Best of
Modern-Classics

1960

The Alexandria Quartet


Lawrence Durrell - 1960
    The lush and sensuous series consists of Justine(1957) Balthazar(1958) Mountolive(1958) Clea(1960).Justine, Balthazar and Mountolive use varied viewpoints to relate a series of events in Alexandria before World War II. In Clea, the story continues into the years during the war. One L.G. Darley is the primary observer of the events, which include events in the lives of those he loves, and those he knows. In Justine, Darley attempts to recover from and put into perspective his recently ended affair with a woman. Balthazar reinterprets the romantic perspective he placed on the affair and its aftermath in Justine, in more philosophical and intellectual terms. Mountolive tells a story minus interpretation, and Clea reveals Darley's healing, and coming to love another woman.

The Balkan Trilogy


Olivia Manning - 1960
    This classic work of post-war fiction was made into a magnificent BBC television series starring Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh.

The Sot-Weed Factor


John Barth - 1960
    Set in the late 1600s, it recounts the wildly chaotic odyssey of hapless, ungainly Ebenezer Cooke, sent to the New World to look after his father's tobacco business and to record the struggles of the Maryland colony in an epic poem.On his mission, Cooke experiences capture by pirates and Indians; the loss of his father's estate to roguish impostors; love for a farmer prostitute; stealthy efforts to rob him of his virginity, which he is (almost) determined to protect; and an extraordinary gallery of treacherous characters who continually switch identities. A hilarious, bawdy tribute to all the most insidious human vices, The Sot-Weed Factor has a lasting relevance for readers of all times.

All the King's Men: A Play


Robert Penn Warren - 1960
    

The L-Shaped Room


Lynne Reid Banks - 1960
    In this bestselling classic novel which became a famous film, Jane Graham, alone and pregnant, retreats to a dingy attic bedsit in Fulham where she finds unexpected companionship, happiness and love.Set in the late 1950s, the 27 year-old unmarried Jane Graham arrives alone at a run-down boarding house in London after being turned out of her comfortable middle class home by her shocked father who has learned she is pregnant.Jane narrates the story as we follow her through her pregnancy and her encounters with the other misfits and outsiders who reside at the boarding house.

To Paint Is To Love Again


Henry Miller - 1960
    

A Good Keen Man


Barry Crump - 1960
    Set against the rugged beauty of the New Zealand back country, this is the tale of a young man's introduction to the art of deer culling and follows the exploits of a good keen man as he learns the skills necessary to become a good bushman.

A Burnt-Out Case


Graham Greene - 1960
    Arriving anonymously at a leper colony in the Congo, he is diagnosed as the mental equivalent of a 'burnt-out case', a leper mutilated by disease and amputation. Querry slowly moves towards a cure, his mind getting clearer as he works for the colony. However, in the heat of the tropics, no relationship with a married woman, however blameless, will ever be taken as innocent.

Brother, My Brother (Filipino Literary Classics)


Bienvenido N. Santos - 1960
    Leonard Casper's description of the narrative which, if put together by the critical reader, the twenty-three stories in this volume might add up to. In You Lovely People, Bienvenido N. Santos's first book, he took for his subject the Filipino in America during the war years. There he presented the loneliness and hunger of a people who were almost all of them hurt to the bone. And having gone to America as a government pensionado and lectured extensively for the Commonwealth Government in exile, Mr. Santos knew whereof he spoke. Like that earlier volume, Brother, My Brother, a collection of stories that stand on their own as stories, is a literary document about the Filipino, at home. Tondo, Albay and Mount Mayon, Plaza Miranda and Quiapo provide the setting and mood of many of these stories. Here, Santos's characters are not dreamy-eyed Pinoys longing for home but people every so much closer, geographically, to his reader: priests, salesmen, schoolteachers, and students.