Simone de Beauvoir: The Mandarins (1954–) [EN, ES, RU]

In her famous novel, The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir takes an unflinching look at Parisian intellectual society at the end of World War II. In fictionally relating the stories of those around her – Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler, Nelson Algren – de Beauvoir dissects the emotional and philosophical currents of her time. At once an engrossing drama and an intriguing political tale, The Mandarins is the emotional odyssey of a woman torn between her inner desires and her public life.

First published in French as Les Mandarins, Gallimard, 1954

English edition
Translated by Leonard M. Friedman
First published in English in 1956
Publisher Harper, London, 2005
With an Introduction by Doris Lessing
ISBN 0007203942

Wikipedia
Publisher (EN)

The Mandarins (English, trans. Leonard M. Friedman, 1956/2005, EPUB)
Los Mandarines (Spanish, PDF’d HTML)
Мандарины (Russian, trans. Наталья Полторацкая and Нина Световидова, 2005)

Bertolt Brecht: Stories of Mr. Keuner (1949–) [DE, EN, GR]

Bertolt Brecht’s Stories of Mr. Keuner is a collection of fables, aphorisms, and comments on politics, everyday life, and exile. From 1930 til his death in 1956, Brecht penned these ironic portraits of his times as he was “changing countries more often than shoes.” An ardent antifascist, Brecht roamed across Europe just ahead of Hitler’s armies-only to wind up poolside in Los Angeles and then interrogated by Senator Joe McCarthy’s infamous committee.

German edition
First published in Kalendergeschichten, 1949
Publisher of a book-length edition: Suhrkamp, 1971
108 pages

English edition
First published in Tales from the Calendar, translated by Yvonne Kapp and Michael Hamburger, 1961
New edition translated by Martin Chalmers
Publisher City Lights Publishers, San Francisco, 2001
ISBN 0872863832, 9780872863835
120 pages

Publisher (EN)

Geschichten vom Herrn Keuner (German, from Kalendergeschichten, pp 113-126, 1949)
Anecdotes of Mr Keuner (English, from Tales from the Calendar, pp 110-124, trans. Yvonne Kapp and Michael Hamburger, 1961)
Geschichten vom Herrn Keuner (German, 1971, reformatted PDF)
Ιστορίες του κ. Κόυνερ: Η διαλεκτική σαν τρόπος ζωής (Greek, trans. Petros Markaris, 1991)
Stories of Mr. Keuner (English, trans. Martin Chalmers, 2001, Chalmer’s Afterword is missing, no OCR)

Thomas Pynchon: Bleeding Edge (2013)

It is 2001 in New York City, in the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11th. Silicon Alley is a ghost town, Web 1.0 is having adolescent angst, Google has yet to IPO, Microsoft is still considered the Evil Empire. There may not be quite as much money around as there was at the height of the tech bubble, but theres no shortage of swindlers looking to grab a piece of whats left.

Maxine Tarnow is running a nice little fraud investigation business on the Upper West Side, chasing down different kinds of small-scale con artists. She used to be legally certified but her license got pulled a while back, which has actually turned out to be a blessing because now she can follow her own code of ethicscarry a Beretta, do business with sleazebags, hack into peoples bank accountswithout having too much guilt about any of it. Otherwise, just your average working momtwo boys in elementary school, an off-and-on situation with her sort of semi-ex-husband Horst, life as normal as it ever gets in the neighborhoodtill Maxine starts looking into the finances of a computer-security firm and its billionaire geek CEO, whereupon things begin rapidly to jam onto the subway and head downtown. She soon finds herself mixed up with a drug runner in an art deco motorboat, a professional nose obsessed with Hitlers aftershave, a neoliberal enforcer with footwear issues, plus elements of the Russian mob and various bloggers, hackers, code monkeys, and entrepreneurs, some of whom begin to show up mysteriously dead. Foul play, of course.

With occasional excursions into the DeepWeb and out to Long Island, Thomas Pynchon, channeling his inner Jewish mother, brings us a historical romance of New York in the early days of the internet, not that distant in calendar time but galactically remote from where weve journeyed to since.

Will perpetrators be revealed, forget about brought to justice? Will Maxine have to take the handgun out of her purse? Will she and Horst get back together? Will Jerry Seinfeld make an unscheduled guest appearance? Will accounts secular and karmic be brought into balance?

Hey. Who wants to know?

Publisher Penguin, 2013
ISBN 0698142683, 9780698142688
496 pages
via tyl3rdurd3n

Review (Evgeny Morozov, Frankfurter Allgemeine)
Review (Justin St. Clair, Los Angeles Review of Books)
Review (Jonathan Lethem, The New York Times)
Review (Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal)
Review (Tim Martin, The Telegraph)
Review (Gary Lippman, The Paris Review)

Publisher
Google books

Download (removed on 2013-10-9 upon request of the publisher)