Luring the reader down labyrinthine tunnels of myth, history, and magic, The Deptford Trilogy provides an exhilarating antidote to a world from where "the fear and dread and splendour of wonder have been banished."

    Today he endures as the archetypal Romantic genius who explored the limits of the imagination and celebrated the pleasures of the senses but suffered a tragic early death. Edmund Wilson counted him as 'one of the half dozen greatest English writers,' and T. S. Eliot has paid tribute to the Shakespearean quality of Keats's greatness. Indeed, his work has survived better than that of any of his contemporaries the devaluation of Romantic poetry that began early in this century. This Modern Library edition contains all of Keats's magnificent verse: 'Lamia,' 'Isabella,' and 'The Eve of St. Agnes'; his sonnets and odes; the allegorical romance Endymion; and the five-act poetic tragedy Otho the Great. Presented as well are the famous posthumous and fugitive poems, including the fragmentary 'The Eve of Saint Mark' and the great 'La Belle Dame sans Merci,' perhaps the most distinguished literary ballad in the language. 'No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perception of loveliness,' said Matthew Arnold. 'In the faculty of naturalistic interpretation, in what we call natural magic, he ranks with Shakespeare.'

    And J R is a book of comparable magnitude, substance, and humor--a rushing, raucous look at money and its influence, at love and its absence, at success and its failures, in the magnificently orchestrated circus of all its larger- and smaller-than-life characters; a frantic, forlorn comedy about who uses -- and misuses -- whom.At the center: J R, ambitious sixth-grader in torn sneakers, bred on the challenge of "free enterprise" and fired by heady mail-order promises of "success." His teachers would rather be elsewhere, his principal doubles as a bank president, his Long Island classroom mirrors the world he sees around him -- a world of public relations and private betrayals where everything (and everyone) wears a price tag, a world of "deals" where honesty is no substitute for experience, and the letter of the law flouts its spirit at every turn. Operating from the remote anonymity of phone booths and the local post office, with beachheads in a seedy New York cafeteria and a catastrophic, carton-crammed tenement on East 96th Street, J R parlays a deal for thousands of surplus Navy picnic forks through penny stock flyers and a distant textile-mill bankruptcy into a nationwide, hydra-headed "family of companies."The J R Corp and its Boss engulf brokers, lawyers, Congressmen, disaffected school teachers and disenfranchised Indians, drunks, divorcées, second-hand generals, and a fledgling composer hopelessly entangled in a nightmare marriage of business and the arts. Their bullish ventures -- shaky mineral claims and gas leases, cost-plus defense contracts, a string of nursing homes cum funeral parlors, a formula for frozen music -- burgeon into a paper empire ranging from timber to textiles, from matchbooks to (legalized) marijuana, from prostheses to publishing, inadvertently crushing hopes, careers, an entire town, on a collision course with the bigger world . . . the pragmatic Real World where the business of America is business, where the stock market exists as a convenience, and the tax laws make some people more equal than others . . . the world that makes the rules because it plays to win, and plays for keeps.Absurdly logical, mercilessly real, gathering its own tumultuous momentum for the ultimate brush with commodity trading when the drop in pork belly futures masks the crumbling of our own, J R captures the reader in the cacophony of voices that revolves around this young captive of his own myths -- voices that dominate the book, talking to each other, at each other, into phones, on intercoms, from TV screens and radios -- a vast mosaic of sound that sweeps the reader into the relentless "real time" of spoken words in a way unprecedented in modern fiction. The disturbing clarity with which this finished writer captures the ways in which we deal, dissemble, stumble through our words -- through our lives -- while the real plans are being made elsewhere makes J R the extraordinary novel that it is.--From the first-edition dustjacket

    We witness the gradual breakdown of a genius ceaselessly compelled to correct and refine his perceptions until the only logical conclusion is the negation of his own soul.

    It has been named the best science book ever by the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and is considered to be Levi's crowning achievement.

    The Book of Sand was the last of Borges' major collections to be published. The stories are, in his words, 'variations on favourite themes...combining a plain and at times almost colloquial style with a fantastic plot'. It includes such marvellous tales as "The Congress", "Undr" and "The Mirror and the Mask". Also included are the handful of stories written right at the end of Borges' life - "August 25, 1983", "Blue Tigers", "The Rose of Paracelsus" and "Shakespeare's Memory".

    The Dialogic Imagination presents, in superb English translation, four selections from Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Problems of literature and esthetics), published in Moscow in 1975. The volume also contains a lengthy introduction to Bakhtin and his thought and a glossary of terminology.Bakhtin uses the category "novel" in a highly idiosyncratic way, claiming for it vastly larger territory than has been traditionally accepted. For him, the novel is not so much a genre as it is a force, "novelness," which he discusses in "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse." Two essays, "Epic and Novel" and "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," deal with literary history in Bakhtin's own unorthodox way. In the final essay, he discusses literature and language in general, which he sees as stratified, constantly changing systems of subgenres, dialects, and fragmented "languages" in battle with one another.

    Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art. In the second volume they move to London in a whirl of marriage and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures. These books "provide an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.). The third volume follows Nick into army life and evokes London during the blitz. In the climactic final volume, England has won the war and must now count the losses.In this climactic volume of A Dance to the Music of Time, Nick Jenkins describes a world of ambition, intrigue, and dissolution. England has won the war, but now the losses, physical and moral, must be counted. Pamela Widmerpool sets a snare for the young writer Trapnel, while her husband suffers private agony and public humiliation. Set against a background of politics, business, high society, and the counterculture in England and Europe, this magnificent work of art sounds an unforgettable requiem for an age.Includes these novels: Books Do Furnish a Room Temporary Kings Hearing Secret Harmonies

    On a rafting trip down the Colorado River, Hayduke joins forces with feminist saboteur Bonnie Abbzug, wilderness guide Seldom Seen Smith, and billboard torcher Doc Sarvis, M.D., and together they wander off to wage war on the big yellow machines, on dam builders and road builders and strip miners. As they do, his characters voice Abbey's concerns about wilderness preservation ("Hell of a place to lose a cow," Smith thinks to himself while roaming through the canyonlands of southern Utah. "Hell of a place to lose your heart. Hell of a place... to lose. Period").Moving from one improbable situation to the next, packing more adventure into the space of a few weeks than most real people do in a lifetime, the motley gang puts fear into the hearts of their enemies, laughing all the while. It's comic, yes, and required reading for anyone who has come to love the desert.

    He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn’t particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, “You are no Jew.” In the lowest circle of the Holocaust, Georg remains an outsider.The genius of Imre Kertesz’s unblinking novel lies in its refusal to mitigate the strangeness of its events, not least of which is Georg’s dogmatic insistence on making sense of what he witnesses–or pretending that what he witnesses makes sense. Haunting, evocative, and all the more horrifying for its rigorous avoidance of sentiment, Fatelessness is a masterpiece in the traditions of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski.

    In contrast to traditional readings that see in Kafka's work a case of Oedipalized neurosis or a flight into transcendence, guilt, and subjectivity, Deleuze and Guattari make a case for Kafka as a man of joy, a promoter of radical politics who resisted at every turn submission to frozen hierarchies.

    Opening with letters written during Steinbeck's early years in California, and closing with a 1968 note written in Sag Harbor, New York, Steinbeck: A Life in Letters reveals the inner thoughts and rough character of this American author as nothing else has and as nothing else ever will.

    Ashberry reaffirms the poetic powers that have made him such an outstanding figure in contemporary literature. This new book continues his astonishing explorations of places where no one has ever been.

    He must fight for his place against the bullies in his Depression-shadowed Bronx neighborhood and his own frail health. As a young man, he must start anew and define his own path of personal belief that diverges sharply with his devout father and everything he has been taught...

    The title is Latin for "Our earth". Modeled on James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Terra Nostra shifts unpredictably between the sixteenth century and the twentieth, seeking the roots of contemporary Latin American society in the struggle between the conquistadors and indigenous Americans. -Terra Nostra is the spreading out of the novel, the exploration of its possibilities, the voyage to the edge of what only a novelist can see and say.- Milan Kundera

    Here are three of his finest works, presented in their entirety. Tess of the Durbervilles tells the tragic tale of a poor young girl's coming of age and her traumatic relationships with two men: the wealthy and cold Alec D'Urberville and the beautiful, but unforgiving Angel Clare. Michael Henchard, the title character of The Mayor of Casterbridge, reaches the pinnacles of power-only to lose everything through folly and bad luck. Set in Hardy's beloved Wessex, and always attentive to the struggles of everyday life in the farming community, Far From the Madding Crowd centers on Bathsheba Everdene and the men who love her.

    It is the story of Nedra and Viri, whose favored life is centered around dinners, ingenious games with their children, enviable friends, and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach. But even as he lingers over the surface of their marriage, Salter lets us see the fine cracks that are spreading through it, flaws that will eventually mar the lovely picture beyond repair. Seductive, witty, and elegantly nuanced, Light Years is a classic novel of an entire generation that discovered the limits of its own happiness—and then felt compelled to destroy it.

    Out of her rich imagination she drew forth tales of bold princesses and cowardly kings, spurned suitors and ardent lovers, fearless young men and heartless queens. Every conceivable place of enchantment was Lola Basyang’s domain.The First “Kuwento ni Lola Basyang “ appeared in the Tagalog magazine Liwayway in 1925. Its author, Severino Reyes, was the founder and editor of Liwayway as well as a pioneering figure in Tagalog theater. Mr. Reyes wrote more that 400 stories under the pen name Lola Basyang.Tahanan Books has gathered together a literary dream team to produce this landmark collection of twelve tales. Poet and literary critic Bienvenido Lumbera sifted through hundreds of manuscripts to select the best of Reyes’ tales. Acclaimed author and publisher Gilda Cordero-Fernando delivered the original English translation and renowned children’s book illustrator Albert Gamos rendered over 30 unforgettable illustrations.Tahanan’s anthology introduces Lola Basyang to a new generation of readers in English. Open this book, sit at her feet, and let the magic begin.

    "Barthes par Barthes is a genuinely post-modern autobiography, an innovation in the art of autobiography comparable in its theoretical implications for our understanding of autobiography to Sartre's The Words."--Hayden White, University of California

    With no pretense of courage, and a vague dislike for what she feels is the cheap availability of her emotions, Olly grieves the husband she probably would have divorced, while coping with the warmth and awkwardness of family trying (and failing) to distract her from their own grief. As she learns to rethink her life and her love, she becomes close to Sam's brother, Patrick—and begins to realize Sam's recklessness and passion may not be as foreign to her as she thought.Laurie Colwin depicts Olly—the “More Life Widow of the More Life Kid”—with humor, compassion, and a decided lack of sentimentality, creating a real heroine who tries to remain true to her heart while keeping her head.This edition features cover art by Olivia McGiff.

    The novel is an attempt to address the complications of religion through Tulsidas while portraying him as a person who was afflicted with all the virtues and vices known to human beings. How Tulsidas finds Shri Ram -- is a question that the author answers in a fashion that can only be termed as brilliant for lack of better word. The best thing about the work is that it doesn't attempt to glorify any God or deity, but simple tries to go into the mind of the devotee -- Tulsidas in this case.

    It is the tragic monologue of a woman speaking with the child she carries in her womb. This letter confronts the burning theme of abortion, and the meaning of life, by asking difficult questions: Is it fair to impose life even if it means suffering? Would it be better not to be born at all?Letter to a Child Never Born touches on the real meaning of being a woman: the power to give life or not. When the book begins, the protagonist is upset after learning she is pregnant. She knows nothing about the child, except that this creature depends totally and uniquely on her own choices. The creation of another person directly within one’s own body is a very shocking thing. The sense of responsibility is huge; it is a heavy burden that gives life to endless reflections, from the origin of our existence to the shame of our selfishness. If the child could choose, would he prefer to be born, to grow up, and to suffer, or would he return to the joyful limbo from which he came? A woman’s freedom and individuality are also challenged by a newborn—should she renounce her freedom, her job, and her choice? What should she do at this point?

    Outsiders, even their parents, cannot tell them apart, and call them Jean-Paul. The mysterious bond between them excludes all others; they speak their own language; they are one perfectly harmonious unit; they are, in all innocence, lovers.For Paul, this unity is paradise, but as they grow up Jean rebels against it. He takes a mistress and deserts his brother, but Paul sets out to follow him in a pilgrimage that leads all around the world, through places that reflect their separation--the mirrored halls of Venice, the Zen gardens of Japan, the newly divided city of Berlin. The exquisite love story of Jean-Paul is set against the ugliness and pain of human existence. " Gemini" is a novel of extraordinary proportions, intricate images, and profound thought, in which Michel Tournier tells his fascinating story with an irresistible humor.

    Vargas Llosa's first work of non-fiction will send the reader back to Flaubert's masterpiece with renewed interest.

    Tolstoyan in scope and  Proustian in detail  but completely individual in effect, it records the encounter between East and West through the experiences of a dozen people caught up in the upheavals of the Second World War and the growing campaign for Indian independence from Britain. In The Towers of Silence, Barbie Batchelor, a British missionary and schoolteacher, befriends a British family and witnesses the trial of Hari Kumar, an Indian man accused of assaulting his beloved Daphne Manners, while observing the dangerously cruel Captain Ronald Merrick, Hari’s nemesis. In A Division of the Spoils, the chaos of the departure of the British and the fervor of Partition wreaks havoc upon the twilight of the Raj — and the end of a era. On occasions unsparing in its study of personal dramas and racial differences, the Raj Quartet is at all times profoundly humane, not least in the author’s capacity to identify with a huge range of characters. It is also illuminated by delicate social comedy and wonderful evocations of the Indian scene, all narrated in luminous prose. The other two novels in the Raj Quartet, The Jewel in the Crown and The Day of the Scorpion, are also available from Everyman’s Library. With a new introduction by Hilary Spurling (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

    Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art. In the second volume they move to London in a whirl of marriage and adulteries, fashions and frivolities, personal triumphs and failures. These books "provide an unsurpassed picture, at once gay and melancholy, of social and artistic life in Britain between the wars" (Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.). The third volume follows Nick into army life and evokes London during the blitz. In the climactic final volume, England has won the war and must now count the losses. Four very different young men on the threshold of manhood dominate this opening volume of A Dance to the Music of Time. The narrator, Jenkins—a budding writer—shares a room with Templer, already a passionate womanizer, and Stringham, aristocratic and reckless. Widermerpool, as hopelessly awkward as he is intensely ambitious, lurks on the periphery of their world. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, these four gain their initiations into sex, society, business, and art. Considered a masterpiece of modern fiction, Powell's epic creates a rich panorama of life in England between the wars. Includes these novels: A Question of Upbringing A Buyer's Market The Acceptance World "Anthony Powell is the best living English novelist by far. Hisadmirers are addicts, let us face it, held in thrall by a magician."—Chicago Tribune "A book which creates a world and explores it in depth, which ponders changing relationships and values, which creates brilliantly living and diverse characters and then watches them grow and change in their milieu. . . . Powell's world is as large and as complex as Proust's."—Elizabeth Janeway, New York Times "One of the most important works of fiction since the Second World War. . . . The novel looked, as it began, something like a comedy of manners; then, for a while, like a tragedy of manners; now like a vastly entertaining, deeply melancholy, yet somehow courageous statement about human experience."—Naomi Bliven, New Yorker

    Detail by detail their diaries record a world in which thought leads to action and action brings William G. and Neaera H. to their own open sea.

    Omer is the seraskier, commander in chief of the Sultan’s armies, and as the book begins he arrives from Istanbul, dispatched to bring Sarajevo’s landowners to heel, a task that he accomplishes with his usual ferocity and efficiency. And yet the seraskier’s expedition to Bosnia is a time of reckoning for him as well: he was born in the Balkans, a Serb and a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a bright boy who escaped his father’s financial disgrace by running away and converting to Islam. Now, at the height of his power, he heads an army of misfits, adventurers, and outcasts from across Europe and Asia, and yet wherever he goes he remains a stranger.Ivo Andrić, who won the Nobel Prize in 1961, is a spellbinding storyteller and a magnificent stylist, and here, in his final novel, he surrounds his enigmatic central figure with many vivid and fascinating minor characters, lost souls and hopeless dreamers all, in a world that is slowly sliding towards disaster. Omer Pasha Latas combines the leisurely melancholy of Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March with the stark fatalism of an old ballad.

    The three-volume novel The Aesthetics of Resistance is the crowning achievement of Peter Weiss, the internationally renowned dramatist best known for his play Marat/Sade. The first volume, presented here, was initially published in Germany in 1975; the third and final volume appeared in 1981, just six months before Weiss’s death. Spanning the period from the late 1930s to World War II, this historical novel dramatizes antifascist resistance and the rise and fall of proletarian political parties in Europe. Living in Berlin in 1937, the unnamed narrator and his peers—sixteen- and seventeen-year-old working-class students—seek ways to express their hatred for the Nazi regime. They meet in museums and galleries, and in their discussions they explore the affinity between political resistance and art, the connection at the heart of Weiss’s novel. Weiss suggests that meaning lies in embracing resistance, no matter how intense the oppression, and that we must look to art for new models of political action and social understanding. The novel includes extended meditations on paintings, sculpture, and literature. Moving from the Berlin underground to the front lines of the Spanish Civil War and on to other parts of Europe, the story teems with characters, almost all of whom are based on historical figures. The Aesthetics of Resistance is one of the truly great works of postwar German literature and an essential resource for understanding twentieth-century German history.

    Also living in Zurich at this time was a British consula official called Henry Carr, a man acquainted with Joyce through the theater and later through a lawsuit concerning a pair of trousers. Taking Carr as his core, Stoppard spins this historical coincidence into a masterful and riotously funny play, a speculative portrait of what could have been the meeting of these profoundly influential men in a germinal Europe as seen through the lucid, lurid, faulty, and wholy riveting memory of an aging Henry Carr.

    Deferred from military service, Chinaski travels from city to city, moving listlessly from one odd job to another, always needing money but never badly enough to keep a job. His day-to-day existence spirals into an endless litany of pathetic whores, sordid rooms, dreary embraces, and drunken brawls, as he makes his bitter, brilliant way from one drink to the next.Charles Bukowski's posthumous legend continues to grow. Factotum is a masterfully vivid evocation of slow-paced, low-life urbanity and alcoholism, and an excellent introduction to the fictional world of Charles Bukowski.

    Introduced with a new foreword by Antonio Loprieno.Volume II shows the culmination of these literary genres within the single period known as the New Kingdom (1550-1080 B.C.). With a new foreword by Hans-W. Fischer-Elfert.Volume III spans the last millennium of Pharaonic civilization, from the tenth century B.C. to the beginning of the Christian era. With a new foreword by Joseph G. Manning.

    There are some facts and figures, but they tell us nothing about the women themselves: their motives, their emotions, and the memories they passed on to their children. Gayl Jones's first novel is a gripping portrait of this harsh sexual and psychological genealogy....Jones's language is subtle and sinewy, and her imagination sure." —Margo Jefferson, Newsweek

    "Nothing more beautiful and moving has been written in years". -- New York Times Book Review

    His fantasies obstinately refuse to become reality, and in a world of unyielding girls and ruthless Nazi invaders, jazz is his only solace. By the author of "The Bass Saxophone" and "The Engineer of Human Souls".

    An Israeli scout risks the safety and respect of his comrades in an act of transfiguring gentleness and charity. In a hot, dirty typewriter ribbon factory in the Bronx, a young man finds love. A Dutch child in a Canadian orphanage carries in her heart, her love for her parents and the pain of war. A soldier is overpowered by his days of burying the dead. A Sicilian widow meditates on the end of her family line. These twenty stories are strikingly beautiful pieces on enduring, universal questions by a writer the San Francisco Review of Books calls "a master crafter of the short story."

    "A wide and deep sampling of the best poetry written in the English language, from medieval times to the present day." (from the Preface of the third edition containing over 1,400 poems by more than 200 poets.)

    He established the style of the modern short story and influenced many great writers, including George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Katherine Mansfield, and Virginia Woolf.

    Our divine journey -- 2. God and eternity -- 3. Prayer -- 4. Growth and self-development -- 5. Life's little lessons -- 6. Friends and relationships -- 7. Women -- 8. Men and women -- 9. Motherhood, pregnancy and birth -- 10. Adoption -- 11. Parenthood and childraising -- 12. Adversity -- 13. Service -- 14. Healing and comfort -- 15. Old age -- 16. Death and beyond -- Indexes.

    Ranging over a period of some six years, the story is set during the late 1930s and early 1940s; but it is not so much a tale of this period as Herbert's analysis and indictment of the steps by which we came to the Australia of today. Herbert parallels an intimate personal narrative with a tale of approaching war and the disconnect between modern Australia and its first inhabitants. With enduring portraits of a large cast of local and international characters, Herbert paints a scene of racial, familial, and political disparity. He lays bare the paradoxes of this wild land, both old and wise, young flawed. Winner of the Miles Franklin Award on first publication in 1975, Poor Fellow, My Country is masterful storytelling, an epic in the truest sense. This is the decisive story of how Australia threw away her chance of becoming a True Commonwealth. It is undoubtedly Herbert's supreme contribution to Australian literature.

    This powerful story of the sea is also a resonantly symbolic account of the relations between man and nature.An adventure story and a deeply considered meditation upon the sea itself.

    Also included is The Trouble with Nigeria, Achebe's searing outpouring of his frustrations with his country. GREAT IDEAS. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

    Haunted by illness and obsessed with death, he moves to Mumbai from his village Udali, breaking away from his feudal roots. He encounters young men frustrated by the system but refuses to become one of them. Suddenly, he takes a fancy to education and pursues masters in Arts, without his family knowing about it.Bidhar is the story of a pessimist who struggles to move on in life.

    In addition to his long public service as a diplomat, Irving was amazingly prolific: His collected works fill forty volumes that encompass essays, history, travel writings, and multi-volume biographies of Columbus and Washington. But it is Irving’s mastery of suspense, characterization, tempo, and irony that transforms his fiction into virtuoso performances, earning him his reputation as the father of the American short story. Charles Neider has gathered all sixty-one of Irving's tales, originally scattered throughout his many collections of nonfiction essays and sketches, into one magnificent volume. Together, they reveal his wide range: besides the expected classics like "Rip Van Winkle," "The Spectre Bridegroom," "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and "The Devil and Tom Walker," his fiction embraces realistic tales, ghost stories, parodies, legends, fables, and satires. For those familiar only with secondhand retellings of Irving's most famous tales, this collection offers the opportunity to step inside Washington Irving's imagination and partake of its innumerable and timeless pleasures.

    Collected after his death by his friend and literary executor Max Brod, here are more than two decades' worth of Franz Kafka's letters to the men and women with whom he maintained his closest personal relationships, from his years as a student in Prague in the early 1900s to his final months in the sanatorium near Vienna where he died in 1924.Sometimes surprisingly humorous, sometimes wrenchingly sad, they include charming notes to school friends; fascinating accounts to Brod about his work in its various stages of publication; correspondence with his publisher, Kurt Wolff, about manuscripts in progress, suggested book titles, type design, and late royalty statements; revealing exchanges with other young writers of the day, including Martin Buber and Felix Weltsch, on life, literature, and girls; and heartbreaking reports to his parents, sisters, and friends on the declining state of his health in the last months of his life.

    Alive with feeling and intelligence, endearing characters and feminist insights, this is one of the very best by an immensely gifted author.

    

    Fleeing from pirates, Robinson Crusoe is swept ashore in a storm possessing only a knife, a box of tobacco, a pipe-and the will to survive. His is the saga of a man alone: a man who overcomes self-pity and despair to reconstruct his life; who painstakingly teaches himself how to fashion a pot, bake bread, build a canoe; and who, after twenty-four agonizing years of solitude, discovers a human footprint in the sand... Consistently popular since its first publication in 1719, Daniel Defoe's story of human endurance in an exotic, faraway land exerts a timeless appeal.

    In this autobiographical work, Solzhenitsyn tells of his ten-year war to outwit Russia's rulers and get his works published in his own country.

    Kate Chopin (1851-1904): The Story of an HourEdith Wharton (1862-1937): The Other TwoWilla Cather (1873-1947): A Wagner MatinéeColette (1873-1947): The Secret WomanGertrude Stein (1874-1946): Miss Furr and Miss SkeeneVirginia Woolf (1882-1941): The New DressContentsKatherine Mansfield (1888-1923): The Garden PartyKatherine Anne Porter (1890-1980): RopeKay Boyle (1902-1992): Winter NightEudora Welty (1909-2001): A Worn PathHortense Calisher (1911- ): The Scream on Fifty-Seventh StreetAnn Petry (1911-1997): Like a Winding SheetMary Lavin (1912-1996): In a CaféTillie Olsen (1913- ): I Stand Here IroningMaeve Brennan (1917-1993): The Eldest ChildCarson McCullers (1917-1967): WunderkindDoris Lessing (1919- ): To Room NineteenGrace Paley (1922- ): An Interest in LifeFlannery O'Connor (1925-1964): RevelationJean Stubbs (1926- ): Cousin LewisEdna O'Brien (1930- ): A JourneyAlice Munro (1931- ): The OfficeJoyce Carol Oates (1938- ): In the Region of IceMargaret Drabble (1939- ): The Gifts of WarJulie Hayden (1939-1981): Day-Old Baby RatsAlice Walker (1944- ): Everyday Use

    A superb introduction to important areas of modern physics, it covers Feynman diagrams, quasi particles, Fermi systems at finite temperature, superconductivity, vacuum amplitude, Dyson's equation, ladder approximation, and much more. "A great delight to read." — Physics Today. 1974 edition.

    Whether the setting is a brief encounter in Persia or a wife-swapping party in the suburbs, a pre-war English tennis party or an Irish wedding. William Trevor reveals himself once more as a master of regret and betrayal: and a master of telling a story which is never false to the human heart.Contents: In Isfahan/The Distant Past/Angels at the Ritz/Mrs Silly/The Tennis Court/A Complicated Nature/Teresa's Wedding/Office Romances/Mr McNamara/Afternoon Dancing/Last Wishes/Mrs Acland's Ghost

    It is falling from a great height, a meteor, a massive, compact, oblong block of rock, like a giant egg with a pocked, uneven surface.""The opening sentence of "La Belle Captive" introduces a dreamworld where the conventions of the traditional novel have been overthrown. Objects move through space without regard to laws of nature, characters move through the text in a maddening complex of events.Published in 1975, Alain Robbe-Grillet's "nouveau roman" is illustrated with 77 paintings by Rene Magritte. Robbe-Grillet uses Magritte's paintings as pretexts for the novel, letting them generate themes for an imaginary discourse that parallels their imagery, glosses them, contradicts them. Simultaneously, he comments on Magritte's paintings while taking advantage of them to parade his own favorite themes: play, eroticism, subversion. Robbe-Grillet gives us a plot that frustrates expectations yet shares his pleasure with the mysterious and poetic in Magritte's art, and with the cultural myths that painter and novelist both parody.The book includes a critical essay by novelist and translator Ben Stoltzfus on the pictorial and linguistic affinities between Magritte and Robbe-Grillet. Stoltzfus explores the image of the beautiful captive not only in her mythical and erotic dimensions, but also as a metaphor for the artistic process.

    This early novel deals with the pain and dislocation of the clash of the old and new ways - the educated young man determined to go overseas, and the elders of the family believing his duty is to stay and head the family.

    An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century & the First World War. The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, NY, at the home of an affluent American family. One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. Almost magically, the line between fantasy & historical fact, between real & imaginary characters, disappears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J.P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud & Emiliano Zapata slip in & out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family & other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler & a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.

    The "book as book" has been removed from the oral tradition by such features as prefaces, footnotes, and indexes. Books have become voiceless in some sense - they are to be read silently, not recited aloud. How this mechanical change affected the possibilities of fiction is Kenner's subject.

    

    His wife, Justine, is a fortune teller who can't remember the past. Her grandfather, Daniel, longs to find the brother who walked out of his life in 1912, with nothing more than a fiddle in his hand. All three are taking journeys that lead back to the family's deepest roots...to a place where rebellion and acceptance have the haunting power to merge into one....From the Paperback edition.

    This second volume of Wole Soyinka's plays traces the ironic development and consequences of 'progress'.

    

    Professor Branestawm is still hard at work on his inventions, and still causing calamity after calamity and laugh after laugh.

    Marcia Falk’s rich and lyrical translation, praised by poets and scholars alike, is paired here with the original Hebrew text.

    Fleeing to Philadelphia, he fashions a ghostly existence in an underground train station. When a young woman appears to free him from his malaise, they return together to the Iowa heartland, where the novel soars to its heartrending climax. First published to enormous acclaim in 1975, Rock Island Line brings Rhodes's striking characterizations and unparalleled eye for the telling detail to this tale of paradise lost — and possibly regained.

    These lively, often intimate exchanges turn on practical, everyday matters as well as wider philosophical issues, as Krishnamurti encourages his audience to appreciate that the beginning of wisdom is self-knowledge. Jiddu Krishnamurti was born in southern India in 1895 and died in 1986. The essence of his teachings is that societal change and world peace can only occur through a complete change of individual consciousness. It is only in seeing ourselves as we are, with absolute clarity, that real revolution—an inner revolution—takes place.

    

    In a philosophical approach to color, William Gass explores man's perception of the color blue as well as its common erotic, symbolic, and emotional associations.

    The editor has added a new introduction and prefatory material."Mary Helen Washington has had a greater impact upon the formation of the canon of Afro-American literature than has any other scholar." —The New York Times Book Review

    When Mikkel's older handicapped brother accidentally hurts someone and is threatened by that boy's friends, Mikkel resolves the situation in an unusual and interesting way.

    Folio Society Jane Austen Set (Seven volume set: Emma; Mansfield Park; Northanger Abbey; Persuasion; Pride and Prejudice; Sense and Sensibility; Shorter Works)

    The story of a woman facing the nightmare of mental breakdown, who finds brief happiness in an idyllic but doomed love affair.

    This reprint (with updated 'Suggestions for Further Reading') of the Houghton Mifflin edition makes David Bevington's classic anthology of medieval drama available again at an affordable price.

    In the hands of the great Haitian author known simply as Frankétienne, zombification takes on a symbolic dimension that stands as a potent commentary on a country haunted by a history of slavery. Now this dynamic new translation brings this touchstone in Haitian literature to English-language readers for the first time.Written in a provocative experimental style, with a myriad of voices and combining myth, poetry, allegory, magical realism, and social realism, Dézafi tells the tale of a plantation that is run and worked by zombies for the financial benefit of the living owner. The owner's daughter falls in love with a zombie and facilitates his transformation back into fully human form, leading to a rebellion that challenges the oppressive imbalance that had robbed the workers of their spirit. With the walking dead and bloody cockfights (the "dézafi" of the title) as cultural metaphors for Haitian existence, Frankétienne's novel is ultimately a powerful allegory of political and social liberation.

    . . and a black whore Hazel with a heart of gold. . . and stop me or Mr. Coleman if you've heard this one only he'll sneak it right past you. Orphan Jim (well that's what his sister Trudy, thirteen, calls him) and Trudy both hit the road out of Pluma, Alabama, toward Montgomery where they have some mean-spirited relatives who'll put them in a Home so they leave and only Hazel, visited weekly by her white married railroad man Mr. Harris, takes them in and lets them stay. Jim goes to school, Trudy pays their way working in a store, and when Mr. Harris dies real sudden--the youngsters have made it on their own. Coleman gloves the sentimental hard knocks and it's all as natural and unexpected and sunny as a dandelion on some forgotten back road.

    Two old friends, however, rescue him. They applaud his phony diploma as perfect in “a world where everything is false” and they draw him into their hedonistic rounds as gentlemen of leisure. Life, they explain, “while essentially pointless is extremely interesting.”  The small city may seem tedious, but there are women to seduce, powerful men to tease, and also strange events: rich notables are disappearing.Eyeing the machinations of our three pleasure seekers and nervous about the missing rich men, the authorities soon see—in complex schemes to bed young girls—signs of political conspiracies. The three young men, although mistaken for terrorists, enjoy freedom, wit, and romance. After all, though “not every man is capable of appreciating what is around him,” the conspirators in pleasure certainly do.

    Fighter, thief, black marketeer, courageous leader, quiet dreamer...and a lyrical lover of women. Across China's most merciless land, aswarm with warlords, cut-throats, Japanese deserters, whores and nomads...Jake Dodds is running for his life!

    From these seemingly unrelated events, Ivan Angelo's remarkable debut novel connects and implicates the lives of a complex of characters spanning three decades of tumultuous social and political history in twentieth-century Brazil. But with the central event - the celebration - missing, the reader is thrust into the middle of an intricate puzzle, left to construct the story from the evidence that accrues in a range of comic, unnverving, misleading and tragic episodes.

    Not a usual marker, but a feather, a tip feather from a peacock's train, lucently blue and green ...

    Thomas' great heart and tough street philosophy face off lyrically with the brutality of guards, the sterility of steel and cement, the perversity fostered on both sides of the bars by incarceration. Seven Long Times is the critically-acclaimed sequel to Thomas' classic of urban and prison literature, Down These Mean Streets.

    Set in the plain of North Carolina and the coast and hills of Virginia from 1903 to 1944, it chronicles the marriage of Forrest Mayfield and Eva Kendal, the hard birth of their son, Eva's return to her father after her mother's death, and the lives of two succeeding generations. The Surface of Earth is the work of one of America's supreme masters of fiction, a journey across time and the poignantly evoked America of the first half of our century that explores the mysterious topography of the powers of love, home, and identity. In his evocation of the hungers, defeats, and rewards of individuals in moments of dark solitude and radiant union, Price has created an enduring literary testament to the range of human life.