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The 158-Pound Marriage
''The 158-Pound Marriage'' is the third novel by American author John Irving. The book explores the sexual revolution-era trend of " swinging" (partner-swapping) via a glimpse into the lives of two couples in a small New England college town who enter casually into such an affair, with disastrous consequences. Plot summary The narrator (who never identifies himself by name) is a college professor and a relatively unsuccessful author of historical novels. While doing research in Vienna, Austria, he met Utch, an orphaned survivor of the German occupation and the Russian siege at the end of World War II. At the opening of the novel, the narrator and Utch are married with two children and live a relatively placid existence until, at a faculty party, they become acquainted with Severin Winter, a Viennese-born professor of German and coach of the school's wrestling team, and his wife Edith, a WASP from a privileged background (she met her husband in Vienna while on a buying trip for MO ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Irving
John Winslow Irving (born John Wallace Blunt Jr.; March 2, 1942) is an American-Canadian novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter. Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim after the international success of ''The World According to Garp'' in 1978. Many of Irving's novels, including ''The Hotel New Hampshire'' (1981), ''The Cider House Rules'' (1985), ''A Prayer for Owen Meany'' (1989), and ''A Widow for One Year'' (1998), have been bestsellers. He won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in the 72nd Academy Awards (1999) for his script of ''The Cider House Rules''."John Irving 1999 Acceptance Speech on Winning the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay" ''oscars.org'' Five of his novels have been adapted into films (''Garp'', ''H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis powers. World War II was a total war that directly involved more than 100 million personnel from more than 30 countries. The major participants in the war threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. Aircraft played a major role in the conflict, enabling the strategic bombing of population centres and deploying the only two nuclear weapons ever used in war. World War II was by far the deadliest conflict in human history; it resulted in 70 to 85 million fatalities, mostly among civilians. Tens of millions died due to genocides (including the Holocaust), starvation, ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Novels About Writers
A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the la, novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ''novellus'', diminutive of ''novus'', meaning "new". Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, John Cowper Powys, preferred the term "romance" to describe their novels. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, in Chivalric romance, and in the tradition of the Italian renaissance novella.Margaret Anne Doody''The True Story of the Novel'' New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, rept. 1997, p. 1. Retrieved 25 April 2014. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, especially the histori ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1974 American Novels
Major events in 1974 include the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis and the resignation of President of the United States, United States President Richard Nixon following the Watergate scandal. In the Middle East, the aftermath of the 1973 Yom Kippur War determined politics; following List of Prime Ministers of Israel, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir's resignation in response to high Israeli casualties, she was succeeded by Yitzhak Rabin. In Europe, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, invasion and occupation of northern Cyprus by Turkey, Turkish troops initiated the Cyprus dispute, the Carnation Revolution took place in Portugal, and Chancellor of Germany, Chancellor of West Germany Willy Brandt resigned following an Guillaume affair, espionage scandal surrounding his secretary Günter Guillaume. In sports, the year was primarily dominated by the 1974 FIFA World Cup, FIFA World Cup in West Germany, in which the Germany national football team, German national team won the championshi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Iowa
Iowa () is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States, bordered by the Mississippi River to the east and the Missouri River and Big Sioux River to the west. It is bordered by six states: Wisconsin to the northeast, Illinois to the east and southeast, Missouri to the south, Nebraska to the west, South Dakota to the northwest, and Minnesota to the north. During the 18th and early 19th centuries, Iowa was a part of French Louisiana and Spanish Louisiana; its state flag is patterned after the flag of France. After the Louisiana Purchase, people laid the foundation for an agriculture-based economy in the heart of the Corn Belt. In the latter half of the 20th century, Iowa's agricultural economy transitioned to a diversified economy of advanced manufacturing, processing, financial services, information technology, biotechnology, and green energy production. Iowa is the 26th most extensive in total area and the 31st most populous of the 50 U.S. states, with a populat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Play Date
Play date or playdate is an expression, primarily used in the United States, for an arranged appointment for children to meet and play. It should not be confused with dating as there is no implied romantic component. Play dates have become common because the work schedules for busy parents, along with media warnings about leaving children unattended, prevent the kind of play that children of other generations participated in. Play dates are also arranged by destinations that feature child-friendly programs like museums, parks, or playgrounds. The intention of a play date is to give children time to interact freely in a less structured environment than other planned activities might provide. Play dates are different from organized activities or scheduled sports Sport pertains to any form of competitive physical activity or game that aims to use, maintain, or improve physical ability and skills while providing enjoyment to participants and, in some cases, entertainm ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Museum Of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of the largest and most influential museums of modern art in the world. MoMA's collection offers an overview of modern and contemporary art, including works of architecture and design, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, prints, illustrated and artist's books, film, and electronic media. The MoMA Library includes about 300,000 books and exhibition catalogs, more than 1,000 periodical titles, and more than 40,000 files of ephemera about individual artists and groups. The archives hold primary source material related to the history of modern and contemporary art. It attracted 1,160,686 visitors in 2021, an increase of 64% from 2020. It ranked 15th on the list of most visited art museums in the world in 2021.'' The Art Newspaper'' an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
White Anglo-Saxon Protestant
In the United States, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants or WASPs are an ethnoreligious group who are the white, upper-class, American Protestant historical elite, typically of British descent. WASPs dominated American society, culture, and politics for most of the history of the United States. From the 1950s, the New Left criticized the WASP hegemony and disparaged them as part of "The Establishment". Although the social influence of wealthy WASPs has declined since the 1940s, the group continues to play a central role in American finance, politics and philanthropy. ''Anglo-Saxon'' refers to people of British ancestry, but ''WASP'' is sometimes used more broadly by sociologists and others to include all Protestant Americans of Northern European or Northwestern European ancestry. ''WASP'' is also used for elites in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The 1998 ''Random House Unabridged Dictionary'' says the term is "sometimes disparaging and offensive". Naming The Angles and Saxons ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Collegiate Wrestling
Collegiate wrestling (also known as folkstyle wrestling) is the form of wrestling practiced at the college and university level in the United States. This style of wrestling, with some slight modifications, is also practiced at high school and middle school levels, and also among younger participants. The rules and style of collegiate or folkstyle wrestling differs from other styles of wrestling that are practiced around the world such as those in the Olympic Games, freestyle wrestling and Greco-Roman wrestling. Women's wrestling at the US college level uses two different rulesets. The National Wrestling Coaches Association, whose women's division is now recognized by the NCAA as part of its Emerging Sports for Women program, uses the freestyle ruleset as defined by the sport's international governing body, United World Wrestling. The National Collegiate Wrestling Association, a separate governing body that conducts competition for colleges and universities parallel to but outsid ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated between the Baltic and North seas to the north, and the Alps to the south; it covers an area of , with a population of almost 84 million within its 16 constituent states. Germany borders Denmark to the north, Poland and the Czech Republic to the east, Austria and Switzerland to the south, and France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and the Netherlands to the west. The nation's capital and most populous city is Berlin and its financial centre is Frankfurt; the largest urban area is the Ruhr. Various Germanic tribes have inhabited the northern parts of modern Germany since classical antiquity. A region named Germania was documented before AD 100. In 962, the Kingdom of Germany formed the bulk of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th ce ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anschluss
The (, or , ), also known as the (, en, Annexation of Austria), was the annexation of the Federal State of Austria into the German Reich on 13 March 1938. The idea of an (a united Austria and Germany that would form a " Greater Germany") began after the unification of Germany excluded Austria and the German Austrians from the Prussian-dominated German Empire in 1871. Following the end of World War I with the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1918, the newly formed Republic of German-Austria attempted to form a union with Germany, but the Treaty of Saint Germain (10 September 1919) and the Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919) forbade both the union and the continued use of the name "German-Austria" (); and stripped Austria of some of its territories, such as the Sudetenland. Prior to the , there had been strong support in both Austria and Germany for unification of the two countries. In the immediate aftermath of the dissolution of the Habsburg monarchy—with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Random House
Random House is an American book publisher and the largest general-interest paperback publisher in the world. The company has several independently managed subsidiaries around the world. It is part of Penguin Random House, which is owned by German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. History Random House was founded in 1927 by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer, two years after they acquired the Modern Library imprint from publisher Horace Liveright, which reprints classic works of literature. Cerf is quoted as saying, "We just said we were going to publish a few books on the side at random," which suggested the name Random House. In 1934 they published the first authorized edition of James Joyce's novel ''Ulysses'' in the Anglophone world. ''Ulysses'' transformed Random House into a formidable publisher over the next two decades. In 1936, it absorbed the firm of Smith and Haas—Robert Haas became the third partner until retiring and selling his share back to Cerf and Klopfer in 19 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
