Open University Set Books

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (S.F. Masterworks)

Amazon.co.uk ReviewProduct DescriptionSynopsisAbout the Author
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a book that most people think they remember, and almost always get more or less wrong. Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner took a lot from it, and threw a lot away; wonderful in itself, it is a flash thriller where Dick's novel is a sober meditation. As we all know, bounty hunter Rick Deckard is stalking a group of androids returned from space with short life spans and murder on their minds--where Scott's Deckard was Harrison Ford, Dick's is a financially over-stretched municipal employee with bills to pay and a depressed wife. In a world where most animals have died, and pet-keeping is a social duty, he can only afford a robot imitation, unless he gets a big financial break. The genetically warped "chickenhead" John Isidore has visions of a tomb-world where entropy has finally won. And everyone plugs in to the spiritual agony of Mercer, whose sufferings for the sins of humanity are broadcast several times a day. Prefiguring the religious obsessions of Dick's last novels, this asks dark questions about identity and altruism. After all, is it right to kill the killers just because Mercer says so? --Roz KaveneyWorld War Terminus had left the Earth devastated. Through its ruins, bounty hunter Rick Deckard stalked, in search of the renegade replicants who were his prey. When he wasn't 'retiring' them with his laser weapon, he dreamed of owning a live animal -- the ultimate status symbol in a world all but bereft of animal life. Then Rick got his chance: the assignment to kill six Nexus-6 targets, for a huge reward. But in Deckard's world things were never that simple, and his assignment quickly turned into a nightmare kaleidoscope of subterfuge and deceit -- and the threat of death for the hunter rather than the hunted...World War Terminus had left the Earth devastated. Through its ruins, bounty hunter Rick Deckard stalked, in search of the renegade replicants who were his prey. When he wasn't 'retiring' them with his laser weapon, he dreamed of owning a live animal -- the ultimate status symbol in a world all but bereft of animal life. Then Rick got his chance: the assignment to kill six Nexus-6 targets, for a huge reward. But in Deckard's world things were never that simple, and his assignment quickly turned into a nightmare kaleidoscope of subterfuge and deceit -- and the threat of death for the hunter rather than the hunted...Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) was born in Chicago but lived in California for most of his life. He went to college at Berkeley for a year, ran a record store and had his own classical-music show on a local radio station. He published his first short story, 'Beyond Lies the Wub' in 1952. Among his many fine novels are The Man in the High Castle, Time Out of Joint, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.

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Five Plays: "Ivanov", "The Seagull", "Uncle Vanya", "Three Sisters", "The Cherry Orchard" (Oxford World's Classics)

Product DescriptionSynopsis
This volume contains English translations of: Ivanov, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard, with a new Introduction by Ronald Hingley.This volume contains English translations of: Ivanov, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard, with a new Introduction by Ronald Hingley.

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The Ghost Road (The Regeneration Trilogy)

Synopsis
'"The Ghost Road" is a startlingly good novel ...With the other two volumes of the trilogy, it forms one of the richest and most rewarding works of fiction of recent times. Intricately plotted, beautifully written, skilfully assembled, tender, horrifying and funny, it lives on in the imagination, like the war it so imaginatively and so intelligently explores' - "Times Literary Supplement".

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Howl (Pocket Poets)

Synopsis
Ginsberg's love for a man with whom he shared some of life's worst experiences is celebrated in poems which were once the subject of a prolonged court trial.

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Kiss of the Spider Woman (Arena Books)

Ann McFerran, Time OutThe ScotsmanThe Sunday TimesEric Shorter, Daily TelegraphJim Hiley, The ListenerThe Daily TelegraphBook DescriptionSynopsisAbout the Author
...an assured new translation ... Puig captures the oppressive nature of his native Argentina's fascist regime...This is one of those rare plays that forces the viewer to re-examine clichés and facile preconceptions.It comes as near to being about pure undiluted love as any play I've ever seen.The title ... hardly hints at the quality of this remarkable relationship between two men with almost nothing in common......beautifully translated by Allan Baker ... stunning.The film may be lavish but it could never reach the spirit of the work more truthfully [than the play].Two prisoners share a cell in an Argentinian gaol. Valentin, a young Marxist revolutionary, is contemptuous of the older Molina who is gay, yet a deep friendship develops. But the guards are bribing Molina with the promise of an early release if he can get his cellmate to talk... Translation by Allan Baker of the stage adaptation by Manuel Puig of his own novel. First performed at the Bush Theatre, London in 1985 starring Simon Callow and Mark Rylance, it went on to become a major film (starring William Hurt) and also a musical. (Cast, 2m)Sometimes they talk all night long. In the still darkness of their cell, Molina re-weaves the glittering and fragile stories of the film he loves, and the cynical Valentin listens. Valentin believes in the just cause which makes all suffering bearable; Molina believes in the magic of love which makes all else endurable. Each has always been alone, and always - especially now - in danger of betrayal. But in cell, each surrenders to the other something of himself that he has never surrendered before.Manuel Puig (1932-1990) was an Argentinian playwright, novelist and screenwriter. He won major international prizes for his novels which have been published in at least fourteen languages. His works include the semi-autobiographical La Traicin de Rita Hayworth (Betrayed by Rita Hayworth), Boquitas Pintadas (Heartbreak Tango), Sangre de Amour Correspondido (Blood of Requited Love) and Misterio del Ramo de Rosas (Mystery of the Rose Bouquet) presented in London 1987; but he is probably best remembered for Kiss of the Spider Woman (El Beso de la Mujer Araña), first published in 1976.

Allan Baker read Spanish and French at Cambridge. Kiss of the Spider Woman was his first translation. He also did the adaptation and screenplay of Storia di una capinera (Sparrow) (1993). His television work includes Dead Entry (1987), Aliens in the Family (1987), Just William (1994), and El Tránsfuga (2003).

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Life of Galileo (Methuen Student Editions) (Student Editions)

Synopsis
The figure of Galileo, whose 'heretical' discoveries about the solar system brought him to the attention of the Inquisition, is one Brecht's most human and complex creations. Temporarily silenced by the Inquisition's threat of torture, and forced to abjure his theories publicly, Galileo continues to work in private, eventually smuggling his work out of the country. "One of the greatest poets and dramatists of our century" (Observer)

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New Selected Poems, 1966-87

Book DescriptionProduct DescriptionSynopsis
Author won the Nobel Laureate 1995An updated selection of all Heaney's books, up to and including "The Haw Lantern", which was published in 1987. The book also includes selections from "Stations", prose poems of 1975 which have never appeared except as a pamphlet.An updated selection of all Heaney's books, up to and including "The Haw Lantern", which was published in 1987. The book also includes selections from "Stations", prose poems of 1975 which have never appeared except as a pamphlet.

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Orlando: A Biography (Oxford World's Classics)

Product DescriptionSynopsis
Virginia Woolf's exuberant `biography' tells the story of the cross-dressing, sex-changing Orlando who begins life as a young noble in the sixteenth century and moves through numerous historical and geographical worlds to finish as a modern woman writer in the 1920s. The book is in part a happy tribute to the `life' that her love for Vita Sackville-West had breathed into Virginia Woolf's own day-to-day existence; it is also Woolf's light-hearted and light-handed teasing out of the assumptions that lie behind the normal conventions for writing about a fictional or historical life. In this novel, Virginia Woolf plays loose and fast: Orlando uncovers a literary and sexual revolution overnight.Virginia Woolf's exuberant `biography' tells the story of the cross-dressing, sex-changing Orlando who begins life as a young noble in the sixteenth century and moves through numerous historical and geographical worlds to finish as a modern woman writer in the 1920s. The book is in part a happy tribute to the `life' that her love for Vita Sackville-West had breathed into Virginia Woolf's own day-to-day existence; it is also Woolf's light-hearted and light-handed teasing out of the assumptions that lie behind the normal conventions for writing about a fictional or historical life. In this novel, Virginia Woolf plays loose and fast: Orlando uncovers a literary and sexual revolution overnight. This book is intended for general readers, teachers and students of English literature, and Women's Studies.

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Paradise

ReviewGuardianGuardianBook DescriptionProduct DescriptionSynopsisAbout the Author
'Many layered, violent, beautiful and strange a poetic and vividly conjured book about Africa and the brooding power of the unknown' Independent on Sunday 'An aural archive of a lost Africa Tangling travel adventures, social documentary, political indictment and a doomed love story Paradise is alive with the unexpected. In it, an obliterated world is enthrallingly retrieved' Sunday Times 'Gurnah evokes his world in poetic prose which is pure and lucid a small paradise in itself The pleasures, sadnesses and losses in all the shining facets of this book are lingering and exquisite' Guardian 'Paradise is that rare thing, a novel that is totally convincing in the vivid physical world it presents, yet transcending that world and reaching into the universal. Folk tale, travel story, drama of love and loss, by turns touching and horrifying, it is a novel to be grateful for' Barry Unsworth?Gurnah evokes his world in poetic prose which is pure and lucid ? a small paradise in itself.??The pleasures, sadnesses and losses in all the shining facets of this book are lingering and exquisite.?Shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize and published by Bloomsbury for the first time By the author of By The SeaAn Open University set text, and a core text for universities nationwideBorn in East Africa, Yusuf has few qualms about the journey he is to make. It never occurs to him to ask why he is accompanying Uncle Aziz or why the trip has been organised so suddenly, and he does not think to ask when he will be returning. But the truth is that his 'uncle' is a rich and powerful merchant and Yusuf has been pawned to him to pay his father's debts, Paradise is a rich tapestry of myth, dreams and Biblical and Koranic tradition, the story of a young boy's coming of age against the backdrop of an Africa increasingly corrupted by colonialism and violence.Born in East Africa, Yusuf has few qualms about the journey he is to make. It never occurs to him to ask why he is accompanying Uncle Aziz or why the trip has been organised so suddenly, and he does not think to ask when he will be returning. But the truth is that his 'uncle' is a rich and powerful merchant and Yusuf has been pawned to him to pay his father's debts, Paradise is a rich tapestry of myth, dreams and Biblical and Koranic tradition, the story of a young boy's coming of age against the backdrop of an Africa increasingly corrupted by colonialism and violence.Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in 1948 in Zanzibar and teaches at the University of Kent. He is the author of the novels Memory of Departure, Pilgrims Way, Dottie, Paradise, Admiring Silence and By the Sea. His fourth novel, Paradise (1994) was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prizes.

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Poetry of the Thirties (Penguin Modern Classics)

Product DescriptionSynopsis
Auden, Day, Lewis, Spender, MacNeice and the other key poets of the 'Thirties' were children of the First World War, obsessed by war and by communalism, by the class-struggle and a passionate belief in poets as people whose actions are as publically important as their poems. For them, the Spanish Civil War epitomized the mood of the times, as their symbolic obsessions were transmuted into tragic reality. But from within their strongly defined unity of ideals, an astonishingly varied body of poetry emerged. Robin Skelton has arranged the poetry to make an illuminating 'critical essay' of the period, and in his introduction he brilliantly probes the moods and mores of an intensely troubled and creative decade.Auden, Day, Lewis, Spender, MacNeice and the other key poets of the 'Thirties' were children of the First World War, obsessed by war and by communalism, by the class-struggle and a passionate belief in poets as people whose actions are as publically important as their poems. For them, the Spanish Civil War epitomized the mood of the times, as their symbolic obsessions were transmuted into tragic reality. But from within their strongly defined unity of ideals, an astonishingly varied body of poetry emerged. Robin Skelton has arranged the poetry to make an illuminating 'critical essay' of the period, and in his introduction he brilliantly probes the moods and mores of an intensely troubled and creative decade.

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Prufrock and Other Observations (Poet to Poet: An Essential Choice of Classic Verse)

Book Description
Prufrock and Other Observations is bundled free with Pushcart Prize nominee "The Diaries of Fortune"

by Daniel Oldis.

Comments on THE DIARIES OF FORTUNE:

“A delight; a great idea deftly and wistfully handled�

â€" Richard Powers, winner 2006 National Book Award.

“Pretty good story�

â€" Jonathan Franzen, winner 2001 National Book Award.

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Rebecca

Product Description

"Last Night I Dreamt
I Went To Manderley Again."

So the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter remembered the chilling events that led her down the turning drive past ther beeches, white and naked, to the isolated gray stone manse on the windswept Cornish coast. With a husband she barely knew, the young bride arrived at this immense estate, only to be inexorably drawn into the life of the first Mrs. de Winter, the beautiful Rebecca, dead but never forgotten...her suite of rooms never touched, her clothes ready to be worn, her servant -- the sinister Mrs. Danvers -- still loyal. And as an eerie presentiment of evil tightened around her heart, the second Mrs. de Winter began her search for the real fate of Rebecca...for the secrets of Manderley.

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Selected Stories (Oxford World's Classics)

Product DescriptionSynopsis
'I was jealous of her writing. The only writing I have ever been jealous of.' Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf was not the only writer to admire Mansfield's work: Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, and Elizabeth Bowen all praised her stories, and her early death at the age of thirty-four cut short one of the finest short-story writers in the English language. This selection covers the full range of Mansfield's fiction, from her early satirical stories to the subtly nuanced comedy of 'The Daughters of the Late Colonel' and the macabre and ominous 'A Married Man's Story'. The stories that pay what Mansfield calls 'a debt of love' to New Zealand are as sharply etched as the European stories, and she recreates her childhood world with mordant insight. Disruption is a constant theme, whether the tone is comic, tragic, nostalgic, or domestic, echoing Mansfield's disrupted life and the fractured expressions of Modernism. This new edition increases the selection from 27 to 33 stories and prints them in the order in which they first appeared, in the definitive texts established by Anthony Alpers.'I was jealous of her writing. The only writing I have ever been jealous of.' Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf was not the only writer to admire Mansfield's work: Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, and Elizabeth Bowen all praised her stories, and her early death at the age of thirty-four cut short one of the finest short-story writers in the English language. This selection covers the full range of Mansfield's fiction, from her early satirical stories to the subtly nuanced comedy of 'The Daughters of the Late Colonel' and the macabre and ominous 'A Married Man's Story'. The stories that pay what Mansfield calls 'a debt of love' to New Zealand are as sharply etched as the European stories, and she recreates her childhood world with mordant insight. Disruption is a constant theme, whether the tone is comic, tragic, nostalgic, or domestic, echoing Mansfield's disrupted life and the fractured expressions of Modernism. This new edition increases the selection from 27 to 33 stories and prints them in the order in which they first appeared, in the definitive texts established by Anthony Alpers.

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Sunset Song (Canongate Classics)

Synopsis
Divided between her love of the land and the harshness of farming life, young Chris Guthrie finally decides to stay in the rural community of her childhood. Yet World War I and the changes that follow make her a widow and mock the efforts of her youth.

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A Twentieth Century Literature Reader: Texts and Debates (Twentieth-Century Literature: Texts and Debates)

Product DescriptionSynopsisFrom the PublisherFrom the Back Cover
This critical reader is the essential companion to any course in twentieth-century literature.This critical reader is the essential companion to any course in twentieth-century literature. Drawing upon the work of a wide range of key writers and critics, the selected extracts provide: *a literary-historical overview of the twentieth century *insight into theoretical discussions around the purpose, value and form of literature which dominated the century *closer examination of representative texts from the period, around which key critical issues might be debated. Clearly conveying the excitement generated by twentieth-century literary texts and by the provocative critical ideas and arguments that surrounded them, this reader can be used alongside the two volumes of Debating Twentieth-Century Literature or as a core text for any module on the literature of the last century. Texts examined in detail include: Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard , Mansfield's Short Stories , poetry of the 1930s, Gibbon's Sunset Song , Eliot's Prufrock , Brecht's Galileo , Woolf's Orlando , Okigbo's Selected Poems , du Maurier's Rebecca , poetry by Ginsburg and O'Hara, Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

, Puig's Kiss of the Spiderwoman , Beckett's Waiting for Godot , Heaney's New Selected Poems 1966-1987 , Gurnah's Paradise and Barker's The Ghost Road.This book is now published and available.This critical reader is the essential companion to any course in twentieth-century literature. Drawing upon the work of a wide range of key writers and critics, the selected extracts provide:
*a literary-historical overview of the twentieth century
*insight into theoretical discussions around the purpose, value and form of literature which dominated the century
*closer examination of representative texts from the period, around which key critical issues might be debated.
Clearly conveying the excitement generated by twentieth-century literary texts and by the provocative critical ideas and arguments that surrounded them, this reader can be used alongside the two volumes of Debating Twentieth-Century Literature or as a core text for any module on the literature of the last century.
Texts examined in detail include: Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Mansfield's Short Stories, poetry of the 1930s, Gibbon's Sunset Song, Eliot's Prufrock, Brecht's Galileo, Woolf's Orlando, Okigbo's Selected Poems, du Maurier's Rebecca, poetry by Ginsburg and O'Hara, Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Puig's Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Heaney's New Selected Poems 1966-1987, Gurnah's Paradise and Barker's The Ghost Road.

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Waiting for Godot (Acting Edition)

Book Description
"Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful?" Estragon's complaint, uttered in the first act of "Waiting for Godot", is the playwright's sly joke at the expense of his own play - or rather at the expense of those in the audience who expect theatre always to consist of events progressing in an apparently purposeful and logical manner towards a decisive climax. In those terms, "Waiting for Godot" - which has been famously described as a play in which "nothing happens, twice"- scarcely seems recognizable as theatre at all. As the great English critic wrote "Waiting for Godot jettisons everything by which we recognize theatre. It arrives at the custom-house, as it were, with no luggage, no passport, and nothing to declare; yet it gets through, as might a pilgrim from Mars."

Produced at the state of the art recording studios of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation with sound effects and music.

Performed by James Blendick, Joe Dinicol, Tim MacDonald, Tom McCamus, and Stephen Ouimette

Music composed and performed by Don Horsburgh

Approximate Duration 2 Hours

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