Presents a collection of adventures starring Lulu Moppet and her neighborhood pals.

1001 Buildings You Must See Before You Die is a visual testament to the world's greatest achievements in architecture. Each entry includes essential information about the featured structure: who designed it, who commissioned it, key dates in construction, engineering, or design, and more. The accompanying descriptions detail the cultural, historical, geographic, and social considerations that influenced and shaped the design while stunning photographs illustrate the technical ingenuity and aesthetic brilliance of architects past and present.
The book is organized chronologically beginning with the marvels of the ancient world, such as the Ziggurat at Ur, the Parthenon, and the Colosseum, and continuing with the masterpieces of each successive era to the present day. On display is a treasure trove of the world's finest architecture from Byzantine and Gothic wonders, such as Istanbul's Hagia Sophia and Notre Dame in Paris, through the incredible wealth of the Renaissance and Baroque, such as St. Peter's in Rome and Russia's Winter Palace. The book progresses to the twentieth century with the Chrysler Building at the pinnacle of Art Deco and the rise of Modernism. It culminates with the far-reaching achievements of the past decade, such as Norman Foster's Reichstag redesign in Berlin and Herzog & de Meuron's Beijing Stadium.

The truth about one of the greatest mysteries.

Until I Find You is the story of the actor Jack Burns – his life, loves, celebrity and astonishing search for the truth about his parents.

When he is four years old, Jack travels with his mother Alice, a tattoo artist, to several North Sea ports in search of his father, William Burns. From Copenhagen to Amsterdam, William, a brilliant church organist and profligate womanizer, is always a step ahead – has always just departed in a wave of scandal, with a new tattoo somewhere on his body from a local master or “scratcher.”

Alice and Jack abandon their quest, and Jack is educated at schools in Canada and New England – including, tellingly, a girls' school in Toronto. His real education consists of his relationships with older women – from Emma Oastler, who initiates him into erotic life, to the girls of St. Hilda's, with whom he first appears on stage, to the abusive Mrs. Machado, whom he first meets when sent to learn wrestling at a local gym.

Too much happens in this expansive, eventful novel to possibly summarize it all. Emma and Jack move to Los Angeles, where Emma becomes a successful novelist and Jack a promising actor. A host of eccentric minor characters memorably come and go, including Jack's hilariously confused teacher the Wurtz; Michelle Maher, the girlfriend he will never forget; and a precocious child Jack finds in the back of an Audi in a restaurant parking lot. We learn about tattoo addiction and movie cross-dressing, “sleeping in the needles” and the cure for cauliflower ears. And John Irving renders his protagonist's unusual rise through Hollywood with the same vivid detail and range of emotions he gives to the organ music Jack hears as a child in European churches. This is an absorbing and moving book about obsession and loss, truth and storytelling, the signs we carry on us and inside us, the traces we can't get rid of.

Jack has always lived in the shadow of his absent father. But as he grows older – and when his mother dies – he starts to doubt the portrait of his father's character she painted for him when he was a child. This is the cue for a second journey around Europe in search of his father, from Edinburgh to Switzerland, towards a conclusion of great emotional force.

A melancholy tale of deception, Until I Find You is also a swaggering comic novel, a giant tapestry of life's hopes. It is a masterpiece to compare with John Irving's great novels, and restates the author's claim to be considered the most glorious, comic, moving novelist at work today.


From the Hardcover edition.

Il romanzo di John Irving è, prima di tutto, l'insolita storia d'amore tra un'artista canadese del tatuaggio, Alice, e un organista con l'ossessione di farsi tatuare tutto il corpo, William. A ricostruirla è il figlio della coppia, Jack Burns, destinato a diventare un celebre attore di Hollywood, che conosce il padre solo attraverso i racconti della madre. Dopo la morte di Alice, Jack scopre che la donna nascondeva molti misteri e si mette alla ricerca del padre. John Irving è nato nel 1942 nel New Hampshire. Autore de 'Il mondo secondo Garp', ha ricevuto numerosi premi per la sua attività di narratore e l'Oscar per la sceneggiatura del film 'Le regole della casa del sidro'.

For eight-year-old Lulu Moppet, nothing is impossible - even if the results of her efforts are impossibly imperfect. Need to quell the fury of a rambunctious two-year-old? Lulu's got a hilarious fairy tale brewing in her brain that'll do just the trick. Father needs his best suit taken to the tailor? Lulu can handle it - so long as Pop doesn't mind if she makes a few unplanned - and wholly unpredictable! - stops along the way. Have a wayward ghost in your house who needs a new home? Lulu's your girl!

Little Lulu has been taking shots at the funnybones of comics fans for nearly fifty years - but you've got another thing coming if you dare assume this means today's readers won't love her, too. As tough as she is tender-hearted, as smart as she is sassy, and as fair and generous as she is cantankerous, Lulu Moppet is a real one-of-a-kind. Now, for the first time ever, comics fans can read and relish every Little Lulu comic book story from the original, long-running Dell Comics series in Dark Horse Books' handy paperback library series! Handy, affordable, and hilarious, these thick, fun-filled volumes are bursting with stories from every angle of Lulu's world - from the far-flung fairy tales she dreams up to calm the quarrelsome tot, Alvin, to the silly slice-of-life adventures that end with impossible complexities and belly laughs for readers.

Until I Find You is the story of the actor Jack Burns – his life, loves, celebrity and astonishing search for the truth about his parents.

When he is four years old, Jack travels with his mother Alice, a tattoo artist, to several North Sea ports in search of his father, William Burns. From Copenhagen to Amsterdam, William, a brilliant church organist and profligate womanizer, is always a step ahead – has always just departed in a wave of scandal, with a new tattoo somewhere on his body from a local master or “scratcher.”

Alice and Jack abandon their quest, and Jack is educated at schools in Canada and New England – including, tellingly, a girls' school in Toronto. His real education consists of his relationships with older women – from Emma Oastler, who initiates him into erotic life, to the girls of St. Hilda's, with whom he first appears on stage, to the abusive Mrs. Machado, whom he first meets when sent to learn wrestling at a local gym.

Too much happens in this expansive, eventful novel to possibly summarize it all. Emma and Jack move to Los Angeles, where Emma becomes a successful novelist and Jack a promising actor. A host of eccentric minor characters memorably come and go, including Jack's hilariously confused teacher the Wurtz; Michelle Maher, the girlfriend he will never forget; and a precocious child Jack finds in the back of an Audi in a restaurant parking lot. We learn about tattoo addiction and movie cross-dressing, “sleeping in the needles” and the cure for cauliflower ears. And John Irving renders his protagonist's unusual rise through Hollywood with the same vivid detail and range of emotions he gives to the organ music Jack hears as a child in European churches. This is an absorbing and moving book about obsession and loss, truth and storytelling, the signs we carry on us and inside us, the traces we can't get rid of.

Jack has always lived in the shadow of his absent father. But as he grows older – and when his mother dies – he starts to doubt the portrait of his father's character she painted for him when he was a child. This is the cue for a second journey around Europe in search of his father, from Edinburgh to Switzerland, towards a conclusion of great emotional force.

A melancholy tale of deception, Until I Find You is also a swaggering comic novel, a giant tapestry of life's hopes. It is a masterpiece to compare with John Irving's great novels, and restates the author's claim to be considered the most glorious, comic, moving novelist at work today.

Il giornalista newyorkese (e dongiovanni passivo) Patrick Wallingford sta facendo un reportage in India quando si vede divorare una mano da un leone da circo. Milioni di spettatori assistono all'episodio in TV e Wallingford diventa celebre ben oltre i confini del suo paese. È un'occasione d'oro per il dottor Zajac, un famoso chirurgo di Boston, che aspetta da anni di eseguire il suo primo trapianto di mano. Zajac ha un'ex moglie che lo vuole morto, un figlio dodicenne con problemi di anoressia e un cane molto bizzarro. Proprio mentre Zajac contatta Wallingford per proporgli l'intervento, un'ammiratrice, Doris Clausen, decide di donare al giornalista la mano del marito. Il problema è che il marito è ancora vivo, giovane e in buona salute.

1. A passionate and complex theme throughout the book is the concept of a writer's imagination. 'Eddie O'Hare, who was doomed to be only autobiographical in his novels, knew better than to presume that Ruth Cole was writing about herself. He understood from the first time he read her that she was better than that' (p. 204). What role does imagination, lack of it, even fear of it, play in the lives and careers of the central characters? 2. Ruth, as a novelist, sees books as inventions based on both borrowed and imagined experiences--not necessarily personal ones. However, her best friend, Hannah, a journalist, presumes that all novels are substantially autobiographical; she sees in Ruth's books a 'Hannah' character, who is the adventurer, as well as a 'Ruth' character, who holds herself back. Explore the ideas of fiction and imagination and the autobiographical ingredients of writing. 3. What is the meaning and symbolism of the 'feet' photo? Why do you think it became kind of a talisman for Ruth? What emotions does the photo evoke in you as a reader? 4. Discuss the humor and the pathos of Ted Cole's oeuvre. What about the humor and pathos of Ted himself? Where does Ted's true imagination lie--if not in his writing? Is Ted's real talent--his passion, his art--the seduction of the prettiest and unhappiest of young mothers? Doesn't Ted pursue his seductions as passionately as his daughter will pursue her writing? 5. During that fateful summer, Eddie, the aspiring young writer, found his voice. Marion gave him his voice. 'It was losing her that had given him something to say. It was the thought of his life without Marion that provided Eddie O'Hare with the authority to write' (p. 112). Discuss the life and writing career of Eddie O'Hare: his brilliance when being truly autobiographical, and his mediocrity when it came to believability in things that were 'imagined.' 6. When Ted tells Eddie the 'story' of Thomas and Timothy's accident, he tells it in the third-person removed. 'If Marion had ever told the story, she would have stood so close to it that, in the telling of it, she would have descended into a final madness--a madness much greater than whatever madness had caused Marion to abandon her only living child' (p. 154). Examine the madness. Discuss Ted's ability--and Marion's inability--to detach. 7. How is Eddie, who appears as the most benign of characters, often the most powerful? For example, beginning with the restaurant 'fingerprinting' scene (p. 240), he gives Ruth the gift of her past, of her mother, of other realities. How does he open the door to her future? 8. Examine: 'Ruth thought of a novel as a great, untidy house, a disorderly mansion; her job was to make the place fit to live in, to give it at least the semblance of order. Only when she wrote was she unafraid' (p. 267). Discuss the idea that the books in Ruth's life and the characters in them were more fixed in Ruth's life than the flesh-and-blood people closest to her--namely, her father and her best friend. 9. Why do you think Ruth decides to marry Allan? Why was he so safe? How was he different from her 'type' of man--a type that disturbed her so? 10. Discuss the theme of humiliation in her novel-in-progress as well as Ruth's own unconscious quest for humiliation. Examine the themes of women, humiliation, and control. In Amsterdam, Ruth writes in her diary: 'The conventional wisdom is that prostitution is a kind of rape for money; in truth, in prostitution--maybe only in prostitution--the woman seems in charge' (p. 338). What do you think of this? 11. Examine the scene after she witnesses the murder. 'At last she'd found the humiliation she was looking for, but of course this was one humiliation that she wouldn't write about' (p. 375). 12. Examine the powerful car scene before Ted's suicide. As Ted is driving, Ruth reveals the shocking incident with Scott. Her tale is one of degradation. Does it have the desired effect on her father? What does she want? Was this scene about revenge--about giving back the hurt done to her? Can matters of families, of love and hate (her father is the one she most loves and hates in her life), ever really be understood? Of course this scene mirrors the driving scene where Ted tells Ruth the details of her brothers' death. Discuss. 13. What changes occur in Ruth after she becomes a widow? How do these changes finally free her to fall in love at last? 14. What kind of emotions do you feel at the ending of the book? How have the characters of Ruth, Marion, and Eddie found, in essence, their way back? How has Marion, through her books, come to terms with her grief? When she reveals to Eddie that 'grief is contagious,' is she effectively saying that her absence from her daughter's life was the only way she could love her or the only way she could not destroy her daughter?

“The Imaginary Girlfriend is a miniature autobiography detailing Irving's parallel careers of writing and wrestling. . . . Tales of encounters with writers (John Cheever, Nelson Algren, Kurt Vonnegut) are intertwined with those about his wrestling teammates and coaches. With humor and compassion, [Irving] details the few truly important lessons he learned about writing. . . . And in beefing up his narrative with anecdotes that are every bit as hilarious as the antics in his novels, Irving combines the lessons of both obsessions (wrestling and writing) . . . into a somber reflection on the importance of living well.”
–The Denver Post

While reporting a story from India, New York journalist Patrick Wallingford inadvertently becomes his own headline when his left hand is eaten by a lion. In Boston, a renowned surgeon eagerly awaits the opportunity to perform the nation's first hand transplant. But what if the donor's widow demands visitation rights with the hand? In answering this unexpected question, John Irving has written a novel that is by turns brilliantly comic and emotionally moving, offering a penetrating look at the power of second chances and the will to change.

Ruth Cole is a complex, often self-contradictory character--a 'difficult' woman.  By no means is she conventionally 'nice,' but she will never be forgotten.

Ruth's story is told in three parts, each focusing on a crucial time in her life.  When we first meet her--on Long Island, in the summer of 1958--Ruth is only four.

The second window into Ruth's life opens in the fall of 1990, when Ruth is an unmarried woman whose personal life is not nearly as successful as her literary career.  She distrusts her judgment in men, for good reason.

A Widow for One Year closes in the autumn of 1995, when Ruth Cole is a forty-one-year-old widow and mother.  She's about to fall in love for the first time.

Richly comic, as well as deeply disturbing A Widow for One Year is a multilayered love story of astonishing emotional force.  Both ribald and erotic, it is also a brilliant novel about the passage of time and the relentlessness of grief.

Irving Penn is one of the twentieth century's most distinguished practitioners of the time-honored genre of still life. Following the venerable tradition of Chardin and other great still life painters, Penn brings his own astute and austere eye to the subject in photographs taken over the past sixty years. From his innovative and ongoing work for the editorial pages of Vogue to the harsher personal work of his later years, which explores the visual intrigue of such inconsequential objects as street trash, bones, and cigarette butts, he has created images that have a wit, simplicity, and edginess that set his work apart. These are photographs that can shock as well as delight.

'Non piangere tesoro. Siamo soltanto Eddie ed io.' Marion non riesce a trovare altra risposta allo sguardo della figlia Ruth, quattro anni, quando questa la sorprende in intima compagnia del giovane Eddie. È l'estate del 1958, la prima tappa della vita di Ruth, segnata dall'impossibile relazione con la madre, in perpetuo lutto per la morte prematura dei due figli maggiori in un tragico incidente stradale. Ruth diventa adulta, si realizza professionalmente, ma è sola, in continua competizione con il padre. Passano più di trent'anni da quell'estate del '58. Ruth si sposa, rimane vedova, si innamora ancora, proprio di Eddie, ormai cinquantenne, celebre autore di romanzi. Una saga contemporanea romantica ed erotica, umoristica e drammatica.

After two producers, four directors, thirteen years, and uncounted rewrites, the movie version of John Irving's acclaimed novel, The Cider House Rules, at last made it to the big screen. Here is the author's account of the novel-to-film process. Anecdotal, affectionate, and delightfully candid, My Movie Business dazzles with Irving's incomparable wit and style.

Un giorno qualunque dell'estate 1953, con una palla lanciata durante una partita di baseball, Owen Meany uccide per sbaglio l'adorata madre del suo più caro compagno di giochi, John Wheelwright. Un'amicizia, quella tra i due ragazzi, resa speciale dall'unicità di Owen, che, incredibilmente minuto e dotato di un'eterea vocetta nasale, catalizza le attenzioni di chiunque lo incontri. Acuto e introspettivo, polemico e riflessivo, filosofo e fervido credente, è lui che, dopo la prematura scomparsa della madre di John, veglia sull'amico, inducendolo a terminare gli studi e a sfuggire all'arruolamento per il Vietnam. Owen Meany diviene così il ritratto di una creatura eccezionale, toccante, comica e al contempo fatale.

First published in 1985, The Cider House Rules is John Irving's sixth novel. Set in rural Maine in the first half of this century, it tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch--saint and obstetrician, founder and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Cloud's, ether addict and abortionist. It is also the story of Dr. Larch's favorite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted.

Irving is one of America's most original and memorable literary talents, and amongst his novels are the bestselling titles }The Cider House Rules{ and }A Prayer For Owen Meany{. This is the paperback edition of his latest highly acclaimed novel

1. A passionate and complex theme throughout the book is the concept of a writer's imagination. 'Eddie O'Hare, who was doomed to be only autobiographical in his novels, knew better than to presume that Ruth Cole was writing about herself. He understood from the first time he read her that she was better than that' (p. 204). What role does imagination, lack of it, even fear of it, play in the lives and careers of the central characters? 2. Ruth, as a novelist, sees books as inventions based on both borrowed and imagined experiences--not necessarily personal ones. However, her best friend, Hannah, a journalist, presumes that all novels are substantially autobiographical; she sees in Ruth's books a 'Hannah' character, who is the adventurer, as well as a 'Ruth' character, who holds herself back. Explore the ideas of fiction and imagination and the autobiographical ingredients of writing. 3. What is the meaning and symbolism of the 'feet' photo? Why do you think it became kind of a talisman for Ruth? What emotions does the photo evoke in you as a reader? 4. Discuss the humor and the pathos of Ted Cole's oeuvre. What about the humor and pathos of Ted himself? Where does Ted's true imagination lie--if not in his writing? Is Ted's real talent--his passion, his art--the seduction of the prettiest and unhappiest of young mothers? Doesn't Ted pursue his seductions as passionately as his daughter will pursue her writing? 5. During that fateful summer, Eddie, the aspiring young writer, found his voice. Marion gave him his voice. 'It was losing her that had given him something to say. It was the thought of his life without Marion that provided Eddie O'Hare with the authority to write' (p. 112). Discuss the life and writing career of Eddie O'Hare: his brilliance when being truly autobiographical, and his mediocrity when it came to believability in things that were 'imagined.' 6. When Ted tells Eddie the 'story' of Thomas and Timothy's accident, he tells it in the third-person removed. 'If Marion had ever told the story, she would have stood so close to it that, in the telling of it, she would have descended into a final madness--a madness much greater than whatever madness had caused Marion to abandon her only living child' (p. 154). Examine the madness. Discuss Ted's ability--and Marion's inability--to detach. 7. How is Eddie, who appears as the most benign of characters, often the most powerful? For example, beginning with the restaurant 'fingerprinting' scene (p. 240), he gives Ruth the gift of her past, of her mother, of other realities. How does he open the door to her future? 8. Examine: 'Ruth thought of a novel as a great, untidy house, a disorderly mansion; her job was to make the place fit to live in, to give it at least the semblance of order. Only when she wrote was she unafraid' (p. 267). Discuss the idea that the books in Ruth's life and the characters in them were more fixed in Ruth's life than the flesh-and-blood people closest to her--namely, her father and her best friend. 9. Why do you think Ruth decides to marry Allan? Why was he so safe? How was he different from her 'type' of man--a type that disturbed her so? 10. Discuss the theme of humiliation in her novel-in-progress as well as Ruth's own unconscious quest for humiliation. Examine the themes of women, humiliation, and control. In Amsterdam, Ruth writes in her diary: 'The conventional wisdom is that prostitution is a kind of rape for money; in truth, in prostitution--maybe only in prostitution--the woman seems in charge' (p. 338). What do you think of this? 11. Examine the scene after she witnesses the murder. 'At last she'd found the humiliation she was looking for, but of course this was one humiliation that she wouldn't write about' (p. 375). 12. Examine the powerful car scene before Ted's suicide. As Ted is driving, Ruth reveals the shocking incident with Scott. Her tale is one of degradation. Does it have the desired effect on her father? What does she want? Was this scene about revenge--about giving back the hurt done to her? Can matters of families, of love and hate (her father is the one she most loves and hates in her life), ever really be understood? Of course this scene mirrors the driving scene where Ted tells Ruth the details of her brothers' death. Discuss. 13. What changes occur in Ruth after she becomes a widow? How do these changes finally free her to fall in love at last? 14. What kind of emotions do you feel at the ending of the book? How have the characters of Ruth, Marion, and Eddie found, in essence, their way back? How has Marion, through her books, come to terms with her grief? When she reveals to Eddie that 'grief is contagious,' is she effectively saying that her absence from her daughter's life was the only way she could love her or the only way she could not destroy her daughter?

This is the life and times of T. S. Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields--a feminist leader ahead of her times. This is the life and death of a famous mother and her almost-famous son; theirs is a world of sexual extremes--even of sexual assassinations. It is a novel rich with 'lunacy and sorrow'; yet the dark, violent events of the story do not undermine a comedy both ribald and robust. In more than thirty languages, in more than forty countries--with more than ten million copies in print--this novel provides almost cheerful, even hilarious evidence of its famous last line: 'In the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases.'

First published in 1985, The Cider House Rules is John Irving's sixth novel. Set in rural Maine in the first half of this century, it tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch--saint and obstetrician, founder and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Cloud's, ether addict and abortionist. It is also the story of Dr. Larch's favorite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted.

“The first of my father’s illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels.” So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they “dream on” in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel by the remarkable author of A Prayer for Owen Meany and Last Night in Twisted River.

'Irving looks cunningly beyond the eye-catching gyrations of the mating dance to the morning-after implications.' --The Washington Post The darker vision and sexual ambiguities of this erotic, ironic tale about a ménage a quatre in a New England university town foreshadow those of The World According to Garp ; but this very trim and precise novel is a marked departure from the author's generally robust, boisterous style. Though Mr. Irving's cool eye spares none of his foursome, he writes with genuine compassion for the sexual tests and illusions they perpetrate on each other; but the sexual intrigue between them demonstrates how even the kind can be ungenerous, and even the well-intentioned, destructive. 'One of the most remarkable things about John Irving's first three novels, viewed from the vantage of The World According to Garp , is that they can be read as one extended fictional enterprise. . . . The 158-Pound Marriage is as lean and concentrated as a mine shaft.' --Terrence Des Pres From the Paperback edition.

John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany is the inspiring modern classic that introduced two of the author's most unforgettable characters, boys bonded forever in childhood: the stunted Owen Meany, whose life is touched by God, and the orphaned Johnny Wheelwright, whose life is touched by Owen. From the accident that links them to the mystery that follows them–and the martyrdom that parts them–the events of their lives form a tapestry of fate and faith in a novel that is Irving at his irresistible best.

It is 1967 and two Viennese university students want to liberate the Vienna Zoo, as was done after World War II. But their good intentions have both comic and gruesome consequences, in this first novel written by a twenty-five year old John Irving, already a master storyteller.


From the Paperback edition.