This Penguin Classics edition contains an afterword by Geoff Wilkes, as well as facsimiles of the original Gestapo file which inspired the novel. Berlin, 1940, and the city is filled with fear. At the house on 55 Jablonski Strasse, its various occupants try to live under Nazi rule in their different ways: the bullying Hitler loyalists the Persickes, the retired judge Fromm and the unassuming couple Otto and Anna Quangel. Then the Quangels receive the news that their beloved son has been killed fighting in France. Shocked out of their quiet existence, they begin a silent campaign of defiance, and a deadly game of cat and mouse develops between the Quangels and the ambitious Gestapo inspector Escherich. When petty criminals Kluge and Borkhausen also become involved, deception, betrayal and murder ensue, tightening the noose around the Quangels' necks ... If you enjoyed Alone in Berlin, you might like John Steinbeck's The Moon is Down, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'One of the most extraordinary and compelling novels written about World War II. Ever' Alan Furst 'Terrific ... a fast-moving, important and astutely deadpan thriller' Irish Times 'An unrivalled and vivid portrait of life in wartime Berlin' Philip Kerr 'To read Fallada's testament to the darkest years of the 20th century is to be accompanied by a wise, somber ghost who grips your shoulder and whispers into your ear: "This is how it was. This is what happened"' The New York Times

    On the French liner home, he meets two Chinese beauties, Miss Su and Miss Pao. Qian writes, "With Miss Pao it wasn't a matter of heart or soul. She hadn't any change of heart, since she didn't have a heart." In a sort of painful comedy, Fang obtains a teaching post at a newly established university where the effete pseudo-intellectuals he encounters in academia become the butt of Qian's merciless satire. Soon Fang is trapped into a marriage of Nabokovian proportions of distress and absurdity. Recalling Fielding's Tom Jones in its farcical litany of misadventures and Flaubert's "style indirect libre," Fortress Besieged is its own unique feast of delights.

    Woods, is a modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which Germany sells its soul to the Devil. Mann's protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, is the flower of German culture, a brilliant, isolated, overreaching figure, his radical new music a breakneck game played by art at the very edge of impossibility. In return for twenty-four years of unparalleled musical accomplishment, he bargains away his soul - and the ability to love his fellow man.Leverkühn's life story is a brilliant allegory of the rise of the Third Reich, of Germany's renunciation of its own humanity and its embrace of ambition and its nihilism. It is also Mann's most profound meditation on the German genius - both national and individual - and the terrible responsibilities of the truly great artist.

    The suggestively named Dix Steele, a cynical vet with a chip on his shoulder about the opposite sex, is the LAPD's top suspect. Dix knows enough to watch his step, especially since his best friend is on the force, but when he meets the luscious Laurel Gray—a femme fatale with brains—something begins to crack. The basis for extraordinary performances by Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame in the 1950 film version of the book, In a Lonely Place tightens the suspense with taut, hard-boiled prose and stunningly undoes the conventional noir plot.

    But his literary stature and popularity have grown steadily with the years, and he is accounted the single most important influence on the development of the modern short story.Edited and with an introduction by Avrahm Yarmolinsky, The Portable Chekhov presents twenty-eight of Chekhov's best stories, chosen as particularly representative of his many-sided portrayal of the human comedy--including "The Kiss," "The Darling," and "In the Ravine"--as well as two complete plays; The Boor, an example of Chekhov's earlier dramatic work, and The Cherry Orchard, his last and finest play. In addition, this volume includes a selection of letters, candidly revealing of Chekhov's impassioned convictions on life and art, his high aspirations, his marriage, and his omnipresent compassion.

    Heroic resistance is old hat. Everything is in short supply, and tempers are even shorter. Overwhelmed by the terrors and rigors of the Blitz, middle-aged Miss Roach has retreated to the relative safety and stupefying boredom of the suburban town of Thames Lockdon, where she rents a room in a boarding house run by Mrs. Payne. There the savvy, sensible, decent, but all-too-meek Miss Roach endures the dinner-table interrogations of Mr. Thwaites and seeks to relieve her solitude by going out drinking and necking with a wayward American lieutenant. Life is almost bearable until Vicki Kugelmann, a seeming friend, moves into the adjacent room. That’s when Miss Roach’s troubles really start to begin.Recounting an epic battle of wills in the claustrophobic confines of the boarding house, Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude, with a delightfully improbable heroine, is one of the finest and funniest books ever written about the trials of a lonely heart.

    In Oran, a coastal town in North Africa, the plague begins as a series of portents, unheeded by the people. It gradually becomes an omnipresent reality, obliterating all traces of the past and driving its victims to almost unearthly extremes of suffering, madness, and compassion.

    • Four complete works: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, Collected Poems (including Chamber Music) and Exiles, James Joyce's only drama• A generous sampling from Ulysses • Selections from Finnegans Wake (including the famous "Anna Livia Plurabelle" episode)• “A volume that makes Joyce easily available, in compact form, to peripatetic Joyceans”—Leon Edel

    Knock on Any Door dramatizes young immigrant Nick Romano's struggle to survive when his father's business folds, leaving his family with no choice but to move to a poor neighborhood across town. A series of petty crimes land the former Catholic altar boy in reform school, where forceful "rehabilitation" only creates a hardened and resistant spirit among the inmates. Once released, Nick returns to Chicago, where family conflicts and a brief, tragic marriage spiral him further downward, culminating in his arrest for the murder of a police officer. The whole city watches the thrilling legal battle unfold as Nick takes the stand to fight for his life. Motley researched his novel on the streets of his native Chicago, talking to immigrants about their experiences and visiting juveniles in Illinois's youth detention centers. In Knock on Any Door, Motley creates a painfully vivid picture of poverty, the struggle for ethnic identity, and the flaws of the penal system in urban America.

    Osamu Dazai’s The Setting Sun takes this milieu as its background to tell the story of the decline of a minor aristocratic family.The story is told through the eyes of Kazuko, the unmarried daughter of a widowed aristocrat. Her search for self meaning in a society devoid of use for her forms the crux of Dazai’s novel. It is a sad story, and structurally is a novel very much within the confines of the Japanese take on the novel in a way reminiscent of authors such as Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata – the social interactions are peripheral and understated, nuances must be drawn, and for readers more used to Western novelistic forms this comes across as being rather wishy-washy.Kazuko’s mother falls ill, and due to their financial circumstances they are forced to take a cottage in the countryside. Her brother, who became addicted to opium during the war is missing. When he returns, Kazuko attempts to form a liaison with the novelist Uehara. This romantic displacement only furthers to deepen her alienation from society.

    Stripped of any preciousness or sentimentality, Natalia Ginzburg’s writing here is white-hot, tempered by rage. She transforms the unhappy tale of an ordinary dull marriage into a rich psychological thriller that seems to beg the question: why don’t more wives kill their husbands?

    The English village of Wealding is no longer troubled by distant sirens, yet the rustling coils of barbed wire are a reminder that something, some quality of life, has evaporated. Together again after years of separation, Laura and Stephen Marshall and their daughter Victoria are forced to manage without "those anonymous caps and aprons who lived out of sight and pulled the strings." Their rambling garden refuses to be tamed, the house seems perceptibly to crumble. But alone on a hillside, as evening falls, Laura comes to see what it would have meant if the war had been lost, and looks to the future with a new hope and optimism. First published in 1947, this subtle, finely wrought novel presents a memorable portrait of the aftermath of war, its effect upon a marriage, and the gradual but significant change in the nature of English middle-class life.

    Crowded with unforgettable characters, it is a relentless expose of the fight racket. A modern Samson in the form of a simple Argentine peasant is ballyhooed by an unscrupulous fight promoter and his press agent and then betrayed and destroyed by connivers. Mr. Schulberg creates a wonderfully authentic atmosphere for this book that many critics hailed as even better than What Makes Sammy Run? "The quintessential novel of boxing and corruption."-USA Today "The book will stand not only as the novel about boxing but also as a book that indirectly tells more about civilization than do most books about civilization itself."-Arthur Miller. "Brilliant, witty, and amusing-the best book on fighting that I have read."-Gene Tunney.

    When Neil Kingsblood, a typical middle-American banker with a comfortable life, makes the shocking discovery that he has African blood, the odyssey that ensues creates an unforgettable portrayal of two Americas, one black, one white. As timely as when it was first published in 1947, one need only open today's newspaper to see the same issues passionately being discussed between blacks and whites that we find in Kingsblood Royal, says Charles Johnson. Perhaps only now can we fully appreciate Sinclair Lewis's astonishing achievement.

    But nevertheless Vian was a great songwriter, playwright, singer, jazz critic and, of course novelist so it should have been Boris instead of Jack. Vian's 1947 novel Autumn in Peking (L'Automne a Pekin) is perhaps Vian's most slapstick work, with an added amount of despair in its exotic recipe for a violent cocktail drink. The story takes place in the imaginary desert called Exopotamie where all the leading characters take part in the building of a train station with tracks that go nowhere. Houses and buildings are destroyed to build this unnecessary structure - and in Vian's world waste not, make not. In Alistair Rolls' pioneering study of Vian's novels, "The Flight of the Angels," he expresses that Exopotamie is a thinly disguised version of Paris, where after the war the city started changing its previous centuries of architecture to something more modern. Yes, something dull to take the place of what was exciting and mysterious. Vian, in a mixture of great humor and unequal amount of disgust, introduces various 'eccentric' characters in this 'desert' adventure, such as Anne and Angel who are best friends; and Rochelle who is in love and sleeps with Anne, while Angel is madly in love with her. Besides the trio there is also Doctor Mangemanche; the archeologist Athanagore Porphyroginite, his aide, Cuivre; and Pipo - all of them in a locality similar to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, where there is a tinge of darkness and anything is possible, except for happiness.

    It is set in the midst of the port town of Brest, where sailors and the sea are associated with murder. Its protagonist, Georges Querelle, is a bisexual thief, prostitute, and serial killer who manipulates and kills his lovers for thrills and profit. The novel formed the basis for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's last film, Querelle (1982)

    Torn between their mother's world of genteel respectability and their grandfather's and uncle's world of cowboy masculinity, neither Molly nor Ralph can find an acceptable adult role to aspire to. As events move to their swift and inevitable conclusion, Stafford uncovers and indicts the social forces that require boys to sacrifice the feminine in order to become men and doom intelligent girls who aren't pretty.

    H. Auden's last, longest, and most ambitious book-length poem--immediately struck a powerful chord, capturing the imagination of the cultural moment that it diagnosed and named. Beginning as a conversation among four strangers in a barroom on New York's Third Avenue, Auden's analysis of Western culture during the Second World War won the Pulitzer Prize and inspired a symphony by Leonard Bernstein as well as a ballet by Jerome Robbins. Yet reviews of the poem were sharply divided, and today, despite its continuing fame, it is unjustly neglected by readers.This volume--the first annotated, critical edition of the poem--introduces this important work to a new generation of readers by putting it in historical and biographical context and elucidating its difficulties. Alan Jacobs's introduction and thorough annotations help today's readers understand and appreciate the full richness of a poem that contains some of Auden's most powerful and beautiful verse, and that still deserves a central place in the canon of twentieth-century poetry.

    Supported, encouraged, by a mother who understood Borghild's obstacle but did not give in to it, she went to school, then on to the university, and finally into teaching which she accomplished largely from memory. She helped support her sisters and brothers, she took an M.A. at Columbia, she was awarded a scholarship in Norway, she taught in a college in the mid west, lectured widely, and finally faced what seemed like a hopeless setback when she lost what little vision she had. But another operation restored and slightly improved what sight she had, and she set forth on a new career as a writer. A book with inspirational rather than literary value.Kirkus https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-re...

    At the dark center of this work are questions of why certain individuals turn against their own country, their own values, and their own "selves" so to speak. But in this weaving of fact and fiction, the faithful and the traitors are not necessarily easily distinguishable. A wonderful tale of adventure and a country's fate by the author of The Road to the World's End (Sun & Moon Press) and The Troll Circle.Sigurd Hoel was for years an editor of the great Norwegian publishing house Gyldendal. He died in 1960.

    Set in France between 1910 and 1940 and first published in France in 1947, five years after the author’s death, All Our Worldly Goods is a gripping story of war, family life and star-crossed lovers. Pierre and Agnes marry for love against the wishes of his parents and his grandfather, the tyrannical family patriarch. Their marriage provokes a family feud that cascades down the generations. This brilliant novel is full of drama, heartbreak, and the telling observations that have made Némirovsky’s work so beloved and admired.

     They knew too much.  As free as unmarried women, they were fully armed; this was an unfair advantage, and when it was combined with beauty, an air of well-being, a gaiety which, in a woman over forty had an unsuitable hit of mischief in it, he felt that . . . all manhood was insulted . . . But he knew how to protect himself." Fastidious Mr. Blackett rules his home in Upper Radstowe with a gloomy and niggardly spirit, and his wife Bertha and their three daughters succumb to his dictates unquestioningly -- until the arrival next door of the Fraser family 'with no apparent male chieftain at the head of it'. The delightful, unconventional Rosamund presides over this unruly household with shocking tolerance and good humour, and Herbert Blackett is both fascinated and repelled by his sensuous and 'unprincipled' neighbour. But whilst he struts in the background, allegiances form between Rosamund and Bertha and their children, bringing changes to Chatterton Square which, in the months leading up to the Second World War, are intensified by the certainty that nothing can be taken for granted.

    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

    At the age of fifteen he joined the revolutionary movement. He was expelled from the gymnasium for distributing Bolshevik leaflets, was arrested and served more than a year in prison. From 1909 to 1917 he was a resident of Paris and did much traveling throughout Europe. It was at this time that he took to writing poetry, which he printed in Russia and other countries. In 1917 he returned to his native country. In 1921 he again left for France, and lived in Paris, making frequent trips to the Soviet Union.Ehrenburg's writings show great diversity of theme and genre. Whether the work at hand was a purely literary article or a novel of fantastic cast, a story of adventure or a delicately penned novelette, a book of verse or a political pamphlet, whether he was dispensing humor or the comments of a journalist, he wielded pen with equal mastery and brilliance.The Storm was the Stalin Prize Novel for 1947.

    Paul Angle, the noted Lincoln scholar, selected passages from the works on contemporaries, later biographers & even Lincoln himself, to form a composite portrait of one of the wisest & most beloved American presidents. These passages, interwoven by Angle's running commentary, blend into a single vivid narrative of Lincoln's life, from his boyhood in Indiana to his assassination & funeral. First published in 1947, The Lincoln Reader has long been considered the most definitive, complete & authentic retelling of the life of Abraham Lincoln.Preface Kentucky childhoodYouth in IndianaNew Salem The DeWitt Clinton of IllinoisAttorney & Counsellor at LawRomance & marriage Mr. Lincoln of Illinois Leader of the Illinois bar The house of eighth street Rebirth in politics: 1854-58The great debates "The taste is in my mouth a little": nomination, 1860 Candidate & president electThe new president The momentous issueThe war begins Search for a generalEmancipation Life in the White House Gettysburg Years of victory The second electionPeace Death & a people's grief Epilogue

    Himes undertakes to consider the everpresent subconscious terror of the black man, the political morality of American Communists, the psychology of union politics, Uncle Tomism, and the relationship between Jews and Blacks. The value of this book lies in its effort to understand the psychology of oppressed and oppressor and their relationship to each other."--James Baldwin "A better story about a young black man who become a union organizer at a west coast airplane factory during World War II. The tragedy of this particular man is a psychological one, a growing despair over being black which hamstrings him in every human relationship."--The New Yorker "Mr. Himes can write with power and effectiveness."--New York Times

    There, due to scarcity, she is suddenly more attractive to men and gains much needed confidence but ultimately experiences both joy and real heartbreak.

    By the time he published The Difficulty of Being in 1947, Jean Cocteau had produced some of the most respected films and literature of the twentieth century, and had worked with the foremost artists of his time, including Proust, Gide, Picasso, and Stravinsky. This memoir tells the inside account of those achievements and of his glittering social circle. Cocteau writes about his childhood, about his development as an artist, and the peculiarity of the artist’s life, about his dreams, friendships, pain, and laughter. He probes his motivations and explains his philosophies, giving intimate details in soaring prose. And sprinkled throughout are anecdotes about the elite and historic people he associated with. Beyond illuminating a truly remarkable life, The Difficulty of Being is an inspiring homage to the belief that art matters.

    Suddenly. Unexpectedly. Of natural causes. It happens that way sometimes. And when it does, it is a signal for all-out warfare.Frank Regalbuto was the son and heir. but Frankie was too young, too inexperienced.Angelo DiMorra had been No. 2 man for a long time.The Fargo brothers were tough, crafty, and cold-blooded. But they were small time. No class.And then there was Bruno. A big shot. He was still doing time. But Bruno's power reached beyond prison walls. It was not healthy to cross Bruno.Then, of course, there was the one they called The Accountant. A weasel turned cobra. And a wife who fed his ambition with a greed.They all met and smiled and talked. And no one listened. Violence hung in the air like an unexploded bomb.And then it happened...

    New for 2008, the Encyclopedia Britannica World Atlas contains comprehensive content that ranges from stunning satellite images of every continent to detailed plans of the world's greatest cities. Balanced coverage of all regions of the world, authoritative information, and colorful maps enrich the learning experience.

    Is he an innocent artist who just happens to have some very dangerous people interested in him? Or is he a killer on the lam from his last murder—with a satchel worth over $300,000 in tow?Relentlessly focused, Nightfall may be David Goodis’ most accomplished novel. It is a fiendishly constructed maze, filled with unpredictable pitfalls and human predators whose authenticity only makes them more terrifying.David Goodis (1917–1967), a former pulp, radio, and Hollywood script writer, is now recognized as a leading author of crime fiction. Besides sojourns in New York City and Hollywood, he lived primarily in Philadelphia.

    In the first edition, the book was described as "Mr. Noel Langley's epic pastiche in the grand classic heroic manner, wherein he pays glowing homage to the nice sensibility and decorous passions that are the special elixir of the artistic temperament, whether it inhabit Heathcliff, Manon Lescaut, the Mock Turtle or Desbarollda the Waltzing Mouse."