To Ruhleben – And Back
2.990 kr.Geoffrey Pyke was one of the 20th century’s most brilliant eccentrics-mad genius, financial wizard, impoverished hermit. But in 1914, Pyke was just another Cambridge teenager. He pitched a wild notion to a London newspaper editor: Why not make him their war correspondent in Berlin? The editor called the boy’s bluff, and Pyke made his way across Europe on little more than a false passport, a pretty good German accent, and sheer chutzpah.
And so begins an odyssey into the heart of wartime Berlin, and a plunge into a harrowing year of solitary confinement and then imprisonment at Ruhleben, an internment camp that is now considered the model for Germany’s concentration camps. After an escape and a perilous dash to the Dutch border, Pyke returned home at the age of twenty to write To Rubleben – And Back.
Lost to obscurity for over eighty years, his extraordinary book is a college student’s sharp-tongued travelogue, a sober meditation on imprisonment and escape… and, as Pyke intended, a ripping yarn.
“The war will produce few books of more absorbing interest than this one.” -The New York Times
“A very fine story of a great and perilous adventure.” -The Times (London)
The Better of McSweeney’s, Vol. 1
1.990 kr.This book collects some of the best stories from the first ten issues of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the literary journal that has become one of the country’s most important and influential publications. McSweeney’s began as a small collection of work rejected by other magazines, but it soon began to publish pieces primarily written for the journal, and to attract some of the finest writers in the country. Contributors to Best of McSweeney’s, Volume One include Jonathan Lethem, Glen David Gold, A. M. Homes, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, Amanda Davis, George Saunders, Paul Collins, and William Vollmann, as well as many talented newcomers. Stories included here have been selected for The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Best American Short Stories, and one was performed in a regional musical theater.
English as She Is Spoke
2.990 kr.In 1855, when Jose da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino wrote an English phrasebook for Portuguese students, they faced just one problem: The didn’t know any English. All they had was a Portuguese-to-French dictionary, and a French-to-English dictionary. The linguistic train wreck that ensued is a classic of unintentional humor, now revived in the first newly selected edition in a century.