18 books like The magic barrel
暁の寺
A young man expends his spirit in the obsessive pursuit of a beautiful woman and a passionate search for mystical enlightenment.
"Yukio Mishima's The Temple of Dawn is the third novel in his masterful tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility. Here, Shigekuni Honda continues his pursuit of the successive reincarnations of Kiyoaki Matsugae, his childhood friend. Travelling in Thailand in the early 1940s,…
Shares: Japanese, Travel
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
A short story collection featuring, in the title story, one of Sillitoe’s very best. The story concerns a teenaged boy from a poor working class background who is sent to a borstal for robbery and takes up long-distance running as a way of temporarily escaping from both his present situation and his bleak future prospects. Seeing his natural ability the institution Governor enters him into a race…
Shares: English Short stories, English language, Manners and customs, Social life and customs
Cry, The Beloved Country
This book is the most famous and important novel in South Africa's history, and an immediate worldwide bestseller when it was published in 1948.
Alan Paton's impassioned novel about a black man's country under white man's law is a work of searing beauty. The eminent literary critic Lewis Gannett wrote, " We have had many novels from statesmen and reformers, almost all bad; many novels from…
Shares: Textbooks for foreign speakers, English language
Bitter lemons
With the publication of Justine Lawrence Durrell became, almost overnight, one of the most talked about, widely acclaimed novelists of the decade. Now, in Bitter Lemons, his focus has shifted from the world of his imagination to life itself. Writing in the exquisite poetic prose that critics have hailed as unequalled in contemporary literature, he tells the perceptive, often humorous story of his…
Shares: Manners and customs, Travel, Social life and customs
Our Old Home
Our Old Home, a series of English sketches by Nathaniel Hawthorne. This volume of charming sketches was published in 1863, and (in the words of the author) presents “a few of the external aspects of English scenery and life, especially those that are touched with the antique charm to which our countrymen are more susceptible than are the people among whom it is of native growth.”
Shares: Americans, Travel, Social life and customs
Lyonel Feininger
Lyonel und Julia: Von der Kunst, zu lieben. Eine schicksalshafte Liebesgeschichte, erzählt in größtenteils nie veröffentlichten Briefen. Zugleich ein Zeugnis vom Arbeiten und Leben des großen Malers, pünktlich zu seinem 150. Geburtstag.Im Juli 1905 treffen Lyonel Feininger und Julia Berg im Zug Richtung Ostsee jeweils die Liebe ihres Lebens. Beide sind verheiratet, doch schnell ist ihnen klar,…
Shares: Painters, Travel
Business Basics
A brand new collection of essential management skills and best practices from world-renowned experts… in a convenient e-format, at a great price! Your complete modern management library: today’s most crucial skills and best practices for success! From finance to strategy, leadership to communication, these four outstanding books bring together the skills and best practices every manager and…
Shares: Textbooks for foreign speakers, English language
China Road
Route 312 is the Chinese Route 66. It flows three thousand miles from east to west, passing through the factory towns of the coastal areas, through the rural heart of China, then up into the Gobi Desert, where it merges with the Old Silk Road. The highway witnesses every part of the social and economic revolution that is turning China upside down.In this utterly surprising and deeply personal…
Shares: Manners and customs, Travel, Social life and customs
1984
Winston Smith lives in a society where the government controls people every second of the day. He fights this world with love. But it's dangerous: love for another person can be punished by death - and Big Brother is always watching.
Orwell's classic story shows that there is no freedom unless ideas and beliefs can be questioned. This is as true today as when it was written, more than fifty…
Shares: Textbooks for foreign speakers, English language
Romeo and Juliet, 1750
Adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.
Shares: Textbooks for foreign speakers, English language
![Cover of The complete works of O. Henry [pseud.]](/covers/9566966.jpg)
The complete works of O. Henry [pseud.]
The FICTION & PROSE LITERATURE collection includes books from the British Library digitised by Microsoft. The collection provides readers with a perspective of the world from some of the 18th and 19th century’s most talented writers. Written for a range of audiences, these works are a treasure for any curious reader looking to see the world through the eyes of ages past. Beyond the main body of…
Shares: Manners and customs, Social life and customs
The troll garden
"This collection of Willa Cather stories - her first book of fiction and the capstone of her early career - is as relevant today as at the time of its initial publication. As different and individually distinguished as the seven stories may be, they share as their subject the role and status of the artist in American society.
The passions, ambitions, and pretensions, the cant and the pathos of…
Shares: Manners and customs, Social life and customs
Отцы и дети
Fathers and Sons takes the conflict between generations as its subject. The novel's central characters, Yevgeny Bazarov and his disciple and fellow student, Arkady Kirsanov, are self-proclaimed Nihilists: repudiators of all the received truths of art, religion, and politics-all claims to truth, in fact, except those verifiable by scientific experiment. Turgenev thrusts his snarling young radicals…
Shares: Textbooks for foreign speakers, Manners and customs, Social life and customs
The road to Little Dribbling
Twenty years ago, Bill Bryson went on a trip around Britain to discover and celebrate that green and pleasant land. The result was Notes from a Small Island, one of the bestselling travel books ever written. Now he has traveled about Britain again, by bus and train and rental car and on foot, to see what has changed -- and what hasn't. Following a route he dubs the Bryson Line, from Bognor Regis…
Shares: Manners and customs, Travel, Social life and customs
Noa Noa
Paul Gauguin fled what he called "filthy Europe" in 1891 to what he hoped would be an unspoiled paradise, Tahiti. He painted 66 magnificent can vases during the first two years he spent there and kept notes from which he later wrote Noa Noa—a journal recording his thoughts and impressions of that time.
Noa Noa—the most widely known of Gauguin's writings—is reproduced here from a rare early…
Shares: Painters, Travel, Social life and customs
Nine Stories
First published short story volume by the author of Catcher In The Rye.
Shares: English Short stories, Manners and customs, Social life and customs
Tent-life in Siberia and adventures among the Koraks and other tribes in Kamchatka and northern Asia
An account of a period living in Siberia in pursuit of a plan to carry a telegraph line across land to Europe through Siberia in consequence of the failure of efforts to carry a telegraph line to Europe under the Atlantic.
Shares: Travel, Social life and customs
Venetian life
This is a novel book. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Howells was appointed United States consul in Venice, Italy. In Venetian Life, an utterly engaging travelogue, Howells revises a series of travel letters he had written about his experiences in Venice for the Boston Advertiser. Honest in its love for (yet discomfort in) Venice, it would be followed by Italian Journeys.
Shares: Manners and customs, Travel, Social life and customs