portrait of the artist as never before seen: a shy but devoted lover, an empathetic friend of the people, a loyal brother and friend, and a writer able to penetrate to the very depths of the human soul.