He joins forces with Ippolit Matveyevich Vorobyaninov, a former nobleman who has returned to his hometown to find a cache of missing jewels which were hidden in some chairs that have been appropriated by the Soviet authorities. The search for the bejeweled chairs takes these unlikely heroes from the provinces to Moscow to the wilds of Soviet Georgia and the Trans-caucasus mountains; on their quest they encounter a wide variety of characters: from opportunistic Soviet bureaucrats to aging survivors of the prerevolutionary propertied classes, each one more selfish, venal, and ineffective than the one before.

    In his autobiography, he wrote: I have had a life which, for variety and romance, could, I think, hardly be exceeded. He was not wrong. But Conan Doyle was also a Victorian with a twist, a man of tensions and contradictions. He was fascinated by travel, exploration, invention, and indeed all things modern and technological; yet at the same time very traditional, voicing support for values such as chivalry, duty, constancy, and honour. By the time of his death he was a celebrity, achieving worldwide fame for his creation of the rationalist, scientific super-detective Sherlock Holmes; but his later decades were taken up with advocacy of the new religion of Spiritualism, in which he became a devoted believer.

    Based on a lecture given at Girton College, Cambridge, the essay is one of the great feminist polemics, ranging in its themes from Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte to the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted (imaginary) sister and the effects of poverty and sexual constraint on female creativity.Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is regarded as a major twentieth-century author and essayist, a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist, and the centre of 'The Bloomsbury Group'.

    First published on the 24th of October, 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers and characters in fiction, the manuscript for the delivery of the series of lectures, titled Women and Fiction, and hence the essay, are considered nonfiction. The essay is seen as a feminist text, and is noted in its argument for both a literal and figural space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by patriarchy.

    "The Quiet Don") is 4-volume epic novel by Russian writer Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov. The 1st three volumes were written from 1925 to '32 & published in the Soviet magazine October in 1928–32. The 4th volume was finished in 1940. The English translation of the 1st three volumes appeared under this title in 1934. The novel is considered one of the most significant works of Russian literature in the 20th century. It depicts the lives & struggles of Don Cossacks during WWI, the Russian Revolution & Russian Civil War. In 1965, Sholokhov was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The authorship of the novel is contested by some literary critics & historians, who believe it wasn't entirely written by Sholokhov. However, following the discovery of the manuscript, the consensus is that the work is, in fact, Sholokhov’s.

    Chevengur is a massive series of satirical scenes from Soviet life during the New Economic Policy instituted by Lenin in the 1920s, the story of the efforts of provincial builders of Communism, but in their grotesque Utopia, Cheka murders are the only thing efficiently organized.

    A restless young mulatto tries desperately to find a comfortable place in a world in which she sees herself as a perpetual outsider. A mother's confrontation with tragedy tests her loyalty to her race.The gifted Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen wrote compelling dramas about the black middle class that featured sensitive, spirited heroines struggling to find a place where they belonged. Passing, Larsen's best-known work, is a disturbing story about the unraveling lives of two childhood friends, one of whom turns her back on her past and marries a white bigot. Just as disquieting is the portrait in Quicksand of Helga Crane, half black and half white, who can't escape her loneliness no matter where and with whom she lives. Race and marriage offer few securities her or in the other stories in a collection that is compellingly readable, rich in psychological complexity, and imbued with a sense of place that brings Harlem vibrantly to life.

    In this autobiographical piece about her own color, Hurston reflects on her early childhood in an all-black Florida town and her first experiences in life feeling different. In this beautiful piece, Hurston largely focuses on the similarities we all share and on her own self-identity in the face of difference. Through it all, I remain myself.This short work is part of Applewood's American Roots series, tactile mementos of American passions by some of America's most famous writers and thinkers.

    Tagore visited Japan and collected them in his notebooks. Each firefly, rarely more than a sentence long, represents a luminous thought on love, life, beauty or God. Each page of this book contains a decorative design by Boris Artzybasheff with the short maxim of Tagore's beneath. The text also includes Tagore's Nobel Acceptance Speech.

    Indeed, Georg Lukacs—one of the most trenchant opponents of Benjamin’s aesthetics—singled out this work as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century.The Origin of German Tragic Drama begins with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the peculiar stage-form of the royal martyr dramas called Trauerspiel. Benjamin also comments on the engravings of Durer, and the theatre of Shakespeare and Calderon. Baroque tragedy, he argues, was distinguished from classical tragedy by its shift from myth into history.The characteristic atmosphere of the Trauerspiel was consequently ‘melancholy’. The emblems of baroque allegory point to the extinct values of a classical world that they can never attain or repeat. Their suggestive power, however, remains to haunt subsequent cultures, down to this century.

    Returning always to this personal experience of poetry, Owen Barfield at the same time seeks objective standards of criticism and a theory of poetic diction in broader philosophical considerations on the relation of world and thought. His profound musings explore concerns fundamental to the understanding and appreciation of poetry, including the nature of metaphor, poetic effect, the difference between verse and prose, and the essence of meaning.Forward by Howard Nemerov.

    -- Alan Dundes. Propp's work is seminal...[and], now that it is available in a new edition, should be even more valuable to folklorists who are directing their attention to the form of the folktale, especially to those structural characteristics which are common to many entries coming from even different cultures. -- Choice

    This edition restores the original format with 2 paintings and 12 drawings.

    This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

    B. Yeats's The Tower appeared in bookstores in London on Valentine's Day, 1928. His English publisher printed just 2,000 copies of this slender volume of twenty-one poems, priced at six shillings. The book was immediately embraced by book buyers and critics alike, and it quickly became a bestseller. Subsequent versions of the volume made various changes throughout, but this Scribner facsimile edition reproduces exactly that seminal first edition as it reached its earliest audience in 1928, adding an introduction and notes by esteemed Yeats scholar Richard J. Finneran. Written between 1912 and 1927, these poems ("Sailing to Byzantium," "Leda and the Swan," and "Among School Children" among them) are today considered some of the best and most famous in the entire Yeats canon. As Virginia Woolf declared in her unsigned review of this collection, "Mr. Yeats has never written more exactly and more passionately."

    Press]

    They open up a whole world of experience and struggle that seemed to me, when I first read them years ago, absolutely absorbing, fascinating, and indispensable."--Alice Walker"Discovering Nella Larsen is like finding lost money with no name on it. One can enjoy it with delight and share it without guilt."  --Maya Angelou"A hugely influential and insighful writer." --The New York Times"Larsen's heroines are complex, restless, figures, whose hungers and frustrations will haunt every sensitive reader. Quicksand and Passing are slender novels with huge themes." -- Sarah Waters"A tantalizing mix of moral fable and sensuous colorful narrative, exploring female sexuality and racial solidarity."-Women's Studies International ForumNella Larsen's novels Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929) document the historical realities of Harlem in the 1920s and shed a bright light on the social world of the black bourgeoisie. The novels' greatest appeal and achievement, however, is not sociological, but psychological. As noted in the editor's comprehensive introduction, Larsen takes the theme of psychic dualism, so popular in Harlem Renaissance fiction, to a higher and more complex level, displaying a sophisticated understanding and penetrating analysis of black female psychology.

    The poet was inspired by his concern with form and Western culture, especially architecture. This work, together with "The Collected Critical Prose and Letters" mark Mandelstam's centenary in 1991.

    Scott Fitzgerald's best-loved and most beguiling stories, together in a single volume In 1928, while struggling with his novel Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald began writing a series of stories about Basil Duke Lee, a fictionalized version of his younger self. Drawing on his childhood and adolescent experiences, Fitzgerald wrote nine tales that were published in the Saturday Evening Post about his life from the time he was an eleven-year-old boy living in Buffalo, New York, until he entered Princeton University in 1913. Then from 1930 to 1931, with Tender Is the Night still unfinished, Fitzgerald wrote five more stories (also published in the Post) that centered around Josephine Perry, Basil's female counterpart. Although Fitzgerald intended to combine the fourteen Basil Lee and Josephine Perry stories into a single work, he never succeeded in doing so in his lifetime. Here, The Basil and Josephine Stories brings together in one volume the complete set, resulting in one of Fitzgerald's most charming and evocative works.

    In Clouds of Witness Lord Peter-amateur detective, scholar and bon vivant-learns while on vacation in France that his brother, the Duke of Denver is being held for the murder of their sister's fiance, Captain Denis Cathcart. Evidence has been given to show that Cathcart quarreled with the accused-and was subsequently shot. A pistol belonging to the Duke was found on the grounds of his estate, near the scene of the crime. The murder of an elderly member is at the cause of the Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. The club, it has been joshingly said, resembles a morgue. Then, one night, the jest became a reality. The eminent and ancient General Fentiman thought to be napping in the wing chair by the fireplace, is sleeping his last sleep! There is no reason to suspect causes other than natural ones in the death of a man of ninety. He is duly buried and that seems to be the end of him. Soon however matters of money develop-a huge sum of money- which dempends for its disposition on exactly when the old man dies. How long had he been lying in the fireplace chair before his body was discovered? There had been an approximate estimate based on the degree of rigor mortis, but approximations are now insufficient-and Lord Peter finds himself intrigued by the unusual aspect of this particular rigor mortis. As he investigates, other peculiarities also demand answers-such as the lethal quantity of digitalin discovered post-exhumation autopsy! Book Club Edition486 pages

    Pound's lyric genius, his superb technique, and his fresh insight into literary problems make him one of the small company of men who through the centuries have kept poetry alive, and one of the great innovators.This book offers a compact yet representative selection of Ezra Pound's poems and translations. The span covered is Pound's entire writing career, from his early lyrics and the translations of Provençal songs to his English version of Sophocles' Trachiniae. Included are parts of his best known works—the Chinese translations, the sequence called Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, the Homage to Sextus Propertius. The Cantos, Pound's major epic, are presented in generous selections, chosen to emphasize the main themes of the whole poem.

    Leonhart Maurizarius, convicted of the muder of his wife, is languishing in prison. His case has been forgotten by everyone except the imprisoned man and his father, who is convinced of his innocence. The story of how the father provokes first the son of the man who prosecuted the case and then the prosecutor himself to reopen and re-examine the mystery is a narrative at once wise in the ways of human behavior and rich in the dramatization of philosophical concerns.

    At the story's centre is a family, Grandfather (an ornithologist), grandmother and grandchild living in a corner house in Sivtsey Vrazhek and it is through their experiences and those of their circle that we glimpse the surrounding momentous events. It was not the author's intention to fashion an abstract historical sweep but rather to focus on the experiences of individuals (and even some of those from the animal kingdom). For Osorgin, nature is a more powerful force in life than the solipsistic beliefs of humankind. At the heart of 'A Corner House in Moscow' is the portrait of the coming-of-age granddaughter, Tanyusha, and her development as an individual in spite of the surrounding chaos. Indeed, a host of memorable characters grace the novel including Stolnikov, the young university graduate who volunteers in 1914, becomes an officer and wins the St George Cross but ultimately loses both his arms and legs to an artillery shell. In the hospital he became known as 'the trunk'. 'The doctors said: "A miracle. Just look at him. There's nature for you."' Written in very short chapters, the wealth of the novel is in the vignettes of individuals and incidences. Cumulatively, they combine to affirm life over death and individuals over ideology.Mikhail Osorgin was born in 1878 into the landed gentry. He studied law at Moscow State University. After joining the Party of Social Revolutionaries and participating in the revolution of 1905; Osorgin fled Russia and eventually spent ten years in exile, mostly in Italy, where he earned a living as a journalist. Returning to Russia in 1916, he wrote mainly for socialist newspapers but was arrested by the Cheka in 1919. Although released through international pressure, in 1922 he was expelled by Lenin from Russia. He died in exile in France in 1942.

    Based on John Gay's eighteenth-century Beggar's Opera, the play is set in Victorian England's Soho but satirizes the bourgeois society of the Weimar Republic through its wry love story of Polly Peachum and "Mack the Knife" Macheath. With Kurt Weill's music, which was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to introduce jazz into the theater, it became a popular hit throughout the Western world.Commissioned and authorized by the Brecht estate, Arcade's definitive edition contains the acclaimed translation by Ralph Manheim and John Willett that was first staged at the York Theatre Royal and subsequently at Lincoln Center in New York. Willett and Manheim, the joint editors of Brecht's complete dramatic work in English, also provide Brecht's own notes and discarded songs, as well as extensive editorial commentary on the genesis of his play.

    For the scope of its critical imagination, it is the most radical work of Laura Riding's early period. This period extends from the end of 1925, when she left America for Europe and Robert Graves, to 1939, the year she returned to America, renounced any further writing of poetry, and soon after married Schuyler Jackson.Published in 1928, when Riding was twenty-seven, Anarchism is a kind of early autobiographia literaria. Long out of print and now available for the first time in paperback, this is one of the most imaginative and daring works of literary theory ever written by a modernist figure. Lisa Samuels's edition sets the work in its historical context and elucidates its central intellectual difficulties. Her introduction and notes are a valuable aid to an understanding of Riding's work.

    Rider Haggard are collected in this giant anthology with an active table of contents.Works include:Allan and the Holy FlowerAllan QuatermainAllan's WifeThe Ancient AllanAyeshaBeatriceBlack heart and White HeartThe BrethrenCetywayo and his White NeighboursChild of StormCleopatraColonel Quaritch, V.C.DawnDoctor TherneElissaEric BrighteyesFair MargaretFinishedThe Ghost KingsHeart of the WorldHunter Quatermain's StoryThe Ivory ChildJessJoan HasteKing Solomon's MinesThe Lady Of BlossholmeLong OddsLove EternalA Tale Of The DutchThe Mahatma and the HareMaiwa's RevengeMarieMontezuma's DaughterMoon of IsraelMorning StarMr. Meeson's WillNada the LilyPearl-MaidenQueen Sheba’s RingRed EveRegenerationSHEShe and AllanSmith and the Pharaohs, and Other TalesThe Spirit of BambatseStella FregeliusSwallowA Tale of Three LionsThe Virgin of the SunThe Wanderer's NecklaceThe Way of the SpiritWhen the World Shook, Being an Account of the Great Adventure of Bastin, Bickley and ArbuthnotThe Witch's HeadThe WizardWorld's DesireThe Yellow God

    . . 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 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.

    

    Included is a URL for a free full audiobook read by Kevin I. Slaughter.Benjamin DeCasseres (is) the Pontius Pilate of America. -H.L. MenckenA passionate, erratic poet... strives to shake the foundation of the world. -The Saturday Review of LiteratureHe occupies a niche that is all his own and asks space to stand for no other man . -The NationDeCasseres is the most fiery and independent writer that I know of. -Remy de GourmontThere is but one Benjamin DeCasseres. And he is perhaps the one living wonder of the literary world. It is fortunate that such an one must be born, that he cannot be made; especially that he cannot be imitated, for if every one wrote like DeCasseres readers would go mad. That he can keep in any semblance of thought-order such whirls of words is something to marvel at. Yet to read him once, twice, is to experience the greatest mental exhilaration. -New York Times

    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

    Filled with dreamy optimism and a love for the unspoken promises of the night sky, David tries to find his way in a narrow, unforgiving, and controlled world. His conflicts are both internal and external, locking him in an unceasing struggle for survival; sometimes the sea is his enemy, sometimes his own rude behavior, sometimes his best friend Gershom Born, sometimes his secret love for the island teacher Mary Dauphiny; but always, inevitably, his Jung relatives and their manifold ambitions for money and power.The balance of life on Rockbound is precarious and thus fiercely guarded by all who inhabit its lonely domain, but just as a sudden change in the direction of the wind can lead to certain peril at sea, so too can the sudden change in the direction of a man's heart lead to a danger altogether unknown.Enormously evocative of the power, terror, and dramatic beauty of the Atlantic sea, and unrelenting in its portrait of back-breaking labour, cunning bitterness, and family strife, Rockbound is a story of many passions-love, pride, greed, and yearning -- all formed and buffeted on a small island by an unyielding wind and the rocky landscape of the human spirit.Roockbound won Canada Reads in 2005.