Proud Promise

Proud Promise
Author: Jean Huon
Publisher:
Total Pages: 199
Release: 1995
Genre: France
ISBN: 9780889351868

Proud Beggars

Proud Beggars
Author: Albert Cossery
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2011-12-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1590174631

Early in Proud Beggars, a brutal and motiveless murder is committed in a Cairo brothel. But the real mystery at the heart of Albert Cossery’s wry black comedy is not the cause of this death but the paradoxical richness to be found in even the most materially impoverished life. Chief among Cossery’s proud beggars is Gohar, a former professor turned whorehouse accountant, hashish aficionado, and street philosopher. Such is his native charm that he has accumulated a small coterie that includes Yeghen, a rhapsodic poet and drug dealer, and El Kordi, an ineffectual clerk and would-be revolutionary who dreams of rescuing a consumptive prostitute. The police investigator Nour El Dine, harboring a dark secret of his own, suspects all three of the murder but finds himself captivated by their warm good humor. How is it that they live amid degrading poverty, yet possess a joie de vivre that even the most assiduous forces of state cannot suppress? Do they, despite their rejection of social norms and all ambition, hold the secret of contentment? And so this short novel, considered one of Cossery’s masterpieces, is at once biting social commentary, police procedural, and a mischievous delight in its own right.

Works

Works
Author: Charles Dickens
Publisher:
Total Pages: 458
Release: 1890
Genre:
ISBN:

The Rules of Perspective

The Rules of Perspective
Author: Adam Thorpe
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2006-03-07
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0805080422

In April 1945, as a shell from the advancing American army tears through the roof of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, acting museum director Heinrich Hoffer and three of his colleague seek refuge from the bombardment in the museum's vaults.