The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.

    He edited the manuscript just before his death, and these four stories are some of his best known and most powerful work, marking his maturity as a writer. In addition to "First Sorrow," "A Little Woman," and "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse People" is the title story, "A Hunger Artist," which has been called by the critic Heinz Politzer "a perfection, a fatal fulfillment that expresses Kafka's desire for permanence." The three volumes Twisted Spoon Press has published: Contemplation, A Country Doctor, and A Hunger Artist are the collections of stories that Kafka had published during his lifetime. Though each volume has its own distinctive character, they have most often appeared in English in collected editions. They are presented here as separate editions, in new translations by Kevin Blahut, each with its own illustrator from the Prague community.

    Evangeline Knapp is the perfect, compulsive housekeeper, while her husband, Lester, is a poet and a dreamer. Suddenly, through a nearly fatal accident, their roles are reversed: Lester is confined to home in a wheelchair and his wife must work to support the family. The changes that take place between husband and wife and particularly between parents and children are both fascinating and poignant.

    Shatranj Ke Khiladi (शतरंज के खिलाड़ी) is a story of two nawabs of Lucknow who are so deeply immersed into playing chess that they forget to protect their city which falls into the hand of the British.

    Left an orphan at 19 years old in the late 1880s, Selina Peake needs to support herself. She leaves the city life she has known to become a teacher in the farming community of High Prairie, IL. Her father had told her that life is an adventure, and one should make the most of it.Selina sees beauty everywhere, including in the fields of cabbages. She has a natural curiosity about farming and oversteps the woman's traditional role by having the audacity to ask the men questions. She soon marries Pervus DeJong, a farmer. Selina eagerly offers suggestions for operational improvements, but Pervus ignores her, preferring to use the unprofitable farming methods employed by his father.Though she suffers many hardships, Selina always remembers the importance of beauty, and she admires those who exercise their creative talents. She tries to instill these views in her son Dirk and fights with her husband over the need for their child to get a full education. Once Dirk finishes college and starts work, will he retain Selina's values?So Big was the first book to have the rare distinction of being the best-selling book of the year and win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

    Living in a run-down boardinghouse, Baton spends his days searching working-class Paris for the modest comforts of warmth, cheap meals, and friendship, but he finds little. And despite his situation, Baton remains vain and unsympathetic, a Bovian antihero to the fullest. Bove himself called My Friends, published in France in 1923, a "novel of impoverished solitude." The book drew praise from such writers as Rilke, Gide, and, later, Beckett, and is to this day perhaps the author's most celebrated work.

    Who could have done it? A flashback unravels the mystery of the three English Geste brothers. A classic, rip-roaring tale of adventure.

    Originally published in 1924 and long out of print, these tales are vintage Wharton, dealing boldly with such themes as infidelity, illegitimacy, jealousy, the class system, and the condition of women in society Included in this remarkable quartet are False Dawn, The Old Maid, The Spark, and New Year's Day.

    Wells's fantastic novels. Consummate science fiction, they are convincing and unforgettably real. Included in this omnibus edition are his four greatest works of fiction:In The Time Machine, a time traveler steps out of his vehicle to find himself in the year 802,701 A.D. He encounters creatures that live in perfect harmony. Or so he thinks, until he witnesses a morbid ritual and discovers that his only means of escape - his time machine - has been stolen.A lonely island in the Pacific... the scientist who rules it... the strange beings that live there under his control. This is the backdrop for the haunting The Island of Dr. Moreau. In this novel, Wells's dark vision serves as a reminder of the horrors that reckless experimentation with nature can produce.The Invisible Man is a dazzling display of imagination and psychological insight. It is the classic tale of a young scientist who, by experimenting on himself, becomes both invisible and criminally insane. Considered by many to be Wells's masterwork, the novel powerfully depicts the horror of a man trapped within a terror of his own creation.War of the Worlds is a compelling and horrifying novel that describes the invasion of Earth by Martians. Using fiery rays and crushing strength, these heartless aliens have the capacity to conquer the world. Will they succeed? Is this the end of mankind?

    But some say that Helen was never in Troy, that she had been conveyed by Zeus to Egypt, and that Greeks and Trojans alike fought for an illusion. A fifty-line fragment by the poet Stesichorus of Sicily (c. 640-555 B.C.), what survives of his Pallinode, tells us almost all we know of this other Helen, and from it H. D. wove her book-length poem. Yet Helen in Egypt is not a simple retelling of the Egyptian legend but a recreation of the many myths surrounding Helen, Paris, Achilles, Theseus, and other figures of Greek tradition, fused with the mysteries of Egyptian hermeticism.

    The sweep of his writings- encompassing ferocious social satire, agonized reflection, and formal experimentation-is represented in this comprehensive edition. Here are Melville's masterpieces: Moby-Dick in its entirety; Billy Budd; "Bartleby, The Scrivener"; "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles"; the essay "Hawthorne and His Mosses"; and 21 poems, including "The House-top", an anguished response to the New York draft riots.

    The Most Dangerous Game features a big-game hunter from New York who becomes shipwrecked on an isolated island in the Caribbean and is hunted by a Russian aristocrat.

    The 'subject' was the world as it culminated in the war." Published in four parts between 1924 and 1928, his extraordinary novel centers on Christopher Tietjens, an officer and a gentleman -- "the last English Tory"--and follows him from the secure, orderly world of Edwardian England into the chaotic madness of the First World War. Against the backdrop of a world at war, Ford recounts the complex sexual warfare between Tietjens and his faithless wife, Sylvia. A work of truly amazing subtlety and profundity, Parade's End affirms Graham Greene's prediction: "There is no novelist of this century more likely to live than Ford Madox Ford."

    In a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, ruled over by the all-powerful 'Benefactor', the citizens of the totalitarian society of OneState live out lives devoid of passion and creativity - until D-503, a mathematician who dreams in numbers, makes a discovery: he has an individual soul. Set in the twenty-sixth century AD, We is the classic dystopian novel and was the forerunner of works such as George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. It was suppressed for many years in Russia and remains a resounding cry for individual freedom, yet is also a powerful, exciting and vivid work of science fiction. Clarence Brown's brilliant translation is based on the corrected text of the novel, first published in Russia in 1988 after more than sixty years' suppression.

    Set in Philadelphia some 60 years ago, There Is Confusion traces the lives of Joanna Mitchell and Peter Bye, whose families must come to terms with an inheritance of prejudice and discrimination as they struggle for legitimacy and respect.

    . . before all, to make you see"Heart of Darkness, his exploration of European colonialism in Africa and of elusive human values, embodies more profoundly than almost any other modern fiction the difficulty of 'seeing,' its relativity and shifting compromise. Portraying a young man's first sea-voyage to the East in Youth, an unenlightened maturity in Heart of Darkness, and the blind old age of Captain Whalley in The End of the Tether, the stories in this volume are united in their theme - the 'Ages of Man' - and in their scepticism. Conrad's vision has influenced twentieth-century writers and artists from T. S. Eliot to Jorge Luis Borges and Werner Herzog, and continues to draw critical fire. In his stimulating introduction John Lyon discusses the links between these three stories, the critiques of Chinua Achebe and Edward Said, and the ebb and flow of Conrad's magnificent narrative art.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

    Although it has been ignored for nearly a hundred years, it is an important, and extremely readable, book. Edith Zangwill (1874–1945) - her husband was the writer Israel Zangwill - bases the detailed descriptions of Ursula’s working life on the life of Edith Zangwill’s stepmother, Hertha Ayrton (1854–1923), a physicist who became an expert on the electric arc. Yet, as Elizabeth Day writes: ‘The Call gives a rare insight into a woman’s domestic life in the first two decades of the 20th century ... domestic details about running a house are, most unusually, given their due alongside Ursula’s political actions, elegantly making the point that a woman’s work behind closed doors is just as worthy of our attention as what goes on in the wider world.’ By making political points in the guise of a ‘woman’s novel’, the author stunningly reveals her commitment to feminism.’

    Joan's mother binds her daughter to her with hoops of steel, a trap which nothing can spring no career, no man and certainly no woman.

    

    Most famous for his story Rashomon and the Kurosawa movie it inspired, Akutagawa’s wide range of fiction is beautifully displayed in this newly reissued collection of his stories. With characteristic lyricism and great style, the stories here capture the strange world of Akutagawa, from the slow, gentle death of a haiku master (“Withered Fields”) to a vicious, marauding gang and their bloody fight with samurai (“The Robbers”), and the sly tale told from a dog’s perspective of his escape from home (“The Dog, Shiro”). Throughout these stories, Akutagawa captures the often confused spirit of a Japan undergoing great change and confronting modernity at the turn of the last century. But these stories remain timeless classics, and any reader, whether a fan of Akutagawa or someone discovering him for the first time, will find wonderful delight in these unusual stories. Previously published in a Liveright edition as Exotic Japanese Stories.

    In this story, George O'Kelly, an aspiring engineer turned insurance salesman, fights to recapture the love of Jonquil Cary. When George receives a letter from Jonquil that sounds "nervous" George quits his insurance job and heads down to Tennessee to convince Jonquil of his love for her. Upon arriving, George finds Jonquil in the company of two younger boys and he knows that something is wrong. After their break-up, George leaves Tennessee to pick up the pieces of his life. We return to George over a year later as he comes back to see Jonquil again. The years have been good to George - he is tan, well dressed and successful. When the two reunite, things have changed.

    S. Eliot. In this definitive edition, French and English texts appear on facing pages. Preface by T. S. Eliot.

    Like the others, Satan's Bushel is a splendid book, not just from the point of view of economics but also as a piece of literature. What is Satan's Bushel? It is the last bushel that the farmer puts on the market that "breaks the price" – that is reduces it to the point that wheat farming is no longer profitable. The puzzle that afflicts the wheat farmers is that they sell their goods when the price is low and have no goods to sell when the price is high. Withholding goods from the market is one answer but why should any farmer do that? What is the answer to this problem? Working from this premise, then, as implausible as it may sound, but the central figure in this book is the price of wheat. It is the main source of drama. The settings are the wheat pit at the Chicago exchange (circa. 1915) and the Kansas wheat fields. Linking those two radically different universes is the mission of this book.

    The Vajkays—call them Mother and Father—live in Sárszeg, a dead-end burg in the provincial heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Father retired some years ago to devote his days to genealogical research and quaint questions of heraldry. Mother keeps house. Both are utterly enthralled with their daughter, Skylark. Unintelligent, unimaginative, unattractive, and unmarried, Skylark cooks and sews for her parents and anchors the unremitting tedium of their lives.Now Skylark is going away, for one week only, it’s true, but a week that yawns endlessly for her parents. What will they do? Before they know it, they are eating at restaurants, reconnecting with old friends, and attending the theater. But this is just a prelude to Father’s night out at the Panther Club, about which the less said the better. Drunk, in the light of dawn Father surprises himself and Mother with his true, buried, unspeakable feelings about Skylark.Then, Skylark is back. Is there a world beyond the daily grind and life's creeping disappointments? Kosztolányi’s crystalline prose, perfect comic timing, and profound human sympathy conjure up a tantalizing beauty that lies on the far side of the irredeemably ordinary. To that extent, Skylark is nothing less than a magical novel.