Bøker av Kevin McDermott

They Imagine Texas is the story of six lives, two deaths and Perros Salvajes County.On a vacant Sunday morning a 28-year-old teacher, Katherine Moliere, is out for a solitary run when she observes a man in a playground knock his son to the ground. Moliere, righteous in her way, intervenes. The man Moliere encounters is Tibor Rauscha, prominent in Texas politics and the wealthiest person in Perros Salvajes. When Moliere crosses his path Rauscha has recently divorced wife one and is engaged to wife two, Fanny DaCosta.None of them know it but Moliere's encounter at the playground has set in motion a sequence in which little things blow up into big ones. When they cross paths again four years later one death has already happened. Weeks later there will be another.Even then, Texas is not finished with Katherine Moliere.They Imagine Texas has been called "a broken-hearted comedy." It is a story of haunted lives and haunted houses, and a guide to the categories of justice and mercy. With camping and tacos._________________________________________________Kevin McDermott has worked around the world and written from everywhere-including Texas. His career has included journalism from France for The Washington Post and Saveur, from England for The New York Times, and from Haiti for The Atlantic. His poems and short stories have appeared on both sides of the Atlantic. A short story drawing on his reporting from Haiti, "Magic & Hidden Things," was listed among the distinguished short fiction in that year's edition of Best American Short Stories. His play, Our Intoxication, was a production of the Manhattan Theatre Festival in New York, where he lives.McDermott's previous novel, Fortunes Neck, earned comparisons to Sherwood Anderson and Tom Drury. Fortunes Neck was a New England Book Festival nominee and was subsequently nominated for the PEN/New England Award and the American Book Award.

Stalin's massive impact on Soviet history is often explained in terms of his inherent evil, personality defects and power lust.

By incorporating the most recent Western and Soviet research the authors explain the legendary complexities of Comintern history and chart its degeneration from a revolutionary internationalist organisation into an obedient instrument of Soviet foreign policy.

Few Europeans in the twentieth century have been subject to the repeated buffetings by foreign powers, ideologically driven transformations and internal upheaval of the Czechs and the Slovaks. The period of Communist rule was complex, and those who gleefully overthrew the regime in 1989 were the very grandchildren of those who had voted for Communism with hope in the free elections of 1946. This concise account includes both political and social history, analysing half a century of Communism from at all strata of society. Kevin McDermott is equally intrigued by those in power and ordinary citizens, asking what motivates a young Czech worker-believer to join the Communist Party in the early 1950s, enrol in the People's Militia and remain in the party during the dark years of 'normalisation', yet end up welcoming the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Using Czech and Slovak archival sources and the most recent historiography, McDermott challenges the still dominant 'totalitarian' paradigm and argues that the forty year communist experience in Czechoslovakia cannot simply be dismissed as a Soviet-imposed aberration.

Valentina, the president's daughter, ventures out of the protected Citadel for the first time with her friends Damian and Pippa. Outside the Green Zone, the island is teeming with refugees who have fled their homes because of flood or fire. What responsibility does Val have to these people? And will she survive the Badlands?

An intimate photographic tour of Edward Gorey's strange and wonderful house.