Penguin Books Pozostałe - książki, ebooki i audiobooki

"I've been told that no one sings the word 'hunger' like I do. Or the word 'love'."Lady Sings the Blues is the inimitable autobiography of one of the greatest icons of the twentieth century. Born to a single mother in 1915 Baltimore, Billie Holiday had her first run-in with the law at aged 13. But Billie Holiday is no victim. Her memoir tells the story of her life spent in jazz, smoky Harlem clubs and packed-out concert halls, her love affairs, her wildly creative friends, he...

The old, top-down approach to leadership doesn't work any more. What we need is a more flexible, creative approach – one that empowers people to do their best work, rather than tells them to do so.In Creative Leadership, Rama Gheerawo applies the mind of a design expert to the twenty-first-century organisation. In particular, his book shows how success in the future will increasingly be dependent on a mastery of three basic principles: creativity, clarity and empathy. Drawing...

Frantz Fanon's seminal work on the trauma of colonization made him the leading anti-colonialist thinker of the twentieth century. Written at the height of the Algerian war for independence from French colonial rule and first published in 1961, it analyses the role of class, race, national culture and violence in the struggle for freedom. Fanon, himself a psychotherapist, makes clear the economic and psychological degradation inflicted by imperialism. Showing how decolonizatio...

Reading Brodsky's essays is like a conversation with an immensely erudite, hugely entertaining and witty (and often very funny) interlocutor' Wall Street JournalWatermark is Joseph Brodsky's witty, intelligent, moving and elegant portrait of Venice. Looking at every aspect of the city, from its waterways, streets and architecture to its food, politics and people, Brodsky captures its magnificence and beauty, and recalls his own memories of the place he called home for many wi...

The Hearing Trumpet is the story of 92-year-old Marian Leatherby, who is given the gift of a hearing trumpet only to discover that what her family is saying is that she is to be committed to an institution. But this is an institution where the buildings are shaped like birthday cakes and igloos, where the Winking Abbess and the Queen Bee reign, and where the gateway to the underworld is open. It is also the scene of a mysterious murder. Occult twin to Alice in Wonderland, The...

There's something nasty in suburbia. In these deliciously dark tales, the daily commute turns into a nightmarish game of hide and seek, the loving wife hides homicidal thoughts and the concerned citizen might just be an infamous serial killer. In the haunting world of Shirley Jackson, nothing is as it seems and nowhere is safe, from the city streets to the crumbling country pile, and from the small-town apartment to the dark, dark woods...

Nobody before Borges had ever attempted this strange and wonderful mixture of arcana, popular literature, national myth, the nature of time and classical themes. Now we can see it in all its intense and disturbing brilliance, certain that we will never see anything like it again' - Justin Cartwright, Independent on Sunday

West Germany, a simmering cauldron of radical protests, has produced a new danger to Britain: Karfeld, menacing leader of the opposition. At the same time Leo Harting, a Second Secretary in the British Embassy, has gone missing - along with more than forty Confidential embassy files. Alan Turner of the Foreign Office must travel to Bonn to recover them, facing riots, Nazi secrets and the delicate machinations of an unstable Europe in the throes of the Cold War.As Turner gets ...

Controversial and compelling, In Cold Blood reconstructs the murder in 1959 of a Kansas farmer, his wife and both their children. Truman Capote's comprehensive study of the killings and subsequent investigation explores the circumstances surrounding this terrible crime and the effect it had on those involved. At the centre of his study are the amoral young killers Perry Smith and Dick Hickcock, who, vividly drawn by Capote, are shown to be reprehensible yet entirely and frigh...

From the moment Karen Blixen arrived in Kenya in 1914 to manage a coffee plantation, her heart belonged to Africa. Drawn to the intense colours and ravishing landscapes, Karen Blixen spent her happiest years on the farm and her experiences and friendships with the people around her are vividly recalled in these memoirs. Out of Africa is the story of a remarkable and unconventional woman and of a way of life that has vanished for ever.

Now recognized as one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, SILENT SPRING exposed the destruction of wildlife through the widespread use of pesticides. Despite condemnation in the press and heavy-handed attempts by the chemical industry to ban the book, Rachel carson succeeded in creating a new public awareness of the environment which led to changes in government and inspired the ecological movement.

Abandoned by her husband, Amanda Wingfield comforts herself with recollections of her earlier, more gracious life in Blue Mountain when she was pursued by 'gentleman callers'. Her son Tom, a poet with a job in a warehouse, longs for adventure and escape from his mother's suffocating embrace, while Laura, her shy crippled daughter, has her glass menagerie and her memories. Amanda is desperate to find her daughter a husband, but when the long-awaited gentleman caller does arriv...

Goliarda Sapienza's The Art of Joy was written over a nine year span, from 1967 to 1976. Sapienza had been unable to find a publisher for what was to become her most celebrated work, due to its perceived immorality. The manuscript lay for decades in a chest finally being proclaimed a "forgotten masterpiece" when it was eventually published in 2005. This epic Sicilian novel, which follows its main character, Modesta, through nearly the entire span of the 20th century, is at on...

Full grown with a long, smoke-coloured beard, requiring the services of a cane and fonder of cigars than warm milk, Benjamin Button is a very curious baby indeed. And, as Benjamin becomes increasingly youthful with the passing years, his family wonders why he persists in the embarrassing folly of living in reverse. In this imaginative fable of ageing and the other stories collected here – including ‘The Cut-Glass Bowl’ in which an ill-meant gift haunts a family’s misfortunes,...

In 1939 Miller left Paris and headed out with his friend Lawrence Durrell to explore the Grecian countryside, recording their travels and discoveries. A flock of sheep nearly tramples the two as they lie naked on a beach, the Greek poet Katsmbalis stirs every rooster within earshot of the Acropolis, cold hard-boiled eggs are warmed in a village's single stove, and they stay in hotels that "have seen better days, but which have an aroma of the past". A classic in travel litera...

'How did I so unwittingly transform the joy of living into the great luxury of being alive?'Between 1967 and 1977, Clarice Lispector wrote weekly dispatches from her desk in Rio for the Jornal do Brasil. Already famous for her revolutionary, interior, metaphysical novels, in her Chronicles she turns her attention to the everyday, turning the material of her life into profound, touching and funny, tiny revelations.Observing the world around her, small encounters like hearing t...

Ahnna is haunted by the destruction of her homeland so when the wealthy kingdom of Harendell claims her as a bride for its crown prince, Ahnna is prepared to do whatever it takes to gain influence as the future queen.But she soon discovers that beneath the beautiful surface of Harendell's court lurk dark secrets and the only person who she feels she can trust is not her future husband, but his infuriating half brother, James.And it isn't long before Ahnna finds herself attrac...

Despite its manifest failures, the narrative of neoliberalism retains its grip on the public mind and the policies of governments all over the world. By this narrative, less regulation and more ‘animal spirits’ capitalism produces not only greater prosperity, but more freedom for individuals in society - and is therefore morally better.But, in The Road to Freedom Stiglitz asks, whose freedom are we – should we be – thinking about? What happens when one person’s freedom comes ...

In this ground-breaking and inspiring guide, renowned Harvard psychologist Professor Michael Norton demonstrates how turning everyday habits into rituals can improve your work, your relationships and your life.Think of the quirky traditions that you have with your friends. Or the unusual ways you and your family mark special occasions. Or the gifts your partner gives – and what you’d think if they’d bought the same for an ex. These are rituals: practices that are imbued with ...

With the Second World War only a few years in the past, and Japan still reeling from its effects, two half sisters - born to the same father but different mothers - struggle to make sense of the new world in which they are coming of age. Asako, the younger, has become obsessed with locating a third sibling, while also experiencing love for the first time, while Momoko, their father's first child - haunted by the loss of her kamikaze boyfriend and their final, disturbing days ...

First published in 1960, The Prime of Life offers an intimate, captivating picture of Simone de Beauvoir in her twenties, thirties and forties. Beginning as a recent graduate from the Sorbonne teaching high-school girls, we see de Beauvoir revel in the freedom her new financial independence brings. We see her and Jean-Paul Sartre recognise the powerful romantic and intellectual partnership they have found in one another, as they fall in love and define their own unconventiona...

A classic work that has charmed generations of readers, this collection assembles Carson McCullers's best stories, including her beloved novella "The Ballad of the Sad Café." A haunting tale of a human triangle that culminates in an astonishing brawl, the novella introduces readers to Miss Amelia, a formidable southern woman whose café serves as the town's gathering place. Among other fine works, the collection also includes "Wunderkind," McCullers's first published story wri...

Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways: the bullying Hitler loyalists the Persickes, the retired judge Fromm and the unassuming couple Otto and Anna Quangel. Then the Quangels receive the news that their beloved son has been killed fighting in France. Shocked out of their quiet existence, they begin a silent campaign of defiance, and a deadly game of cat an...

'If one criterion of a classic is its ability to reorient our most basic way of viewing an object or a concept, Eric Williams's study supremely passes that test' Seymour Drescher Arguing that the slave trade was at the heart of Britain's economic progress, Eric Williams's landmark 1944 study revealed the connections between capitalism and racism, and has influenced generations of historians ever since. Williams traces the rise and fall of the Atlantic slave trade through the ...