Best of
Classics

1930

The Man Without Qualities: Volume I


Robert Musil - 1930
    A Sort of Introduction and Pseudo Reality Prevails

Narcissus and Goldmund


Hermann Hesse - 1930
    First published in 1930, Hesse's novel remains a moving and pointed exploration of the conflict between the life of the spirit and the life of the flesh. It is a theme that transcends all time.

The Man Without Qualities


Robert Musil - 1930
    This new translation—published in two elegant volumes—is the first to present Musil's complete text, including material that remained unpublished during his lifetime.

The World of Peter Rabbit (Original Peter Rabbit, Books 1-23)


Beatrix Potter - 1930
    This luxurious box features the new branded design, spot lamination and full-color original Beatrix Potter art, including a pop-up of Peter Rabbit and friends inside the lid. Titles include:#1 The Tale of Peter Rabbit#2 The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin#3 The Tailor of Gloucester#4 The Tale of Benjamin Bunny#5 The Tale of Two Bad Mice#6 The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle#7 The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher#8 The Tale of Tim Kitten#9 The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck#10 The Tale of Flopsy Bunnies#11 The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse#12 The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes#13 The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse#14 The Tale of Mr. Tod#15 The Tale of Pigling Bland#16 The Tale of Samuel Whiskers#17 The Tale of The Pie and the Patty-Pan#18 The Tale of Ginger and Pickles#19 Little Pig Robinson#20 The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit#21 The Story og Miss Moppet#22 Appley Dapply's Nursery Rhymes# 23 Cecily Parsley's Nursery Rhymes

Not Without Laughter


Langston Hughes - 1930
    Sandy’s mother, Annjee, works as a housekeeper for a rich white family, while his father traverses the country in search of work. Not Without Laughter is a moving examination of growing up in a racially divided society. A rich and important work, Hughes deftly echoes the Black American experience with this novel.

The Collected Short Stories of Saki


Saki - 1930
    Munro) stands alongside Anton Chekhov and O Henry as a master of the short story. His extraordinary stories are a mixture of humorous satire, irony and the macabre, in which the stupidities and hypocrisy of conventional society are viciously pilloried. This collection includes Sredni Vastar and The Unrest Cure. 'We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other married couples they sometimes live apart'[Description from back cover]

High Wages


Dorothy Whipple - 1930
    It is about a girl called Jane who gets a badly-paid job in a draper’s shop in the early years of the last century. Yet the title of the book is based on a Carlyle quotation – ‘Experience doth take dreadfully high wages, but she teacheth like none other’ – and Jane, having saved some money and been lent some by a friend, opens her own dress-shop.As Jane Brocket writes in her Persephone Preface: the novel ‘is a celebration of the Lancastrian values of hard work and stubbornness, and there could be no finer setting for a shop-girl-made-good story than the county in which cotton was king.’

U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel / 1919 / The Big Money


John Dos Passos - 1930
    He interweaves the careers of his characters and the events of their time with a narrative verve and breathtaking technical skill that make U.S.A. among the most compulsively readable of modern classics.A startling range of experimental devices captures the textures and background noises of 20th-century life: "Newsreels" with blaring headlines; autobiographical "Camera Eye" sections with poetic stream-of-consciousness; "biographies" evoking emblematic historical figures like J.P. Morgan, Henry Ford, John Reed, Frank Lloyd Wright, Thorstein Veblen, and the Unknown Soldier. Holding everything together is sheer storytelling power, tracing dozens of characters from the Spanish-American War to the onset of the Depression.The U.S.A. trilogy is filled with American speech: labor radicals and advertising executives, sailors and stenographers, interior decorators and movie stars. Their crisscrossing destinies take in wars and revolutions, desperate love affairs and harrowing family crises, corrupt public triumphs and private catastrophes, in settings that include the trenches of World War I, insurgent Mexico, Hollywood studios in the silent era, Wall Street boardrooms, and the tumultuous streets of Boston just before the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.

A Rose for Emily and Other Stories


William Faulkner - 1930
    Emily is a member of a family in the antebellum Southern aristocracy; after the Civil War, the family has fallen on hard times.

My Mother's House & Sido


Colette - 1930
    Vividly alive, fond of cities, music, theater, and books, Sido devoted herself to her village, Saint-Saveur; to her garden, with its inhabitants and its animals; and, especially, to her children, particularly her youngest, whom she called Minet-Chéri. Unlike Gigi and Chéri, which focus largely on sexual love and its repercussions, My Mother's House and Sido center on the compelling figure of a powerful, nurturing woman in late-nineteenth-century rural France, conveying the impact she had on her community and on her daughter -- who grew up to be a great writer.

Murder at the Vicarage


Agatha Christie - 1930
    And one which was to come back and haunt the clergyman just a few hours later – when the colonel was found shot dead in the clergyman’s study. But as Miss Marple soon discovers, the whole village seems to have had a motive to kill Colonel Protheroe.Librarian's note: this entry is for the novel "Murder at the Vicarage." Collections and other Miss Marple stories are located elsewhere on Goodreads. The series includes 12 novels and 20 short stories. Entries for the short stories can be found by searching Goodreads for: "a Miss Marple Short Story."

East Wind: West Wind


Pearl S. Buck - 1930
    The story follows Kwei-lan as she begins to accept different points of view from the western world, and re-discovers her sense of self through this coming-of-age narrative.

Street Haunting


Virginia Woolf - 1930
    Six short stories and / or essays, extracted from The Crowded Dance of Modern Life (1993) and Selected Short Stories (1993).

Fortunes of Richard Mahony


Henry Handel Richardson - 1930
    Richard Mahony, despite finding initial contentment with his wife Mary, becomes increasingly dissatified with his ordered life. His restlessness is not understood by Mary, who has to endure the constant shattering of her security as Richard desperately attempts to free himself; his attempts finally plunge them into poverty. In the figure of Richard Mahony, Richardson captures the soul of the emigrant, ever restless, ever searching for some equilibrium, yet never really able to settle anywhere. Richard’s search, though, is also the more universal one for a meaning that will validate and give purpose to his existence.

Miss Mole


E.H. Young - 1930
    At the beginning of the novel she's returned after a long absence to the fictional town of Radstowe (which is a thinly disguised portrait of Bristol). Miss Mole is not getting along well with her current employer and after a few days in a boarding house, gets a new job via her cousin Lilla, who is from the wealthier side of the family and has some good contacts. Without revealing the family connection, Lilla recommends her for a job as a housekeeper of sorts for a rather stuffy, pompous minister named Robert Corder, whose wife has recently passed away. The household consists of Reverend Corder, a nonconformist; daughter Ethel, who's rather desperately looking for a man so she can escape the house; young Ruth, who is still in school and longing for a mother figure; and their sassy cousin Wilfred, who's attending medical school nearby. Wilfred's presence in the house is rather awkward and raises a few eyebrows, but his mother is wealthy and the Reverend can't risk offending her. A spinster housekeeper/chaperone is exactly what they need to keep the house respectable -- or so they think. Miss Mole moves in and simultaneously elevates their lives and yet turns things upside-down. She's comforting and yet slyly subversive, and Reverend Corder doesn't quite know if he should appreciate her or fear her, as Hannah is smarter than he is. Wilfred takes to her instantly, recognizing her sharp with, and Ruth grows to love her. Eventually, though, there are whispers about Miss Mole's background which much be addressed, and we learn the real reason for her long absence from her hometown.

On Being Ill


Virginia Woolf - 1930
    We cannot quote Shakespeare to describe a headache. We must, Woolf says, invent language to describe pain. And though illness enhances our perceptions, she observes that it reduces self-consciousness; it is "the great confessional." Woolf discusses the cultural taboos associated with illness and explores how illness changes the way we read. Poems clarify and astonish, Shakespeare exudes new brilliance, and so does melodramatic fiction!On Being Ill was published as an individual volume by Hogarth Press in 1930. While other Woolf essays, such as A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, were first published by Hogarth as individual volumes and have since been widely available, On Being Ill has been overlooked. The Paris Press edition features original cover art by Woolf’s sister, the painter Vanessa Bell. Hermione Lee’s Introduction discusses this extraordinary work, and explores Woolf’s revelations about poetry, language, and illness.

Swallows and Amazons


Arthur Ransome - 1930
    Swallows and Amazons introduces the lovable Walker family, the camp on Wild Cat island, the able-bodied catboat Swallow, and the two intrepid Amazons, Nancy and Peggy Blackett.

The Road to Nowhere


Alexander Grin - 1930
    

On Forsyte 'Change


John Galsworthy - 1930
    Galsworthy states in a foreword that "They have all been written since Swan Song was finished but in place they come between the Saga and the Comedy…" By way of explanation he says that "It is hard to part suddenly and finally from those with whom one has lived so long; and these footnotes do really, I think, help to fill in and round out the chronicles of the Forsyte family".Contents:The Buckles of Superior Dosset, 1821-1863 Sands of Time, 1821-1863 Hester's Little Tour, 1845 Timothy's Narrow Squeak, 1851 Aunt Juley's Courtship, 1855 Nicholas Rex, 1864 A Sad Affair, 1867 Revolt at Roger's, 1870 June's First Lame Duck, 1876 Dog at Timothy's, 1878 Midsummer Madness, 1880 The Hondekoeter, 1880 Cry of Peacock, 1883 Francie's Fourpenny Foreigner, 1888 Four-In-Hand Forsyte, 1890 The Sorrows of Tweetyman, 1895 The Dromios, 1900 A Forsyte Encounters the People, 1917 Soames and the Flag, 1914-1918

Raggedy Ann in the Deep Deep Woods: Classic Edition


Johnny Gruelle - 1930
    Pook Press are working to republish these classic works in affordable, high quality, colour editions, using the original text and artwork so these works can delight another generation of children.

The Saga Of The Volsungs; The Saga Of Ragnar Lodbrok Together With The Lay Of Kraka


Margaret Schlauch - 1930
    

The Deepening Stream


Dorothy Canfield Fisher - 1930
    American novelist and juvenile writer, Canfield begins The Deepening Stream: When people talked about things they could remember Matey always wondered which kind of remembering they meant-the kind that was just a sort of knowing how something in the past had happened or the other kind when suddenly everything seemed to be happening all over again. Why did time fade out some memories so that they didn't seem any more real than a story in a book? And why were others, whether you liked it or not, a living part of you at any moment when they come into your head? These were among the many questions for which Matey never found an answer. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.

The Personality of a House


Emily Post - 1930
    Book of Home Design and Decoration

The Secret of the Old Clock


Carolyn Keene - 1930
    To the surprise of many, the Topham family will inherit wealthy Josiah Crowley's fortune, instead of deserving relatives and friends who were promised inheritances. Nancy determines that a clue to a second will might be found in an old clock Mr. Crowley had owned and she seeks to find the timepiece. Her search not only tests her keen mind, but also leads her into a thrilling adventure.

Mountain City


Upton Sinclair - 1930
    Novels such as this one prompted Congress to pass the Securities and Exchange Acts of 1933 & 1934, which regulated the issue of securities in the primary market, and the trading of securities in the secondary market.In most novels, Jed Rusher might be the `Great American Dream,' but here, he is a tragic figure. Rusher is intelligent, hard-working, and personable - yet he still needs to take liberties with his conscience in order to get some business breaks. He trades on insider secrets he learns as an assistant for Claudius G. Warriner. He builds a nest egg of capital for this trading by anonymously turning in Warriner's daughter as a diamond smuggler, in order to capture the reward. To be fair, that woman was dismissive of Jed, treating him as an inconvenience and not as a person.Everything seems to be a business deal to Jed, even his marriage. Such a cynical view of business was part of Upton Sinclair's makeup. He was an unabashed socialist who viewed the capitalist society of America as unequal and corrupt. We know today that the gross inefficiencies of socialism and planned economies make them untenable. Some of Sinclair's ideas just won't work. He is still fun to read, though, because his entertaining stories illustrate historical problems and issues.It may be naive to believe that competition and the free markets prevents the blackmail scheme of the Mountain City News from occurring today, but what business could stay afloat if it had to pay an `extortion advertisement?" In fact, what news agency could sit on a story in today's competitive news market?Readers of this book today may be confused about the single tax, a policy first suggested by Henry George in `Progress and Poverty.' The idea was to place a special tax on land held for speculative purposes, forcing the owner of the land to either do something with it, or sell it - presumably at a discount. It was considered a way to get cheap land available to the average person, particularly an unemployed city dweller who was willing to work on a subsistence farm. Although the single tax was never instituted, there are ad valorem taxes used by counties to raise revenue for government, schools, and internal improvements. Ad valorem taxes aren't considered much of an impediment to land speculators.A character in one of E.L. Doctorow's novels advised people to read Upton Sinclair's novels to understand the issues of the 1st half of the 20th century. Mountain City is the novel one can read to understand why securities reform was important, as Sinclair presents a market that is unfair and unreliable to the common investor."Taken from Amazon.com, customer review by Scrapple8, Brooklyn, NY. Review posted 10/1/2011

Sherlock Holmes Detective Stories


Arthur Conan Doyle - 1930
    John Watson in a collection of adventure classics, including...-A Study in Scarlet-The Sign of the Four-The Ring of Thoth-A Scandal in Bohemia-A Case of Identity-The Surgeon of Gaster Fell-The Captain of the "Pole Star"-J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement-The Great Keinplatz Experiment-That Little Square Box

John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelly, Complete Poetical Works


John Keats - 1930