Omeros


Derek Walcott - 1990
    A poem in five books, of circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, which simultaneously charts two currents of history: the visible history charted in events—the tribal losses of the American Indian, the tragedy of African enslavement—and the interior, unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile.

Paradise


Abdulrazak Gurnah - 1994
    It presents a major African voice to American readers - a voice that prompted Peter Tinniswood to write in the London Times, reviewing Gurnah's previous novel, "Mr. Gurnah is a very fine writer. I am certain he will become a great one." Paradise is Abdulrazak Gurnah's great novel. At twelve, Yusuf, the protagonist of this twentieth-century odyssey, is sold by his father in repayment of a debt. From the simple life of rural Africa, Yusuf is thrown into the complexities of precolonial urban East Africa - a fascinating world in which Muslim black Africans, Christian missionaries, and Indians from the subcontinent coexist in a fragile, subtle social hierarchy. Through the eyes of Yusuf, Gurnah depicts communities at war, trading safaris gone awry, and the universal trials of adolescence. Then, just as Yusuf begins to comprehend the choices required of him, he and everyone around him must adjust to the new reality of European colonialism. The result is a page-turning saga that covers the same territory as the novels of Isak Dinesen and William Boyd, but does so from a perspective never before available on that seldom-chronicled part of the world.

A Good Man Is Hard To Find


Flannery O'Connor - 1949
    O'Connor herself singled it out by making it the title piece of her first collection and the story she most often chose for readings or talks to students. It is an unforgettable tale, both riveting and comic, of the confrontation of a family with violence and sudden death. More than anything else O'Connor ever wrote, this story mixes the comedy, violence, and religious concerns that characterize her fiction.This casebook for the story includes an introduction by the editor, a chronology of the author's life, the authoritative text of the story itself, comments and letters by O'Connor about the story, critical essays, and a bibliography. The critical essays span more than twenty years of commentary and suggest several approaches to the story--formalistic, thematic, deconstructionist-- all within the grasp of the undergraduate, while the introduction also points interested students toward still other resources. Useful for both beginning and advanced students, this casebook provides an in-depth introduction to one of America's most gifted modern writers.

Death in Venice and Other Tales


Thomas Mann - 1911
    In this new, widely acclaimed translation that restores the controversial passages that were cut out of the original English version, "Death in Venice" tells about a ruinous quest for love and beauty amid degenerating splendor. Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but lonely author, travels to the Queen of the Adriatic in search of an elusive spiritual fulfillment that turns into his erotic doom. Spellbound by a beautiful Polish boy, he finds himself fettered to this hypnotic city of sun-drenched sensuality and eerie physical decay. Also included in this volume are eleven other stories by Mann: "Tonio Kroger," "Gladius Dei," "The Blood of the Walsungs," "The Will for Happiness," "Little Herr Friedmann," "Tobias Mindernickel," "Little Lizzy," "Tristan," "The Starvelings," "The Wunderkind," and "Harsh Hour." All of the stories collected here display Mann's inimitable use of irony, his subtle characterizations, and superb, complex plots.

Happy Endings


Margaret Atwood - 1983
    The names of characters recur throughout the stories, and the stories reference each other (for example, "everything continues as in 'A'"), challenging narrative conventions. In addition, the story explores themes of domesticity, welfare, and success.

The Garden Party and Other Stories


Katherine Mansfield - 1922
    The fifteen stories featured, many of them set in her native New Zealand, vary in length and tone from the opening story, "At the Bay, " a vivid impressionistic evocation of family life, to the short, sharp sketch "Mrs. Brill, " in which a lonely woman's precarious sense of self is brutally destroyed when she overhears two young lovers mocking her. Sensitive revelations of human behaviour, these stories reveal Mansfield's supreme talent as an innovator who freed the story from its conventions and gave it a new strength and prestige.

When Rain Clouds Gather


Bessie Head - 1969
    When a political refugee from South Africa joins forces with an English agricultural expert, the time-honoured subsistence-farming method and old ways of life are challenged.

Araby


James Joyce - 1914
    Joyce was also acclaimed for his poetry, journalism, and novels like A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.This edition of Joyce’s Araby includes a Table of Contents.

One World: A Global Anthology of Short Stories


Chris BrazierPetina Gappah - 2009
    All belong to one world, united in their diversity and ethnicity. And together they have one aim: to involve and move the reader.The range of authors takes in such literary greats as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Jhumpa Lahiri, and emerging authors such as Elaine Chiew, Petina Gappah, and Henrietta Rose-Innes.The members of the collective are:Elaine Chiew (Malaysia)Molara Wood (Nigeria)Jhumpa Lahiri (United States)Martin A Ramos (Puerto Rico)Lauri Kubutsile (Botswana)Chika Unigwe (Nigeria)Ravi Mangla (United States)Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria)Skye Brannon (United States)Jude Dibia (Nigeria)Shabnam Nadiya (Bangladesh)Petina Gappah (Zimbabwe)Ivan Gabirel Reborek (Australia)Vanessa Gebbie (Britain)Emmanual Dipita Kwa (Cameroon)Henrietta Rose-Innes (South Africa)Lucinda Nelson Dhavan (India)Adetokunbo Abiola (Nigeria)Wadzanai Mhute (Zimbabwe)Konstantinos Tzikas (Greece)Ken Kamoche (Kenya)Sequoia Nagamatsu (United States)Ovo Adagha (Nigeria)From the Introduction:The concept of One World is often a multi-colored tapestry into whichsundry, if not contending patterns can be woven. for those of us who workedon  this  project, ‘One World’ goes beyond the everyday notion of the globeas a physical geographic entity. Rather, we understand it as a universal idea,one that transcends national boundaries to comment on the most prevailingaspects of the human condition.This attempt to redefine the borders of the world we live in through theshort story recognizes the many conflicting issues of race, language, economy,gender and ethnicity, which separate and limit us. We readily acknowledge,however, that regardless of our differences or the disparities in our stories, weare united by our humanity.We invite the reader on a personal journey across continents, countries,cultures and landscapes, to reflect on these beautiful, at times chaotic, renditionson the human experience. We hope the reach of this path will transcend theborders of each story, and perhaps function as an agent of change.Welcome to our world.

Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze


Eliza Fowler Haywood - 1724
    Since the 1980s, Eliza Haywood's literary works have been gaining in recognition and interest. She wrote and published over seventy works during her lifetime including fiction, drama, translations, poetry, conduct literature and periodicals. Haywood is a significant figure of the long 18th century as one of the important founders of the novel in English. Her writing career began in 1719 with the first two installments of Love in Excess. Many of her works were published anonymously. Amongst her other works are Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze (1724), The Fortunate Foundlings (1744), Life's Progress Through the Passions; or, The Adventures of Natura (1748) and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751).

Exile and the Kingdom


Albert Camus - 1957
    Translated from the French by Justin O'Brien.The six works featured in this volume are: "The Adulterous Woman" ("La Femme adultère") "The Renegade or a Confused Spirit" ("Le Renégat ou un esprit confus") "The Silent Men" ("Les Muets") "The Guest" ("L'Hôte") "Jonas or the Artist at Work" ("Jonas ou l’artiste au travail") "The Growing Stone" ("La Pierre qui pousse")

Long Day's Journey into Night


Eugene O'Neill - 1956
    First published by Yale University Press in 1956, it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 and has since sold more than one million copies. This edition includes a new foreword by Harold Bloom.The action covers a fateful, heart-rending day from around 8:30 am to midnight, in August 1912 at the seaside Connecticut home of the Tyrones - the semi-autobiographical representations of O'Neill himself, his older brother, and their parents at their home, Monte Cristo Cottage.One theme of the play is addiction and the resulting dysfunction of the family. All three males are alcoholics and Mary is addicted to morphine. They all constantly conceal, blame, resent, regret, accuse and deny in an escalating cycle of conflict with occasional desperate and half-sincere attempts at affection, encouragement and consolation.

The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories


Henry James - 1898
    She sees the figure of an unknown man on the tower and his face at the window. It is Peter Quint, the master's dissolute valet, and he has come for little Miles. But Peter Quint is dead.Like the other tales collected here - 'Sir Edmund Orme', 'Owen Wingrave', and 'The Friends of the Friends' - 'The Turn of the Screw' is to all immediate appearances a ghost story. But are the appearances what they seem? Is what appears to the governess a ghost or a hallucination? Who else sees what she sees? The reader may wonder whether the children are victims of corruption from beyond the grave, or victims of the governess's `infernal imagination', which torments but also entrals her?'The Turn of the Screw' is probably the most famous, certainly the most eerily equivocal, of all ghostly tales. Is it a subtle, self-conscious exploration of the haunted house of Victorian culture, filled with echoes of sexual and social unease? Or is it simply, 'the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read'?

The Story of an African Farm


Olive Schreiner - 1883
    The first of the great South African novels chronicles the adventures of three childhood friends who defy societal repression. The novel's unorthodox views on religion and marriage aroused widespread controversy upon its 1883 publication, and the work retains in power more than a century later. We are delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience.

The Pearl


John Steinbeck - 1945
    Then, on a day like any other, Kino emerges from the sea with a pearl as large as a sea gull’s egg, as “perfect as the moon.” With the pearl comes hope, the promise of comfort and of security…A story of classic simplicity, based on a Mexican folk tale, The Pearl explores the secrets of man’s nature, greed, the darkest depths of evil, and the luminous possibilities of love.