(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) One of the most swiftly movingand unified of Charles Dickens's great novels, "Oliver Twist" isalso famous for its re-creation-through the splendidly realizedfigures of Fagin, Nancy, the Artful Dodger, and the evil BillSikes-of the vast London underworld of pickpockets, thieves,prostitutes, and abandoned children. Victorian critics took Dickensto task for rendering this world in such a compelling, believableway, but readers over the last 150 years have delivered analternative judgment by making this story of the orphaned OliverTwist one of its author's most loved works. This edition reprintsthe original Everyman's introduction by G. K. Chesterton andincludes twenty-four illustrations by George Cruikshank.

After defeat at the Battle of Shrewsbury the rebels regroup. ButPrince Hal’s reluctance to inherit the crown threatens to destroythe ailing Henry IV’s dream of a lasting dynasty. Shakespeare’sportrait of the prodigal son’s journey from youth to maturityembraces the full panorama of society. Under the editorial supervision of Jonathan Bateand Eric Rasmussen, two of today’s most accomplished Shakespeareanscholars, this Modern Library series incorporates definitive textsand authoritative notes from William Shakespeare: Complete Works.Each play includes an Introduction as well as an overview ofShakespeare’s theatrical career; commentary on past and currentproductions based on interviews with leading directors, actors, anddesigners; scene-by-scene analysis; key facts about the work; achronology of Shakespeare’s life and times; and black-and-whiteillustrations. Ideal for students, theater professionals, andgeneral readers, these modern and accessible editions from theRoyal Shakespeare Company

The Victorian language of flowers was used to convey romanticexpressions: honeysuckle for devotion, asters for patience, and redroses for love. But for Victoria Jones, it’s been more useful incommunicating mistrust and solitude. After a childhood spent in thefoster-care system, she is unable to get close to anybody, and heronly connection to the world is through flowers and their meanings.Now eighteen and emancipated from the system with nowhere to go,Victoria realizes she has a gift for helping others through theflowers she chooses for them. But an unexpected encounter with amysterious stranger has her questioning what’s been missing in herlife. And when she’s forced to confront a painful secret from herpast, she must decide whether it’s worth risking everything for asecond chance at happiness.

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed) An immediate success on itspublication in 1726, GULLIVER'S TRAVELS was read, as John Gay putit, "from the cabinet council to the nursery." Dean Swift's greatsatire is presented here in its unexpurgated entirety.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) By 1854, when Hard Times waspublished, Charles Dickens' magisterial progress as a writer hadcome to incorporate a many-sided, coherent vision of Englishsociety, both as it was and as he wished it to be. Hard Times. aclassic Dickensian story of redemption set in a North of Englandtown beset by industrialism, everywhere benefits from this vision -in the trenchancy of its satire, in its sweeping indignation atsocial injustice, and in the persistent humanity with which itsauthor enlivens his largest and smallest incidents.

The real Life of Sebastian Knight is a perversely magicalliterary detective story--subtle, intricate, leading to atantalizing climax--about the mysterious life of a famouswriter.

In The Paradiso, Dante explores the goal of human striving:the merging of individual destiny with universal order. One of thetowering creations of world literature, this epic discovery oftruth is a work of mystical intensity- an immortal hymn to God,Nature, Eternity, and Love.

This new collection of Sandburgs finest and most representativepoetry draws on all of his previous volumes and includes fourunpublished poems about Lincoln. The Hendricks comprehensiveintroduction discusses how Sandburgs life and beliefs colored hiswork and why it continues to resonate so deeply with americanstoday. Edited and with an Introduction by George and WilleneHendrick.

From one of the 20th century's great writers comes one of thefinest autobiographies of our time. Speak, Memory was firstpublished by Vladimir Nabokov in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence andthen assiduously revised and republished in 1966. The Everyman'sLibrary edition includes, for the first time, the previouslyunpublished "Chapter 16"--the most significant unpublished piece ofwriting by the master, newly released by the Nabokov estate--whichprovided an extraordinary insight into Speak, Memory. Nabokov's memoir is a moving account of a loving, civilizedfamily, of adolescent awakenings, flight from Bolshevik terror,education in England, and émigré life in Paris and Berlin. TheNabokovs were eccentric, liberal aristocrats, who lived a lifeimmersed in politics and literature on splendid country estatesuntil their world was swept away by the Russian revolution when theauthor was eighteen years old. Speak, Memory vividly evokes avanished past in the inimitable prose of Nabokov at his best.

In 1895 Hardy's final novel, the great tale of JudetheObscure, sent shock waves of indignationrolling across VictorianEngland. Hardy haddared to write frankly about sexuality andtoindict the institutions of marriage, education,and religion. Buthe had, in fact, created a deeplymoral work. The stonemason JudeFawley is adreamer; his is a tragedy of unfulfilled aims.With histantalizing cousin Sue Bridehead, thelast and most extraordinary ofHardy's heroines,Jude takes on the world--and discovers,tragically,its brutal indifference.The most powerful expression ofHardy's philosophy,and a profound exploration of man'sessentialloneliness, Jude the Obscure is a great and beautifulbook."His style touches sublimity." --T. S. Eliot

Ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary, TarBaby is Toni Morrison’s reinvention of the love story. JadineChilds is a black fashion model with a white patron, a whiteboyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son isa black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires.As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from theCaribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all thenuances of obligation and betrayal between blacks and whites,masters and servants, and men and women.

"The Star Rover" is the story of San Quentin death-row inmateDarrell Standing, who escapes the horror of prison life--and longstretches in a straitjacket--by withdrawing into vivid dreams ofpast lives, including incarnations as a French nobleman and anEnglishman in medieval Korea. Based on the life and imprisonment ofJack London's friend Ed Morrell, this is one of the author's mostcomplex and original works. As Lorenzo Carcaterra argues in hisIntroduction, "The Star Rover" is "written with energy and force,brilliantly marching between the netherworlds of brutality andbeauty." This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the textof the first American edition, published in 1915.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Dostoevsky's most revolutionarynovel, "Notes from Underground" marks the dividing line betweennineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and between the visionsof self each century embodied. One of the most remarkablecharacters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former officialwho has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In fullretreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive,self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack onsocial utopianism and an assertion of man's essentially irrationalnature. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose Dostoevskytranslations have become the standard, give us a brilliantlyfaithful edition of this classic novel, conveying all the tragedyand tormented comedy of the original.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) In its marvelously perceptiveportrayal of two young women in love, "Sense and Sensibility" isthe answer to those critics and readers who believe that JaneAusten's novels, despite their perfection of form and tone, lackstrong feeling. Its two heroines-so utterly unlike each other-bothundergo the most violent passions when they are separated from themen they love. What differentiates them, and gives thisextraordinary book its complexity and brilliance, is the way eachexpresses her suffering: Marianne-young, impetuous, ardent-fallsinto paroxysms of grief when she is rejected by the dashing JohnWilloughby; while her sister, Elinor-wiser, more sensible, moreself-controlled-masks her despair when it appears that EdwardFerrars is to marry the mean-spirited and cunning Lucy Steele. All,of course, ends happily-but not until Elinor's "sense" andMarianne's "sensibility" have equally worked to reveal the profoundemotional life that runs beneath the surface of Jane Austen'simmaculate

Written in 1852, this grand indictment of Victorian society--on its surface a mystery story-- deals with the themes of thevagaries of the High Court of Chancery and misplaced children. Fromthe Inside Flap Introduction by Barbara Hardy

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed) Introduction by JohnBayley

Kafka's first and funniest novel, Amerika tells the story ofthe young immigrant Karl Rossmann who, after an embarrassing sexualmisadventure, finds himself "packed off to America" by his parents.Expected to redeem himself in this magical land of opportunity,young Karl is swept up instead in a whirlwind of dizzyingreversals, strange escapades, and picaresque adventures. Although Kafka never visited America, images of its vastlandscape, dangers, and opportunities inspired this saga of the"golden land." Here is a startlingly modern, fantastic andvisionary tale of America "as a place no one has yet seen, in ahistorical period that can't be identified," writes E. L. Doctorowin his new foreword. "Kafka made his first novel from his ownmind's mythic elements," Doctorow explains, "and the research datathat caught his eye were bent like light rays in a field ofgravity."

FROM AWARD-WINNING TRANSLATORS, Amasterful newtranslation--never before pub-lished---of the novel in which FyodorDostoevskyset out to portray a truly beautiful soul. Just two years after completing CrimeandPunishment, Dostoevsky produced a second novelwith a verydifferent man at its center. InThe Idiot, the saintly PrinceMyshkin returns toRussia from a Swiss sanatorium and findshim-selfa stranger in a society obsessed with wealth,power, andsexual conquest. He soon becomesentangled in a love triangle with anotoriouskept woman, Nastasya, and a beautiful younggirl, Aglaya.Extortion and scandal escalate tomurder, as Dostoevsky's"positively beautifulman" clashes with the emptiness of asocietythat cannot accommodate his innocence andmoral idealism. TheIdiot is both a powerfulindictment of that society and a rich andgrip-ping masterpiece.

Twenty-two-year-old Karla is thrilled to be hired as anentertainer on the Sound of Music cruise ship where the rum punchis 80 percent Kool-Aid, the ice sculp- tures are plastic, and her"fake it till you make it" M.O. seems adventuresome. Karla is lessthrilled when her new boyfriend, Jack, suggests that they form asinging duo on land, but by now faking enthusiasm has become a wayof life. She and Jack buy backing tracks, crib lyrics from theradio, and embark on a not-as-glamorous-as-it-should-be careerperforming in the luxury hotel bars of the Middle East and China.But after a thousand and one nights on the road, Karla and Jackfind themselves struggling to keep their act both personal andprofessional together. Funny, fast-paced, and incisive, A Thousandand One Nights captures the performances, large and small, we useto make it through life.

Gordon Comstock is a poor young man who works in a grubbyLondon bookstore and spends his evenings shivering in a rentedroom, trying to write. He is determined to stay free of the "moneyworld" of lucrative jobs, family responsibilities, and the kind ofsecurity symbolized by the homely aspidistra plant that sits inevery middle-class British window.

This complete collection includes all the published stories ofEudora Welty. There are forty-one stories in all, including theearlier collections A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The GoldenApples, and The Bride of the Innisfallen, as well as previouslyuncollected stories. With a Preface written by the Authorespecially for this edition.