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Author: Kingsley Amis
Publisher: Penguin Mass Market
Published: 1993
Total Pages: 296
ISBN-13: 9780140144758
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Award-winning writer Kingsley Amis's newest novel is a dazzling romp through a territory he has made triumphantly his own--the battle of the sexes and the conflicting claims of love and integrity. Art, literature, political correctness, and the gender war all come under Amis's seasoned scalpel in this corrosively funny academic satire.
Author: Kenneth Rosenberg
Publisher: Kenneth Rosenberg
Published: 2020-12-22
Total Pages: 233
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A sex trafficking victim wreaks vengeance on the criminal gang who enslaved her. Born into poverty in the heart of Eastern Europe, Natalia Nicolaeva dreams of a better life. When she is offered a job abroad, however, the promise of the outside world is as terrifying as it is thrilling. After gathering the courage to leave her tiny village, it doesn’t take long before Natalia’s worst fears are confirmed. Kidnapped by a vicious gang of criminals, Natalia must fight first for her honor and then for her life. Russia Girl portrays Natalia’s transformation from innocent farm girl to lethal dispenser of vigilante justice. This is one girl they never should have messed with. Be warned, this story is gritty and raw, but guaranteed to keep your pulse pounding. Author Q&A with Kenneth Rosenberg Q: This novel is a bit of a different take on the typical thriller genre. What was the inspiration for this story? A: I saw a documentary about women from Eastern Europe who were lured abroad under false pretenses and sold into prostitution. The film told the stories of five women who had managed to escape captivity and survive to tell about it. My book was inspired by their stories of courage. Q: Does that mean some of your novel is actually true? A: The circumstances in the first half of the novel were based on actual events. I decided to take that story and turn it into a thriller, where the main character becomes a kick-ass vigilante, dispensing her own brand of justice. Q: This book is set in Istanbul and on a farm in the breakaway republic of Transnistria. Do you have any experience in these places? Have you been to them? A: When I was working on the book, I traveled to Istanbul for research. I spent a week walking the streets and exploring the neighborhoods where it is set. Transnistria is more of a challenge, with complicated visa requirements, but I did spend time just across the border in Ukraine, which I felt was similar enough to give me a sense for the region. Q: Who have you been most influenced by as a writer? A: I’ve always loved a good international thriller. I guess this goes back to my childhood, when my friends and I loved all of the James Bond movies and couldn’t wait for the newest one to come out. Later, I came to be a big fan of the Bourne series. My books are probably closest in DNA to the Millennium Series by Stieg Larsson, including The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. They both involve a strong female character who goes through hell but comes out fighting. Q: Does this mean we can expect more from Natalia Nicolaeva? A: Absolutely! I’ve already finished the next two books. Vendetta Girl is set in St. Petersburg, Russia, and Spy Girl takes place in London. Mystery Girl is set in Budapest and is coming along nicely. I hope that Natalia has a long and illustrious career of fighting injustice all around the world.
Author: Julia L. Mickenberg
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-04-25
Total Pages: 436
ISBN-13: 022625612X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →If you were an independent, adventurous, liberated American woman in the 1920s or 1930s where might you have sought escape from the constraints and compromises of bourgeois living? Paris and the Left Bank quickly come to mind. But would you have ever thought of Russia and the wilds of Siberia? This choice was not as unusual as it seems now. As Julia L. Mickenberg uncovers in American Girls in Red Russia, there is a forgotten counterpoint to the story of the Lost Generation: beginning in the late nineteenth century, Russian revolutionary ideology attracted many women, including suffragists, reformers, educators, journalists, and artists, as well as curious travelers. Some were famous, like Isadora Duncan or Lillian Hellman; some were committed radicals, though more were just intrigued by the “Soviet experiment.” But all came to Russia in search of social arrangements that would be more equitable, just, and satisfying. And most in the end were disillusioned, some by the mundane realities, others by horrifying truths. Mickenberg reveals the complex motives that drew American women to Russia as they sought models for a revolutionary new era in which women would be not merely independent of men, but also equal builders of a new society. Soviet women, after all, earned the right to vote in 1917, and they also had abortion rights, property rights, the right to divorce, maternity benefits, and state-supported childcare. Even women from Soviet national minorities—many recently unveiled—became public figures, as African American and Jewish women noted. Yet as Mickenberg’s collective biography shows, Russia turned out to be as much a grim commune as a utopia of freedom, replete with economic, social, and sexual inequities. American Girls in Red Russia recounts the experiences of women who saved starving children from the Russian famine, worked on rural communes in Siberia, wrote for Moscow or New York newspapers, or performed on Soviet stages. Mickenberg finally tells these forgotten stories, full of hope and grave disappointments.
Author: Kingsley Amis
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 1995-05-01
Total Pages: 308
ISBN-13: 9780140251722
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →“Sex, booze, and Russian intrigue . . . A cool cocktail mixed with parts of Updike and De Vries, with a peel of le Carré.”—The New York Times Book Review Richard Vaisey is a respected scholar specializing in Russian studies when Anna Danilova arrives on campus. A visiting Russian poet with a mission more than literary, Anna challenges his integrity—and his marriage. Richard’s beautiful but unspeakably monstrous wife, Cordelia, seeks revenge on her adulterous husband, determined to ruin him by canceling his credit cards and reporting his car as stolen to the police. But Richard must face even further humiliating consequences, for the seductive Anna is also an irremediably bad poet. The Russian Girl is vintage Kingsley Amis: entertaining, thought-provoking, and wittily wise. “A brilliant satire . . . Kingsley Amis can skewer the modern world like no other writer.”—Los Angeles Times Book Review “Genuinely entertaining, and corrosively funny . . . Amis’s work is the result of beautifully organized and polished craftsmanship.”—The New York Review of Books
Author: Eliyana R. Adler
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 218
ISBN-13: 9780814334928
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Illuminates the role that private schools for Jewish girls played in Russian Jewish society and documents their influence on contemporary political discourse and educational innovation.
Author: Olga Kane
Publisher:
Published: 2018-01-04
Total Pages: 506
ISBN-13: 9780692966457
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Russian Mosaic is the true story of a young girl from a Russian mining town above the Arctic Circle, whose coming of age is marked by tragedy and hardship, but ultimately survival. She spent her childhood and college years under the structured control of the state. With always a bit of rebellion for the lack of freedom and self-expression, she learned to "play along" to get by. As a young adult, she witnessed the fall of communism and the Soviet Union, and with it, the change of lifestyle for all Russians. The daughter of a miner father and an accountant mother, Olga endures a number of ordeals that would have broken others less resilient. From the untimely passing of her father, and through a variety of early life experiences, she learns from her mother not to rely on others, but to be self-sufficient and to make her own way in the world. She not only survives but succeeds and writes with the hope of inspiring other women who face adversity in life.
Author: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2017-02-07
Total Pages: 176
ISBN-13: 1101993510
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography The prizewinning memoir of one of the world’s great writers, about coming of age as an enemy of the people and finding her voice in Stalinist Russia Born across the street from the Kremlin in the opulent Metropol Hotel—the setting of the New York Times bestselling novel A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles—Ludmilla Petrushevskaya grew up in a family of Bolshevik intellectuals who were reduced in the wake of the Russian Revolution to waiting in bread lines. In The Girl from the Metropol Hotel, her prizewinning memoir, she recounts her childhood of extreme deprivation—of wandering the streets like a young Edith Piaf, singing for alms, and living by her wits like Oliver Twist, a diminutive figure far removed from the heights she would attain as an internationally celebrated writer. As she unravels the threads of her itinerant upbringing—of feigned orphandom, of sleeping in freight cars and beneath the dining tables of communal apartments, of the fugitive pleasures of scraps of food—we see, both in her remarkable lack of self-pity and in the two dozen photographs throughout the text, her feral instinct and the crucible in which her gift for giving voice to a nation of survivors was forged. “From heartrending facts Petrushevskaya concocts a humorous and lyrical account of the toughest childhood and youth imaginable. . . . It [belongs] alongside the classic stories of humanity’s beloved plucky child heroes: Edith Piaf, Charlie Chaplin, the Artful Dodger, Gavroche, David Copperfield. . . . The child is irresistible and so is the adult narrator who creates a poignant portrait from the rags and riches of her memory.” —Anna Summers, from the Introduction
Author: Linda Lafferty
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2016
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781503937260
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In a sweeping story straight out of Russian history, Tsar Alexander I and a courageous girl named Nadezhda Durova join forces against Napoleon. It's 1803, and an adolescent Nadya is determined not to follow in her overbearing Ukrainian mother's footsteps. She's a horsewoman, not a housewife. When Tsar Paul is assassinated in St. Petersburg and a reluctant and naive Alexander is crowned emperor, Nadya runs away from home and joins the Russian cavalry in the war against Napoleon. Disguised as a boy and riding her spirited stallion, Alcides, Nadya rises in the ranks, even as her father begs the tsar to find his daughter and send her home. Both Nadya and Alexander defy expectations--she as a heroic fighter and he as a spiritual seeker--while the battles of Austerlitz, Friedland, Borodino, and Smolensk rage on. In a captivating tale that brings Durova's memoirs to life, from bloody battlefields to glittering palaces, two rebels dare to break free of their expected roles and discover themselves in the process.
Author: Kate Furnivall
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2009-06-02
Total Pages: 516
ISBN-13: 9780425227640
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An epic journey of love and discovery from the national bestselling author of The Russian Concubine and The Red Scarf. China, 1929. For years Lydia Ivanova believed her father was killed by the Bolsheviks. But when she learns he is imprisoned in Stalin-controlled Russia, the fiery girl is willing to leave everything behind- even her Chinese lover, Chang An Lo. Lydia begins a dangerous search, journeying to Moscow with her half-brother Alexei. But when Alexei abruptly disappears, Lydia is left alone, penniless in Soviet Russia. All seems lost, but Chang An Lo has not forgotten Lydia. He knows things about her father that she does not. And while he races to protect her, she is prepared to risk treacherous consequences to discover the truth.
Author: Anna Bek
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2004-11-10
Total Pages: 182
ISBN-13: 9780253111173
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Life of a Russian Woman Doctor by Anna Bek (1869--1954) yields rich insights into the lives of a generation of Russian women who lived at a time of revolutionary change, extraordinary challenges, and unprecedented opportunities. Written in a lively and compelling style, Anna Bek's memoir reveals not only the experiences but also the motives and values of women who sought education, independence, and self-sufficiency, the obstacles they encountered, and the influences of other women and men on their lives. This engrossing memoir also engages the special context of Siberian geography and history -- the vast distances and isolation, the heterogeneous population of settlers, exiles, and convicts, the closeness and interdependence of families and communities, and the deep appreciation of nature. This book offers a rewarding excursion into Siberian social history and an intimate acquaintance with two exceptional individuals of great charm and courage -- Anna Bek and her American editor, Anne D. Rassweiler.
