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Temptation and desire in Hollywood. Hard-boiled. Perverse! Plot Summary: Ralph Carston, a handsome young man from Georgia, and roommate Mona Matthews work as extras and dream of Hollywood stardom when a courtroom fracas by Mona gives them a flash of notoriety. This leads to a swank Hollywood party and an introduction to Ethel Smithers, a rich older woman with a less than pure interest in Carston...
To the Lighthouse (5 May 1927) is a novel by Virginia Woolf. A landmark novel of high modernism, the text, centering on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920, skillfully manipulates temporality and psychological exploration. To the Lighthouse follows and extends the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel Proust and James Joyce, where the plot is secondary to philosophical introspection, and the prose can be winding and hard to follow. The novel includes little dialogue and almost no action; most of it is written as thoughts and observations. The novel recalls the power of childhood emotions and highlights the impermanence of adult relationships. Among the book's many tropes and themes are those of loss, subjectivity, and the problem of perception. In 1998, the Modern Library named To the Lighthouse No. 15, on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 2005, the novel was chosen by TIME magazine as one of the one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to present. (wikipedia.org)
Orison Swett Marden (1850 - 1924) was an American writer associated with the New Thought Movement. He also held a degree in medicine, and was a successful hotel owner. Like many proponents of the New Thought philosophy, Marden believed that our thoughts influence our lives and our life circumstances. He said, "We make the world we live in and shape our own environment." Yet although he is best known for his books on financial success, he always emphasized that this would come as a result of cultivating one's personal development: "The golden opportunity you are seeking is in yourself. It is not in your environment; it is not in luck or chance, or the help of others; it is in yourself alone." (wikipedia.org
Flush: A Biography, an imaginative biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel, is a cross-genre blend of fiction and nonfiction by Virginia Woolf published in 1933. It was Written after the completion of her emotionally draining The Waves, the work returned Woolf to the imaginative consideration of English history that she had begun in Orlando: A Biography, and to which she would return in Between the Acts...(wikipedia.org)
Between the Acts is the final novel by Virginia Woolf, published in 1941 shortly after her suicide. This is a book laden with hidden meaning and allusion. It describes the mounting, performance, and audience of a festival play (hence the title) in a small English village just before the outbreak of the Second World War. Much of it looks forward to the war, with veiled allusions to connection with the continent by flight, swallows representing aircraft, and plunging into darkness. The pageant is a play within a play, representing a rather cynical view of English history. Woolf links together many different threads and ideas - a particularly interesting technique being the use of rhyme words to suggest hidden meanings. Relationships between the characters and aspects of their personalities are explored. The English village bonds throughout the play through their differences and similarities. (wikipedia.org)
The Waves, first published in 1931, is Virginia Woolf's most experimental novel. The 21st Century author and critic Becky Nordensten has described The Waves as a "beautiful novel with language and imagery unmatched in 20th Century English literature." In 1996, Italian pianist Ludovico Einaudi released a solo piano album "Le Onde" based upon the novel.
Elizabeth Keckley's post-Civil War life story is part slave narrative, part gossip column, part Horatio Alger story. It blends autobiography with - is there a word to describe a biography that disparages its subject? Although Elizabeth Keckley lived longer as a slave than as modiste to First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, most of her engrossing autobiography is devoted to her White House years. The opening three chapters establish her as a woman to be reckoned with: the "school of slavery," as she calls her bondage, taught her to be fiercely self-reliant, persevering, and defiant, though more than one slavemaster tried to beat her into submission. Having worked as a reputable seamstress for three years while also performing her full-time duties as a slavewoman, she finally manages to buy freedom for both herself and her son. After a brief, unhappy marriage, she begins her rapid social ascent from seamstress for the solid South's "best ladies" to Mary Todd Lincoln's best friend and confidante. Elizabeth Keckley's narrative is riveting as she recounts life in the White House during the Lincoln administration in meticulous detail. Behind the Scenes will engage equally the history buff, the gossip monger, and the lover of literature. - For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. - From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Joycelyn Moody
Understood Betsy is a 1916 novel for children by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. The story tells of Elizabeth Ann, a 9-year-old orphan who goes from a sheltered existence with her father's aunt Harriet and cousin Frances in the city, to living on a Vermont farm with her mother's family, the Putneys, whose child-rearing practices had always seemed suspect to Harriet and her daughter. In her new rural life, Elizabeth Ann comes to be nicknamed "Betsy," and to find that many activities that Frances had always thought too demanding for a little girl are considered, by the Putney family, routine activities for a child: walking to school alone, cooking, and having household duties to perform... (wikipedia.org)
Theodore Lothrop Stoddard (June 29, 1883 - May 1, 1950) was an American political scientist, historian, journalist, anthropologist, eugenicist, pacifist, and anti-immigration advocate who wrote a number of books which are cited by historians as prominent examples of early 20th-century scientific racism.During World War II he wrote Into the Darkness, about the effect of war on Nazi Germany. Stoddard was relatively nonpartisan in his coverage of the Nazi regime, but he did express concern for the welfare of the European Jewish community, foreseeing intense violence against the Jews.
Excerpt:...There is, however, in art another kind of external similarity which is founded on a fundamental truth. When there is a similarity of inner tendency in the whole moral and spiritual atmosphere, a similarity of ideals, at first closely pursued but later lost to sight, a similarity in the inner feeling of any one period to that of another, the logical result will be a revival of the external forms which served to express those inner feelings in an earlier age. An example of this today is our sympathy, our spiritual relationship, with the Primitives. Like ourselves, these artists sought to express in their work only internal truths, renouncing in consequence all consideration of external form.
The Critique of Practical Reason is the second of Immanuel Kant's three critiques, first published in 1788. It follows on from his Critique of Pure Reason and deals with his moral philosophy.The second Critique exercised a decisive influence over the subsequent development of the field of ethics and moral philosophy, beginning with Fichte's Doctrine of Science and becoming, during the 20th century, the principal reference point for every moral philosophy of a deontological stamp.
Men Like Gods is a novel written in 1923 by H. G. Wells. It features a utopian parallel universe. Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 - 13 August 1946) was an English author, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing text books. Together with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback, Wells has been referred to as "The Father of Science Fiction". (wikipedia.org)
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