Mrs. Dalloway chronicles a June day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway-a day that is taken up with running minor errands in preparation for a party and that is punctuated, toward the end, by the suicide of a young man she has never met. In giving an apparently ordinary day such immense resonance and significance-infusing it with the elemental conflict between death and life-Virginia Woolf triumphantly discovers her distinctive style as a novelist. Originally published in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf's first complete rendering of what she described as the "luminous...
Mrs. Dalloway chronicles a June day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway-a day that is taken up with running minor errands in preparatio...
Lucie Manette had been separated from her father for eighteen years while he languished in Paris's most feared prison, the Bastille. Finally reunited, the Manettes's fortunes become inextricably intertwined with those of two men, the heroic aristocrat Darnay, and the dissolute lawyer, Carton. Their story, which encompasses violence, revenge, love and redemption, is grippingly played out against the backdrop of the terrifying brutality of the French Revolution. A Tale of Two Cities begins on a muddy English road in an atmosphere charged with mystery and drama, and it ends in the...
Lucie Manette had been separated from her father for eighteen years while he languished in Paris's most feared prison, the Bastille. Finally reunit...
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Jorge Luis Borges was one of those very rare creators who changed the face of an art form--in his case, the short story. His work has been paid the ultimate honor of being appropriated and imitated by innumerable writers on every continent of the world.The seventeen brief masterpieces of FICCIONES explode the boundaries of genre, offering up labyrinthine libraries, a fictional encyclopedia entry that spawns an entire world, a review of a nonexistent writer's attempt to re-create Don Quixote word for word, a man with the disabling inability to forget anything he...
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Jorge Luis Borges was one of those very rare creators who changed the face of an art form--in his case, the short story....
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Franz Kafka's imagination so far outstripped the forms and conventions of the literary tradition he inherited that he was forced to turn that tradition inside out in order to tell his splendid, mysterious tales. Scrupulously naturalistic on the surface, uncanny in their depths, these stories represent the achieved art of a modern master who had the gift of making our problematic spiritual life palpable and real.This edition of his stories includes all his available shorter fiction in a collection edited, arranged, and introduced by Gabriel Josipovici in ways that...
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Franz Kafka's imagination so far outstripped the forms and conventions of the literary tradition he inherited that he wa...
In a novella which remains highly controversial to this day, Conrad explores the relations between Africa and Europe. On the surface, this is a horrifying tale of colonial exploitation. The narrator, Marlowe journeys on business deep into the heart of Africa. But there he encounters Kurtz, an idealist apparently crazed and depraved by his power over the natives, and the meeting prompts Marlowe to reflect on the darkness at the heart of all men. This short but complex and often ambiguous story, which has been the basis of several films and plays, continues to provoke interpretation and...
In a novella which remains highly controversial to this day, Conrad explores the relations between Africa and Europe. On the surface, this is a hor...
The Divine Comedy, translated by Allen Mandelbaum, begins in a shadowed forest on Good Friday in the year 1300. It proceeds on a journey that, in its intense recreation of the depths and the heights of human experience, has become the key with which Western civilization has sought to unlock the mystery of its own identity.
Mandelbaum's astonishingly Dantean translation, which captures so much of the life of the original, renders whole for us the masterpiece of that genius whom our greatest poets have recognized as a central model for all poets. This Everyman's...
The Divine Comedy, translated by Allen Mandelbaum, begins in a shadowed forest on Good Friday in the year 1300. It proceeds on a journey tha...
At The Center of Martin Chuzzlewit - the novel Angus Wilson called "one of the most sheerly exciting of all Dickens stories" - is Martin himself, very old, very rich, very much on his guard. What he suspects (with good reason) is that every one of Iris close and distant relations, now converging in droves on the country inn where they believe he is dying, will stop at nothing to become the inheritor of Iris great fortune. The distinctive combination of manic comedy, bitter satire and fierce melodrama separates this novel from its author's other works. Published in 1844 after...
At The Center of Martin Chuzzlewit - the novel Angus Wilson called "one of the most sheerly exciting of all Dickens stories" - is Martin him...
Rudyard Kipling's Kim is the tale of an Irish orphan raised as an Indian vagabond on the rough streets of colonial Lahore. Young Kimball O'Hara's coming of age takes place in a world of high adventure, mystic quests, and secret games of espionage played out between the Russians and the British in the mountain passages of Asia. Kim is torn between his allegiance to the ascetic lama who becomes his beloved mentor and the temptations of those who want to recruit him as a spy in the "great game" of imperial conflict. In a series of thrilling escapades, he crisscrosses India on missions...
Rudyard Kipling's Kim is the tale of an Irish orphan raised as an Indian vagabond on the rough streets of colonial Lahore. Young Kimball O'H...
When we first met him in Rabbit, Run (1960), the book that established John Updike as a major novelist, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom is playing basketball with some boys in an alley in Pennsylvania during the tail end of the Eisenhower era, reliving for a moment his past as a star high school athlete. Athleticism of a different sort is on display throughout these four magnificent novels--the athleticism of an imagination possessed of the ability to lay bare, with a seemingly effortless animal grace, the enchantments and disenchantments of life. Updike revisited his hero toward the end...
When we first met him in Rabbit, Run (1960), the book that established John Updike as a major novelist, Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom is playing bask...
In this celebrated novel, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison created a new way of rendering the contradictory nuances of black life in America. Its earthy poetic language and striking use of folklore and myth established Morrison as a major voice in contemporary fiction.
Song of Solomon begins with one of the most arresting scenes in our century's literature: a dreamlike tableau depicting a man poised on a roof, about to fly into the air, while cloth rose petals swirl above the snow-covered ground and, in the astonished crowd below, one woman sings as...
In this celebrated novel, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison created a new way of rendering the contradictory nuances of black life i...