Neil Darrow Strauss, also known by the pen names Style and Chris Powles (born March 9, 1969) is an American author, journalist and ghostwriter. He is best known for his book The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, in which he describes his experiences in the seduction community in an effort to become a “pick-up artist.” He is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and also wrote regularly for The New York Times.
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Ask the Dust
Ask the Dust is a virtuoso performance by an influential master of the twentieth-century American novel. It is the story of Arturo Bandini, a young writer in 1930s Los Angeles who falls hard for the elusive, mocking, unstable Camilla Lopez, a Mexican waitress. Struggling to survive, he perseveres until, at last, his first novel is published. But the bright light of success is extinguished when Camilla has a nervous breakdown and disappears . . . and Bandini forever rejects the writer???s life he fought so hard to attain.
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Journey to the End of the Night
C??line???s masterpiece???colloquial, polemic, hyper-realistic, boiling over with black humor.,C??line???s masterpiece???colloquial, polemic, hyper realistic???boils over with bitter humor and revulsion at society???s idiocy and hypocrisy: Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of cruelty and violence that hurtles through the improbable travels of the petit bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu: from the trenches of WWI, to the African jungle, to New York, to the Ford Factory in Detroit, and finally to life in Paris as a failed doctor. Ralph Manheim???s pitch-perfect translation captures C??line???s savage energy, and a dynamic afterword by William T. Vollmann presents a fresh, furiously alive take on this astonishing novel.
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Life Is Elsewhere
Kundera initially intended to call this novel ,. 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 entrapped by the communist revolution, entrapped in a sombre farce.
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Maxims
Excerpt from Maxims: And Reflections Upon Man.,The family of La Rochefoucauld is one of the most ancient and illustrious in France. Its founder, according to Andrew Du Chesne, was one Foucauld, or Fulk, a cadet, as is supposed, of the house of Lusignan, or Lezignem, and connected with the ancient Dukes of Guienne, who appears, about the period A. D. 1000, as Seigneur, or Lord, of the Town of La Roche in the Angoumois. He is described in contemporary charters as Vir nobilissimus Fulcaldus, and his renown seems to have been sufficiently extensive to confer his name on La Roche, which has ever since borne, and bestowed on his descendants, the distinctive appellation of La Roche Foucauld. Guy, the eighth Seigneur de la Roche Foucauld, is mentioned by Froissart as having per formed, ih the year 1380, a celebrated tilt in the lists at Bordeaux, whither he came, attended by 200 of his kins men and connections.
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Meditations
Meditations is a series of personal writings by Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 AD, recording his private notes to himself and ideas on Stoic philosophy.,Marcus Aurelius wrote the 12 books of the Meditations in Koine Greek as a source for his own guidance and self-improvement. It is possible that large portions of the work were written at Sirmium, where he spent much time planning military campaigns from 170 to 180. Some of it was written while he was positioned at Aquincum on campaign in Pannonia, because internal notes tell us that the first book was written when he was campaigning against the Quadi on the river Granova and the second book was written at Carnuntum.
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On the Shortness of Life
The Stoic philosopher Seneca offers piercing and profound insights into human nature and a vision of the good life, so that one may say with him ???Life is long, if you know how to live it.???Seneca (5 BC to AD 65) was born in Cordoba and raised in Rome, where he was trained in rhetoric and philosophy. He was a tutor and later an advisor to Nero, but later Nero forced him to take his own life. His stoic and serene suicide is portrayed in countless paintings.
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
One of the most influential literary works of our time, , remains a dazzling and original achievement by the masterful Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature., tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendi?? family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad and alive with unforgettable men and women???brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul???this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.
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Siddhartha
Herman Hesse’s classic novel has delighted, inspired, and influenced generations of readers, writers, and thinkers. In this story of a wealthy Indian Brahmin who casts off a life of privilege to seek spiritual fulfillment. Hesse synthesizes disparate philosophies–Eastern religions, Jungian archetypes, Western individualism–into a unique vision of life as expressed through one man’s search for true meaning.
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StrengthsFinder 2.0
Do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?,Chances are, you don’t. All too often, our natural talents go untapped. From the cradle to the cubicle, we devote more time to fixing our shortcomings than to developing our strengths.,To help people uncover their talents, Gallup introduced the first version of its online assessment, StrengthsFinder, in 2001 which ignited a global conversation and helped millions to discover their top five talents.,In its latest national bestseller, StrengthsFinder 2.0, Gallup unveils the new and improved version of its popular assessment, language of 34 themes, and much more (see below for details). While you can read this book in one sitting, you’ll use it as a reference for decades.,Loaded with hundreds of strategies for applying your strengths, this new book and accompanying website will change the way you look at yourself–and the world around you–forever.
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The Painted Bird
Jerzy Kosinski’s mythic, master-work of a shattered post-War Europe.,Originally published in 1965, The Painted Bird established Jerzy Kosinski as a major literary figure. Kosinski’s story follows a dark-haired, olive-skinned boy, abandoned by his parents during World War II, as he wanders alone from one village to another, sometimes hounded and tortured, only rarely sheltered and cared for. Through the juxtaposition of adolescence and the most brutal of adult experiences, Kosinski sums up a Bosch-like world of harrowing excess where senseless violence and untempered hatred are the norm. Through sparse prose and vivid imagery, Kosinski’s novel is a story of mythic proportion, even more relevant to today’s society than it was upon its original publication.
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Ulysses
Ulysses is a modernist novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It was first serialised in parts in the American journal The Little Review from March 1918 to December 1920, and then published in its entirety by Sylvia Beach in February 1922, in Paris. It is considered to be one of the most important works of modernist literature, and has been called “a demonstration and summation of the entire movement”. According to Declan Kiberd, “Before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so foregrounded the process of thinking.” However, even proponents of Ulysses such as Anthony Burgess have described the book as “inimitable, and also possibly mad”. Ulysses chronicles the peripatetic appointments and encounters of Leopold Bloom in Dublin in the course of an ordinary day, 16 June 1904. Ulysses is the Latinised name of Odysseus, the hero of Homer’s epic poem Odyssey, and the novel establishes a series of parallels between its characters and events and those of the poem.
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Under Saturn’s Shadow
Saturn was the Roman god who ate his childern to stop them from usurping his power. Men have been psychologically and spiritually wounded by this legacy. Hollis offers a rich perspective on the secrets men carry in their hearts.