With the publication of her first novel, THE HEART IS A LONELYHUNTER, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literarysensation. With its profound sense of moral isolation and itscompassionate glimpses into its characters' inner lives, the novelis considered McCullers' finest work, an enduring masterpiece firstpublished by Houghton Mifflin in 1940. At its center is thedeaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for various typesof misfits in a Georgia mill town during the 1930s. Each one yearnsfor escape from small town life. When Singer's mute companion goesinsane, Singer moves into the Kelly house, where Mick Kelly, thebook's heroine (and loosely based on McCullers), finds solace inher music. Wonderfully attuned to the spiritual isolation thatunderlies the human condition, and with a deft sense for racialtensions in the South, McCullers spins a haunting, unforgettablestory that gives voice to the rejected, the forgotten, and themistreated -- and, through Mick Kelly, gives voice to the quiet,in

Renaissance England’s great tragedy of intellectual overreaching is as relevant and unsettling today as it was when first performed at the end of the sixteenth century. This edition provides newly edited texts of both the 1604 (A-Text) and 1616 (B-Text) versions of the play, each with detailed explanatory annotations. "Sources and Contexts" includes a generous selection from Marlowe’s main source, The Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Dr. John Faustus, along with contemporary writings on magic and religion (including texts by Agrippa, Calvin, and Perkins) that establish the play’s intellectual background. This volume also reprints early documents relating to the writing and publication of the play and to its first performances, along with contemporary comments on Marlowe’s scandalous reputation. Twenty-five carefully chosen interpretations—written from the eighteenth century to the present—allow students to enrich their critical understanding of the play. These diverse critical essays in

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed) Introduction by JohnBayley

In this bestselling compilation of essays, written in theclear-eyed, uncompromising language for which he is famous, Orwelldiscusses with vigor such diverse subjects as his boyhoodschooling, the Spanish Civil War, Henry Miller, Britishimperialism, and the profession of writing.

Based on the true story of Alexander Selkirk, who survivedalone for almost five years on an uninhabited island off the coastof Chile, "The Mysterious Island" is considered by many to be JulesVerne's masterpiece. "Wide-eyed mid-nineteenth-century humanisticoptimism in a breezy, blissfully readable translation by Stump"("Kirkus Reviews"), here is the enthralling tale of five men and adog who land in a balloon on a faraway, fantastic island ofbewildering goings-on and their struggle to survive as they uncoverthe island's secret.

Here are the best of Hawthorne's short stories. There aretwenty-four of them -- not only the most familiar, but also manythat are virtually unknown to the average reader. The selection wasmade by Professor Newton Arvin of Smith College, a recognizedauthority on Hawthorne and a distinguished literary critic as well.His fine introduction admirably interprets Hawthorne's mind andart.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) The story of HesterPrynne-found out in adultery, pilloried by her Puritan community,and abandoned, in different ways, by both her partner in sin andher vengeance-seeking husband-possesses a reality heightened byHawthorne's pure human sympathy and his unmixed devotion to hissupposedly fallen but fundamentally innocent heroine. In its moralforce and the beauty of its conciliations, "The Scarlet Letter"rightly deserves its stature as the first great novel written by anAmerican, the novel that announced an American literature equal toany in the world.

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.

"One of the most noble and moving plays of our generation, athrenody of hope deceived and deferred but never extinguished;a play suffused with tenderness for the whole humanperplexity; with phrases that come like a sharp stab ofbeauty and pain."

Nabokov's first novel. A tale of youth, first love andnostalgia. In a Berlin rooming house, a vigorous young officerpoised between his past and his future relives his first loveaffair.

Stevenson’s brooding historical romance demonstrates his mostabiding theme—the elemental struggle between good and evil—as itunfolds against a hauntingly beautiful Scottish landscape, amid thefierce loyalties and violent enmities that characterized Scottishhistory. When two brothers attempt to split their loyalties betweenthe warring factions of the 1745 Jacobite rising, one family findsitself tragically divided. Stevenson’s remarkably vividcharacterizations create an acutely moving, psychologically complexwork; as Andrea Barrett points out in her Introduction, “Thebrothers’ characters, not the historical facts, shape thedrama.” This Modern Library Paperback Classic includes illustrationsreproduced from the original edition.

One of the most celebrated writers of our time gives us hisfirst cycle of short fiction: five brilliantly etched,interconnected stories in which music is a vivid and essentialcharacter. A once-popular singer, desperate to make a comeback, turningfrom the one certainty in his life . . . A man whose unerring tastein music is the only thing his closest friends value in him . . . Astruggling singer-songwriter unwittingly involved in the failingmarriage of a couple he’s only just met . . . A gifted,underappreciated jazz musician who lets himself believe thatplastic surgery will help his career . . . A young cellist whosetutor promises to “unwrap” his talent . . . Passion or necessity—or the often uneasy combination of thetwo—determines the place of music in each of these lives. And, inone way or another, music delivers each of them to a moment ofreckoning: sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, sometimes justeluding their grasp. An exploration of love, need, and the ineluctable fo

"Transparent Things revolves around the four visits of thehero--sullen, gawky Hugh Person--to Switzerland . . . As a youngpublisher, Hugh is sent to interview R., falls in love with Armandeon the way, wrests her, after multiple humiliations, from agrinning Scandinavian and returns to NY with his bride. . . . Eightyears later--following a murder, a period of madness and a briefimprisonment--Hugh makes a lone sentimental journey to wheedle outhis past. . . . The several strands of dream, memory, and time[are] set off against the literary theorizing of R. and, morecentrally, against the world of observable objects." --MartinAmis

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.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) The story of the mysteriousindictment, trial, and reckoning forced upon Joseph K. in FranzKafka's "The Trial" is one of the twentieth century's masterparables, reflecting the central spiritual crises of modern life.Kafka's method-one that has influenced, in some way, almost everywriter of substance who followed him-was to render the absurd andthe terrifying convincing by a scrupulous, hyperrealmatter-of-factness of tone and treatment. He thereby imparted tohis work a level of seriousness normally associated withcivilization's most cherished poems and religious texts. Translatedby Willa and Edwin Muir

From the first tee to the nineteenth hole, here's a collection of above-par cartoons and comic strips featuring favorite cartoon characters on the links, in the rough, and out of luck when it comes to the game of golf!

“Never did any novelist make more use of an impeccable sense ofhuman values.”

Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965--thirty years after itsoriginal publication-- Despair is the wickedly inventive andrichly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfectcrime--his own murder.

Like the celebrated Klondike Tales, the stories that compriseSouth Sea Tales derive their intensity from the author’s ownfar-flung adventures, conveying an impassioned, unsparing visionborne only of experience. The powerful tales gathered here vividlyevoke the turn-of-the-century colonial Pacific and its capricioustropical landscape, while also trenchantly observing the delicateinterplay between imperialism and the exotic. And as Tony Horwitzasserts in his Introduction, “When London’s stories click, we areutterly there, at the edge of the world and the limit of humanendurance.”

Shakespeare forged his tremendous art in the crucible of hiscomic imagination, which throughout his life enveloped andcontained his tragic one. His early comedies—with their baroquepoetic exuberance, intense theatricality, explosive bursts ofhumor, and superbly concrete realizations of the dialects oflove—capture as in a chrysalis all that he was to become. Theyprovide a complete inventory of the mind of our greatest writer inthe middle of his golden youth. This volume contains The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of theShrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labor's Lost, AMidsummer Night's Dream, and it's companion piece, Romeo andJuliet, which Tony Tanner describes in his introduction as "atragedy by less than one minute." The texts, authoritatively editedby Sylvan Barnet, are supplemented with textual notes,bibliographies, a detailed chronology of Shakespeare's life andtimes, and a substantial introduction in which Tanner discusseseach play individually and in the context of Shakespeare'so

" Zamyatin's] intuitive grasp of the irrational side oftotalitarianism- human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself-makesWe] superior to Huxley's Brave New World]."-George Orwell Aninspiration for George Orwell's "1984" and a precursor to the workof Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem, We is a classic of dystopianscience fiction ripe for rediscovery. Written in 1921 by theRussian revolutionary Yevgeny Zamyatin, this story of the thirtiethcentury is set in the One State, a society where all live for thecollective good and individual freedom does not exist. The noveltakes the form of the diary of state mathematician D-503, who, tohis shock, experiences the most disruptive emotion imaginable: lovefor another human being.At once satirical and sobering-and nowavailable in a powerful new modern translation-We speaks to all whohave suffered under repression of their personal and artisticfreedom. "One of the greatest novels of the twentiethcentury."-Irving Howe

In his long-awaited, vastly innovative new novel, Naipaul,"one of literature's great travelers" (Los Angles Times), spanscontinents and centuries to create what is at once an autobiographyand a fictional archaeology of colonialism. "Dickensian . . . abrilliant new prism through which to view (Naipaul's) life andwork."--New York Times.