Really obscure (but superb) reading!
Discover truly obscure but superb reads in our curated book list—from Djuna Barnes' modernist classic Nightwood to Iris Murdoch's A Severed Head. Explore hidden gems in fiction, biography, and family life, including Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent and the legendary Maria Callas biography. Perfect for readers seeking rare, unforgettable literary treasures.
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The Trolley Car Family
by Eleanor Clymer
The Parker's acquisition of an old trolley car results in a delightful summer in the country and a new job for Father.
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Nightwood
by Djuna Barnes
The fiery and enigmatic masterpiece--one of the greatest novels of the Modernist era.
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The Secret Agent
by Joseph Conrad
'An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this act of madness or despair.'Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London's Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be 'ASimple Tale' proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats and London's fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations.Based on the text which Conrad's first English readers enjoyed, this new edition includes a critical introduction which describes Conrad's great London novel as the realization of a 'monstrous town', a place of idiocy, madness, criminality, and butchery.
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A Severed Head
by Iris Murdoch
A novel about the frightfulness and ruthlessness of being in love, from the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Sea, The Sea Martin Lynch-Gibson believes he can possess both a beautiful wife and a delightful lover. But when his wife, Antonia, suddenly leaves him for her psychoanalyst, Martin is plunged into an intensive emotional reeducation. He attempts to behave beautifully and sensibly. Then he meets a woman whose demonic splendor at first repels him and later arouses a consuming and monstrous passion. As his Medusa informs him, “this is nothing to do with happiness.” A Severed Head was adapted for a successful stage production in 1963 and was later made into a film starring Claire Bloom, Lee Remick, Richard Attenborough, and Ian Holm.
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Maria Callas, the Woman Behind the Legend
by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington
No summary available.
