In The Idiot, the saintly Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from a Swiss sanatorium and finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with wealth, power, and sexual conquest. He soon becomes entangled in a love triangle with a notorious kept woman, Nastasya, and a beautiful young girl, Aglaya. Extortion and scandal escalate to murder, as Dostoevsky's "positively beautiful man" clashes with the emptiness of a society that cannot accommodate his innocence and moral idealism. The Idiot is both a powerful indictment of that society and a rich and gripping masterpiece.
From...
In The Idiot, the saintly Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from a Swiss sanatorium and finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with w...
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) The only complete edition of stories by the undisputed master of detective literature, collected here for the first time in one volume, including some stories that have been unavailable for decades. When Raymond Chandler turned to writing at the age of forty-five, he began by publishing stories in pulp magazines such as "Black Mask" before later writing his famous novels. These stories are where Chandler honed his art and developed his uniquely vivid underworld, peopled with good cops and bad cops, informers and extortionists, lethally predatory blondes...
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) The only complete edition of stories by the undisputed master of detective literature, collected here for the first...
A generous and varied selection-the only hardcover edition available-of the literary and political writings of one of the greatest essayists of the twentieth century.
Although best known as the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four, George Orwell left an even more lastingly significant achievement in his voluminous essays, which dealt with all the great social, political, and literary questions of the day and exemplified an incisive prose style that is still universally admired. Included among the more than 240 essays in this volume are Orwell's...
A generous and varied selection-the only hardcover edition available-of the literary and political writings of one of the greatest essayist...
The doppelganger, the ghostly double infecting the soul, was a popular fictional subject for late nineteenth-century writers, and it found its most brilliant realization in Robert Louis Stevenon's story of Dr Jekyll, whose reckless genius allows him to bring his own appalling double to life. The finest horror story in our language, Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde is also a metaphysical fairy-tale of stunning perspicacity. Also included in this collection are Markheim, A Lodging for the Night, Thrawn Janet, The Body-Snatcher and The Misadventures of John Nicholson. (Book Jacket Status:...
The doppelganger, the ghostly double infecting the soul, was a popular fictional subject for late nineteenth-century writers, and it found its most...
The title of the novel comes from the Yorkshire manor on the moors of the story. The narrative centres on the all-encompassing, passionate, but ultimately doomed love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, and how this unresolved passion eventually destroys them and the people around them. Virginia Woolf said of Emily Bronte that her writing could "make the wind blow and the thunder roar," and so it does in Wuthering Heights. Catherine Earnshaw, Heathcliff, and the windswept moors that are the setting of their mythic love are as immediately stirring to the reader of today as...
The title of the novel comes from the Yorkshire manor on the moors of the story. The narrative centres on the all-encompassing, passionate, but ultima...
(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed) An immediate success on its publication in 1726, GULLIVER'S TRAVELS was read, as John Gay put it, -from the cabinet council to the nursery.- Dean Swift's great satire is presented here in its unexpurgated entirety.
(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed) An immediate success on its publication in 1726, GULLIVER'S TRAVELS was read, as John Gay put it, -from the cab...
Isabel Archer, a beautiful, intelligent, and headstrong American girl newly endowed with wealth and embarked in Europe on a treacherous journey to self-knowledge, is delineated with a magnificence that is at once casual and tense with force and insight. The characters with whom she is entangled--the good man and the evil one, between whom she wavers, and the mysterious witchlike woman with whom she must do battle--are each rendered with a virtuosity that suggests dazzling imaginative powers. And the scene painting--in England and Italy--provides a continuous visual pleasure while always...
Isabel Archer, a beautiful, intelligent, and headstrong American girl newly endowed with wealth and embarked in Europe on a treacherous journey to ...
A panoramic satire of English society during the Napoleonic Wars, Vanity Fair is William Makepeace Thackeray's masterpiece. At its center is one of the most unforgettable characters in nineteenth-century literature: the enthralling Becky Sharp, a charmingly ruthless social climber who is determined to leave behind her humble origins, no matter the cost. Her more gentle friend Amelia, by contrast, only cares for Captain George Osborne, despite his selfishness and her family's disapproval. As both women move within the flamboyant milieu of Regency England, the political...
A panoramic satire of English society during the Napoleonic Wars, Vanity Fair is William Makepeace Thackeray's masterpiece. At its ...
One of the most accomplished and prominent novels of the Victorian era, Middlemarch is an unsurpassed portrait of nineteenth-century English provincial life. Dorothea Brooke is a young woman of fervent ideals who yearns to effect social change yet faces resistance from the society she inhabits. In this epic in a small landscape, Eliot's large cast of precisely delineated characters and the rich tapestry of their stories result in a wise, compassionate, and astute vision of human nature. As Virginia Woolf declared, George Eliot "was one of the first English novelists to discover that...
One of the most accomplished and prominent novels of the Victorian era, Middlemarch is an unsurpassed portrait of nineteenth-century English...
One of the first and most influential of English novels, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones--published in 1749--is blessed with a lively and endearing hero at the center of one of the most ingeniously constructed comic plots in fiction. Tom Jones, a foundling brought up in the household of the benevolent Squire Allworthy, falls in love with the beautiful heiress Sophia Western, whose father forbids them to marry on grounds of Tom's low birth. Tom is a lusty, high-spirited yet good-hearted soul, and after he is banished by his guardian for youthful misbehavior he heads to London to make...
One of the first and most influential of English novels, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones--published in 1749--is blessed with a lively and endeari...