Gilbert Adair

Paris in the spring of 1968. The city is beginning to emerge from hibernation and an obscure spirit of social and political renewal is in the air. Yet Théo, his twin sister Isabelle and Matthew, an American student they have befriended, think only of immersing themselves in another, addictive form of hibernation: moviegoing at the Cinémathèque Française. Night after night, they take their place beside their fellow cinephiles in the very front row of the stalls and feast insatiably off the images that flicker across the vast white screen. Denied their nightly 'fix' when the French government suddenly orders the Cinémathèque's closure, Théo, Isabelle and Matthew gradually withdraw into a hermetically sealed universe of their own creation, an airless universe of obsessive private games, ordeals, humiliations and sexual jousting which finds them shedding their clothes and their inhibitions with equal abandon. A vertiginous free fall interrupted only, and tragically, when the real world outside their shuttered apartment succeeds at last in encroaching on their delirium. The study of a triangular relationship whose perverse eroticism contrives nevertheless to conserve its own bruised purity, brilliant in its narrative invention and startling in its imagery, The Dreamers (now a major film by Bernardo Bertolucci) belongs to the romantic French tradition of Les Enfants Terribles and Le Grand Meaulnes and resembles no other work in recent British fiction.

The Dreamers

A Romance

The Holy Innocents

Part murder mystery and all jet-black satire, and based on a real life scandal, this edgy novella tells the story of L opold Sfax, world-renowned as the creator of "The Theory" a bizarre literary theory that grew from an intellectual folly to a dominant school of criticism that enslaved college campuses across the country. However, The Theory, which holds that the text of any piece of writing tells us all that we need to know about its author (as if the author himself is "dead") takes on extra perversity when the revered or is it feared? Sfax is found to have once written something that seems...well, murderously revealing. In the hands of Gilbert Adair, it's a dexterously wrought and hysterically devilish look at academic cultishness. It's also a taut metaphysical murder mystery that confounds the reader's expectations on almost every page and reserves its most stunning surprise the ultimate whodunit twist for the very last page.

The Death of the Author

Georges Perec

Anton Vowl is missing. Ransacking his Paris flat, a group of his faithful companions trawl through his diary for any hint as to his location and, insidiously, a ghost, from Vowl's past starts to cast its malignant shadow. This virtuoso story, chock-full of plots and subplots, shows the skill of both author and translator who impart all the action without a crucial grammatical prop: the letter 'e'.

A Void

The Postmodernist Always Rings Twice

The Key of the Tower

Sanjari

A Novel

Love and Death on Long Island

Vervolg op "Alice in Wonderland" van Lewis Carroll door een bewonderaar en navolger.

A Third Adventure for Lewis Carroll's 'Alice'

Alice Through the Needle's Eye

And then there was no one

Aslı Biçen

Kapalı kitap :roman

Marzyciele

Ten-year-old Miranda mysteriously jumps from the ship carrying her and her family from India to England and meets Peter Pan, who now resides beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean.

Peter Pan and the Only Children

Marina Warner

Sophie Herxheimer

Especially for grown-ups, this is a selection of subversive, satirical, and sophisticated fairy tales full of polished wit and prose.

Wonder Tales

Boxing Day circa 1935. A snowed-in manor on the very edge of Dartmoor. A Christmas house-party. And overhead, in the attic, the dead body of Raymond Gentry, gossip columnist and blackmailer, shot through the heart. But the attic door is locked from the inside, its sole window is traversed by thick iron bars and, naturally, there is no sign of a murderer or a murder weapon. Fortunately (though, for the murderer, unfortunately), one of the guests is the formidable Evadne Mount, the bestselling author of countless classic whodunits. In fact, were she not its presiding sleuth, THE ACT OF ROGER MURGATROYD is exactly the type of whodunit she herself might have written.

The Act of Roger Murgatroyd

A reserved British intellectual falls obsessively in love with a young American heartthrob, in this witty and poignant “tour de force” (Literary Review). When he wanders into the wrong theater and finds himself watching the wretched teen-pic Hotpants College II, cerebral British author Giles De’Ath becomes romantically obsessed with dreamboat Ronnie Bostock. Giles’s infatuation drives him to the unthinkable: he reads American fan magazines and watches movies with titles like Tex Mex and Skid Marks. And finally, he travels to Long Island, intent on meeting Ronnie in the flesh. The basis for the hit independent film starring Jason Priestley and John Hurt, Love and Death on Long Island is a brilliant and heartrending update of Thomas Mann’s early twentieth-century novella Death in Venice. It offers both a poignant meditation on passion, and “a very funny portrait of an extraordinarily unworldly academic’s introduction to the dizzyingly incomprehensible realm of popular culture” (Nick Hornby). “Brief, pure, intense . . . The writing is masterly, the conjuring of contrasting worlds a triumph.” —The Financial Times

The brilliantly witty and charmingly grisly new murder mystery from the author of A Mysterious Affair of Style.

And Then There was No One

Gideon is a lonely, horny young Englishman who arrives in Paris to take up a teaching post in the local Berlitz, and becomes increasingly fascinated by the intoxicating atmosphere of erotic banter and bragging in the school's all-male and virtually all-gay common room. The moment has surely arrived for him, too, to overcome his own chronic timidity and actually do what he has only ever dared fantasize about. Yet Gideon has a secret - one he is prepared to share with nobody but the reader, a secret he is finally obliged to confront, with surprising results.

Buenas Noches, Buenos Aires

Whilst visiting Venice in 1911 Thomas Mann's eye was drawn to a young sailor suited boy of almost supernatural beauty, and inspired to write Death in Venice. This is a biography of that boy, who went on to lead a life as rich and as full of twists as any piece of fiction.

Wladyslaw Moes 1900 to 1962

A Boy Who Inspired Thomas Manns Death in Venice

Ein Mord in einem abgeschiedenen englischen Herrenhaus führt Weihnachten 1935 zu peinlichen Enthüllungen, boshaften Wortgefechten und zu einem überraschenden Finale.

Gilbert Adair

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