(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Russian fiction, Mikhail Bulgakov's THE MASTER AND MARGARITA was written during Stalin's regime and could not be published until many years after its author's death.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 Meanwhile, the Master, author of an unpublished novel about Jesus and Pontius Pilate, languishes in despair in a...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...
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Arriving in a village to take up the position of land surveyor for the mysterious lord of a castle, the character known as K. finds himself in a bitter and baffling struggle to contact his new employer and go about his duties. As the villagers and the Castle officials block his efforts at every turn, K.'s consuming quest-quite possibly a self-imposed one-to penetrate the inaccessible heart of the Castle and take its measure is repeatedly frustrated. Kafka once suggested that the would-be surveyor in The Castle is driven by a wish "to get clear about...
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Arriving in a village to take up the position of land surveyor for the mysterious lord of a castle, the character k...
While in the service of India s Nizam of Hyderabad, Marmaduke Pickthall converted to Islam and, with the help of Muslim theologians and linguists, produced this clear and lovingly precise English interpretation of the Holy Koran. His work is honored by believer and non-believer alike for its unique combination of piety, scholarly rigor in its translation and explanatory notes, and deep feeling for the poetic beauty and moral grandeur of its Arabic original. With an Introduction by William Montgomery Watt (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) "
While in the service of India s Nizam of Hyderabad, Marmaduke Pickthall converted to Islam and, with the help of Muslim theologians and linguists, ...
Buddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1901, when Mann was only twenty-six, has become a classic of modern literature.
It is the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany facing the advent of modernity; in an uncertain new world, the family's bonds and traditions begin to disintegrate. As Mann charts the Buddenbrooks' decline from prosperity to bankruptcy, from moral and psychic soundness to sickly piety, artistic decadence, and madness, he ushers the reader into a world of stunning vitality, pieced together from births and...
Buddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1901, when Mann was only twenty-six, has become a classic of modern literature.
One of the most celebrated classics of the twentieth century, Orwell's cautionary tale of a man trapped under the gaze of an authoritarian state feels more relevant now than ever before. Winston Smith, a member of the outer Party, spends his days rewriting history to fit the narrative that his government wants citizens to believe. But as the gap between the propaganda he writes and the reality he lives proves too much for Winston to swallow, he begins to seek some form of escape. His desperate struggle to free himself from an all-encompassing, tyrannical state illuminates the tendencies...
One of the most celebrated classics of the twentieth century, Orwell's cautionary tale of a man trapped under the gaze of an authoritarian state fe...
Edgar Allan Poe s gift for the macabre his genius in finding the strangeness lurking at the heart of things was so extraordinary that he exerted a major influence on Baudelaire and French symbolism, on Freudian analysis, and also on the detective novel and the Hollywood movie. His psychologically profound stories of encounters with the marvelous, the uncanny, and the dreadful represent in contrast to the optimism of writers like Emerson and Whitman the other, darker side of the nineteenth-century American sensibility. (Jacket Status: Jacketed)
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Edgar Allan Poe s gift for the macabre his genius in finding the strangeness lurking at the heart of things was so extraordinary that he exerte...