Upon its publication in 1857, "Little Dorrit" immediatelyoutsold any of Dickens's previous books. The story of WilliamDorrit, imprisoned for debt in Marshalsea Prison, and his daughterand helpmate, Amy, or Little Dorrit, the novel charts the progressof the Dorrit family from poverty to riches. In his Introduction,David Gates argues that "intensity of imagination is the gift fromwhich Dickens's other great attributes derive: his eye and ear, hisnear-universal empathy, his ability to entertain both a sense ofthe ridiculous and a sense of ultimate significance." This ModernLibrary Paperback Classic is set from the text of the 1857edition.
Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of thegreatest modern writers presented in attractive, accessiblepaperback editions. “It was Nabokov’s gift to bring paradise wherever he alighted.”—John Updike, The New York Review of Books Novelist, poet, critic, translator, and, above all, a peerlessimaginer, Vladimir Nabokov was arguably the most dazzling prosestylist of the twentieth century. In novels like Lolita, Pale Fire,and Ada, or Ardor, he turned language into an instrument ofecstasy. Vintage Nabokov includes sections 1-10 of his most famous andcontroversial novel, Lolita; the stories “The Return of Chorb,”“The Aurelian,” “A Forgotten Poet,” “Time and Ebb,” “Signs andSymbols,” “The Vane Sisters,” and “Lance”; and chapter 12 from hismemoir Speak, Memory.
After traveling the world to exotic lands, Alexandra, Jane,and Sukie–now widowed but still witches–return to the Rhode Islandseaside t own of Eastwick, “the scene of their primes,” site oftheir enchanted mischief more than three decades ago. DiabolicalDarryl Van Horne is gone, and what was once a center of license andliberation is now a “haven of wholesomeness” populated by hockeymoms and househusbands acting out against the old ways of their ownabsent, experimenting parents. With spirits still willing but fleshweaker, the three women must confront a powerful new counterspellof conformity. In this wicked and wonderful novel, John Updike isat his very best–a legendary master of literary magic up to his olddelightful tricks.
Robert Louis Stevenson's cherished, unforgettable adventuremagically captures the thrill of a sea voyage and a treasure huntthrough the eyes of its teenage protagonist, Jim Hawkins. Crossingthe Atlantic in search of the buried cache, Jim and the ship's crewmust brave the elements and a mutinous charge led by thequintessentially ruthless pirate Long John Silver. Brilliantlyconceived and splendidly executed, it is a novel that has seizedthe imagination of generations of adults and children alike. And asDavid Cordingly points out in his Introduction, Treasure Island isalso the best and most influential of all the stories aboutpirates.
On the 150th anniversary of its publication, a new edition ofthe nature classic First published in 1854, Henry David Thoreau'sgroundbreaking book has influenced generations of readers andcontinues to inspire and inform anyone with an open mind and a loveof nature. With Bill McKibben providing a newly revisedIntroduction and helpful annotations that place Thoreau firmly inhis role as cultural and spiritual seer, this beautiful edition ofWalden for the new millennium is more accessible and relevant thanever. " Thoreau] says so many pithy and brilliant things, andoffers so many piquant, and, we may add, so many just, comments onsociety as it is, that this book is well worth the reading, bothfor its actual contents and its suggestive capacity." --A. P.Peabody, North American Review, 1854 " Walden] still seems to methe best youth's companion yet written by an American, for itcarries a solemn warning against the loss of one's valuables, itadvances a good argument for traveling light and trying newadventures,
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.
Jailbird takes us into a fractured and comic, pure Vonnegut world of high crimes and misdemeanors in government and in the heart. This wry tale follows bumbling bureaucrat Walter F. Starbuck from Harvard to the Nixon White House to the penitentiary as Watergate s least known co-conspirator. But the humor turns dark when Vonnegut shines his spotlight on the cold hearts and calculated greed of the mighty, giving a razor-sharp edge to an unforgettable portrait of power and politics in our times.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER In 1951, the second year of the KoreanWar, a studious, law-abiding, and intense youngster from Newark,New Jersey, Marcus Messner, begins his sophomore year on thepastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And whyis he there and not at a local college in Newark where heoriginally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hardworkingneighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad-mad with fear andapprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of theworld, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy. Farfrom Newark, Marcus has to find his way amid the customs andconstrictions of another American world. Indignation, Philip Roth'stwenty-ninth book, is a startling departure from the hauntednarratives of old age and experience in Roth's recent books and apowerful exploration of a remarkable moment in Americanhistory.
When Sir Francis Drake returned to England in 1580, manyquestions concerning his momentous voyage were left unanswered—hisjournals were impounded and his men were forbidden, on pain ofdeath, to divulge where they had been. Drawing on newly uncoveredevidence, geographer and maritime historian Samuel Bawlfmasterfully reconstructs Francis Drake’s historic round-the-worldexpedition, exploring the drama surrounding the voyage and offeringintriguing insights into life at sea in the sixteenth century. Butit is Bawlf’s assertion of Drake’s whereabouts in the summer of1579 that gives the book even greater originality: from anintensive study of maps of the period, Bawlf shows with certaintythat Drake sailed all the way to Alaska—much farther than anyonehas heretofore imagined—thereby rewriting the history ofexploration in North America.
Philip Roth’s instant New York Times hardcover bestseller nowavailable in mass market paperback!
Robert Prentice has spent all his life attempting to escape hismother's stifling presence. His mother, Alice, for her part,struggles with her own demons as she attempts to realize her dreamsof prosperity and success as a sculptor. As Robert goes off tofight in Europe, hoping to become his own man, Richard Yatesportrays a soldier in the depths of war striving to live up to hisheroic ideals. With haunting clarity, Yates crafts an unforgettableportrait of two people who cannot help but hope for more even aslife challenges them both.
The hero of Charlotte Bronte's first novel escapes a drearyclerkship in industrial Yorkshire by taking a job as a teacher inBelgium. There, however, his entanglement with the sensuous butmanipulative Zoraide Reuter, complicates his affections for apenniless girl who is both teacher and pupil in Reuter's school.Also included in this edition is Emma, Charlotte Bronte's last,unfinished novel. Both works are drawn from the original Clarendontexts. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable editionof this title.
Fashioned from the same experiences that would inspire themasterpiece Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi isMark Twain’s most brilliant and most personal nonfiction work. Itis at once an affectionate evocation of the vital river life in thesteamboat era and a melancholy reminiscence of its passing afterthe Civil War, a priceless collection of humorous anecdotes andfolktales, and a unique glimpse into Twain’s life before he beganto write. Written in a prose style that has been hailed as among thegreatest in English literature, Life on the Mississippi established Twain as not only the most popular humorist of his timebut also America’s most profound chronicler of the humancomedy.
Pip, a poor orphan being raised by a cruel sister, does not havemuch in the way of great expectations between his terrifyingexperience in a graveyard with a convict named Magwitch and hishumiliating visits with the eccentric Miss Havisham's beautiful butmanipulative niece, Estella, who torments him until he is elevatedto wealth by an anonymous benefactor. Full of unforgettablecharacters, Great Expectations is a tale of intrigue, unattainablelove, and all of the happiness money can't buy. Great Expectationshas the most wonderful and most perfectly worked-out plot for anovel in the English language, according to John Irving, and J.Hillis Miller declares, Great Expectations is the most unified andconcentrated expression of Dickens's abiding sense of the world,and Pip might be called the archetypal Dickens hero.
'Although it's difficult to believe, the sixties are not fictional; they actually happened' (Author's Afterword) Stephen King, whose first novel, Carrie, was published in 1974, the year before the last US troops withdrew from Vietnam, is the first hugely popular writer of the TV generation. Images from that war - and the protests against it - had flooded America's living rooms for a decade. Hearts in Atlantis is composed offive linked stories set in the years from 1960 to 1999. Each story is deeply rooted in the sixties, and each is haunted by the Vietnam War. Full of danger, full of suspense, most of all full of heart, Hearts in Atlantis will take some readers to a place they have never been...and others to a place they have never been able to completely leave.
Once again, Carlos Ruiz Zafón takes us into a dark, gothicBarcelona and creates a breathtaking tale of intrigue, romance, andtragedy. At the beginning of this powerful, labyrinthian thriller,David Martin, a pulp fiction writer struggling to stay afloat, isholed up in an abandoned mansion in the heart of Barcelona,furiously tapping out story after story, becoming increasinglydesperate and frustrated. When he is approached by a mysteriouspublisher offering a book deal that seems almost too good to bereal, David leaps at the chance. But as he begins the work, andafter a visit to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, he realizes thatthere is a connection between his book and the shadows thatsurround his dilapidated home and that the publisher may be hidinga few troubling secrets of his own.
"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.
On Christmas Eve, a party of friends descends on a purportedlyhaunted country retreat, charged with the task of discoveringevidence of the supernatural. Sequestered in their rooms for theholiday, the friends reconvene on Twelfth Night at a great feastand share their stories of spectral encounter. “Conducted” byCharles Dickens and counting Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collinsamong its contributors, The Haunted House examinesquintessentially Victorian themes–sex and longing, nostalgia andloss–in ways that continue to resonate today. Ingeniously conceivedand written, and spiked with flashes of Dickensian humor, thisvolume is a strange and sheer delight.
A dying man cautiously unravels the mysteries of memory and creation. Vadim is a Russian emigre who, like Nabokov, is a novelist, poet and critic. There are threads linking the fictional hero with his creator as he reconstructs the images of his past from young love to his serious illness.
They meet by chance on Copacabana Beach:Tristao Raposo, a poor black teen from the Rio slums, surviving dayto day on street smarts and the hustle, and Isabel Leme, anupper-class white girl, treated like a pampered slave by her absentthough very powerful father. Convinced that fate brought themtogether, betrayed by families who threaten to tear them apart,Tristao and Isabel flee to the farthest reaches of Brazil's wildwest -- unaware of the astonishing destiny that awaits them . . .Spanning twenty-two years, from the mid-sixties to the lateeighties, BRAZIL surprises and embraces the reader with itscelebration of passion, loyalty, and New World innocence. "A tourde force . . . Spectacular." -- Time "Updike's novel, as tender asit is erotic, becomes a magnificently wrought love story . . . .Beautifully written." -- Detroit Free Press "From the Paperbackedition."
Mike Lovett rents a room in a Brooklyn boarding house with theintention of writing a novel. Wounded during World War II, Lovettis an amnesiac, and much of his past is a secret to himself. ButLovett's housemates have secrets of their own. As these mysteriousfigures vie for Lovett's allegiance, Barbary Shore playshavoc with our certainties, combining Kafkaesque unease withOrwellian paranoia and delivering its effects with a power thatMailer has made all his own.
Shakespeare became famous as a dazzling poet before most peopleeven knew that he wrote plays. His sonnets are the Englishlanguage's most extraordinary anatomy of love in all itsdimensions-desire and despair, longing and loss, adoration anddisgust. To read them is to confront morality and eternity in thesame breath. Produced under the editorial supervision of JonathanBate and Eric Rasmussen, two of today's most accomplishedShakespearean scholars, The Sonnets and Other Poems includes all ofShakespeare's sonnets, the long narrative poems "Venus and Adonis"and "The Rape of Lucrece," and several other shorter works.Incorporating definitive texts and authoritative notes from WilliamShakespeare: Complete Works, this unique volume also includes anexpanded Introduction by Jonathan Bate that places the poems inliterary and historical context and illuminates their relationshipto Shakespeare's dramatic writing. Also featured are key factsabout the individual selections; an index of the first lines of thesonnets; a chron
This brilliant new verse translation by Allen Mandelbaumcaptures the consummate beauty of the third and last part ofDante's Divine Comedy. The Paradiso is a luminous poem of love andlight, of optics, angelology, polemics, prayer, prophecy, andtranscendent experience. As Dante ascends to the Celestial Rose, inthe tenth and final heaven, all the spectacle and splendor of agreat poet's vision now becomes accessible to the modern reader inthis highly acclaimed, superb dual language edition. With extensivenotes and commentary.
