Believing in the supreme Ismaili motto “Nothing is true, everything is permitted,” Sabbah wanted to “experiment” with how far he could manipulate religious devotion for his own political gain through appealing to what he called the stupidity and gullibility of people and their passion for pleasure and selfish desires. The novel focuses on Sabbah as he unveils his plan to his inner circle, and on two of his young followers — the beautiful slave girl Halima, who has come to Alamut to join Sabbah's paradise on earth, and young ibn Tahir, Sabbah's most gifted fighter. As both Halima and ibn Tahir become disillusioned with Sabbah's vision, their lives take unexpected turns. Alamut was originally written in 1938 as an allegory to Mussolini's fascist state. In the 1960's it became a cult favorite throughout Tito's Yugoslavia, and in the 1990s, during the Balkan's War, it was read as an allegory of the region's strife and became a bestseller in Germany, France and Spain.

    The Saroyan story was transplanted from New York to 1950s San Francisco for the musical.

    Lewis's ill-informed and terrified victim who leaves Earth much against his will and who, in the first book of the trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, published by the Bodley Head in 1938, encounters the imaginary and delightful world of Macalandra. In the second book, Perelandra (1943), Ransom is transported to a world of sweet smells and delicious tastes, a new Garden of Eden in which is enacted, with a difference, the story of Temptation. That Hideous Strength (1945) completes the trilogy and finds Dr Ransom returned from his travels in space and living in an English university town - where the Senior Common Room is given a mysterious depth, a more than earthly dimension which such things, in the author's view, always have in life.C.S. Lewis believed that popular science was the new mythology of his age, and in The Cosmic Trilogy he ransacks the uncharted territory of space and makes that mythology the medium of his spiritual imagination.

    Here was a disgusted man. His name was Svevo Bandini, and he lived three blocks down that street. He was cold and there were holes in his shoes. That morning he had patched the holes on the inside with pieces of cardboard from a macaroni box. The macaroni in that box was not paid for. He had thought of that as he placed the cardboard inside his shoes.

    Published in 1938, this was the first book from Wright, who would continue on to worldwide fame as the author of the novels Native Son and Black Boy.

    Following an encounter with the former Helen of Troy (now returned to her husband, the king of Sparta, after the ignominious defeat of the Trojans), Odysseus gradually wends his way to Egypt and southward, grappling all the while with questions about the nature of God. Considered by Kazantzakis himself to be one of his most important works, The Odyssey takes readers on a richly imagined quest for adventure and understanding with one of literature’s most timeless characters.

    Invaders threatened on all fronties, but they grew to respect and fear the name of Belisarius, the Emperor Justinian's greatest general. With this book Robert Graves again demonstrates his command of a vast historical subject, creating a startling and vivid picture of a decadent era.

    When successful banker Henry Warren arrives, falls ill, is confined to hospital, he sees locals dying for no apparent reason and aims to help. But all is not well with the schemes of Henry Warren.

    Protected in this manner, the manuscript survived countless rainstorms and unexpected dunkings in the ocean and rivers between Cayenne and California where Belbenoit finally managed to reach the United States and freedom in 1937.While a prisoner at Cayenne, Belbenoit was introduced to the American author Blair Niles who bought several works from Belbenoit for use in her book titled Condemned to Devil's Island. Mrs. Niles paid Belbenoit handsomely for his work and it was this money which financed the next two escape attempts Belbenoit made.Dry Guillotine, Fifteen years among the Living Dead was first published in 1938, copyright E.F. Dutton & Co and was so popularly received that 14 further printings were made in the first year of publication. Additional printings were made by Blue Ribbon Books in 1940 and the book remained incredibly popular for many years

    The first half of this posthumously published novel describes George's evolution from small-town southern boy to struggling New York novelist and attempts to answer the brooding protagonist's question, "What is it that a young man wants?" The second half is devoted to his tempestuous affair with a sophisticated married woman. Ultimately, George, repulsed by the frivolous lifestyle of his wealthy mistress and her circle, retreats to Europe. But, once again, his idealism is shattered as Hitler rises to power in Germany. Disillusioned, George dreams of returning to the South of his childhood but realizes that "you can't go home again."

    In impressionistic, diary form he ruthlessly catalogues his every feeling and sensation about the world and people around him. His thoughts culminate in a pervasive, overpowering feeling of nausea which "spread at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of our time, the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain." Roquentin's efforts to try and come to terms with his life, his philosophical and psychological struggles, give Sartre the opportunity to dramatize the tenets of his Existentialist creed.The introduction for this edition of Nausea by Hayden Carruth gives background on Sartre's life and major works, a summary of the principal themes of Existentialist philosophy, and a critical analysis of the novel itself.

    The heroine, Henriette Deluzy-Desportes, governess to the children of the Duc de Praslin, found herself strangely drawn to her employer; when the Duc murdered his wife in the most savage fashion, she had to plead her own case before the Chancellor of France in a sensational murder trial that helped bring down the French king. After winning her freedom, Henriette took refuge in America, where she hosted a salon visited by all the socialites of New York and New England. This thrilling historical romance, full of passion, mystery, and intrigue, has laid claim to the hearts and minds of readers for generations. This replaces 044102226X.

    In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude", an imaginary crime that defies definition. Cincinnatus spends his final days in an absurd jail, where he is visited by chimerical jailers, an executioner who masquerades as a fellow prisoner, and by his in-laws, who lug their furniture with them into his prison cell.

    But in St. Gatien, on the eve of World War II, everyone is suspect–the American brother and sister, the expatriate Brits, and the German gentleman traveling under at least one assumed name. When the film he drops off at the chemist reveals photographs he has not taken, Vadassy finds himself the object of intense suspicion. The result is anything but the rest he had been hoping for.

    He operates in the Soho of the 1930s, a metropolitan tangle of dodgy geezers, prostitutes, spivs and strong-arm men. Twice filmed, Night and the City is a seminal low-life novel, which presents a vivid glimpse of a lost London. It also marks the return of a lost London author, Gerald Kersh, a maverick character whose life was as colourful as those of his most flamboyant creations.

    Don Marquis' creations have been constantly in print since 1934.

    In the New York society of the 1870s, however, only those with old money can achieve the status of the elite, and it is here that the sisters seem doomed to failure.Nan's new governess, Laura Testvalley, herself an outsider, takes pity on their plight and launches them instead on the unsuspecting British aristocracy. Lords, dukes, marquesses and MPs, it seems, not only appreciate beauty, but also the money that New York's nouveaux riches can supply.A love story of love and marriage among the old and new moneyed classes, The Buccaneers is a delicately perceptive portrayal of a world on the brink of change.

    But this is no political thriller. Like his literary "descendant" Julio Cortazar--who mentions this book in "Hopscotch"--Filloy is far more concerned with his characters' occasionally farcical inner lives than with their radical machinations. With its encyclopedic feel, and its satirical look at both solidarity and nonconformity, "Caterva" is considered to be among Filloy's greatest achievements.

    Excerpts from an acerbic diary kept by New Yorker columnist Margaret Halsey on her first trip to Europe just prior to the start of the Second World War.

    Meanwhile, a little girl loses her innocence and her ability to talk with the forest creatures.

    Takes us through the highs and lows of British History.

    He is opposed by Niels Nielsen, a melancholy intellectual who hurls invective at the dictator and the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of society. Barutanski himself despises the sycophants beneath him and recognizes in Nielsen a genuine foe; but Nielsen, haunted by his own lapses of conscience, struggles to escape both the regime and the role of opposition leader that is thrust upon him.Miroslav Krleza is considered one of the most important Central European authors of the twentieth century. In his career he was a poet, playwright, screenwriter, novelist, essayist, journalist, and travel writer. He also suffered condemnation as a leftist and a practitioner of modernism and his books were proscribed in the 1930s. The first two books of the trilogy The Banquet in Blitva were written in the thirties and their comments on political, psychological, artistic, and ethical issues earned him the enmity of Yugoslavia's increasingly fascist government. He did not write and publish the third book in the trilogy until 1962.

    A prefatory note by “R.C.H.” in Testament purports to explain that his book is based on a faithful adaptation, although with names changed, of a memoir given him in Paris by Captain Alexei Otraveskov. The vision in Testament is personal, from the ground up; there is no panorama, no sweep of history, and it gives a vivid sense of the sheer chaotic muddle of the revolution, and its dislocating and destructive terror. This is not a comfortable or indeed a comforting novel. However, its range and passionate vivacity are such that it should promote Hutchinson to the pantheon of British novelists of the twentieth century.- Emily Temple

    When Dick commits one crime and plans another, the police arrest him for a crime he actually did not commit. Dick attempts to reconcile with his family and find his way out of LA’s seedy underworld. You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up was a bestseller when originally published in 1938 and is a noir classic.

    Like Daumal's Mount Analogue it is a classic work of symbolic fiction. An unnamed narrator spends an evening getting drunk with a group of friends.; as the party becomes intoxicated and exuberant, the narrator embarks on a journey that ranges from seeming paradises to the depths of pure hell. The fantastic world depicted in A Night of Serious Drinking is actually the ordinary world turned upside down. The characters are called the Anthographers, Fabricators of useless objects, Scienters, Nibblists, Clarificators, and other absurd titles. Yet the inhabitants of these strange realms are only too familiar: scientists dissecting an animal in their laboratory, a wise man surrounded by his devotees, politicians, poets expounding their rhetoric. These characters perform hilarious antics and intellectual games, which they see as serious attempts to find meaning and freedom.

    Queneau's fifth novel, Les Enfants du limon, was published in 1938. It is an extraordinary novel, stretching the boundaries of the genre, and has been called the masterpiece of Queneau's pre-war period. Queneau says of the story: "The plot involves three groups of characters: one formed by the grocer Gramigni, devoted to Saint Anthony of Padua, the maid Clemence, who plays the piano, young Bossu, of bitter destiny, and the humble folk of La Ciotat, where the story begins; the second, by the various members of the Claye-Chambernac-Hachamoth family, wealthy industrialists prey to various eccentricities...; the third, by M. Chambernac and his secretary Purpulan, a 'poor devil.'" All of this is spun against a subtly-drawn allegorical background. Realism and social criticism intermingle with fantasy, while the boundary between lunacy and sanity is increasingly called into question by the irrational activities of the children of Claye.