Read Around Europe Challenge

Read at least one book by an author from each country in Europe.

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Best books from Europe (4405)
541.

Life Is Elsewhere by Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher EN

Rating: 4 (1 vote)
Description:
The author initially intended to call this novel The Lyrical Age. The lyrical age, according to Kundera, is youth, and this novel, above all, is an epic of adolescence; an ironic epic that tenderly erodes sacrosanct values: childhood, motherhood, revolution, and even poetry. Jaromil is in fact a poet. His mother made him a poet and accompanies him (figuratively) to his love bed and (literally) to his deathbed. A ridiculous and touching character, horrifying and totally innocent ("innocence with its bloody smile"!), Jaromil is at the same time a true poet. He's no creep, he's Rimbaud. Rimbaud e... continue

542.

RUR by Karel Čapek EN

Rating: 5 (2 votes)
Description:
We rely on your support to help us keep producing beautiful, free, and unrestricted editions of literature for the digital age. Will you support our efforts with a donation? R.U.R., or Rossum’s Universal Robots is a play written in 1920 by Karel Čapek, a Czech writer who wrote many plays and novels, many of them with science-fiction and dystopian themes. R.U.R. is perhaps the most well-known of these works in the English-speaking world because it brought the word “robot” into the language. “Robot” is derived from the Czech word meaning “worker.” The play is set in the island headquarters of th... continue


544.

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel EN

0 Ratings
Description:
Franz Werfel's masterpiece tells the true story of the inhabitants of six Armenian villages on the mountain of Musa Dagh, who choose to defy the deportation order of the Turkish government and are subsequently besieged on the mountainside. Told through the eyes of Gabriel Bagradian, a cosmopolitan Armenian who has returned to his home village with his French wife and son after years living in Europe, the novel is a rich and dramatic epic that powerfully argues for the value of resistance even in impossible circumstances.

545.

The festival of insignificance by Milan Kundera EN

Rating: 4 (2 votes)
Description:
The last novel by the international superstar and author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 'Kundera is the saddest, funniest, and most lovable of authors.' Times An artist, clearly one of the best to be found anywhere.' Salman Rushdie 'Kundera designs fictions of the highest order.' Ian McEwan Casting light on the most serious of problems and at the same time saying not one serious sentence; being fascinated by the reality of the contemporary world and at the same time avoiding realism - that's The Festival of Insignificance. In Kundera's earlier novel, Slowness, Vera, the author's wife, s... continue

546.

New Poems : A Revised Bilingual Edition by Rainer Maria Rilke EN

0 Ratings
Description:
Rilke's first great work ... [Snow's translation] is clear, accurate, and fluent. --Stephen Mitchell.

547.

Slowness by Milan Kundera EN

Rating: 3 (2 votes)
Description:
A heady, existential tale of seduction and romance by the author of modern classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 'An artist, clearly one of the best to be found anywhere.' Salman Rushdie 'Kundera designs fictions of the highest order.' Ian McEwan 'Audacity, wit and sheer brilliance.' New York Times Book Review In a French château on a midsummer's night, two tales of seduction entwine, separated in time by over two hundred years, but united in their quest for sensual pleasure. Through their romantic endeavors, a contemporary holidaymaker and eighteenth-century chevalier illustrate our era'... continue

548.

Ceilings by Zuzana Brabcová EN

0 Ratings
Description:
Awarded the Magnesia Litera Prose Book of the Year in 2013, Ceilings is a polyphonic novel kin to the work of Leonora Carrington and Unica Zürn. Taking place in a mental hospital in Prague where the "narrator" is undergoing detox treatment for substance abuse, the borders blur between inner experience and the outer world, between reality and dream. As the walls and ceilings hemming in the desire for freedom fantastically break open as if into the unknown and gender fluidly shifts between brother and sister, who are one and the same, Brabcová's flights of imagination portray how difficult it is... continue

549.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Briggs by Rainer Maria Rilke EN

0 Ratings
Description:
A masterly new translation of one of the first great modernist novels In the only novel by one of the German language's greatest poets, a young man named Malte Laurids Brigge lives in a cheap room in Paris while his belongings rot in storage. Every person he sees seems to carry their death with them, and with little but a library card to distinguish him from the city's untouchables, he thinks of the deaths, and ghosts, of his aristocratic family, of which he is the sole living descendant. Suffused with passages of lyrical brilliance, Rilke's semi-autobiographical novel is a moving and powerful... continue

550.
The Uncanny

The Uncanny by Sigmund Freud EN

0 Ratings
Description:
Freud was fascinated by the mysteries of creativity and the imagination. The groundbreaking works that comprise The Uncanny present some of his most influential explorations of the mind. In these pieces Freud investigates the vivid but seemingly trivial childhood memories that often "screen" deeply uncomfortable desires; the links between literature and daydreaming; and our intensely mixed feelings about things we experience as "uncanny." Also included is Freud's celebrated study of Leonardo Da Vinci-his first exercise in psychobiography. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leadi... continue


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