The Trial is one of the most important novels of the twentiethcentury: the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bankofficer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defendhimself against a charge about which he can get no information.Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy ofthe excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness oftotalitarianism, Kafka's nightmare has resonated with chillingtruth for generations of readers. This new edition is based uponthe work of an international team of experts who have restored thetext, the sequence of chapters, and their division to create aversion that is as close as possible to the way the author left it.In his brilliant translation, Breon Mitchell masterfully reproducesthe distinctive poetics of Kafka's prose, revealing a novel that isas full of energy and power as it was when it was firstwritten.
This major collection contains all of Doris Lessing's shortfiction, other than the stories set in Africa, from the beginningof her career until now. Set in London, Paris, the south of France,the English countryside, these thirty-five stories reflect thethemes that have always characterized Lessing's work: the bedrockrealities of marriage and other relationships between men andwomen; the crisis of the individual whose very psyche is threatenedby a society unattuned to its own most dangerous qualities; thefate of women.
When Meaulnes first arrives at the local school in Sologne,everyone is captivated by his good looks, daring and charisma. Butwhen Meaulnes disappears for several days, and returns with talesof a strange party at a mysterious house and a beautiful girlhidden within it, he has been changed forever. In his restlesssearch for his Lost Estate and the happiness he found there,Meaulnes, observed by his loyal friend Francois, may risk losingeverything he ever had. Poised between youthful admiration andadult resignation, Alain-Fournier's compelling narrator carries thereader through this evocative and unbearably poignant portrayal ofdesperate friendship and vanished adolescence.
In a beleaguered city where rats and roving gangs terrorizethe streets, where government has broken down and meaninglessviolence holds sway, a woman -- middle-aged and middle-class -- isbrought a twelve-year-old girl and told that it is herresponsibility to raise the child. This book, which the author hascalled "an attempt at autobiography," is that woman's journal -- aglimpse of a future only slightly more horrendous than our present,and of the forces that alone can save us from totaldestruction.
In the "brilliant novel" ("The New York Times") V.S. Naipaultakes us deeply into the life of one man--an Indian who, uprootedby the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in anisolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independentAfrican nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbingvision yet of what happens in a place caught between thedangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past andtraditions.
First published in Arabic in 1983, this brief but powerfulparable is presented as the journal of a traveler known as IbnFattouma. A mystical, lyrical Pilgrim's Progress set in a mythical,timeless Middle East, by the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize forLiterature.
The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his nativeRussian and the crowning achievement of that period in his literarycareer. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the worksof Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: thestory of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished e migre poetliving in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write--abook very much like The Gift itself.
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Arriving in a village to takeup the position of land surveyor for the mysterious lord of acastle, the character known as K. finds himself in a bitter andbaffling struggle to contact his new employer and go about hisduties. As the villagers and the Castle officials block his effortsat every turn, K.'s consuming quest-quite possibly a self-imposedone-to penetrate the inaccessible heart of the Castle and take itsmeasure is repeatedly frustrated. Kafka once suggested that thewould-be surveyor in "The Castle" is driven by a wish "to get clearabout ultimate things," an unrealizable desire that provided thedriving force behind all of Kafka's dazzlingly uncanny fictions.Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir "From the Hardcoveredition."
The early masterpiece of V. S. Naipaul’s brilliant career, AHouse for Mr. Biswas is an unforgettable story inspired byNaipaul's father that has been hailed as one of the twentiethcentury's finest novels. In his forty-six short years, Mr. Mohun Biswas has been fightingagainst destiny to achieve some semblance of independence, only toface a lifetime of calamity. Shuttled from one residence to anotherafter the drowning death of his father, for which he isinadvertently responsible, Mr. Biswas yearns for a place he cancall home. But when he marries into the domineering Tulsi family onwhom he indignantly becomes dependent, Mr. Biswas embarks on anarduous–and endless–struggle to weaken their hold over him andpurchase a house of his own. A heartrending, dark comedy ofmanners, A House for Mr. Biswas masterfully evokes a man’s questfor autonomy against an emblematic post-colonial canvas.
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."
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.
A tragic, spiritual portrait of a perfect English butler andhis reaction to his fading insular world in post-war England. Awonderful, wonderful book.
A stunning novel by the widest-read Arab writer currentlypublished in the U.S. The age of Nasser has ushered in enormoussocial change, and most of the middle-aged and middle-class sonsand daughters of the old bourgeoisie find themselves trying torecreate the cozy, enchanted world they so dearly miss. One night,however, art and reality collide--with unforeseencircumstances.
Seventeen interlinked tales by the winner of the 1988 NobelPrize for Literature follow such themes as betrayal, intrigue,obsessive love, social injustice, reincarnations, and wrongsrighted or made worse. Reprint. K.
Women In Love, the book Lawrence considered his best, waswritten during World War I, and while that conflict is nevermentioned in the novel, a sense of background danger, of lurkingcatastrophe, continually informs its drama of two couplesdynamically engaged in a struggle with themselves, with each other,and with life's intractable limitations. Lawrence was a powerful,prophetic writer, but in addition he brought such delicacy to histreatment of the human and natural worlds that E. M. Forster'sclaim that he was the greatest imaginative novelist of ourgeneration does him too little justice rather than too much.
In this extraordinary literary debut third-generationhomesteader Judy Blunt describes her hardscrabble life on theprairies of eastern Montana in prose as big and bold as thelandscape. On a ranch miles from nowhere, Judy Blunt grew up with cattle andsnakes, outhouse and isolation, epic blizzards and devastatingprairie fires. She also grew up with a set of rules and rolesprescribed to her sex long before she was born, a chafing set ofstrictures she eventually had no choice but to flee, taking alongthree children and leaving behind a confused husband and the onlylife she’d ever known. Gritty, lyrical, unsentimental and wise, Breaking Clean is at once informed by the myths of the Westand powerful enough to break them down.
The final volume in the Everyman's Library Charles Dickenscollection: the timeless story of everyone's favorite misanthrope,Ebenezer Scrooge, together with four more of Dickens's Christmastales and with Arthur Rackham's classic illustrations. No holidayseason is complete without the story of tightfisted Mr. Scrooge, ofhis long-suffering and mild-mannered clerk, Bob Cratchit, of Bob'skindhearted lame son, Tiny Tim, and of the Ghosts of ChristmasPast, Present, and Future. First published in 1843, "A ChristmasCarol "was republished in 1852 in a new edition with four otherChristmas stories--"The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, TheBattle of Life, " and "The Haunted Man." These beloved talesrevived the notion of the Christmas "spirit"--and have kept italive ever since.
Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies avision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dreamcountry, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death bybeheading for andquot; gnostical turpitude.andquot; an imaginarycrime that defies definition. Cincinnatus spends his last days inan absurd jail, where he is visited by chimerical jailers. anexecutioner who masquerades as a fellow prisoner, and by hisin-laws. who lug their furniture with them into his cell. WhenCincinnatus is led out to be executed. he simply wills hisexecutioners out of existence: they disappear, along with the wholeworld they inhabit.
"The Good Terrorist" follows Alice Mellings, a woman whotransforms her home into a headquarters for a group of radicals whoplan to join the IRA. As Alice struggles to bridge her ideology andher bourgeois upbringing, her companions encounter unexpectedchallenges in their quest to incite social change againstcomplacency and capitalism. With a nuanced sense of theintersections between the personal and the political, Nobellaureate Doris Lessing creates in "The Good Terrorist" a compellingportrait of domesticity and rebellion.
(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed) If William Shakespeare hadnever written a single play, if his reputation rested entirely uponthe substantial and sterling body of nondramatic verse he leftbehind, he would still hold the position he does in the hierarchyof world literature. The strikingly modern ?sonnets-intimate,baroque, and expansive at once; the invigorating narratives drawnfrom classical subjects; and the flawless lyricism represented by apoem like "The Phoenix and the Turtle"-permanently deepen ourunderstanding of the multiplicity and extravagant energy of ourgreatest poet.
