[PDF] Utopia Avenue eBook

Author : David Mitchell
Publisher : Knopf Canada
Page : 611 pages
File Size : 45,63 MB
Release : 2020-07-14
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0345809831

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The hotly anticipated new novel from the internationally bestselling author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas. Utopia Avenue may be the most extraordinary British band you've never heard of. Emerging from London's psychedelic scene in 1967 and fronted by folksinger Elf Holloway, guitar demigod Jasper de Zoet and blues bassist Dean Moss, Utopia Avenue released only two LPs during its brief blazing journey from the clubs of Soho and draughty ballrooms to Top of the Pops and the Top 10; to Amsterdam, Rome and a fateful American fortnight in the autumn of 1968. David Mitchell's new novel is the story of Utopia Avenue and its age; of riots in the street and revolutions in the head; of drugs and thugs, schizophrenia, love, sex, grief, art; of the families we choose and the ones we don't; of fame's Faustian pact and stardom's wobbly ladder. Do we change the world or does the world change us? Utopia means 'nowhere' but might it be somewhere, if only we knew how to look?

Author : David Mitchell
Publisher : Random House
Page : 642 pages
File Size : 44,45 MB
Release : 2014-09-02
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0812994736

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The New York Times bestseller by the author of Cloud Atlas • Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize • Named One of the Top Ten Fiction Books of the Year by Time, Entertainment Weekly, and O: The Oprah Magazine • A New York Times Notable Book • An American Library Association Notable Book • Winner of the World Fantasy Award “With The Bone Clocks, [David] Mitchell rises to meet and match the legacy of Cloud Atlas.”—Los Angeles Times Following a terrible fight with her mother over her boyfriend, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her family and her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: A sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as “the radio people,” Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life. For Holly has caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics—and their enemies. But her lost weekend is merely the prelude to a shocking disappearance that leaves her family irrevocably scarred. This unsolved mystery will echo through every decade of Holly’s life, affecting all the people Holly loves—even the ones who are not yet born. A Cambridge scholarship boy grooming himself for wealth and influence, a conflicted father who feels alive only while reporting on the war in Iraq, a middle-aged writer mourning his exile from the bestseller list—all have a part to play in this surreal, invisible war on the margins of our world. From the medieval Swiss Alps to the nineteenth-century Australian bush, from a hotel in Shanghai to a Manhattan townhouse in the near future, their stories come together in moments of everyday grace and extraordinary wonder. Rich with character and realms of possibility, The Bone Clocks is a kaleidoscopic novel that begs to be taken apart and put back together by a writer The Washington Post calls “the novelist who’s been showing us the future of fiction.” An elegant conjurer of interconnected tales, a genre-bending daredevil, and a master prose stylist, David Mitchell has become one of the leading literary voices of his generation. His hypnotic new novel, The Bone Clocks, crackles with invention and wit and sheer storytelling pleasure—it is fiction at its most spellbinding. Named to more than 20 year-end best of lists, including NPR • San Francisco Chronicle • The Atlantic • The Guardian • Slate • BuzzFeed “One of the most entertaining and thrilling novels I’ve read in a long time.”—Meg Wolitzer, NPR “[Mitchell] writes with a furious intensity and slapped-awake vitality, with a delight in language and all the rabbit holes of experience.”—The New York Times Book Review “Intensely compelling . . . fantastically witty . . . offers up a rich selection of domestic realism, gothic fantasy and apocalyptic speculation.”—The Washington Post “[A] time-traveling, culture-crossing, genre-bending marvel of a novel.”—O: The Oprah Magazine “Great fun . . . a tour de force . . . [Mitchell] channels his narrators with vivid expertise.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Author : David Mitchell
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 444 pages
File Size : 47,6 MB
Release : 2007-12-18
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0307426025

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By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas A gallery attendant at the Hermitage. A young jazz buff in Tokyo. A crooked British lawyer in Hong Kong. A disc jockey in Manhattan. A physicist in Ireland. An elderly woman running a tea shack in rural China. A cult-controlled terrorist in Okinawa. A musician in London. A transmigrating spirit in Mongolia. What is the common thread of coincidence or destiny that connects the lives of these nine souls in nine far-flung countries, stretching across the globe from east to west? What pattern do their linked fates form through time and space? A writer of pyrotechnic virtuosity and profound compassion, a mind to which nothing human is alien, David Mitchell spins genres, cultures, and ideas like gossamer threads around and through these nine linked stories. Many forces bind these lives, but at root all involve the same universal longing for connection and transcendence, an axis of commonality that leads in two directions—to creation and to destruction. In the end, as lives converge with a fearful symmetry, Ghostwritten comes full circle, to a point at which a familiar idea—that whether the planet is vast or small is merely a matter of perspective—strikes home with the force of a new revelation. It marks the debut of a writer of astonishing gifts.

Author : Jonathan Lethem
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 242 pages
File Size : 18,63 MB
Release : 2008-04-08
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 030738943X

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Bestselling author Jonathan Lethem delivers a hilarious novel about love, art, and what it's like to be young in Los Angeles. Lucinda Hoekke's daytime gig as a telephone operator at the Complaint Line—an art gallery's high-minded installation piece—is about as exciting as listening to dead air. Her real passion is playing bass in her forever struggling, forever unnamed band. But recently a frequent caller, the Complainer, as Lucinda dubs him, has captivated her with his philosophical musings. When Lucinda's band begins to incorporate the Complainer's catchy, existential phrases into their song lyrics, they are suddenly on the cusp of their big break. There is only one problem: the Complainer wants in. BONUS MATERIAL: This edition includes an excerpt from Jonathan Lethem's Dissident Gardens.

Author : Alastair Gordon
Publisher : Princeton Architectural Press
Page : 207 pages
File Size : 32,67 MB
Release : 2001-05
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1568982720

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The Hamptons are hot. Gordon, who grew up there, traces the invention of the idea of the Hamptons as a resort for the elite of New York City and shows how various forces, including artists, real estate developers, and media professionals transformed what had been a quiet rural place into a modern and worldwide phenomenon. 175 illustrations.

Author : David Mitchell
Publisher : Random House
Page : 483 pages
File Size : 31,16 MB
Release : 2007-12-18
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1588362159

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By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas | Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize “A novel as accomplished as anything being written.”—Newsweek Number9Dream is the international literary sensation from a writer with astonishing range and imaginative energy—an intoxicating ride through Tokyo’s dark underworlds and the even more mysterious landscapes of our collective dreams. David Mitchell follows his eerily precocious, globe-striding first novel, Ghostwritten, with a work that is in its way even more ambitious. In outward form, Number9Dream is a Dickensian coming-of-age journey: Young dreamer Eiji Miyake, from remote rural Japan, thrust out on his own by his sister’s death and his mother’s breakdown, comes to Tokyo in pursuit of the father who abandoned him. Stumbling around this strange, awesome city, he trips over and crosses—through a hidden destiny or just monstrously bad luck—a number of its secret power centers. Suddenly, the riddle of his father’s identity becomes just one of the increasingly urgent questions Eiji must answer. Why is the line between the world of his experiences and the world of his dreams so blurry? Why do so many horrible things keep happening to him? What is it about the number 9? To answer these questions, and ultimately to come to terms with his inheritance, Eiji must somehow acquire an insight into the workings of history and fate that would be rare in anyone, much less in a boy from out of town with a price on his head and less than the cost of a Beatles disc to his name. Praise for Number9Dream “Delirious—a grand blur of overwhelming sensation.”—Entertainment Weekly “To call Mitchell’s book a simple quest novel . . is like calling Don DeLillo’s Underworld the story of a missing baseball.”—The New York Times Book Review “Number9Dream, with its propulsive energy, its Joycean eruption of language and playfulness, represents further confirmation that David Mitchell should be counted among the top young novelists working today.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Mitchell’s new novel has been described as a cross between Don DeLillo and William Gibson, and although that’s a perfectly serviceable cocktail-party formula, it doesn’t do justice to this odd, fitfully compelling work.”—The New Yorker “Leaping with ease from surrealist fables to a teenage coming-of-age story and then spinning back to Yakuza gangster battles and World War II–era kamikaze diaries, Mitchell is an aerial freestyle ski-jumper of fiction. Somehow, after performing feats of literary gymnastics, he manages to stick the landing.”—The Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Author : Erik Reece
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 47,37 MB
Release : 2016-08-09
Category : History
ISBN : 0374710759

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For Erik Reece, life, at last, was good: he was newly married, gainfully employed, living in a creekside cabin in his beloved Kentucky woods. It sounded, as he describes it, "like a country song with a happy ending." And yet he was still haunted by a sense that the world--or, more specifically, his country--could be better. He couldn't ignore his conviction that, in fact, the good ol' USA was in the midst of great social, environmental, and political crises--that for the first time in our history, we were being swept into a future that had no future. Where did we--here, in the land of Jeffersonian optimism and better tomorrows--go wrong? Rather than despair, Reece turned to those who had dared to imagine radically different futures for America. What followed was a giant road trip and research adventure through the sites of America's utopian communities, both historical and contemporary, known and unknown, successful and catastrophic. What he uncovered was not just a series of lost histories and broken visionaries but also a continuing and vital but hidden idealistic tradition in American intellectual history. Utopia Drive is an important and definitive reconstruction of that tradition. It is also, perhaps, a new framework to help us find a genuinely sustainable way forward. " ... an engaging exploration -- and example -- of the fruitful tunnel-visions of dreamers turned doers." - Publishers Weekly

Author : Ellen Wayland-Smith
Publisher : Picador
Page : 319 pages
File Size : 40,89 MB
Release : 2016-05-03
Category : History
ISBN : 1250043107

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A fascinating and unusual chapter in American history about a religious community that held radical notions of equality, sex, and religion---only to transform itself, at the beginning of the twentieth century, into a successful silverware company and a model of buttoned-down corporate propriety. In the early nineteenth century, many Americans were looking for an alternative to the Puritanism that had been the foundation of the new country. Amid the fervor of the religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening, John Humphrey Noyes, a spirited but socially awkward young man, attracted a group of devoted followers with his fiery sermons about creating Jesus’ millennial kingdom here on Earth. Noyes established a revolutionary community in rural New York centered around achieving a life free of sin through God’s grace, while also espousing equality of the sexes and “complex marriage,” a system of free love where sexual relations with multiple partners was encouraged. Noyes’s belief in the perfectibility of human nature eventually inspired him to institute a program of eugenics, known as stirpiculture, that resulted in a new generation of Oneidans who, when the Community disbanded in 1880, sought to exorcise the ghost of their fathers’ disreputable sexual theories. Converted into a joint-stock company, Oneida Community, Limited, would go on to become one of the nation’s leading manufacturers of silverware, and their brand a coveted mark of middle-class respectability in pre- and post-WWII America. Told by a descendant of one of the Community’s original families, Ellen Wayland-Smith's Oneida is a captivating story that straddles two centuries to reveal how a radical, free-love sect, turning its back on its own ideals, transformed into a purveyor of the white-picket-fence American dream.

Author : Monique Jenkinson
Publisher : Bywater Books
Page : 341 pages
File Size : 43,1 MB
Release : 2022-01-25
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1612942229

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Faux Queen: A Life in Drag is the memoir of a ballet-obsessed girl who moves to San Francisco from the suburbs and finds her people at the drag club. It joyously chronicles Monique Jenkinson’s creation of her drag persona Fauxnique, the people and cultural practices that crash her identity into being, her journey through one of the most experimental moments in queer cultural history, and her rise through the nightlife underground to become the first cisgender woman crowned as a major pageant-winning drag queen. Jenkinson finds authenticity through the glee of drag artifice and articulation through the immediacy of performing bodies. She pens a valentine to gay men and their culture while relaying the making of an open-minded feminist and queer ally. Faux Queen finds deep healing in irreverence and posits that it might be possible for us to come together in fabulous difference on the dance floor.

Author : Petra Mason
Publisher : Rizzoli Publications
Page : 245 pages
File Size : 20,13 MB
Release : 2015-10-20
Category : Art
ISBN : 0847846474

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Mixed-media artist Carlos Betancourt and his influential studio, Imperfect Utopia, helped to launch the Miami art scene in the 1980’s. Betancourt’s oeuvre is a lush explosion of radiant, eccentric colors in which he explores the kaleidoscope (multi-racial, multi-lingual, trans-cultural) of Caribbean and American culture. His work alludes to issues of memory, beauty, identity, and communication. He bends the lines between art, photography, and nature in his photographs, collages, painting, installations, and conceptual pieces. Carlos Betancourt’s imagery reinterprets the past and present and offers it in a fresh context. He is inspired by Puerto Rico, Miami, and his extensive travels; also artist Ana Mendieta’s interventions in nature, Robert Rauschenberg’s assemblages, Andy Warhol’s perceptions, Neo Rauch compositions, and a Federico Fellini-esque cast of characters for his photo assemblages. This exuberant volume explores Betancourt’s body of work, with more than 250 images and texts by art critic Paul Laster, art history professor Robert Farris Thompson and United States Inaugural Poet, Richard Blanco. His artwork is included in the permanent collections of various museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The National Portrait Gallery, and The Smithsonian Institute.