A famous legend surrounding the creation of Anna Karenina tells us that Tolstoy began writing a cautionary tale about adultery and ended up falling in love with his magnificent heroine. It is rare to find a reader of the book who doesn't experience the same kind of emotional upheaval. Anna Karenina is filled with major and minor characters who exist in their own right and fully embody their mid-nineteenth-century Russian milieu, but it still belongs entirely to the woman whose name it bears, whose portrait is one of the truest ever made by a writer. Translated by Louise and...
A famous legend surrounding the creation of Anna Karenina tells us that Tolstoy began writing a cautionary tale about adultery and ended up ...
The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, published just before his death in 1881, chronicles the bitter love-hate struggle between the outsized Fyodor Karamazov and his three very different sons. It is above all the story of a murder, told with hair-raising intellectual clarity and a feeling for the human condition unsurpassed in world literature. Dostoevsky's towering reputation as one of the handful of thinkers who forged the modern sensibility has sometimes obscured the purely novelistic virtues-brilliant characterizations, flair for suspense and...
The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, published just before his death in 1881, chronicles the bitter love-hate strug...
When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause celebre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. But Vladimir Nabokov's wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as one of the twentieth century's novels of record not to the controversy its material aroused but to its author's use of that material to tell a love story almost shocking in its beauty and tenderness.
Awe and exhilaration-along with heartbreak and mordant wit-abound in this account of the aging...
When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause celebre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it han...
That Machiavelli's name has become synonymous with cold-eyed political calculation only heightens the intrinsic fascination of The Prince-the world's preeminent how-to manual on the art of getting and keeping power, and one of the literary landmarks of the Italian Renaissance. Written in a vigorous, straightforward style that reflects its author's realism, this treatise on states, statecraft, and the ideal ruler is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how human society actually works.
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
That Machiavelli's name has become synonymous with cold-eyed political calculation only heightens the intrinsic fascination of The Princ...
Ivan Turgenev s first literary masterpiece is a sweeping portrayal of the magnificent nineteenth century Russian countryside and the harsh lives of those who inhabited it. In a series of sketches, a hunter wanders through the vast landscape of steppe and forest in search of game, encountering a varied cast of peasants, landlords, bailiffs, overseers, horse traders, and merchants. He witnesses both feudal tyranny and the fatalistic submission of the tyrannized, against a backdrop of the sublime and pitiless terrain of rural Russia.
These beautifully embellished, evocative stories were...
Ivan Turgenev s first literary masterpiece is a sweeping portrayal of the magnificent nineteenth century Russian countryside and the harsh lives of...
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)The underground masterpiece of twentieth-century Russian fiction, Mikhail Bulgakov's THE MASTER AND MARGARITA was written during Stalin's regime and could not be published until many years after its author's death. When the devil arrives in 1930s Moscow, consorting with a retinue of odd associates--including a talking black cat, an assassin, and a beautiful naked witch--his antics wreak havoc among the literary elite of the world capital of atheism. Meanwhile, the Master, author of an unpublished novel about Jesus and Pontius Pilate, languishes in despair in a...
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)The underground masterpiece of twentieth-century Russian fiction, Mikhail Bulgakov's THE MASTER AND MARGARITA was writte...
The urbane authority that Vladimir Nabokov brought to every word he ever wrote, and the ironic amusement he cultivated in response to being uprooted and politically exiled twice in his life, never found fuller expression than in Pale Fire published in 1962 after the critical and popular success of Lolita had made him an international literary figure.
An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and learned commentary, Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem written by the literary genius John...
The urbane authority that Vladimir Nabokov brought to every word he ever wrote, and the ironic amusement he cultivated in response to being uproote...
At the center of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park is Fanny Price, the classic "poor cousin" who has been brought to live with the rich Sir Thomas Bertram and his wife as an act of charity. Over time, Fanny comes to demonstrate forcibly those virtues Austen most admired: modesty, firm principles, and a loving heart. As Fanny watches her cousins Maria and Julia cast aside their scruples in dangerous flirtations (and worse), and as she herself resolutely resists the advantages of marriage to the fascinating but morally unsteady Henry Crawford, her seeming austerity grows in appeal and...
At the center of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park is Fanny Price, the classic "poor cousin" who has been brought to live with the rich Sir Thoma...
Oliver is an orphan living on the dangerous London streets with no one but himself to rely on. Fleeing from poverty and hardship, he falls in with a criminal street gang who will not let him go, however hard he tries to escape. One of the most swiftly moving and unified of Charles Dickens's great novels, Oliver Twist is also famous for its re-creation-through the splendidly realized figures of Fagin, Nancy, the Artful Dodger, and the evil Bill Sikes-of the vast London underworld of pickpockets, thieves, prostitutes, and abandoned children. Victorian critics took Dickens to task...
Oliver is an orphan living on the dangerous London streets with no one but himself to rely on. Fleeing from poverty and hardship, he falls in with ...
Hester Prynne is a beautiful young woman. She is also an outcast. In the eyes of her neighbours she has committed an unforgivable sin. Everyone knows that her little daughter Pearl is the product of an illicit affair but no one knows the identity of Pearl's father. Hester's refusal to name him brings more condemnation upon her. But she stands strong in the face of public scorn, even when she is forced to wear the sign of her shame sewn onto her clothes: the scarlet letter "A" for "Adulteress."
The story of Hester Prynne-found out in adultery, pilloried by her Puritan community, and...
Hester Prynne is a beautiful young woman. She is also an outcast. In the eyes of her neighbours she has committed an unforgivable sin. Everyone kno...