Best of
Literature

1954

The Collected Poems


Wallace Stevens - 1954
    This definitive poetry collection, originally published in 1954 to honor Stevens on his 75th birthday, contains:- "Harmonium"- "Ideas of Order"- "The Man With the Blue Guitar"- "Parts of the World"- "Transport Summer"- "The Auroras of Autumn"- "The Rock"

The Lord of the Rings Boxed Set


J.R.R. Tolkien - 1954
    Tolkien's classic masterpiece, together with The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion, an annotated guide to all three parts of the Book of the Century.Since it was first published in 1954, The Lord of the Rings has been a book people have treasured. Steeped in unrivalled magic and otherworldliness, its sweeping fantasy has touched the hearts of young and old alike. One hundred million copies of its many editions have been sold around the world, and occasional collectors' editions become prized and valuable items of publishing. Now, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its first publication, the text has been fully restored with almost 400 corrections - with the full co-operation of Christopher Tolkien - making it the definitive version of the text, and as close as possible to the version that J.R.R. Tolkien wanted. In addition to now having the definitive version of the text, this paperback set also includes a companion volume, The Lord of the Rings: A Reader's Companion, a unique annotated guide to the text, which will enhance the reader's enjoyment and understanding of the book of the 20th century.

The Mandarins


Simone de Beauvoir - 1954
    Drawing on those who surrounded her -- Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler -- and her passionate love affair with Nelson Algren, Beauvoir dissects the emotional and philosophical currents of her time. At once an engrossing drama and an intriguing political tale, The Mandarins is the emotional odyssey of a woman torn between her inner desire and her public life.The Mandarins won France's highest literary prize, the Prix Goncourt.

Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky


Fyodor Dostoevsky - 1954
    As in all Delphi Classics, the work is presented in a scholarly fashion, with all of the novels placed in chronological order, allowing readers to explore the author's gradual development in writing. The majority of texts are from Constance Garnett's celebrated translations, bringing the true spirit of Dostoyevsky's work to the English reader. Please note: we aim to provide the most comprehensive author collections available to Kindle readers. Sadly, it’s not always possible to guarantee an absolutely ‘complete’ works, due to copyright restrictions or the scarcity of minor works that have been translated into English. However, we do ensure our customers that every possible major text and a wealth of other material are included. We are dedicated to developing and enhancing our eBooks, which are available as free updates for customers who have already purchased them.CONTENTS:The NovelsPOOR FOLKTHE DOUBLENETOCHKA NEZVANOVAUNCLE’S DREAMTHE VILLAGE OF STEPANCHIKOVOTHE INSULTED AND HUMILIATEDTHE HOUSE OF THE DEADNOTES FROM UNDERGROUNDCRIME AND PUNISHMENTTHE GAMBLERTHE ETERNAL HUSBANDTHE IDIOTTHE POSSESSEDTHE RAW YOUTHTHE BROTHERS KARAMAZOVThe Short StoriesMR. PROHARTCHINTHE CHRISTMAS TREE AND THE WEDDINGTHE HEAVENLY CHRISTMAS TREETHE CROCODILEBOBOKA GENTLE SPIRITTHE DREAM OF A RIDICULOUS MANTHE PEASANT MAREYTHE LITTLE ORPHANA WEAK HEARTWHITE NIGHTSTHE MEEK GIRLPOLZUNKOVA LITTLE HEROTHE HONEST THIEFA NOVEL IN NINE LETTERSTHE LANDLADYAN UNPLEASANT PREDICAMENTANOTHER MAN'S WIFETHE GRAND INQUISITORThe Non-FictionDOSTOYEVSKY’S JOURNALTHE COMPLETE LETTERSThe CriticismON RUSSIAN NOVELISTS BY WILLIAM LYON PHELPSRUSSIAN ROMANCE BY EARL OF EVELYN BARING CROMERA SURVEY OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE BY ISABEL FLORENCE HAPGOODAN OUTLINE OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE BY MAURICE BARING

I'm Not Stiller


Max Frisch - 1954
    To prove he is who he claims to be, he confesses to three unsolved murders and recalls in great detail an adventuresome life in America and Mexico among cowboys and peasants, in back alleys and docks. He is consumed by "the morbid impulse to convince," but no one believes him. This is a harrowing account part Kafka, part Camus of the power of self-deception and the freedom that ultimately lies in self-acceptance. Simultaneously haunting and humorous, I'm Not Stiller has come to be recognized as "one of the major post-war works of fiction" and a masterpiece of German literature.

Selected Poetry


Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - 1954
    This is to be the first verse translation of Goethe's poetry in penguin classics and replaces Luke's own 1964 prose translation which has been in print continously since then (life sales 43,000).

Under Milk Wood


Dylan Thomas - 1954
    A moving and hilarious account of a spring day in a small Welsh coastal town, Under Milk Wood is "lyrical, impassioned and funny, an Our Town given universality" (The New Statesman and Nation).

Obras completas


Federico García Lorca - 1954
    Includes poetry, prose, interviews, drawings, musical texts for the songs, and papers. Many black and white reproductions of portraits and photos, one color plate. Thorough index and bibliography. Notes collected at the back of the second volume.There is another listing for a similar edition, with the same isbn (8403009534), but w/o any detail information to be able to verify it is identical.

The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition


M.H. Abrams - 1954
    Abrams has given us a remarkable study, admirably conceived and executed, a book of quite exceptional and no doubt lasting significance for a number of fields - for the history of ideas and comparative literature as well as for English literary history, criticism and aesthetics.

Quite Early One Morning: Stories


Dylan Thomas - 1954
    Many of the 25 short stories, autobiographical sketches and essays in Quite Early One Morning, a volume planned by Thomas shortly before his death, were read by him on such occasions. They are alive with his verbal magic, his intense perception of life, his gargantuan humor and with the very ring of his voice.Included in this collection of prose pieces are such favorites as the hilarious “A Visit to America,” the account of a small boy’s marvelous day’s outing—“A Story,” and the memorable “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” which has been called ‘the twentieth century Christmas Carol.’ Other pieces show Thomas’s power as a sensitive critic of poetry and as an exponent of his own intent as a poet.

Sonnets from the Portuguese and Other Poems


Elizabeth Barrett Browning - 1954
    The marriage of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett has been well named "the most perfect example of wedded happiness in the history of literature - perfect in the inner life and perfect in its poetical expression."

حیدر بابایه سلام


شهریار - 1954
    Published in 1954 in Tabriz, it is about Shahriyar's childhood and his memories of his village Khoshgenab near Tabriz. Heydar Baba is the name of a mountain overlooking the village.In Heydar Babaya Salam Shahriar narrates a nostalgia from his childhood in a village in Iranian Azerbaijan.

Literary Essays of Ezra Pound


Ezra Pound - 1954
    Eliot, contains essays from five earlier volumes: Pavannes and Divisions (1918), Instigations(1920), How to Read(1931), Make it New(1934), and Polite Essays(1937). The thirty-three essays contained in this collection are separated into three categories: The Art of Poetry, The Tradition, and Contemporaries. These essays showcase the range of Pound's interests, with topics ranging from modernist poetry to Japanese iconography, troubadour songs, and much more. Pound's influence on the modernist movement and literature as a whole makes this collection an important piece of literary history. With an introduction by T.S. Eliot.

Contempt


Alberto Moravia - 1954
    All the qualities for which Alberto Moravia is justly famous ~~ his cool clarity of expression, his exacting attention to psychological complexity and social pretension, his still-striking openness about sex—are evident in this story of a failing marriage. Contempt (which was to inspire Jean-Luc Godard’s no-less-celebrated film) is an unflinching examination of desperation and self-deception in the emotional vacuum of modern consumer society.

John Thomas and Lady Jane: The Second Version of Lady Chatterley's Lover


D.H. Lawrence - 1954
    It is in many ways quite different from the first and last: both in the personalities of Parkin, the gamekeeper (later called Mellors) and Connie Chatterley, and in the development of the love story.

Lady Windermere's Fan / A Woman of No Importance / An Ideal Husband / The Importance of Being Earnest / Salomé


Oscar Wilde - 1954
    Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1905. Excerpt: ... ACT I Scene--The octagon room at Sir Robert CHILTern's house in Grosvenor Square. [The room is brilliantly lighted and full of guests. At the top of the staircase stands Lady Chiltern, a woman of grave Greek beauty, about twenty-seven years of age. She receives the guests as they come up. Over the well of the staircase hangs a great chandelier with wax lights, which illumine a large eighteenthcentury French tapestry--representing the Triumph of Love, from a design by Boucher--fhat is stretched on the staircase wall. On the right is the entrance 'to the music-room. The sound of a string quartette is faintly heard. The entrance on the left leads to other reception-rooms. Mrs. Marchmont and Lady Basildon, two very pretty women, are seated together on a Louis Seize sofa. They are types of exquisite fragility. Their affectation of manner- has a delicate charm. Watteau would have loved to paint them.) Mrs. Marchmont. Going on to the Hartlocks' tonight, Margaret? Lady Basildon. I suppose so. Are you? Mrs. Marchmont. Yes. Horribly tedious parties they give, don't they? Lady Basildon. Horribly tedious! Never know why I go. Never know why I go anywhere. Mrs. Marchmont. I come here to be educated. Lady Basildon. Ah! I hate being educated! Mrs. Marchmont. So do I. It puts one almost on a level with the commercial classes, doesn't it? But 1 dear Gertrude Chiltern is always telling me that I should have some serious purpose in life. So I come here to try to find one. Lady Basildon [Looking round through her lorgnette]. I don't see anybody here to-night whom one could possibly call a serious purpose. The man who took me in to dinner talked to me about his wife the whole time. Hrs. MArchmont. How very trivial of him! Lady Basildon. Terribly trivial! What did your man talk about? Mrs. Mabchmont. Abo...

Prayers


Michel Quoist - 1954
    With simplicity and strength, this collection of powerful prayers will help you structure and develop your own sense of prayer. This assembly of petition and thanksgiving represents the full range of human emotion from despair to mystical union.

Impunity Jane


Rumer Godden - 1954
    For many years, she waits in a doll house hoping to be rescued and surprisingly it is a 7-year-old boy named Gideon who hears her calling and liberates her.

Many Lives


Kukrit Pramoj - 1954
    A passenger boat from Ban Phaen to Bangkok, packed with people, pressed on through the current amidst the rising clamor of the rain and storm. . . ." The boat capsizes in the torrent, and washed up on the shore the next morning are the sodden bodies of the many passengers who lost their lives. Thus begins M. R. Kukrit Pramoj's classic novel set in the Thailand of the early 1950s and first published in 1954. The life of each passenger who perished is retraced from birth, revealing a complex web of experiences and emotions. M. R. Kukrit Pramoj (1911D1995) wasa writer of renown, politician, prime minister, intellectual, journalist, and classical dancer. He wrote more than 20 books, including the historical novel Four Reigns.

The Wicked Pavilion


Dawn Powell - 1954
    Dennis Orphen, the writer from Dawn Powell’s Turn, Magic Wheel, makes an appearance here, as does Andy Callingham, Powell’s thinly disguised Ernest Hemingway. The climax of this mercilessly funny novel comes with a party which, remarked Gore Vidal, “resembles Proust’s last roundup,” and where one of the partygoers observes, “There are some people here who have been dead twenty years.”"For decades Dawn Powell was always just on the verge of ceasing to be a cult and becoming a major religion." -- Gore Vidal

Roman Tales


Alberto Moravia - 1954
    They were first published as a collection in 1954. All of the stories are set in Rome or its surroundings after World War II, and focus on 'the common people of Rome' (Roma popolana). The characters in these stories tend to be the unemployed, ex-convicts, waiters, drivers, con artists, thieves and petty criminals, the average man (or woman) and the lower classes aspiring to climb out of poverty.All the stories are told in the first person with the narrator often unnamed, although details are usually furnished to provide a clue to the narrator's identity, such as their occupation, motivations, and social status. Moravia's Racconti Romani provide a snapshot on life in Rome after World War II, revealing much about the inhabitants of Rome in the early 1950s.

Slide Rule


Nevil Shute - 1954
    For 30 years there was a period when airplanes would fly when you wanted them to, but there were still fresh things to be learned on every flight, a period when airplanes were small and so easily built that experiments were cheap and new designs could fly within six months of the first glimmer in the mind of the designer."That halcyon period started about 1910 and it was in full flower after WW I when I was a young man; it died with WW II when airplanes had grown too costly and too complicated for individuals to build or even to operate. I count myself lucky that that fleeting period coincided with my youth and my young manhood, and that I had a part in it."

A Pocket Book of Modern Verse


Oscar Williams - 1954
    More than 500 great modern poems.

Messiah


Gore Vidal - 1954
    When a mortician appears on television to declare that death is infinitely preferable to life, he sparks a religious movement that quickly leaves Christianity and most of Islam in the dust.Gore Vidal’s deft and daring blend of satire and prophecy, first published in 1954, eerily anticipates the excesses of Jim Jones, David Koresh, and the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult.

The World In The Evening


Christopher Isherwood - 1954
    After his second marriage suddenly ends, Stephen finds himself living with a relative in a small Pennsylvania Quaker town, haunted by memories of his prewar affair with a younger man during a visit to the Canary Islands. The world traveler comes to a gradual understanding of himself and of his newly adopted homeland. When first published in 1953, The World in the Evening was notable for its clear-eyed depiction of European and American mores, sexuality, and religion. Today, readers herald Christopher Isherwood’s frank portrayal of bisexuality and his early appreciation of low and high camp

Faulkner Reader


William Faulkner - 1954
    The Sound and the Fury, selections from other novels, three novellas, nine stories, the Nobel Prize address, etc.

The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant


Douglass Wallop - 1954
    Now a new generation is ready to discover this delightful book, restored to its original title, with a new introduction by baseball writer Bill James.Baseball lovers everywhere can identify with Joe Boyd, a die-hard Washington Senators fan who puts his soul in hock to help them wrest the pennant away from the hated, all-conquering Yankees. Transformed by the sulfurous Mr. Applegate's satanic magic into twenty-two-year-old phenom Joe Hardy, he leads the hapless Senators in a torrid late-season pursuit of the men in pinstripes. Joe has until September 21st before the deal becomes final—and eternal. With the luscious temptress Lola to distract him, he'll have a hell of a time wriggling out of the bargain...

Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years


Thomas Mann - 1954
    Krull is a man unhampered by moral precepts that govern the conduct of ordinary mortals, and this natural lack of scruple, coupled with his formidable mental and physical endowments, enables him to develop the arts of subterfuge and deception with astonishing success and to rise swiftly from poverty to affluence. Following Krull along the shady paths his nature has destined him to take, the reader moves through a world peopled by bizarre characters from the lowest to the highest reaches of European society. Chameleon-like, Krull readily adapts himself to the situation of the moment, and so adept in the practices of chicanery does he become that his victims almost seem to count themselves privileged. And so it is too with the women who encounter the irresistible Krull, for where Krull is, the normal laws of human behavior are in suspense.Originally the character of Felix Krull appeared in a short story Mann wrote in 1911. The story wasn't published until 1936, in the book Stories of Three Decades along with 23 other stories written from 1896 to 1929, the year in which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Much later, he expanded the original story into a novel, managing to finish and publish Part 1, "The Early Years," of the Confessions of Felix Krull to great public success. Due to Mann's death in 1955 the saga of the morally flexible and irresistible con-man remains unfinished.

High Water


Richard Pike Bissell - 1954
    

But Not Forsaken


Helen Good Brenneman - 1954
    This fascinating story lets the reader share in the trials of the family, and their trust in the Lord. They were persecuted---but not forsaken.

The World of Odysseus


Moses I. Finley - 1954
    Long celebrated as a pathbreaking achievement in the social history of the ancient world, M.I. Finley's brilliant study remains, as classicist Bernard Knox notes in his introduction to this new edition, "as indispensable to the professional as it is accessible to the general reader"--a fundamental companion for students of Homer and Homeric Greece.

Scott Fitzgerald


Andrew Turnbull - 1954
    Andrew Turnbull tells the story behind F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, revised and finally published when he was twenty-four, making him instantly famous, and his tender love affair with Zelda Sayre, from their glittering early life to the years Zelda spent in and out of sanatoriums. A literary generation, too, comes alive, including Ernest Hemingway, Edmund Wilson and Edith Wharton. Fitzgerald lived on Turnbull's family estate in Baltimore in the early 1930s and there befriended young Andrew, then aged eleven. Turnbull's personal relationship with Fitzgerald and the hundreds of interviews with those who knew him elegantly capture the dramatic, tragic story of F. Scott and the glow and pathos of his flamboyant life.

The Spider


John Crompton - 1954
    

Stories of Five Decades


Hermann Hesse - 1954
    Francis of Assisi (1919)Inside and Outside (1920)Tragic (1923)Dream Journeys (1927)Harry, the Steppenwolf (1928)An Evening with Dr. Faust (1929)Edmund (1934)The Interrupted Class (1948)

Michelet


Roland Barthes - 1954
    Neither a biography nor a critique, Michelet is Barthes's effort to give the reader a sense of the whole man.

A Circle in the Fire and Other Stories


Flannery O'Connor - 1954
    He had stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a glutton.’ In ‘The Lame Shall Enter First’, one of the unforgettable stories in this collection, a widower realises that the charity of which he has been so indignantly proud was but a means of stifling his grief. The violent epiphany that seizes him comes too late – the tragedies wrought by self-delusion and hubris may, finally, be understood, but they may not always be repaired. This is the central theme of Flannery O’Connor’s coruscating, plain-speaking fiction: the painful, necessary salvation that emerges from catastrophic, life-changing, and sometimes life-ending, events.O’Connor was the first fiction writer born in the 20th century to have her works collected and published by the Library of America. She grew up in a Roman Catholic family in Savannah, Georgia and stated that her writing was an expression of her religious commitment. Her characters are torn between the sensory and the spiritual, many of them gripped by morbid preoccupations as they attempt unsuccessfully to unite these dual impulses. Warped park guard Enoch Emery performs ritualistic tours, spying on female bathers and aggravating the animals at the zoo, awaiting the sign that will tell him to reveal the ‘mystery’ at ‘The Heart of the Park’. Many are fanatics, like the blind preacher in ‘The Peeler’. They, and their stories, are comic-grotesque, intertwining glimpses of the transcendental world with physical and psychological horror. This selection includes ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ and ‘Everything that Rises Must Converge’, two of O’Connor’s best-known works. Deanna Staffo’s powerful illustrations capture O’Connor’s Southern settings and macabre, surrealistic style. In a compelling introduction, American author C. E. Morgan, selected as one of The New Yorker’s prestigious ‘20 Under 40’ writers, explores the stories’ uncompromising, idiosyncratic wisdom.

The Classical Tradition: Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature


Gilbert Highet - 1954
    This landmark book explores the ways in which the Greco-Roman tradition has shaped modern European and American literature.