With Patriotism, Mishima was able to give his heartwrenching patriotic idealism an immortal vessel. A lieutenant in the Japanese army comes home to his wife and informs her that his closest friends have become mutineers. He and his beautiful loyal wife decide to end their lives together. In unwavering detail Mishima describes Shinji and Reiko making love for the last time and the couple’s seppuku that follows.

    Let the carriage to a royal ball wait. There is a story to be told: of a starless night, a mother and her sick son, and a mortal who falls in love with the snow god, and will do anything to have her...

    Under the direction of Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor, the editors have reconsidered all aspects of the anthology to make it an even better teaching tool.

    It is the story of Laura, an idealistic woman, who travels to Mexico from Arizona at the age of twenty-two to assist the Obregón Revolution. This casebook on "Flowering Judas" addresses Porter's ambivalence surrounding her roles as woman and artist and also attests to the profound influence of Mexico upon her work. Readers of this early tale will not be surprised to learn that although Porter was a practicing feminist in her life and her work, she actually eschewed the feminist label.Virginia Spencer Carr brings her own sharply focused biographer's eye to the introduction, further illuminating the story and the superb critical essays that it provokes. The casebook includes the authoritative text of the story itself, Porter's own statement regarding the genesis of this highly acclaimed work, an important interview, a collection of significant essays on "Flowering Judas" and the historical, cultural, and personal milieu from which the tale evolved, a bibliography, and a chronology of Porter's life and work.

    They subtly merge the world of reason with the realm of the uncanny and exemplify the period's fascination with the strange and the grotesque. They were also the inspiration for Mizoguchi Kenji's brilliant 1953 film Ugetsu.The title Ugetsu monogatari (literally "rain-moon tales") alludes to the belief that mysterious beings appear on cloudy, rainy nights and in mornings with a lingering moon. In "Shiramine," the vengeful ghost of the former emperor Sutoku reassumes the role of king; in "The Chrysanthemum Vow," a faithful revenant fulfills a promise; "The Kibitsu Cauldron" tells a tale of spirit possession; and in "The Carp of My Dreams," a man straddles the boundaries between human and animal and between the waking world and the world of dreams. The remaining stories feature demons, fiends, goblins, strange dreams, and other manifestations beyond all logic and common sense.The eerie beauty of this masterpiece owes to Akinari's masterful combination of words and phrases from Japanese classics with creatures from Chinese and Japanese fiction and lore. Along with The Tale of Genji and The Tales of the Heike, Tales of Moonlight and Rain has become a timeless work of great significance. This new translation, by a noted translator and scholar, skillfully maintains the allure and complexity of Akinari's original prose.

    Ali Smith’s retelling of Sophocles’ tragedy, about a young Theban princess, who decides to bury her dishonoured brother Polynices, against King Creon’s express orders — with heart-breaking consequences.

    The tale of a passionate, independent woman and her three suitors, it explores Hardy's trademark themes: thwarted love, the inevitability of fate, and the encroachment of industrial society on rural life.

    Sections group tales together by theme or juxtapose variations of individual tales, inviting comparison and analysis across cultures and genres. An accessible section of critical selections provides a foundation for readers to analyze, debate, and interpret the tales for themselves. An expanded introduction by the editors looks at the history of folk and fairy tales and distinguishes between the genres, while revised introductions to individual sections provide more detailed history of particular tellers and tales, paying increased attention to the background and cultural origin of each tale. A selection of illustrations from editions of classic tales from the 19th to the 21st centuries is also included.

    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.

    Jorge Luis Borges's famous 1941 meditation on language, alphabets, and the library that contains all knowledge is an allegory of our Universe, and in this edition is complemented and enhanced by the etching of the French artist, Érik Desmazières.

    He browbeats his flatmate, terrorizes his wife, and is not above sleeping with her best friend-who loathes Jimmy almost as much as he loathes himself. Yet this working-class Hamlet, the original Angry Young Man, is one of the most mesmerizing characters ever to burst onto a stage, a malevolently vital, volcanically articulate internal exile in the dreary, dreaming Siberia of postwar England.First produced in 1956, Look Back in Anger launched a revolution in the English theater. Savagely, sadly, and always impolitely, it compels readers and audiences to acknowledge the hidden currents of rottenness and rage in what used to be called "the good life."

    Rarely do they even leave their own rooms, in which all of their needs are met by the Machine. The Machine allows the humans to communicate "ideas" with one another, which is essentially their only activity. It doesn't stop them from leaving their rooms, but they have little desire to do so anyway. They've started to believe the Machine is omnipotent and omniscient, not to be questioned. And when it begins to malfunction, they trust that it knows what it's doing--forgetting they invented it in the first place . . .From the author of A Passage to India, A Room with a View, and other classic novels, and a sixteen-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, this remarkable science fiction story, which was included in a Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthology, was published in 1909--yet becomes more relevant and thought-provoking with each passing day of the twenty-first century.

    "Contexts" provides readers with invaluable materials on The Waste Land's sources, composition, and publication history. "Criticism" traces the poem's reception with twenty-five reviews and essays, from first reactions through the end of the twentieth century. Included are reviews published in the Times Literary Supplement, along with selections by Virginia Woolf, Gilbert Seldes, Edmund Wilson, Elinor Wylie, Conrad Aiken, Charles Powell, Gorham Munson, Malcolm Cowley, Ralph Ellison, John Crowe Ransom, I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, Delmore Schwartz, Denis Donoghue, Robert Langbaum, Marianne Thormählen, A. D. Moody, Ronald Bush, Maud Ellman, and Tim Armstrong. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are included.

    As she follows Grant, a retired professor whose wife Fiona begins gradually to lose her memory and drift away from him, we slowly see how a lifetime of intimate details can create a marriage, and how mysterious the bonds of love really are.

    It is a revision of Thomas Killigrew's play "Thomaso", or "The Wanderer" (1664), and features multiple plot lines, dealing with the amorous adventures of a group of Englishmen and women in Naples at Carnival time. According to Restoration poet John Dryden, it "lacks the manly vitality of Killigrew's play, but shows greater refinement of expression." The play stood for three centuries as "Behn's most popular and most respected play."