Stefan Zweig's Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman is a dramatic account of the guillotine's most famous victim, from the time when as a fourteen-year-old she took Versailles by storm, to her frustrations with her aloof husband, her passionate love affair with the Swedish Count von Fersen, and ultimately to the chaos of the French Revolution and the savagery of the Terror. An impassioned narrative, Zweig's biography focuses on the human emotions of the participants and victims of the French Revolution, making it both an engrossingly compelling read and a sweeping and informative history.

    Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the reading public in Europe, and later in America where it was first published by New Directions in 1952. The story of the improbable yet convincingly described travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and Detroit, and finally to life as a failed doctor in Paris, takes the readers by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel's inevitable, sad conclusion.

    Through the Battle of Solferino, to the entombment of the last Hapsburg emperor, Roth's intelligent compassionate narrative illuminates the crumbling of a way of life.

    An early novel by Persephone's most popular author about an early 20th century family and, in particular, the relationship of the grandmother and granddaughter.

    Steinbeck tackles two important literary traditions here; American naturalism, with its focus on the conflict between natural instincts and the demand to conform to society's norms, and the short story cycle. Set in the heart of 'Steinbeck land', the lush Californian valleys.

    She writes, too, about the life and art of women. Edited and with an Introduction by Andrew McNeillie; Index.

    Louis writes a journal to explain to them—and to himself—why his soul has been deformed, why his heart seems like a foul nest of twisted serpents. Mauriac’s novel masterfully explores the corruption caused by pride, avarice, and hatred, and its opposite—the divine grace that remains available to each of us until the very moment of our deaths. It is the unforgettable tale of the battle for one man’s soul.

    Even as he grounded his narratives in the intimate daily life of Germany, Broch was identifying the oceanic changes that would shortly sweep that life into the abyss.Whether he is writing about a neurotic army officer The Romantic, a disgruntled bookkeeper and would-be assassin The Anarchist, or an opportunistic war-deserter The Realist, Broch immerses himself in the twists of his characters psyches, and at the same time soars above them, to produce a prophetic portrait of a world tormented by its loss of faith, morals, and reason.

    He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster." Thus begins Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark; this, the author tells us, is the whole story except that he starts from here, with his characteristic dazzling skill and irony, and brilliantly turns a fable into a chilling, original novel of folly and destruction. Amidst a Weimar-era milieu of silent film stars, artists, and aspirants, Nabokov creates a merciless masterwork as Albinus, an aging critic, falls prey to his own desires, to his teenage mistress, and to Axel Rex, the scheming rival for her affections who finds his greatest joy in the downfall of others. Published first in Russian as Kamera Obskura in 1932, this book appeared in Nabokov's own English translation six years later. This New Directions edition, based on the text as Nabokov revised it in 1960, features a new introduction by Booker Prize-winner John Banville.

    Barth s theology found its expression mainly thru his closely reasoned 14-part magnum opus, Die Kirchliche Dogmatik. Having taken over 30 years to write, the Church Dogmatics is regarded as one of the most important theological works of all time, representing the pinnacle of his achievement as a theologian.

    This short story is taken from one of Steinbeck's early works, "The Pastures of Heaven."

    It provides a vivid, poignant picture of life in Germany just before Hitler's takeover and focuses on a young married couple struggling to survive in the country's nightmarish inflation.

    Yet World War I and the changes that follow seem to mock the emotions and experiences of her youth.

    "The Camel closed up until it was flying beside him; the pilot smiling. Biggles showed his teeth in what he imagined to be an answering smile. 'You swine,' he breathed: 'you dirty, unutterable, murdering swine! I'm going to kill you if it's the last thing I do on earth.'"

    The stories in this collection tackle great events and figures of history, myth, and literature in unexpected ways, questioning views on such basic concepts as justice, progress, wisdom, belief, and patriotism.

    During his lifetime, Roussel's work was vociferously championed by the surrealists, but never achieved the widespread acclaim for which he yearned. New Impressions of Africa is undoubtedly Roussel's most extraordinary work. Since its publication in 1932, this weird and wonderful poem has slowly gained cult status, and its admirers have included Salvador Dalì—who dubbed it the most "ungraspably poetic" work of the era—André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, Michel Foucault, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery. Roussel began writing New Impressions of Africa in 1915 while serving in the French Army during the First World War and it took him seventeen years to complete. "It is hard to believe the immense amount of time composition of this kind of verse requires," he later commented. Mysterious, unnerving, hilarious, haunting, both rigorously logical and dizzyingly sublime, it is truly one of the hidden masterpieces of twentieth-century modernism. This bilingual edition of New Impressions of Africa presents the original French text and the English poet Mark Ford's lucid, idiomatic translation on facing pages. It also includes an introduction outlining the poem's peculiar structure and evolution, notes explaining its literary and historical references, and the fifty-nine illustrations anonymously commissioned by Roussel, via a detective agency, from Henri-A. Zo.

    Margaret Mantrip was undoubtedly the doyenne of the householders in the Square, if such establishments as the Swiss Convent and Norman's Hotel were regarded as being outside individual ownership.

    His novel Virgin Soil Upturned, dealing with the collectivization of countryside in the USSR, has been translated into 75 languages and published in over thirty million copies. In 1932 the journal Novy Mir Published the first part of the novel, and that same year Sholokhov announced that he had begun work on the second part. Due to war-time disruptions, including destruction of the near-complete manuscript during World War II, the second part did not appear until 1960.

    In Cruise of Shadows, Jean Ray began to fully explore the trappings of the ghost story to produce a new brand of horror tale: one that described the lineaments to a universe adjacent to this one, an extradimensional space beyond space in which objects sweat hatred and fear, and where the individual must face the unknown in utter isolation. First published in 1931, two years after he served his prison sentence for embezzling funds for his literary magazine, Jean Ray’s second story collection failed to find the success of his first one, Whiskey Tales, but has emerged over the years as a key publication in the Belgian School of the Strange. This staple volume of weird literature has remained unavailable in its integral form even in French until recently, however, even though it contains some of Ray’s most anthologized and celebrated stories, including two of his best known, “The Mainz Psalter” and “The Shadowy Alley.” This is the book’s first English translation, and the second of the volumes of Ray’s books to be published by Wakefield Press.Jean Ray (1887–1964) is the best known of the multiple pseudonyms of Raymundus Joannes Maria de Kremer. Alternately referred to as the “Belgian Poe” and the “Flemish Jack London,” Ray delivered tales and novels of horror under the stylistic influence of his most cherished authors, Charles Dickens and Gregory Chaucer. A pivotal figure in what has come to be known as the “Belgian School of the Strange,” Ray authored some 6,500 texts in his lifetime, not including his own biography, which remains shrouded in legend and fiction, much of it his own making. His alleged lives as an alcohol smuggler on Rum Row in the prohibition era, an executioner in Venice, a Chicago gangster, and hunter in remote jungles in fact covered over a more prosaic, albeit ruinous, existence as a manager of a literary magazine that led to a prison sentence, during which he wrote some of his most memorable tales of fantastical fear.

    

    Dorothy L. Sayers's archetypal British gentleman detective is convinced that mystery author Harriet Vane, convicted of killing her lover, is innocent and sets about to prove her innocence, then the duo investigates a sea-side crime. First two of the Peter & Harriet mysteries.

    The full scientific report of that 20,000-mile trek by dog sled from Greenland to Siberia, known to history as the Fifth Thule Expedition, fills ten volumes. This single volume, Across Arctic America, is Rasmussen's own reworking and condensation of his two-volume popular account written in Danish and gives the essence of his experience of the Arctic and its people.It was the people who most captivated the Greenland-born Rasmussen, who had become a virtual adopted son to the Eskimos of the far northern district still known by the name of the trading post he established there, Thule. His first four Thule expeditions extended the limits of the known world in Greenland solely, but Rasmussen's Fifth Thule Expedition demonstrated the unity of the Eskimo world from the Atlantic Ocean to the Chukchi Sea, proving the people all shared the same basic language and culture.As historian Terrence Cole notes in an introductory biography, "The intellectual and spiritual life of the people themselves were his primary interests, not simply geographical discovery, and thus even when following the tracks of previous explorers, he found uncharted territory. His basic principle was to first earn the trust of the local people by showing understanding and patience: living with the people and not apart from them, sharing their work and their food."That was how Rasmussen approached the entire Arctic: he did not live apart from it, skimming over its surface like the fame-seeking polar explorers of the time such as Peary and Cook, but immersed himself in it so successfully that a Canadian Inuit elder once marveled that he was "the first white man [he had ever seen] who was also an Eskimo."Of most significance to readers today, though, is that Rasmussen was also a noted writer. He wanted to share not just the observations he made but the feelings he experienced, and so in Across Arctic America he offered what fellow arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson described as "not only a work of literary charm but also one of the deepest and soundest interpretations" of Eskimo life ever put into a book.This volume, published in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the completion of the Fifth Thule Expedition, includes an introduction by Classic Reprint Series editor Terrence Cole and an index.

    of what Ladislav Klíma wrote and stood for.—Bohumil HrabalKlima's intense inner life and complex mental state are reflected in his peculiar writings. The eccentricity of style and occasional violence found in his prose were intended to convey the deep conflicts attending his thought processes, and this is perhaps best exemplified in the novella Glorious Nemesis, a balladic ghost story that explores the metaphysics of love and death, crime and reincarnation. Sider, a man of twenty-eight, is confronted in the Tyrol by a giant mountain named Stag's Head and an ancient hovel standing under a high, black cliff. Out one day on a hike, he encounters two women who will mark his fate: the elder Errata, dressed in red, and the younger Orea, dressed in blue (the two colors of the Virgin Mary). From this point on Sider is on a quest for the All, the Absolute, and to achieve eternity by atoning for the misdeeds of a past life. Willing to risk his entire fortune and sanity, he succumbs to his dreams and hallucinations as Orea, or her doppelgänger, becomes for him the apotheosis of the Feminine, a representation of the goddess Nemesis who initiates him into the mysteries of life and death through her attribute of divine retribution. Published posthumously in 1932, this is the first English translation.

    J. A. Symons if he had read Fr. Rolfe's Hadrian the Seventh. He hadn't, but soon did, and found himself entranced by the novel -- "a masterpiece"-- and no less fascinated by the mysterious person of its all-but-forgotten creator. The Quest for Corvo is a hilarious and heartbreaking portrait of the strange Frederick Rolfe, self-appointed Baron Corvo, an artist, writer, and frustrated aspirant to the priesthood with a bottomless talent for self-destruction. But this singular work, subtitled "an experiment in biography," is also a remarkable self-portrait, a study of the obsession and sympathy that inspires the biographer's art.

    At eighteen, she defied her family to marry for love and had built a joyous home for her beloved husband and son. As she surveyed this gracious world, Lucy was supremely content.Until, impulsively, she invited another woman into her home and a dark cloud pressed down on her sunlit happiness. And Lucy, driven by love and a terrible suspicion, acted with all the burning force of her ardent nature to save the crumbling edifice of her marriage....

    As Appius gains knowledge he moves ever closer to the one discovery Virginia does not want him to make: that of his true origins.

    Scott Moncrieff and Stephen HudsonMarcel Proust (1871-1922) spent the last fourteen years of his life writing A la recherche du temps perdu. It is an intimate epic, an excavation of the self, and a comedy of manners by turns and all at once. Proust is the twentieth century's Dante, presenting us with a unique, unsettling picture of ourselves as jealous lovers and unmitigated snobs, frittering our lives away, with only the hope of art as a possible salvation. He offers us a form of redemption for a sober and secular age.Scott Moncrieff's delightful translation was for many years the only access to Proust in English. A labour of love that took him nearly as many years as Proust spent writing the original. Moncrieff's translation strives to capture the extraordinary blend of muscular analysis with poetic reverie that typifies Proust's style. It remains a justly famous classic of translation.

    Jünger’s analyses, written in critical dialogue with Marx, are inspired by a profound intuition of the movement of history and an insightful interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Martin Heidegger considered Jünger “the only genuine follower of Nietzsche,” singularly providing “an interpretation which took shape in the domain of that metaphysics which already determines our epoch, even against our knowledge; this metaphysics is Nietzsche's doctrine of the ‘will to power.’” In The Worker, Jünger examines some of the defining questions of that epoch: the nature of individuality, society, and the state; morality, justice, and law; and the relationships between freedom and power and between technology and nature. This work, appearing in its entirety in English translation for the first time, is an important contribution to debates on work, technology, and politics by one of the most controversial German intellectuals of the twentieth century. Not merely of historical interest, The Worker carries a vital message for contemporary debates about world economy, political stability, and equality in our own age, one marked by unsettling parallels to the 1930s.

    Here Powell turns her attention to those certain rare souls who have the secret of finding their lives glamorous and themselves magnificent under the most humble conditions. Connie Benjamin, the village shoemaker's wife, always wanted an operatic career. Blaine Decker, the new high school music teacher, once spent time abroad studying piano. The two are drawn together into a powerful friendship of dependence, each sustaining the other and translating the surface monotony of their lives into drama richer than reality.

    Street wrote this remarkable farming autobiography in 1932 after struggling through Britain's worst agricultural depression. An instant bestseller, this affectionate recollection of pre-war farming practices and traditions soon established itself as a modern classic.

    This novel is a fictionalized autobiography of the author's boyhood in the the countryside of Provence, told through the eyes of a child.

    R.H. Lockhart's account of the years he spent representing Britain's Foreign Office in Russia is still immensely entertaining and informative today. Lockhart was not an espionage agent; he was a diplomat. He was Britain's Vice-Consul in Moscow, then Acting Consul-General, then official "unofficial" representative to the new Bolshevik regime in Russia, between the years 1912 and 1918. Lockhart describes his attempts at rubber farming as a young man in Malaysia and the circumstances that led to his seeking a career in the Foreign Office. He was given the post of British Vice-Consul in Moscow shortly after joining the Service. In these memoirs, Lockhart gives us his insights into Russian culture and politics during the last years of Tzarist rule, the circumstances of Russia's participation in World War I, and Russia's descent into Bolshevism. Lockhart came to love the Russian people and consider Moscow his home while he witnessed the last Tzar unwittingly ensure his own downfall and the succeeding Provisional Government inevitably fail. He gives an honest account of the errors in British and Allied policies during these precarious years in Russia. We get a close-up view of the eternal rift between diplomatic knowledge and political imperative. "Memoirs of a British Agent" is a supremely literate and insightful first-hand account of the fascinating and turbulent time in Russia that gave birth to the Soviet Union through the eyes of a foreigner who knew many prominent members of both the Tzarist and Bolshevik regimes personally. Lockhart manages to convey great sympathy for Russians of various ideologies while at the same time speaking bluntly of their shortcomings. Rarely has a book that is so informative been so entertaining. "Memoirs of a British Agent" is a real page-turner.

    Desire for personal freedom fits uneasily with commitment to traditional community values and a stubborn narrow-mindedness in this tale of struggle between Skerrett, the national schoolteacher, and the parish priest, Father Moclair.

    A Sailing Cruise.

    When Joan loses both her brother and lover to the war, in anger at the enemy she volunteers for work in a munitions plant, but by the end, she is a confirmed pacifist.

    The place is Madrid, a city beset by labor unrest which has raised fears―and among some, hopes―of revolution. At an overflow meeting of workingmen, the military intervenes and three of the workers' leaders and a member of the socialist party are killed. A public funeral ends in street fighting, sabotage, and the prospect of a general strike throughout Spain. From these events Ramón Sender has fashioned a novel of terror and beauty―one of the great unsung works of the 20th century. Behind the confused and conflicting theories of the revolutionaries who are the central characters of Seven Red Sundays, Mr. Sender discovers a sublime faith and a spirit of self-sacrifice. But whether these idealists with guns represent hope or despair is a haunting question which the reader must decide.