Caught in the inescapable hurricane of life,the protagonist decides to snap out of the everyday mendacity and go on a 4000 km motorbike journey across Ladakh. Little does he know whether he can complete this arduous and uncertain journey and finds himself struggling with the whims and fancies of the mountain. But soon, his journey transforms into a metamorphic one, unsettling the dusts in his mind and teaching him invaluable lessons. The changing landscapes take him on a quest to discover his true identity as he learns to break free and introspect. He finds a connection to his past and finds his way to build his future, the future he always wanted to build but never had the courage to do so. He learns to annihilate the impediments on his path to creativity and entrepreneurship which were created by fear and uncertainty and goes on to follow his bliss. 'When the Road Beckons' is not merely a travelogue but a valuable read for anyone on a quest for meaning of life but is afraid to step into the unknown. It's a story that will take you to that one person whom you are quite eager to discover. And that person is You.

    With Ethan no longer a member of Long Island’s aristocratic class, his wife is restless, and his teenage children are hungry for the tantalizing material comforts he cannot provide. Then one day, in a moment of moral crisis, Ethan decides to take a holiday from his own scrupulous standards.Set in Steinbeck’s contemporary 1960 America, the novel explores the tenuous line between private and public honesty that today ranks it alongside his most acclaimed works of penetrating insight into the American condition. This edition features an introduction and notes by Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw.

    MyLiteratureLab icons are found in the margins of the text along with a list of media assets at the front of the anthology. The most popular Literature anthology continues to bring students the finest literature from fables to poetweets. The Twelfth Edition of "Literature: An Introductiuon to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing," edited" "by X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, includes eleven new stories from students' favorite authors: ZZ Packer's "Brownies," Ray Bradbury's, "The Sound of Thunder," Anne Tyler's, "Teenage Wasteland," David Leavitt's, "A Place I've Never Been" and Isabel Allende's "The Judge's Wife." More than 60 new accessible and engaging poems have been added including former Iraqi soldier Brian Turner's "The Hurt Locker," Katha Pollit's "The Mind-Body Problem" as well as poetweets from Lawrence Bridges and Robert Pinsky. In addition, there are new poems from Kay Ryan, Benjamin Alire Saenz, H. D, Gary Snyder, Joy Harjo, Tami Haaland, Robert Hayden, Denise Levertov, and William Carlos Williams. Three new one-act plays help "ease" students into the study of this genre. The new plays include two comedies-- David Ives's, "Sure Thing" and Jane Martin's "Beauty"--as well as Edward Bok Lee's experimental drama "El Santo Americano." In addition, Milcha Sanchez-Scott's" The Cuban Swimmer "has been added." "

    But then again, there aren't many writers with such irrepressible genius as John Fante.The John Fante Reader is the important next step in the reintroduction of this influential author to modern audiences. Combining excerpts from his novels and stories, as well as his never-before-published letters, this collection is the perfect primer on the work of a writer -- underappreciated in his time -- who is finally taking his place in the pantheon of twentieth-century American writers.

    These are stories that passed down through the ages virtually unaltered in their telling. To those who told and listened to them, they expressed something fundamental about Irish culture and the Irish way of life. The stories in this volume feature a wide variety of fantastic beings, including ghosts, witches, fairies, and changelings, but several feature creatures that are virtually exclusive to Ireland: the banshee, the merrow, the pooka, and the leprechaun. Read these tales of frightening supernatural horrors, brave folk heroes, and everyday people clever enough to outwith the devil, and you'll agree that they could only take place on Irish soil.

    No set of novels so richly recreates the last days of India under British rule--"two nations locked in an imperial embrace"--as Paul Scott's historical tour de force, " The Raj Quartet." "The Jewel in the Crown" opens in 1942 as the British fear both Japanese invasion and Indian demands for independence.

    Eliot for his godchildren and friends in the thirties. They have delighted generations of children since, and inspired Andrew Lloyd Webber's brilliant musical Cats.

    Barnes with a forward by Louis Untermeyer HC/DJ New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1945

    Expected to redeem himself in this magical land of opportunity, young Karl is swept up instead in a whirlwind of dizzying reversals, strange escapades, and picaresque adventures.Although Kafka never visited America, images of its vast landscape, dangers, and opportunities inspired this saga of the "golden land." Here is a startlingly modern, fantastic and visionary tale of America "as a place no one has yet seen, in a historical period that can't be identified," writes E. L. Doctorow in his new foreword. "Kafka made his novel from his own mind's mythic elements," Doctorow explains, "and the research data that caught his eye were bent like rays in a field of gravity."

    The book brilliantly probes the psychodynamics of alienation, obsession, and self-destruction, painting an unforgettable portrait of a man driven by forces beyond his control to the edge of the abyss. Hamsun influenced many of the major 20th-century writers who followed him, including Kafka, Joyce and Henry Miller. Required reading in world literature courses, the highly influential, landmark novel will also find a wide audience among lovers of books that probe the "unexplored crannies in the human soul" (George Egerton).

    Written in a French style that long defied successful translation - Cocteau was always a poet no matter what he was writing - the book came into its own for English-language readers in 1955 when the present version was completed by Rosamond Lehmann. It is a masterpiece of the art of translation of which the Times Literary Supplement said: "It has the rare merit of reading as though it were an English original." Miss Lehmann was able to capture the essence of Cocteau's strange, necromantic imagination and to bring fully to life in English his story of a brother and sister, orphaned in adolescence, who build themselves a private world out of one shared room and their own unbridled fantasies. What started in games and laughter became for Paul and Elisabeth a drug too magical to resist. The crime which finally destroyed them has the inevitability of Greek tragedy. Illustrated with twenty of Cocteau's own drawings.

    Drawing on that episode in her life, she produced Hospital Sketches, a fictionalized account of her experiences at the military hospital in Georgetown.This collection of five poignant short stories contains two pieces from Hospital Sketches, published in 1863: "Obtaining Supplies," recounting the obstacles Alcott's fictionalized persona, Tribulation Periwinkle, faced in gaining her independence and getting to Washington; and "A Night," a moving account of her encounter with a dying soldier. Also included are "My Contraband," a gripping tale of vengeance involving a Civil War nurse, her Confederate patient and his former slave; "Happy Women," a fictionalized essay about four "spinsters" with a positive attitude toward their marital status; and "How I Went Out to Service," an autobiographical sketch of a young woman's undaunted pursuit of financial independence.Rich in their simple eloquence, these stories provide revealing glimpses of the concerns and literary techniques of one of America's most admired authors.

    Texts are in the original Middle English, and each has an introduction, detailed notes and a glossary. Selected titles are also available as CD recordings.

    Although it is set in the early twentieth century, it recalls both Iceland's medieval epics and such classics as Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. And if Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to achieve independence is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic.Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude, Bjartur wants nothing more than to raise his flocks unbeholden to any man. But Bjartur's spirited daughter wants to live unbeholden to him. What ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. Vast in scope and deeply rewarding, Independent People is simply a masterpiece

    After missing the last bus home following a day trip to the seashore, an amateur entomologist is offered lodging for the night at the bottom of a vast sand pit. But when he attempts to leave the next morning, he quickly discovers that the locals have other plans. Held captive with seemingly no chance of escape, he is tasked with shoveling back the ever-advancing sand dunes that threaten to destroy the village. His only companion is an odd young woman, and together their fates become intertwined as they work side by side through this Sisyphean of tasks.