An exploration of the ideas, groupings and the social tensions that shaped the transformation of life caused by the changes of modernity in art, science, politics and philosophy.

At the beginning of Pudd'nhead Wilson a young slave woman, fearing for her infant's son's life, exchanges her light-skinned child with her master's. From this rather simple premise Mark Twain fashioned one of his most entertaining, funny, yet biting novels. On its surface, Pudd'nhead Wilson possesses all the elements of an engrossing nineteenth-century mystery: reversed identities, a horrible crime, an eccentric detective, a suspenseful courtroom drama, and a surprising, unusual solution. Yet it is not a mystery novel. Seething with the undercurrents of antebellum southern...

This first volume of Bradbury's collected critical writings concentrates on British fiction since 1945. It is written from the center of the field it surveys: Bradbury is a writer who is also a critic, a critic who is also a writer. He often feels a conflict between the two roles, but writes in a personal, lucid, and amusing style, alert to modern critical theory yet at the same time deeply involved as a creative novelist.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

Arguably the best novel to come out of World War II, in which Heller strips away the veneer of martial glory to expose its insanity, and gives our language a new paradoxical phrase to describe mankind at the mercy of its own institutions.