Believing in the supreme Ismaili motto “Nothing is true, everything is permitted,” Sabbah wanted to “experiment” with how far he could manipulate religious devotion for his own political gain through appealing to what he called the stupidity and gullibility of people and their passion for pleasure and selfish desires. The novel focuses on Sabbah as he unveils his plan to his inner circle, and on two of his young followers — the beautiful slave girl Halima, who has come to Alamut to join Sabbah's paradise on earth, and young ibn Tahir, Sabbah's most gifted fighter. As both Halima and ibn Tahir become disillusioned with Sabbah's vision, their lives take unexpected turns. Alamut was originally written in 1938 as an allegory to Mussolini's fascist state. In the 1960's it became a cult favorite throughout Tito's Yugoslavia, and in the 1990s, during the Balkan's War, it was read as an allegory of the region's strife and became a bestseller in Germany, France and Spain.

    . .The novel begins in Monte Carlo, where our heroine is swept off her feet by the dashing widower Maxim de Winter and his sudden proposal of marriage. Orphaned and working as a lady's maid, she can barely believe her luck. It is only when they arrive at his massive country estate that she realizes how large a shadow his late wife will cast over their lives--presenting her with a lingering evil that threatens to destroy their marriage from beyond the grave.

    Published in book form a year later and banned in Nazi Germany, it garnered high praise in the United States and much of Europe. A series of fictional letters between a Jewish art dealer living in San Francisco and his former business partner, who has returned to Germany, Address Unknown is a haunting tale of enormous and enduring impact.

    The Saroyan story was transplanted from New York to 1950s San Francisco for the musical.

    In A Room of One's Own (1929), she examines the work of past women writers, and looks ahead to a time when women's creativity will not be hampered by poverty, or by oppression. In Three Guineas (1938), however, Woolf argues that women's historical exclusion offers them the chance to form a political and cultural identity which could challenge the drive towards fascism and war.

    Here was a disgusted man. His name was Svevo Bandini, and he lived three blocks down that street. He was cold and there were holes in his shoes. That morning he had patched the holes on the inside with pieces of cardboard from a macaroni box. The macaroni in that box was not paid for. He had thought of that as he placed the cardboard inside his shoes.

    This famous account describes the war and Orwell’s own experiences. Introduction by Lionel Trilling.

    Published in 1938, this was the first book from Wright, who would continue on to worldwide fame as the author of the novels Native Son and Black Boy.

    Meanwhile, the First World War is destroying his career, his country and his pride in the German people. As Germany and the Hackendahl family unravel, Gustav has to learn to compromise if he is to hold onto anything he holds dear. Iron Gustav is both a moving, realist account of the aftermath of the First World War, and a deeply involving story of a family in crisis. Yet running through the unflinching truth, immediacy and emotional power of Fallada's prose is the charming, almost folkloric whimsicality that makes him such a master story-teller.

    The little wooden horse loves Uncle Peder like a father and hopes never to leave him. When the toymaker falls on hard times, the little wooden horse must go out into the world to seek his fortune. But whether he's working in a coal mine, walking the tightrope in a circus, or gathering pirate treasure, the loyal little horse has only one desire: to return to his beloved master's side. First published in 1938, Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse is well-loved modern children's classic.

    They are enchanting in their own right, and indispensable to an understanding of this great writer.

    Young Jody adopts an orphaned fawn he calls Flag and makes it a part of his family and his best friend. But life in the Florida backwoods is harsh, and so, as his family fights off wolves, bears, and even alligators, and faces failure in their tenuous subsistence farming, Jody must finally part with his dear animal friend. There has been a film and even a musical based on this moving story, a fine work of great American literature.--back cover

    The heroine, Henriette Deluzy-Desportes, governess to the children of the Duc de Praslin, found herself strangely drawn to her employer; when the Duc murdered his wife in the most savage fashion, she had to plead her own case before the Chancellor of France in a sensational murder trial that helped bring down the French king. After winning her freedom, Henriette took refuge in America, where she hosted a salon visited by all the socialites of New York and New England. This thrilling historical romance, full of passion, mystery, and intrigue, has laid claim to the hearts and minds of readers for generations. This replaces 044102226X.

    

    Chesterton. The Coloured Lands. London: Sheed and Ward, 1938. First edition, first printing. Quarto. 238 pages. Publisher's binding and dust jacket.

    The first half of this posthumously published novel describes George's evolution from small-town southern boy to struggling New York novelist and attempts to answer the brooding protagonist's question, "What is it that a young man wants?" The second half is devoted to his tempestuous affair with a sophisticated married woman. Ultimately, George, repulsed by the frivolous lifestyle of his wealthy mistress and her circle, retreats to Europe. But, once again, his idealism is shattered as Hitler rises to power in Germany. Disillusioned, George dreams of returning to the South of his childhood but realizes that "you can't go home again."

    The contents of the books are as follows. Book 1: table of contents of the others and of authorities; 2: mathematical and metrological survey of the universe; 3-6: geography and ethnography of the known world; 7: anthropology and the physiology of man; 8-11: zoology; 12-19: botany, agriculture, and horticulture; 20-27: plant products as used in medicine; 28-32: medical zoology; 33-37: minerals (and medicine), the fine arts, and gemstones.The Loeb Classical Library edition of Natural History is in ten volumes.

    

    The only musical member of a non-musical family, Karen Forrest discovers and pursues her passion for the piano.

    Here are the adventures of Akara-ogun – son of a brave warrior and a wicked witch – as he journeys into the forest, encountering and dealing with all-too-real unforeseen forces, engaging in dynamic spiritual and moral relationships with personifications of his fate, perhaps projections of the terrors and obsessions that haunt man.

    

    Terentius), 116-27 BCE, of Reate, renowned for his vast learning, was an antiquarian, historian, philologist, student of science, agriculturist, and poet. He was a republican who was reconciled to Julius Caesar and was marked out by him to supervise an intended national library.Of Varro's more than seventy works involving hundreds of volumes we have only his treatise On Agriculture (in Loeb number 283) and part of his monumental achievement De Lingua Latina, On the Latin Language, a work typical of its author's interest not only in antiquarian matters but also in the collection of scientific facts. Originally it consisted of twenty-five books in three parts: etymology of Latin words (books 1-7); their inflexions and other changes (books 8-13); and syntax (books 14-25). Of the whole work survive (somewhat imperfectly) books 5 to 10. These are from the section (books 4-6) which applied etymology to words of time and place and to poetic expressions; the section (books 7-9) on analogy as it occurs in word formation; and the section (books 10-12) which applied analogy to word derivation. Varro's work contains much that is of very great value to the study of the Latin language.The Loeb Classical Library edition of On the Latin Language is in two volumes.

    When her employment agency sends her to the wrong address, her life takes an unexpected turn. The alluring nightclub singer, Delysia LaFosse, becomes her new employer, and Miss Pettigrew encounters a kind of glamour that she had only met before at the movies. Over the course of a single day, both women are changed forever.

    A leading figure of the Progressive movement, Altgeld improved workplace safety & child labor laws, pardoned three of the men convicted of the Haymarket Affair & rejected calls in 1894 to break up the Pullman strike with force. In 1896 he was a leader of the left wing of the Democratic Party, opposing President Grover Cleveland & the conservative Bourbon Democrats. He was defeated for reelection in 1896 in an intensely fought, bitter campaign. Originally published in 1938, this is still the best biography of John Peter Altgeld--German immigrant and enemy of orthodoxy--who became governor of Illinois and at the sacrifice of his career pardoned the Haymarket Martyrs.

    

    Selections from the journals of Amos Bronson Alcott which include insightful entries about Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Whitman, Hawthorne, etc.

    All lovers of ancient literature and of poetry will be enthusiastic about these poems which present the spirit of Greece in a modern verse-form of great subtlety and beauty. This edition is limited to five hundred copies and was printed by the University Press in Cambridge.

    At the time he began his work he was able to study a troop of baboons who had never known man. The four-year Boer War removed the settlers, and the tribe led a life undisturbed, with no fear of their modern and most devastating predators, the farmers. Marais was indeed fortunate to watch this animal society in an absolutely natural environment. What they did and how they organised their lives together, how they expressed themselves, and above all, their 'instinctive' reactions, made Marais draw conclusions on the development of animal and human psyche which caused debate in scientific circles.The keenness of his observations is magnificently matched by his compassionate prose. Even the weight of his conclusions is expressed in language so eloquently moving that the very style of the book makes it a treasure to read and possess.

    

    

    Story of an oboe player who has vivid hallucinations of serving in the Spanish Civil War.

    

    

    They are either publishers' humbuggery or the fig-leaf which an author hangs up to assure the public that, though he's been expressing himself, there won't be any indecent exposure, he hopes. Yet with a book like this on my hands, I don't see how I can get out of doing something in the nature of a chairman's job at least. What you see assembled here is a pretty improbable congregation to turn up in book-covers. They do not belong to the writing classes; they have been driven to it through no fault of their own and what pushes them is not the usual writer's excuses, not intimations of immortality, nor scribbler's itch, not self-expression.If one of these thrilling dynamics had been there, my job would have been easier. They weren't, so I had to start from scratch. The initial surge-my own, this time-was one that has stayed by me for a long time. My friends include members of the literary bourgeoisie and lads from the unprinted proletariat. Both parties talk well, and you'd probably enjoy a crack with them as much as I do. But here's the pity. The bourgeois ones get published right and left-especially left; the others are mute as far as print goes, though exceedingly vocal in public-houses. Now I've often felt it would be good to swop them round for a change. The first part of the swop was easy. Many a literary career has been menaced through my taking the writer out for a drink just as he was getting dangerously inspired. Part two, however, was more difficult. For years I simply bore it in mind, that's all. Then circumstances interwove. A publisher, gifted with insight, prevision, and warm-hearted philanthropy, was surveying me one morning while I quietly infested his office, and was wondering what to do with me. Looking at me as if I was a crystal, which is far from being the case in the morning, he swiftly outlined a book which I saw at once was the very one with which to tempt my mates out into the open. Meantime, one or two of them, no doubt having the same feeling as I, had been trying to take their pens out. That, I thought, is something to go on. Taking these for a start, how many others can I persuade? Then began a somewhat pathetic correspondence. I would send out preliminary letters describing how easy the thing was, only to put down what you all know well, don't bother about grammar because I'll put that right (that was swank, of course: I leave my own grammar to compositors). Some wrote back to say they'd have a shot at it if I sent them more particulars; others said they were no hands with a pen but, if I told them what they had to say, they'd try to write it down for me. I wrote some elaborate descriptions of what was required and settled down to await results. Two complete MSS arrived promptly. Also fragments, accompanied by pathetic little notes that told of hard struggle on the distant front. "Dear Jack," says one, "I've done three pages, and I've not nowt more to say. It costs two pints of mild and bitter, IS. ID.; one small Players, 6d. Total IS. 7d. How much will 8,000 words work out at?" A third MS. took another course. It was satisfactorily voluminous and full of good stuff, but got up in a semi-fictional guise which didn't fit it. Then came our first defeat. "I got 3,000 words done, Jack, but it can't be helped, you know the way we live in this bloody tenement, while I was out the baby got hold of the sheets and messed 'em up, so you'll have to count me out." Time passed without anything happening. I exerted pressure and encouragement. This brought forth wails and moans. "I could talk it all right, lad," said one, "but writing it down is hard labour." Next arrival was a bundle of closely-packed hand-written sheets with a note explaining that the author had no schooling. "I am a labourer and have to labour to live, it leaves me no time or energy for this game." Of course, his stuff was very well done: these lads never let you down, if you have patience with them. One would send me a couple of sheets as sample; another a bundle of odd efforts to be thrown into the waste-paper basket if no good. All that I got I shaped up a bit, and sent back with suggestions. Now and then reminders were sent out. I'd get back a card to say that the author had started work a month back, and as he was getting in a lot of overtime, literature had got the knock pro tem. Months went by before I had successfully folded all my black sheep but one. That one is still missing. If you run across him in some pub or other, get him to talk to you-he's good. Well, here is the result: seven narratives in which working-men describe their jobs, they conditions, and some of their reactions to the life they lead. They are not highly literary compositions, yet the lads can write, as you'll see. If I was not sure of that, I'd have had no part in bringing them forward. Two of them have had book published already; a third soon will have, I think. The rest may follow in good time now that they are started on the downward path. The book is not constructed so as to fit any propagandist line, nor to receive the special blessing of any political party, but naturally an intelligent member of the working class must have pronounced opinions upon many matters, so we cannot claim impartiality. In the main, however, the contents here are plain fact, the little details of the daily job told without special emphasis just as they occur. When you finish it you'll have a good idea of what it would be like if you got a job in a blast-furnace, in the cab of a locomotive, or round an East-end market, and this is the stuff from which theories are fabricated and by which they are finally judged. Have a go at it, then. You'll be interested.

    Somewhat naively, he decides to travel to Germany to find her.Emmanuel puts up at a boarding-house and starts asking questions, but everyone is too scared to give him information. The authorities are equally unhelpful. Eventually, they decide that, despite his innocent appearance and British passport, he may well be a spy, and arrest him. Mr Emmanuel sees fellow prisoners tortured and led off to certain execution.He is eventually released, but instead of leaving the country, he continues to search for Bruno's Mother. But will he be able to tell Bruno the truth of what he finds?