Harper Perennial – Knjiga.hr

Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 17:54:26 +0000

A hallucinatory road trip through the American Dream, this cult classic follows a journalist and his attorney as they descend on Las Vegas in the early 1970s, ostensibly to cover a motorcycle race. What unfolds is a surreal, drug-fueled odyssey that doubles as a biting satire of politics, media, and counterculture at the end of the 1960s. Blending reportage with wild subjectivity, the book is a landmark of “Gonzo” journalism, pioneered by its author, and captures a generation’s disillusionment with dark humor and manic energy. Readers drawn to countercultural history, experimental narrative, and sharp social critique will find it both outrageous and strangely prophetic.

American Appetites

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 19:03:35 +0000

Set in an affluent upper-class suburb in the late 1980s, this chilling tale by master storyteller Joyce Carol Oates reveals the dark side of the American Dream. A close-knit group of friends draws closer, and then apart, when scandal and tragedy erupt among them.

Wonder Boys

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 19:09:15 +0000

Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon is a darkly comedic novel following Grady Tripp, a once-promising writer and creative writing professor stalled on his sprawling second novel, now over 2,600 pages long. Set during a chaotic weekend at his university’s WordFest conference, Tripp navigates his crumbling marriage, a pregnant mistress who happens to be the university chancellor, and a troubled student, James Leer, whose impulsive acts—like shooting the chancellor’s dog and stealing a Marilyn Monroe jacket—propel a series of absurd misadventures involving dead pets, a transvestite’s tuba, and a squashed boa constrictor. Chabon’s vibrant prose blends sharp satire of literary ambition with poignant reflections on creativity, failure, and middle-aged disillusionment, cementing it as a modern classic of the genre.

Crooked Little Vein

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 15:16:32 +0000

Burned-out private dick Michael McGill needs to jump-start his career. What he gets instead is a cattle prod to the crotch. The president’s heroin-addicted chief of staff wants McGill to find the Constitution—the real one the Founding Fathers secretly devised for the time of gravest crisis. And with God, civility, and Mom’s homemade apple pie already dead or dying, that time is now. But McGill has a talent for stumbling into every imaginable depravity—and this case is driving him even deeper into America’s darkest, dankest underbelly, toward obscenities that boggle even his mind.

The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece-An Edgar Award Winner

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 17:28:10 +0000

In the predawn hours of a gloomy February day in 1994, two thieves entered the National Gallery in Oslo and made off with one of the world’s most famous paintings, Edvard Munch’s Scream. It was a brazen crime committed while the whole world was watching the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. Baffled and humiliated, the Norwegian police turned to the one man they believed could help: a half English, half American undercover cop named Charley Hill, the world’s greatest art detective. The Rescue Artist is a rollicking narrative that carries readers deep inside the art underworld — and introduces them to a large and colorful cast of titled aristocrats, intrepid investigators, and thick-necked thugs. But most compelling of all is Charley Hill himself, a complicated mix of brilliance, foolhardiness, and charm whose hunt for a purloined treasure would either cap an illustrious career or be the fiasco that would haunt him forever.

Know This: Today s Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments (Edge Question Series)

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 18:31:55 +0000

Today’s most visionary thinkers reveal the cutting-edge scientific ideas and breakthroughs you must understand. Scientific developments radically change and enlighten our understanding of the world — whether it’s advances in technology and medical research or the latest revelations of neuroscience, psychology, physics, economics, anthropology, climatology, or genetics. And yet amid the flood of information today, it’s often difficult to recognize the truly revolutionary ideas that will have lasting impact. In the spirit of identifying the most significant new theories and discoveries, John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org (The world’s smartest website — The Guardian), asked 198 of the finest minds What do you consider the most interesting recent scientific news? What makes it important? Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamondon the best way to understand complex problems * author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics Carlo Rovelli on the mystery of black holes * Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker on the quantification of human progress * TED Talks curator Chris J. Anderson on the growth of the global brain * Harvard cosmologist Lisa Randall on the true measure of breakthrough discoveries * Nobel Prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek on why the twenty-first century will be shaped by our mastery of the laws of matter * philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein on the underestimation of female genius * music legend Peter Gabriel on tearing down the barriers between imagination and reality * Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson on the surprising ability of small (and cheap) upstarts to compete with billion-dollar projects. Plus Nobel laureate John C. Mather, Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy, Wired founding editor Kevin Kelly, psychologist Alison Gopnik, Genome author Matt Ridley, Harvard geneticist George Church, Why Does the World Exist? author Jim Holt, anthropologist Helen Fisher, and more.

Busting Vegas: A True Story of Monumental Excess, Sex, Love, Violence, and Beating the Odds

Wed, 14 May 2025 11:05:47 +0000

He played in casinos around the world with a plan to make himself richer than anyone could possibly imagine — but it would nearly cost him his life. Semyon Dukach was known as the Darling of Las Vegas. A legend at age twenty-one, this cocky hotshot was the biggest high roller to appear in Sin City in decades, a mathematical genius with a system the casinos had never seen before and couldn’t stop — a system that has never been revealed until now; that has nothing to do with card counting, wasn’t illegal, and was more powerful than anything that had been tried before. Las Vegas. Atlantic City. Aruba. Barcelona. London. And the jewel of the gambling crown — Monte Carlo. Dukach and his fellow MIT students hit them all and made millions. They came in hard, with stacks of cash; big, seemingly insane bets; women hanging on their arms; and fake identities. Although they were taking classes and studying for exams during the week, over the weekends they stormed the blackjack tables only to be harassed, banned from casinos, threatened at gunpoint, and beaten in Vegas’s notorious back rooms. The stakes were high, the dangers very real, but the players were up to the challenges, consequences be damned. There was Semyon Dukach himself, bored with school and broke; Victor Cassius, the slick, brilliant MIT grad student who galvanized the team; Owen Keller, with stunning ability but a dark past that would catch up to him; and Allie Simpson, bright, clever, and a feast for the eyes. In the classroom, they were geeks. On the casino floor, they were unstoppable. Busting Vegas is Dukach’s unbelievably true story; a riveting account of monumental greed, excess, hubris, sex, love, violence, fear, and statistics that is high-stakes entertainment at its best.

How to Make it in Hollywood

Wed, 14 May 2025 11:05:06 +0000

Renowned psychotherapist and career counselor Linda Buzzell is the expert in knowing how to create and develop a career in Hollywood. With this book, she shows you how to look at your personality, your strengths, your weaknesses, your special skills, and your talents in order to target your personal goals and maximize your career success. She then explains all the jobs in Hollywood and how to find them, get them, and advance through each stage in your career. How To Make It in Hollywood includes everything you need to know about agents, managers, lawyers, the casting couch, chutzpah, schmoozing, networking, Godfather Calls, rhino skin, Power Rolodexes, handling rejection, constant unemployment, and keeping yourself on the track to your dreams when real life keeps telling you to give it all up and move back to Cincinnati!

Welcome to Night Vale

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 19:01:15 +0000

From the creators of the wildly popular Welcome to Night Vale podcast comes an imaginative mystery of appearances and disappearances that is also a poignant look at the ways in which we all struggle to find ourselves…no matter where we live. Located in a nameless desert somewhere in the great American Southwest, Night Vale is a small town where ghosts, angels, aliens, and government conspiracies are all commonplace parts of everyday life. It is here that the lives of two women, with two mysteries, will converge. Nineteen-year-old Night Vale pawn shop owner Jackie Fierro is given a paper marked King City by a mysterious man in a tan jacket holding a deer skin suitcase. Everything about him and his paper unsettles her, especially the fact that she can’t seem to get the paper to leave her hand, and that no one who meets this man can remember anything about him. Jackie is determined to uncover the mystery of King City and the man in the tan jacket before she herself unravels. Night Vale PTA treasurer Diane Crayton’s son, Josh, is moody and also a shape shifter. And lately Diane’s started to see her son’s father everywhere she goes, looking the same as the day he left years earlier, when they were both teenagers. Josh, looking different every time Diane sees him, shows a stronger and stronger interest in his estranged father, leading to a disaster Diane can see coming, even as she is helpless to prevent it. Diane’s search to reconnect with her son and Jackie’s search for her former routine life collide as they find themselves coming back to two words: King City. It is King City that holds the key to both of their mysteries, and their futures…if they can ever find it.

Howl

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 18:38:06 +0000

First published in 1956, Allen Ginsberg`s Howl is a prophetic masterpiece an epic raging against dehumanizing society that overcame censorship trials and obscenity charges to become one of the most widely read poems of the century. This annotated version of Ginsberg`s classic is the poet`s own re-creation of the revolutionary work`s composition process as well as a treasure trove of anecdotes, an intimate look at the poet`s writing techniques, and a veritable social history of the 1950s.