Bücher veröffentlicht von BigfontBooks

The Twelve Chairs is a classic satirical picaresque novel by the Soviet authors Ilf and Petrov, published in 1928. Its plot follows characters attempting to obtain jewelry hidden in a chair. A sequel was published in 1931. The novel has been adapted to other media, primarily film.Ilf and Petrov gained a high profile for their two satirical novels: The Twelve Chairs (1928) and its sequel, The Little Golden Calf (1931). The two texts are connected by their main character, Ostap Bender, a con man in pursuit of elusive riches. Both books follow the exploits of Bender and his associates looking for treasure amidst contemporary Soviet reality. They were written and are set in the relatively liberal era in Soviet history, the New Economic Policy of the 1920s. The main characters generally avoid contact with lax law enforcement. Their position outside the organized, goal-driven, productive Soviet society is emphasized. It also gives the authors a convenient platform from which to look at this society and to make fun of its less attractive and less socialist aspects. These are among the most widely read and quoted books in Russian culture. The Twelve Chairs was adapted for ca. twenty movies; in the Soviet Union (by Leonid Gaidai and by Mark Zakharov), in the US (in particular by Mel Brooks), and in other countries.The two writers also traveled across the Great Depression-era United States. Ilf took many pictures throughout the journey, and the authors produced a photo essay entitled "American Photographs," published in Ogoniok magazine.

Calculus Made Easy is a book on infinitesimal calculus, initially published in 1910 by Silvanus P. Thompson. It is considered a classic and elegant introduction to the subject. The original text continues to be available as of 2023 from Murine Publication. With its epsilon-delta definition, Calculus Made Easy does not use limits. Instead, it uses a way to get close (to any degree of accuracy) to the correct answer based on Leibniz's ideas about infinitesimals. Modern nonstandard analysis and smooth infinitesimal analysis are now formally supporting it.

Les voyages de Gulliver, également connus sous le nom de Voyages dans plusieurs nations lointaines du monde, en quatre sections. Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and Then a Captain of Several Ships est une satire prose de 1726 de l'écrivain anglo-irlandais Jonathan Swift qui satirise à la fois la nature humaine et le sous-genre littéraire des contes de voyageurs . Il s'agit de l'¿uvre la plus connue de Swift et d'un classique de la littérature anglaise. Swift a affirmé qu'il a écrit Gulliver's Travels "pour gêner plutôt que détourner le monde." Le livre fut un succès instantané. Il est lu universellement, du conseil du cabinet à la crèche , a déclaré le dramaturge anglais John Gay. En 2015, Robert McCrum a publié sa liste des 100 meilleurs romans de tous les temps, qualifiant Gulliver's Travels d'un chef-d'¿uvre satirique . Le voyage commence par un bref préambule dans lequel Lemuel Gulliver décrit sa vie et son histoire avant ses voyages. Gulliver est lavé à terre après un naufrage lors de son premier voyage et devient prisonnier d'une race de gens minuscules, de moins de 6 pouces (15 cm) de haut, qui vivent sur l'île de Lilliput.

Edith Wharton's novel, The Age of Innocence, was published in 1920. It was her eighth novel, first serialized in four parts in the magazine Pictorial Review in 1920. D. Appleton & Company published it as a book later that year. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921, making Wharton the first woman to do so. Though the committee initially agreed to award the prize to Sinclair Lewis for Main Street, the judge's rejection of his book on political grounds "established Wharton as the American 'First Lady of Letters,'" according to the judges. The story occurs in upper-class, "Gilded Age" New York City in the 1870s. Wharton wrote the book in her fifties after establishing herself as a significant author in high demand by publishers. The Age of Innocence, set during Wharton's childhood, was a softer and gentler work than The House of Mirth, which she published in 1905. Wharton wrote in her autobiography that The Age of Innocence gave her "a momentary escape in returning to my childish memories of a long-vanished America. It was becoming more and more evident that 1914 had destroyed the world I had grown up in and formed. Scholars and readers agree that The Age of Innocence is fundamentally about reconciling the old and the new.

John Buchan wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps while he was sick in bed with a duodenal ulcer, an illness that followed him throughout his life and never disappeared. It was later written by Buchan's son William that the name of the book came from the fact that the author's daughter was counting the stairs at St. Cuby, a private nursing home on Cliff Promenade in Broadstairs, where Buchan was recuperating at the time.This novel was his first "shocker," as he called it-a story combining personal and political dramas. It marked a turning point in Buchan's literary career and introduced his adventuring hero, Richard Hannay. He described a "shocker" as an adventure where the events in the story are unlikely, and the reader can only just believe that they happened.After a brief legal career, Buchan simultaneously began his writing career and his political and diplomatic careers, serving as a private secretary to the administrators of various colonies in southern Africa. He eventually wrote propaganda for the British war effort during the First World War. He was elected Member of Parliament for the Combined Scottish Universities in 1927. Still, he spent most of his time on his writing career, notably The Thirty-Nine Steps and other adventure fiction.

The Travels to the West of Qiu Changchun was a record of the journey embarked on by the Taoist monk Qiu Chuji who traveled from Shandong through Central Asia to present himself before Genghis Khan.In 1220, on the invitation of Genghis Khan with a golden tablet, Qiu Chuji left his hometown in Shandong with nineteen disciples and traveled through Beijing and traveled north. In June, they reached Dexing (present-day Julu Hebei) and stayed in the Longyang Taoist Temple from summer to the end of winter. On February 1221, they resumed their journey. When asked by friends and disciples when to expect the master to return, the master answered, "In three years, three years." On February 3rd, they reached Cuiping Pass (west of Zhangjiakou), and they saw the Taihang Mountains to their south. Traveling north and then northeast, they arrived at Gailipo salt lake (now named Jiuliancheng Naoer, in the south of the Taibus Banner). From there, they went to Lake Buir, Hulunbuir, Ulan Bator, Arkhangai, Altay Mountains, Beshbalik, Dzungaria, and Samarkand and arrived at Hindu Kush of Afghanistan in 1222 and presented himself before Genghis Khan.The journey to Persia and back took three years, from 1220 to 1224. The record was written by a disciple Li Zhichang (Li Chi Ch'ang), who accompanied Qiu on the journey. The Travels consisted of two parts, the first part described the details of the travel to the West and back; the second part contained advice from Qiu Chuji to Genghis Khan.

Rilla of Ingleside is the only Canadian novel written from a woman's perspective about the First World War by a contemporary.The book is the eighth of nine books in the Anne of Green Gables series by Lucy Maud Montgomery but was the sixth "Anne" novel in publication order. This book draws the focus back onto a single character, Anne and Gilbert's youngest daughter Bertha Marilla "Rilla" Blythe. It has a more serious tone, as it takes place during World War I and the three Blythe boys-Jem, Walter, and Shirley-along with Rilla's sweetheart Ken Ford, playmates Jerry Meredith and Carl Meredith-end up fighting in Europe with the Canadian Expeditionary Force.Frederica, Maud's cousin, and best friend grew up in Park Corner, PEI, but died of the Spanish flu. Frederica may have been the model for Diana Barry, Anne of Green Gables' "bosom friend": both had unusual, non-Christian first names, and the fictional Diana's husband was named, perhaps not coincidentally, Fred. In Canada, recruiting meetings were held where ministers, such as the Reverend MacDonald, would speak of Kaiser Wilhelm II as the personification of evil, described the "Rape of Belgium" in graphic detail, and asked for young men to step up to volunteer to fight for Canada, the British Empire, and for justice, in what was described at the time as a crusade against evil. In a 1915 essay appealing to volunteers, Montgomery wrote: "I am not one of those who believe that this war will put an end to war. War is horrible, but there are things that are more horrible still, just as there are fates worse than death." Montgomery argued prior to the war that Canada had been slipping into atheism, materialism, and "moral decay," and the war had brought about a welcome revival of Christianity, patriotism, and moral strength as the Canadian people faced the challenge of the greatest war yet fought in history.

The five collected short detective stories introduce the genius of Hercule Poirot. The Hunter's Lodge CaseThe Plymouth Express AffairThe Missing WillThe Submarine PlansThe Adventure of Johnnie Waverly

The State and Revolution is considered to be Lenin's most important work on the state and has been called by Lucio Colletti "Lenin's greatest contribution to the political theory". According to the Marxologist David McLellan, "the book had its origin in Lenin's argument with Bukharin in the summer of 1916 over the existence of the state after a proletarian revolution. Bukharin had emphasized the 'withering' aspect, whereas Lenin insisted on the necessity of the state machinery to expropriate the expropriators. In fact, it was Lenin who changed his mind, and many of the ideas of State and Revolution, composed in the summer of 1917 - particularly the anti-Statist theme - were those of Bukharin".

Though born a Maronite, Gibran was influenced not only by his own religion but also by the Bahá'í Faith, Islam, and the mysticism of the Sufis. His knowledge of Lebanon's bloody history, with its destructive factional struggles, strengthened his belief in the fundamental unity of religions, something which his parents exemplified by welcoming people of various religions in their home. Connections and parallels have also been made to William Blake's work, as well as the theological ideas of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson such as reincarnation and the Over-soul. Themes of influence in his work were Arabic art, European Classicism (particularly Leonardo da Vinci) and Romanticism (Blake and Auguste Rodin), the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and more modern symbolism and surrealism.Kahlil Gibran was a Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist, also considered a philosopher although he himself rejected the title. He is best known as the author of The Prophet, which was first published in the United States in 1923 and has since become one of the best-selling books of all time, having been translated into more than 100 languages.Born in a village of the Ottoman-ruled Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate to a Maronite family, the young Gibran immigrated with his mother and siblings to the United States in 1895. Gibran was sent back to his native land by his family at the age of fifteen to enroll at the Collège de la Sagesse in Beirut. Returning to Boston upon his youngest sister's death in 1902, he lost his older half-brother and his mother the following year, seemingly relying afterwards on his remaining sister's income from her work at a dressmaker's shop for some time.

A Chinese classic of the "inner alchemy" of Taoism, this book was first translated by Richard Wilhelm (also translator, in the 1920s, of the Chinese philosophical classic the I Ching). Wilhelm, was German, and his translations from Chinese to German were later translated to English by Cary F. Baynes. According to Wilhelm, Lu Dongbin was the main originator of the material presented in the book suggests that the material is from Quanzhen School founder Wang Chongyang, a student of Lu Dongbin).Despite the varieties of impressions, interpretation and opinion expressed by translators, the meditation technique described by The Secret of the Golden Flower is a straightforward, silent method; the book's description of meditation has been characterized as "Zen with details". The meditation technique, set forth in poetic language, reduces to a formula of sitting, breathing, and contemplating.According to those in the modern mystical move several of the meditation techniques in the book are said to have been based on the Judeo-Christian Meditation practice known as Tohu Wa-Bohu which has been used as a precursor to the practices mentioned in the Secret of the Golden Flower.

The novel is set in the fictional Massachusetts town of Durham shortly after World War I. The Pentland family is rich and part of the upper class, but their world is rapidly changing. The old Congregational church the Pentlands long favored has disbanded as more and more WASPs have left Durham, replaced by immigrant Roman Catholics with very different religious customs. The Pentlands once ruled upper-class society in Durham, and still do. But even upper-class society is changing: Many of the "old line" families have either died off or moved away, while many nouveaux riches have moved into the area who do not share the same old-fashioned values and observe the same old-fashioned norms of behavior that the Pentlands do.