The trouble began in Venice ...'Mihály has dreamt of Italy all his life. When he finally travels there on his honeymoon with wife Erszi, he soon abandon her in order to find himself, haunted by old friends from his turbulent teenage days: beautiful, kind Tamas, brash and wicked Janos, and the sexless yet unforgettable Eva. Journeying from Venice to Ravenna, Florence and Rome, Mihály loses himself in Venetian back alleys and in the Tuscan and Umbrian countryside, driven by an irresistible desire to resurrect his lost youth among Hungary's Bright Young Things, and knowing that he must soon decide whether to return to the ambiguous promise of a placid adult life, or allow himself to be seduced into a life of scandalous adventure.Journey by Moonlight (Utas és Holdvilág) is an undoubted masterpiece of Modernist literature, a darkly comic novel cut through by sex and death, which traces the effects of a socially and sexually claustrophobic world on the life of one man.Translated from the Hungarian by the renowned and award-winning Len Rix, Antal Szerb's Journey by Moonlight (first published as Utas és Holdvilág in Hungary in 1937) is the consummate European novel of the inter-war period.

    Based on Cronin's own experiences as a physician, The Citadel boldly confronts traditional medical ethics, and has been noted as one of the inspirations for the formation of the National Health Service.The Citadel has been adapted into several successful film, radio, and television productions around the world, including the Oscar-nominated 1938 film starring Ralph Donat, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Richardson, and Rex Harrison.

    Henry's short stories are known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization and clever twist endings.

    In the words of Isaac Bashevis Singer, "What he did in his short life was enough to make him one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived." Weaving myth, fantasy, and reality, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, is, to quote Schulz, "an attempt at eliciting the history of a certain family . . . by a search for the mythical sense, the essential core of that history."

    based on the First ed. of 1918 and enl. to incorporate all known Poems and Fragments. Ed. with additional notes, a Foreword on the Revised Text, and a new biographical and critical introd. by W.H. Gardner and N.H. MacKenzie.

    Hindus and Moslems, Brahmins and Untouchables, western missionaries and British colonial bureaucrats, the famous novelist brings to life the social conditions of the last decade of the British Raj.

    The indifference and contempt of most of the people around him only reinforces his sense of destiny, for in Iceland poets are as likely to be scorned as they are to be revered. Over the ensuing years, Olaf comes to lead the paradigmatic poet's life of poverty, loneliness, ruinous love affairs, and sexual scandal. But he will never attain anything like greatness.As imagined by Nobel Prize winner Halldor Laxness in this magnificently humane novel, what might be cruel farce achieves pathos and genuine exaltation. For as Olaf's ambition drives him onward-and into the orbits of an unstable spiritualist, a shady entrepreneur, and several susceptible women-World Light demonstrates how the creative spirit can survive in even the most crushing of environments, and even the most unpromising human vessel.

    It tells of an ordinary American family overtaken by the devastating epidemic of the Spanish influenza of 1918. The book begins on the day before the armistice in a small midwestern town, and the events are seen from the perspective, in turn, of eight-year-old Peter Morison--called Bunny; of his older brother, Robert; and of their father. They are witnesses to a domestic tragedy that is written with beauty and a quite magnificent tenderness. William Maxwell has been described by The Washington Post as "one of America's most distinguished and distinctive stylists." John Updike has said that "Maxwell's voice is one of the wisest in American fiction; it is, as well, one of the kindest." The Times Literary Supplement declares that "Maxwell offers us scrupulously executed, moving landscapes of America's twentieth century, and they do not fade." The Saturday Review said,"They Came Like Swallows is one of those rare tales in which child-hood is reflected in the simplicity and intensity of its own experience."

    Set in Weimar Germany soon after Germany's catastrophic loss of World War I, the story follows a young gambler who loses all in Berlin, then flees the chaotic city, where worthless money and shortages are causing pandemonium. Once in the countryside, however, he finds a defeated German army that has camped there to foment insurrection. Somehow, amidst it all, he finds romance - it's The Year of Living Dangerously in a European setting. Fast-moving as a thriller, fascinating as the best historical fiction, and with lyrical prose that packs a powerful emotional punch, Wolf Among Wolves is the equal of Fallada's acclaimed Every Man Dies Alone as an immensely absorbing work of important literature.

    The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native Russian and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career.  It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative:  the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write--a book very much like The Gift itself.

    During his lifetime, his work found little critical regard, but word of his remarkable talents gradually won him an international readership. This volume brings together his complete fiction, including three short stories and his final surviving work, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Illustrated with Schulz's original drawings, this edition beautifully showcases the distinctive surrealist vision of one of the twentieth century's most gifted and influential writers.

    Janie's quest for identity takes her through three marriages and into a journey back to her roots.

    The first table of contents (at the very beginning of the ebook) lists the titles of all novels included in this volume. By clicking on one of those titles you will be redirected to the beginning of that work, where you'll find a new TOC that lists all the chapters and sub-chapters of that specific work.

    He was then sentenced to execution and spent every day awaiting death—only to be released three months later under pressure from the British government. Out of this experience, Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon, his most acclaimed work in the United States, about a man arrested and executed in a Communist prison.Dialogue with Death is Koestler’s riveting account of the fall of Málaga to rebel forces, his surreal arrest, and his three months facing death from a prison cell. Despite the harrowing circumstances, Koestler manages to convey the stress of uncertainty, fear, and deprivation of human contact with the keen eye of a reporter.Lucas Wittmann | Newsweek:"Koestler’s harrowing memoir of his three months behind bars with the constant threat of execution inspired his iconic Darkness at Noon. Dialogue with Death is the more lasting book for its lucid, exact, and unrelenting depiction of an imprisoned man on the verge of death."

    

    Susan Gaylord is talented, loving, equipped with a strong moral sense, and adept at anything she puts her hand to, from housework to playing the piano to working with marble and clay. But the intensity of her artistic calling comes at a price, isolating her from other people—at times, even from her own family. When her husband dies and she remarries, she finds herself once again comparing the sacrifice of solitude to that of commitment. With a heroine who is naturalistic yet compellingly larger than life, This Proud Heart is incomparable in its sympathetic study of character. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Pearl S. Buck including rare images from the author’s estate.

    Beautiful and cruel, like all big cats, Yellow Eyes and his mate, The Golden One, are tawny shadows lurking in the forest. Rutherford Montgomery is known for his honesty in the portrayal of animal life. In his stories animals are animals, not beasts playing the parts of human beings in a false drama of the wilderness.

    

    The key to Williams' mystically oriented theological thought, Descent into Hell (arguably Williams' greatest novel) is a multidimensional story about human beings who shut themselves up in their own narcissistic projections, so that they are no longer able to love, to 'co-inhere.' The result is a veritable hell.

    His graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, slum housing, mining conditions, squalor, hunger and growing unemployment are written with unblinking honesty, fury and great humanity.

    Zhivago and Romeo and Juliet.  Its mysterious author was recently the subject of a feature article in the New Yorker, which has inspired a forthcoming biography. Out of print for nearly three decades until the hardcover re-release last year, Ali and Nino is Kurban Said's masterpiece. It is a captivating novel as evocative of the exotic desert landscape as it is of the passion between two people pulled apart by culture, religion, and war.It is the eve of World War I in Baku, Azerbaijan, a city on the edge of the Caspian Sea, poised precariously between east and west.  Ali Khan Shirvanshir, a Muslim schoolboy from a proud, aristocratic family, has fallen in love with the beautiful and enigmatic Nino Kipiani, a Christian girl with distinctly European sensibilities.   To be together they must overcome blood feud and scandal, attempt a daring horseback rescue, and travel from the bustling street of oil-boom Baku, through starkly beautiful deserts and remote mountain villages, to the opulent palace of Ali's uncle in neighboring Persia.  Ultimately the lovers are drawn back to Baku, but when war threatens their future, Ali is forced to choose between his loyalty to the beliefs of his Asian ancestors and his profound devotion to Nino.  Combining the exotic fascination of a tale told by Scheherazade with the range and magnificence of an epic, Ali and Nino is a timeless classic of love in the face of war.

    Yeats and T.S. Eliot as one of the masterpieces of modern literature. Fusing poetry and prose, gutter talk and high music, wartime terror and ancient myth, Jones, who served as an infantryman on the Western Front, presents a picture at once panoramic and intimate of a world of interminable waiting and unforeseen death. And yet throughout he remains alert to the flashes of humanity that light up the wasteland of war.

    It is a masterly historical novel, rich in language, character, and plot--a panoramic story of passion, tragedy, and resilience.

    They aim at the elucidation of the Text and the exposition of the spiritual and ethical teachings of the Torah. A vast literature has been sifted, apart from the standard Jewish and non-Jewish commentaries and illuminating extracts which are included in the notes.While reproducing all the advantages that made the original edition successful, the Soncino edition incorporates two new and interesting features which greatly enhance its value and utility. In place of the Revised Version which was originally adopted as the Translation, the American Jewish Version has been substituted. This translation has been universally accepted as conforming more faithfully to traditional Jewish interpretation. Secondly, the work has been carefully planned so as to occupy a single volume only in place of the original five.This copyright Edition, published under the authority of the Trustees of the late Dr J H Hertz, accordingly presents in one light and compact volume over 1,000 comprehensive pages of Hebrew Text, English Translation and Illuminating Notes".

    Part II of the book was subsequently published on its own, with minor modifications, under the title Dialogue with Death. Koestler made three trips to Spain during the civil war; the third time he was captured, sentenced to death and imprisoned by the rebel forces of General Franco. Koestler was at that time working on behalf of the Comintern and as an agent of the Loyalist Government's official news agency, using for cover accreditation to the British daily News Chronicle.The book was published in London by Victor Gollancz Ltd. The 'Contents' of the book is in two parts: Part I is Comintern propaganda, divided into IX chapters, each with its own title. Part II, titled Dialogue with Death, describes Koestler’s prison experiences under sentence of death. This part was written in the late autumn of 1937 immediately after his release from prison, when the events were still vivid.

    A collection of humorous essays, accompanied by the author's own bizarre drawings, presenting Thurber's unremitting retort to the multitude of "self-help" books which were widespread in the 1930s and whose successors are still with us today.

    With this two-volume set, The Library of America presents the finest of Wharton's achievement in short fiction: 67 stories drawn from the entire span of her writing life, including the novella-length works The Touchstone, Sanctuary, and Bunner Sisters, eight shorter pieces never collected by Wharton, and many stories long out-of-print.Her range of setting and subject matter is dazzling, and her mastery of style consistently sure. Here are all the aspects of Wharton's art: her satire, sometimes gentle, sometimes dark and despairing, of upper-class manners; her unblinking recognition of the power of social convention and the limits of passion; her merciless exposure of commercial motivations; her candid exploration of relations between the sexes.The stories range with cosmopolitan ease from her native New York to the salons and summer hotels of Newport, Paris, and the Italian lakes. The depth of her response to World War I is registered in such works as "The Marne." Of particular interest are the remarkable stories, which treat occult and supernatural themes rarely encountered in her novels, such as the classic ghost stories "The Eyes" and "Pomegranate Seed."

    The story of Wolfe's brother Grover and his trip to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair is told from four perspectives, each articulating the sentiments of a different family member. The Lost Boy also captures beautifully the experiences of growing up at the turn of the century and the exhilaration and loss of childhood. For this illustrated edition, James Clark unearthed Wolfe's original manuscript, which was first published in the 1930s in a heavily abridged form.

    Harrington's washing.--The human element.--The alien corn.--The vessel of wrath.--The door of opportunity.--Neil MacAdam.

    Three classic Greek tragedies are translated and critically introduced byEdith Hamilton.

    Higginbotham's catastrophe --Wakefield --The great carbuncle --David Swan --The hollow of the three hills --Dr. Heidegger's experiment --Legends of the Province House --The ambitious guest --Peter Goldthwaite's treasure --The Shaker bridal --Endicott and the Red Cross --From Mosses from an old manse : The birthmark --Young Goodman Brown --Rappaccini's daughter --Mrs. Bullfrog --The Celestial railroad --The procession of life --Feathertop : a moralized legend --Egotism ; or, the bosom serpent --Drowne's wooden image --Roger Malvin's burial --The artist of the beautiful --From the snow image : The snow image : a childish miracle --The Great Stone Face --Ethan Brand --The Canterbury pilgrims --The devil in manuscript --My kinsman, Major Molineux

    Includes illustrated fold out map in back.

    Of the six days which comprise The Creation, this volume contains the two which recreate Torga's childhood spent in the Tras-os-Montes province, as the son of an illiterate peasant family scraping a living off the rocky flanks of The Mountain; and a boyhood of near servitude to his uncle in Brazil, on a remote estate carved out of the serrao.

    "Concentrating primarily on the 19th century, Lukacs offers brilliant reflections on Scott, Hugo, Tolstoy, and Flaubert, the methods of creating a feeling of historical reality, the tradition of epic, the use of the past by the rising bourgeoisie, the negative influence of naturalism, and the place of overt ideology." Washington Post Book World

    Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation. Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own.When they land jobs on a ranch in the Salinas Valley, the fulfillment of their dream seems to be within their grasp. But even George cannot guard Lennie from the provocations of a flirtatious woman, nor predict the consequences of Lennie's unswerving obedience to the things George taught him. "A thriller, a gripping tale . . . that you will not set down until it is finished. Steinbeck has touched the quick." —The New York Times

    They are arranged chronologically and early English has been made accessible to the modern reader. Extracts are given, where necessary, so that longer works are not overlooked.

    Fishermen, hoteliers, store owners, farmers and artists find their lives shattered.

    Garlanded with extravagant praise on its release, it was reprinted several times but fell into neglect and has now been out of print for almost 50 years. Although it takes its inspiration from the life, writings, and correspondence of the great Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, I Live Under a Black Sun is set during and after World War I. The novel follows Jonathan Hare, writer and misogynist, a character very much based on Swift, through his tragic relationships with two women who are likewise based on real people in Swift's life. Luxurious, angular, poetic, and sprinkled with allusions to Swift's most famous works and correspondence, I Live Under a Black Sun is a work that will surely entrance a whole new generation of readers. Highlighting a forgotten classic that has been out of print for nearly half a century, this is a fictionalized biography of Jonathan Swift and his tragic relationships with "Stella" and "Vanessa," updated to a time during and after World War I. Luxurious, angular, and poetic, it is a story unlike any other.

    It is a weird adventure of the spirit on which he leads us. For, mistake not, despite the apparently realistic description of the endless reaches of the desert, of the topless towers of the snow-capped mountains, of the huddling villages in which men rot away in poverty and disease, this Central Asia of Prokosch's is not actual place upon the face of the earth. Like Xanadu, like Arcadia, like Atlantis or Aea or Poictesme, it is a phantom manufactured by a restless mind. ...Whatever the meaning of this book, and there will be much debate on that score, its wild lyrinative splendor and its profound emotional content mark it as a memorable novel.