(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed) Lord Jim is a classic storyof one man's tragic failure and eventual redemption, told under thecircumstances of high adventure at the margins of the known worldwhich made Conrad's work so immediately popular. But it is also thebook in which its author, through a brilliant adaptation of hisstylistic apparatus to his obsessive moral, psychological andpolitical concerns, laid the groundwork for the modern novel as weknow it. With An Introduction By Norman Sherry An expert on theworks of Joseph Conrad, Professor Norman Sherry is the author ofConrad's Eastern World, Conrad's Western World and Conrad and HisWorld. He is also the editor of Conrad: The Critical Heritage, andthe official biographer of Graham Greene.

(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: Not Jacketed) Introduction by JohnBayley

George Eliot's last and most unconventional novel isconsidered by many to be her greatest. First published ininstallments in 1874-76, "Daniel Deronda" is a richly imagined epicwith a mysterious hero at its heart. Deronda, a high-minded youngman searching for his path in life, finds himself drawn by a seriesof dramatic encounters into two contrasting worlds: the Englishcountry-house life of Gwendolen Harleth, a high-spirited beautytrapped in an oppressive marriage, and the very different lives ofa poor Jewish girl, Mirah, and her family. As Deronda uncovers thelong-hidden secret of his own parentage, Eliot's moving andsuspenseful narrative opens up a world of Jewish experiencepreviously unknown to the Victorian novel.

Gathered together in one hardcover volume: three timeless novelsfrom the founding father of science fiction. The first great novelto imagine time travel, "The Time Machine" (1895) follows itsscientist narrator on an incredible journey that takes him finallyto Earth's last moments--and perhaps his own. The scientist whodiscovers how to transform himself in "The Invisible Man" (1897)will also discover, too late, that he has become unmoored fromsociety and from his own sanity. "The War of the Worlds"(1898)--the seminal masterpiece of alien invasion adapted by OrsonWelles for his notorious 1938 radio drama, and subsequently byseveral filmmakers--imagines a fierce race of Martians whodevastate Earth and feed on their human victims while theirvoracious vegetation, the red weed, spreads over the ruined planet.Here are three classic science fiction novels that, more than acentury after their original publication, show no sign of losingtheir grip on readers' imaginations.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Of all Jane Austen's great anddelightful novels, "Persuasion" is widely regarded as the mostmoving. It is the story of a second chance. Anne Elliot, daughterof the snobbish, spendthrift Sir Walter Elliot, is a woman of quietcharm and deep feelings. When she was nineteen, she fell in lovewith-and was engaged to-a naval officer, the fearless andheadstrong Captain Wentworth. But the young man had no fortune, andAnne allowed herself to be persuaded, against her profoundestinstinct, to give him up.Now, at twenty-seven, and believing thatshe has lost her bloom, Anne is startled to learn that CaptainWentworth has returned to the neighborhood, a rich man and stillunwed. Her never-diminished love is muffled by her pride. He seemscold and unforgiving. Even worse, he appears to be infatuated bythe flighty and pretty Louisa Musgrove. What happens as Anne andWentworth are thrown together in the social world of Bath-and as aneager new suitor appears for Anne-is touchingly and wittily told in

(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

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Aanton Chekhov, widely hailed asthe supreme master of the short story, also wrote five works longenough to be called short novels-here brought together in onevolume for the first time, in a masterly new translation by theaward-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky."The Steppe"-the most lyrical of the five-is an account of anine-year-old boy's frightening journey by wagon train across thesteppe of southern Russia. "The Duel "sets two decadent figures-afanatical rationalist and a man of literary sensibility-on acollision course that ends in a series of surprising reversals. In"The Story of an Unknown Man," a political radical spying on animportant official by serving as valet to his son graduallydiscovers that his own terminal illness has changed his long-heldpriorities in startling ways. "Three Years" recounts a complexseries of ironies in the personal life of a rich but passive Moscowmerchant. In "My Life," a man renounces wealth and social positionfor a li

(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.

It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzyof prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small NewEngland town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forcedto retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. Thecharge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would haveastonished even his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has asecret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, hisfour children, his colleagues, and his friends, including thewriter Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk'ssecret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of thiseminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all hislife, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life cameunraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing privatehistory is, in the words of "The" "Wall Street Journal,""magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history ofmodern America."

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed) At The Center of MartinChuzzlewit -- the novel Angus Wilson called "one of the mostsheerly exciting of all Dickens stories" -- is Martin himself, veryold, very rich, very much on his guard. What he suspects (with goodreason) is that every one of Iris close and distant relations. nowconverging in droves on the country inn where they believe he isdying, will stop at nothing to become the inheritor of Iris greatfortune. Having unjustly disinherited Iris grandson, young Martin,the old fellow now trusts no one but Mary Graham, the pretty girlhired as Iris companion. Though she has been made to understand shewill not inherit a penny, she remains old Chuzzlewit's only ally.As the viperish relations and hangers-on close in on him, we meetsome of Dickens's most marvelous characters -- among them Mr.Pecksniff (whose name has entered the language as a synonym forultimate hypocrisy and self-importance); the fabulously evil JonasChuzzlewit; the strutting reptile Tigg Montague; and theri

(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 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.

Every night for three years the vengeful King Shahriyar sleepswith a different virgin, executing her next morning. To end thisbrutal pattern and to save her own life, the vizier's daughter,Shahrazad, begins to tell the king tales of adventure, love, richesand wonder - tales of mystical lands peopled with princes andhunchbacks, the Angel of Death and magical spirits, tales of thevoyages of Sindbad, of Ali Baba's outwitting a band of fortythieves and of jinnis trapped in rings and in lamps. The sequenceof stories will last 1,001 nights.

This is a fully annotated edition of all the poems which are nowgenerally regarded as Shakespeare's, excluding the Sonnets. Itcontains Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Phoenix and theTurtle, The Passionate Pilgrim, and A Lover's Complaint. Theintroduction to the two long narrative poems examines their placewithin the classical and Renaissance European traditions, an issuewhich also applies to The Phoenix and the Turtle. John Roe analysesthe conditions in which the collection was produced, and weighs theevidence for and against Shakespeare's authorship of A Lover'sComplaint and the much-debated question of its genre. Hedemonstrates how in his management of formal tropes Shakespeare,like the best Elizabethans, fashions a living language out ofhandbook oratory. This updated edition contains a new introductorysection on recent critical interpretations and an updated readinglist.

(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.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Britain's three-hundred-yearrelationship with the Indian subcontinent produced much fiction ofinterest but only one indisputable masterpiece: E. M. Forster's "APassage to India," published in 1924, at the height of the Indianindependence movement. Centering on an ambiguous incident between ayoung Englishwoman of uncertain stability and an Indian doctoreager to know his conquerors better, Forster's book explores, withunexampled profundity, both the historical chasm between races andthe eternal one between individuals struggling to ease theirisolation and make sense of their humanity.

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.