Rudin


Ivan Turgenev - 1856
    Rudin is made impotent by the dissonance of honoring the older generations while at the same time embracing the new bold epoch of pre-revolutionary Russia. The theme of melancholic powerless men coupled with vital idealistic women is prevalent in Turgenev's work, and it would be hard to find a clearer study of the type than RUDIN.

The Squabble


Nikolai Gogol - 1835
    In it, he brilliantly ridicules the Ukrainian passion for litigation and reveals life as something really rather absurd. Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich are the greatest of friends—until the day they begin a foolish quarrel that culminates in that very worst of insults: “And you, Ivan Ivanovich, are a goose.” From that moment on, not another word is spoken between them as they choose instead to fight out their differences in the courts. But it seems theirs is a lawsuit that is set to run for years and years.

Skylark


Dezső Kosztolányi - 1924
    The Vajkays—call them Mother and Father—live in Sárszeg, a dead-end burg in the provincial heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Father retired some years ago to devote his days to genealogical research and quaint questions of heraldry. Mother keeps house. Both are utterly enthralled with their daughter, Skylark. Unintelligent, unimaginative, unattractive, and unmarried, Skylark cooks and sews for her parents and anchors the unremitting tedium of their lives.Now Skylark is going away, for one week only, it’s true, but a week that yawns endlessly for her parents. What will they do? Before they know it, they are eating at restaurants, reconnecting with old friends, and attending the theater. But this is just a prelude to Father’s night out at the Panther Club, about which the less said the better. Drunk, in the light of dawn Father surprises himself and Mother with his true, buried, unspeakable feelings about Skylark.Then, Skylark is back. Is there a world beyond the daily grind and life's creeping disappointments? Kosztolányi’s crystalline prose, perfect comic timing, and profound human sympathy conjure up a tantalizing beauty that lies on the far side of the irredeemably ordinary. To that extent, Skylark is nothing less than a magical novel.

The Seducer's Diary


Søren Kierkegaard - 1843
    Intricately, meticulously, cunningly, the seduction proceeds. No detail is too small to escape Johannes. "She sits on the sofa by the tea table and I sit on a chair at her side. This position has an intimate quality and at the same time a detaching dignity."Less erotic than an intellectual depiction of seduction, Diary of a Seducer shows the casuist Kierkegaard in what he characterized as the aesthetic mode.

The Dice Man


Luke Rhinehart - 1971
    Because once you hand over your life to the dice, anything can happen. Entertaining, humorous, scary, shocking, subversive, The Dice Man is one of the cult bestsellers of our time.

Virginia Woolf: The Complete Works


Virginia Woolf - 1994
    Dalloway (1925) To the Lighthouse (1927) The Waves (1931) The Years (1937) Between the Acts (1941) THE 'BIOGRAPHIES' Orlando: a biography (1928) Flush: a biography (1933) Roger Fry: a biography (1940) THE STORIES Two Stories (1917) Kew Gardens (1919) Monday or Tuesday (1921) A Haunted House, and other short stories (1944) Nurse Lugton's Golden Thimble (1966) Mrs Dalloway's Party (1973) The Complete Shorter Fiction (1985) THE ESSAYS Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924) The Common Reader I (1925) A Room of One's Own (1929) On Being Ill (1930) The London Scene (1931) A Letter to a Young Poet (1932) The Common Reader II (1932) Walter Sickert: a conversation (1934) Three Guineas (1938) Reviewing (1939) The Death of the Moth, and other essays (1942) The Moment, and other essays (1947) The Captain's Death Bed, and other essays (1950) Granite and Rainbow (1958) Books and Portraits (1978) Women And Writing (1979) 383 Essays from newspapers and magazines AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITING A Writer's Diary (1953) Moments of Being (1976) The Diary Vols. 1–5 (1977-84) The Letters Vols. 1–6 (1975-80) The Letters of V.W. and Lytton Strachey (1956)  A Passionate Apprentice. The Early Journals 1887-1909 (1990)  THE PLAY Freshwater: A Comedy (both versions) (1976)

And Quiet Flows the Don, Vol 1 of 5


Mikhail Sholokhov - 2001
    

Love


Stendhal - 1822
    Written at a critical time in his life when his own love had been rejected, the book is a thinly disguised picture of the author's innermost feelings. Though it ranges over a wide variety of topics from courtly love to the emancipation of women, central to the book is Stendhal's account of love - an intense, romantic and generally unrequited love.

Oblomov


Ivan Goncharov - 1859
    Stephen Pearl's new translation, the first major English-language publication of Oblomov in more than fifty years, succeeds exquisitely to introduce this astonishing and endearing novel to a new generation of readers.

Brave New World Revisited


Aldous Huxley - 1958
    Here, in one of the most important and fascinating books of his career, Aldous Huxley uses his tremendous knowledge of human relations to compare the modern-day world with his prophetic fantasy. He scrutinizes threats to humanity, such as overpopulation, propaganda, and chemical persuasion, and explains why we have found it virtually impossible to avoid them. Brave New World Revisited is a trenchant plea that humankind should educate itself for freedom before it is too late. Brave New World Revisted (first published in 1958) is not a reissue or revision of 0060850523 Brave New World. Brave New World is a novel, whereas Brave New World Revisted is a nonfiction exploration of the themes in Brave New World.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values


Robert M. Pirsig - 1974
    Pirsig's Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an examination of how we live, a meditation on how to live better set around the narration of a summer motorcycle trip across America's Northwest, undertaken by a father & his young son.

Requiem for a Dream


Hubert Selby Jr. - 1978
    She becomes addicted to diet pills in her obsessive quest, while her junkie son, Harry, along with his girlfriend, Marion, and his best friend, Tyrone, have devised an illicit shortcut to wealth and leisure by scoring a pound of uncut heroin. Entranced by the gleaming visions of their futures, these four convince themselves that unexpected setbacks are only temporary. Even as their lives slowly deteriorate around them, they cling to their delusions and become utterly consumed in the spiral of drugs and addiction, refusing to see that they have instead created their own worst nightmares."Selby's place is in the front rank of American novelists. HIs work has the power, the intimacy with suffering and morality, the honesty and moral urgency of Doestoevsky's. To understand Selby's work is to understand the anguish of America." - The New York Times Book Review

The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship


Charles Bukowski - 1998
    Bukowski's last journals candidly and humorously reveal the events in the writer's life as death draws inexorably nearer, thereby illuminating our own lives and natures, and to give new meaning to what was once only familiar. Crumb has illustrated the text with 12 full-page drawings and a portrait of Bukowski.

Don Quixote de La Mancha, Volume 1


Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra - 1605
    Don Quixote, errant knight and sane madman, with the company of his faithful squire and wise fool, Sancho Panza, together roam the world and haunt readers' imaginations as they have for nearly four hundred years.

The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings


Charlotte Perkins Gilman - 1989
    Probably best known as the author of "The Yellow Wallpaper," in which a woman is driven mad by chauvinist psychiatry, Gilman wrote numerous other short stories and novels reflecting her radical socialist and feminist view of turn-of-the-century America. Collected here by the noted Gilman scholar Ann J. Lane are eighteen stories and fragments, including a selection from Herland, Gilman's novel of a feminist utopia. The resulting anthology provides a provocative blueprint to Gilman's intellectual and creative production.Content:The yellow wallpaperIf I were a manTurnedThe cottagetteAn honest womanMaking a changeMr. Peebles' heartThe widow's mightSelections from HerlandSelections from Women and economics : a study of the economic relation between men and womenSelections from The man-made world : our androcentric culture.