had pencilled across the title page of this autobiographical novel. Although the manuscript survived, it has remained unpublished since its completion in the 1920s. Regarded by many as one of the major poets of the modernist period, H.D. created in Asphodel a remarkable and readable experimental prose text, which in its manipulation of technique and voice can stand with the works of Joyce, Woolf, and Stein; in its frank exploration of lesbian desire, pregnancy and motherhood, artistic independence for women, and female experience during wartime, H.D.'s novel stands alone.A sequel to the author's HERmione, Asphodel takes the reader into the bohemian drawing rooms of pre-World War I London and Paris, a milieu populated by such thinly disguised versions of Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, May Sinclair, Brigit Patmore, and Margaret Cravens; on the other side of what H.D. calls "the chasm," the novel documents the war's devastating effect on the men and women who considered themselves guardians of beauty. Against this riven backdrop, Asphodel plays out the story of Hermione Gart, a young American newly arrived in Europe and testing for the first time the limits of her sexual and artistic identities. Following Hermione through the frustrations of a literary world dominated by men, the failures of an attempted lesbian relationship and a marriage riddled with infidelity, the birth of an illegitimate child, and, finally, happiness with a female companion, Asphodel describes with moving lyricism and striking candor the emergence of a young and gifted woman from her self-exile.Editor Robert Spoo's introduction carefully places Asphodel in the context of H.D.'s life and work. In an appendix featuring capsule biographies of the real figures behind the novel's fictional characters, Spoo provides keys to this roman à clef.

    Then his adoring twin sister, Kate, gets him taken on as the bodyguard of Krogh, her lover and boss, a megalomaniac Swedish financier. All goes well until Krogh gives orders that offend Anthony's innate decency. Outraged and blind to risk, he leaks information to Minty, a shabby journalist and fellow victim of life, a decision that will lead to disastrous consequences.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

    In his introduction John Ashbery calls the book "the finest work of Surrealist fiction," noting that de Chirico "invented for the occasion a new style and a new kind of novel . . . his long run-on sentences, stitched together with semi-colons, allow a cinematic freedom o f narration . . . his language, like his painting, is invisible: a transparent but dense medium containing objects that are more real than reality." Hebdomeros is accompanied by an appendix of previously untranslated or uncollected writings, including M. Dudron's Adventure, a second, fragmentary novel translated by John Ashbery.

    With his train of horses he carried salt and silk across distances incomprehensible to his ancient and static community. He brings ideas as well as gifts that have come, by many short journeys, from market town to market town, and from places as distant as the campfires of the Silk Road. John Turner's death in the 18th century leaves an emotional charge Ian and Sal find affects their relationship in the 21st, challenging the perceptions they have of themselves and of each other. A visionary fable firmly rooted in a verifiable place, this novel is an evocation of the lives and the language of all people who are called to the valley of Thursbitch.

    Upon their return to England, Amy is ungratefully reluctant to maintain their friendship, but the skeins of their existence seem inextricably linked as grief gives way to resilience and again to tragedy. Reversals of fortune and a compelling cast of characters, including Ernie, ex-sailor turned housekeeper, and Amy's wonderfully precocious granddaughters, add spice to a novel that delights even as it unveils the most uncomfortable human emotions.

    By virtue of the novel’s clever structure, the reader’s comprehension of events is limited so as to allow them a powerful experience: Johnson’s humorous yet deeply compassionate depiction of what it means to live life and grow old.

    Huxley's bold, nontraditional narrative tells the loosely autobiographical story of Anthony Beavis, a cynical libertine Oxford graduate who comes of age in the vacuum left by World War I. Unfulfilled by his life, loves, and adventures, Anthony is persuaded by a charismatic friend to become a Marxist and take up arms with Mexican revolutionaries. But when their disastrous embrace of violence nearly kills them, Anthony is left shattered—and is forced to find an alternative to the moral disillusionment of the modern world.

    However, freedom can be a noose around a man's neck.

    In this new edition, the original topics have been brought up to date, added to and elaborated upon: Abbreviations, for example, now includes an essential array of chat room acronyms; Fashion boasts a complete list of British Hairdressers of the Year; and Music features a comprehensive listing of every Top Ten single of the last 40 years.

    In the Forest is a newly reissued edition of the terrifying novel from one of the greatest writers in the English-speaking world (The New York Times), Edna O'Brien...

    A tetralogy containing "Spring Snow", a love story, "Runaway Horses", with a protagonist a right-wing terrorist, "The Temple of Dawn", where a Thai princess is mystically linked with the heroes of the preceding works and, written under the shadow of the author's death, "The Decay of the Angel".

    Communists, socialists, and nationalists; thieves and black marketeers; servants and fading aristocrats; veteran terrorists and bands of murderous children bewitched by the lure of crime and adventure--all of these converge on a provincial town's chief hotel, a microcosm of an uprooted world.

    Once the land is cleared and a rudimentary house built, he brings his wife Amy to the wilderness. Together they face lives of joy and sorrow as they struggle against the environment.

    He hopes that revisiting his cultural roots will inspire him to create the perfect work of art and thereby restore his faith in both art and life. Haunted by his troubled childhood, however, he falls in with shady characters and discovers the emotional, intellectual, and imaginative poverty of his background.

    Set in the steamy monsoon heat of Calcutta, it brings together three suffering characters. There is Anne-Marie Stretter, beautiful wife of the French ambassador, seeking the love of younger men as if desperate for a carefree youth she never had. One of those men who falls for her is the former Vice-Consul of Lahore, an awkward, solitary man prone to irrational, violent rages. And there is a mysterious Cambodian beggar woman whose presence in India intrigues the Europeans, just as the woman herself seems drawn to them. Excerpted from a review at Amazon.com