Quirky, bizarre, tragic, fiendishly funny, The Hotel New Hampshire is anything but a conventional family saga, though a family saga it certainly is. The Berry family are different. Love abounds - both healthy and incestuous. It is the overwhelming desire of the Berry father to run a hotel, which he does, with dubious success in both a former girls' school in New Hampshire, and in Vienna. It is the Berry children who grab the readers' attention, sympathies and love - all five of them: Frank (the eldest), Franny (the weirdest), John (the narrator), Lily (the writer) and Egg (the youngest). When Irving, or rather John, writes 'Frank's queer, Franny's weird, Lily's small and Egg is Egg' the initiated reader can do no other than shout a deafening 'yes, I know what you mean!' From there on,

A man fell from a very tall building. Why didn’t he die? Why did a dead woman have a frozen chicken under her hat? What fell out of an old man’s ear, and why did everybody laugh? And how did a cow fly? Find the answers in these strange stories.

The World According to Garp is a comic and compassionate coming-of-age novel that established John Irving as one of the most imaginative writers of his generation. A worldwide bestseller since its publication in 1978, Irving's classic is filled with stories inside stories about the life and times of T. S. Garp, novelist and bastard son of Jenny Fields - a feminist leader ahead of her time. Beyond that, The World According to Garp virtually defies synopsis.

Eleven-year-old Owen Meany, playing in a Little League baseball gane in Gravesend, New Hampshire, hits a foul ball and kills his best friend's mother. Owen doesn’t believe in accidents; he believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul is both extraordinary and terrifying. At moments a comic, self-deluded victim, but in the end the principal, tragic actor in a divine plan, Owen Meany is the most heartbreaking hero John Irving has yet created.

These stories paint colourful pictures of life in Britain and America in the past. We meet some unusual people. There’s the dreamy boy who wakes up one day to find a bird making a nest in his hair! And there’s the man who tries to catch a ghost.

NOVÉ VYDÁNÍ TOHOTO TITULU BUDE DOSTUPNÉ AŽ NA KONCI ROKU 2011 !

Fred 'Bogus' Trumper is a wayward knight-errant in the battle of the sexes and the pursuit of happiness. He also happens to have a complaint more serious than Portnoy's. Yet he stubbornly clings to the notion that he'll make something of his life, and is about to commit himself to a second marriage that bears remarkable resemblance to his first. The Water-Method Man is a work of consummate artistry and comic invention, bizarre imagery and sharp social and psychological observation.

Severin Winter is not a man to take things lightly. His loving, like his wrestling, is decidedly heavyweight…a fact not lost on Utch, a lovely Viennese lady whose husband is rather taken (literally) by the delicate Edith, Severin's underweight wife. A bizarre menage a quatre is the result of these convoluted desires as Irving blends farce and tragedy in another bubbling, brilliant novel.

Set among the apple orchards of rural Maine, it is a perverse world in which Homer Wells' odyssey begins. As the oldest unadopted offspring at St Cloud's orphanage, he learns about the skills which, one way or another, help young and not-so-young women, from Wilbur Larch, the orphanage's founder, a man of rare compassion with an addiction to ether. Dr Larch loves all his orphans, especially Homer Wells. It is Homer's story we follow, from his early apprenticeship in the orphanage, to his adult life running a cider-making factory and his strange relationship with the wife of his closest friend.

Business Objectives - kurz pro manažery a studenty obchodní angličtiny, kteří dosáhli mírně pokročilé úrovně.

An amusing video training package based on the syllabus of the Business Objectives course.Key features
The video consists of eight short comic episodes which can be used in any order.
It covers all the essential language functions encountered by students who need to use English in a business context.
Each unit focuses on a core business communication skill, e.g., Telephoning, Planning ahead, and Presenting facts and figures.
The functional element is combined with a strong grammar and vocabulary syllabus, reinforced by tasks and exercises in the Activity Book.
Comedy is an important motif in the video, keeping students entertain