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.

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.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) "Mrs. Dalloway "chronicles aJune day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway-a day that is taken upwith running minor errands in preparation for a party and that ispunctuated, toward the end, by the suicide of a young man she hasnever met. In giving an apparently ordinary day such immenseresonance and significance-infusing it with the elemental conflictbetween death and life-Virginia Woolf triumphantly discovers herdistinctive style as a novelist. Originally published in 1925,"Mrs. Dalloway "is Woolf's first complete rendering of what shedescribed as the "luminous envelope" of consciousness: a dazzlingdisplay of the mind's inside as it plays over the brilliant surfaceand darker depths of reality. This edition uses the text of theoriginal British publication of "Mrs. Dalloway," which includeschanges Woolf made that never appeared in the first or subsequentAmerican editions.

(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.

The Portrait of a Lady is the most stunning achievement ofHenry James's early period--in the 1860s and '70s when he wastransforming himself from a talented young American into a residentof Europe, a citizen of the world, and one of the greatestnovelists of modern times. A kind of delight at the success of thistransformation informs every page of this masterpiece. IsabelArcher, a beautiful, intelligent, and headstrong American girlnewly endowed with wealth and embarked in Europe on a treacherousjourney to self-knowledge, is delineated with a magnificence thatis at once casual and tense with force and insight. The characterswith whom she is entangled--the good man and the evil one, betweenwhom she wavers, and the mysterious witchlike woman with whom shemust do battle--are each rendered with a virtuosity that suggestsdazzling imaginative powers. And the scene painting--in England andItaly--provides a continuous visual pleasure while always remainingcrucial to the larger drama.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Though its fame as an icon oftwentieth-century literature rests primarily on the brilliance ofits narrative technique and the impressionistic beauty of itsprose, "To the Lighthouse "is above all the story of a quest, andas such it possesses a brave and magical universality. Observedacross the years at their vacation house facing the gales of theNorth Atlantic, Mrs. Ramsay and her family seek to recapturemeaning from the flux of things and the passage of time. Though itis the death of Mrs. Ramsay on which the novel turns, her presencepervades every page in a poetic evocation of loss and memory thatis also a celebration of domestic life and its most intimatedetails. Virginia Woolf's great book enacts a powerful allegory ofthe creative consciousness and its momentary triumphs over fleetingmaterial life.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Shakespeare's four greatesttragedies were written in a remarkably short period of time,between 1598 and 1606. "Hamlet," "Othello," "Macbeth," and "KingLear" are each so singular an achievement that any rereading ofthem reinforces the awe and almost idolatrous worship that thismost uncanny of the world's great writers invariably inspires. Inthese four plays, Shakespeare engages the problem that is centralto tragedy and crucial to any human community--the problem ofviolence and revenge--on an unprecedented scale. No other literarytexts have been more instrumental in deepening our knowledge ofourselves as individuals and as a civilization. This authoritativeedition of the plays is supplemented with footnotes,bibliographies, a detailed chronology of Shakespeare's life andtimes, and a substantial introduction in which Tony Tannerdiscusses each play individually while setting each in context.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Evelyn Waugh's 1934 novel is abitingly funny vision of aristocratic decadence in England betweenthe wars. It tells the story of Tony Last, who, to the irritationof his wife, is inordinately obsessed with his Victorian Gothiccountry house and life. When Lady Brenda Last embarks on an affairwith the worthless John Beaver out of boredom with her husband, shesets in motion a sequence of tragicomic disasters that reveal Waughat his most scathing. The action is set in the brittle social worldrecognizable from Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, darkened anddeepened by Waugh's own experience of sexual betrayal. As Tony isdriven by the urbane savagery of this world to seek solace in thewilds of the Brazilian jungle, "A Handful of Dust " demonstratesthe incomparably brilliant and wicked wit of one of the twentiethcentury's most accomplished novelists.

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed) Introduction by JohnBayley

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.

Random's Modern Library is reproducing this Hardy standard as atie-in to a Masterpiece Theater presentation and offering a qualityhardcover for a reasonable price. Copyright 1998Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out ofprint or unavailable edition of this title.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Though James Joyce began thesestories of Dublin life in 1904 when he was twenty-two and completedthem in 1907, their unconventional themes and language led torepeated rejections by publishers and delayed publication until1914. In the century since, his story "The Dead" has come to beseen as one of the most powerful evocations of human loss andlonging that the English language possesses; all the other storiesin "Dubliners" are as beautifully turned and as greatly admired.They remind us once again that James Joyce was not only modernism'schief innovator but also one of its most intimate and poeticwriters. In this edition the text has been revised in keeping withJoyce's wishes, and the original versions of "The Sisters,""Eveline," and "After the Race" have been made available in anappendix, along with Joyce's suppressed preface to the 1914 editionof "Dubliners."

“It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t knowit.” So begins the new novel, his first since winning the NobelPrize, from the universally acclaimed author of Snow and My Name IsRed.It is 1975, a perfect spring in Istanbul. Kemal, scion of oneof the city’s wealthiest families, is about to become engaged toSibel, daughter of another prominent family, when he encountersFüsun, a beautiful shopgirl and a distant relation. Once thelong-lost cousins violate the code of virginity, a rift begins toopen between Kemal and the world of the Westernized Istanbulbourgeosie—a world, as he lovingly describes it, with opulentparties and clubs, society gossip, restaurant rituals, picnics, andmansions on the Bosphorus, infused with the melancholy ofdecay—until finally he breaks off his engagement to Sibel. But hisresolve comes too late.For eight years Kemal will find excuses tovisit another Istanbul, that of the impoverished backstreets whereFüsun, her heart now hardened, lives with her parents, and w

(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) 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) Naguib Mahfouz's magnificentepic trilogy of colonial Egypt appears here in one volume for thefirst time. The Nobel Prize--winning writer's masterwork is theengrossing story of a Muslim family in Cairo during Britain'soccupation of Egypt in the early decades of the twentieth century.The novels of "The Cairo Trilogy" trace three generations of thefamily of tyrannical patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, whorules his household with a strict hand while living a secret lifeof self-indulgence. "Palace Walk" introduces us to his gentle,oppressed wife, Amina, his cloistered daughters, Aisha and Khadija,and his three sons-the tragic and idealistic Fahmy, the dissolutehedonist Yasin, and the soul-searching intellectual Kamal.Al-Sayyid Ahmad's rebellious children struggle to move beyond hisdomination in "Palace of Desire," as the world around them opens tothe currents of modernity and political and domestic turmoilbrought by the 1920s. "Sugar Street" brings Mahfouz's vividtapestr

One of the towering figures of world literature, Goethe hasnever held quite as prominent a place in the English-speaking worldas he deserves. This collection of his four major works, togetherwith a selection of his finest letters and poems, shows that he isnot only one of the very greatest European writers: he is alsoaccessible, entertaining, and contemporary. The Sorrows of Young Wertheris a story of self-destructive love that made its author acelebrity overnight at the age of twenty-five. Its exploration ofthe conflicts between ideas and feelings, between circumstance anddesire, continues in his controversial novel probing theinstitution of marriage, Elective Affinities. The cosmic drama ofFaust goes far beyond the realism of the novels in a poeticexploration of good and evil, while Italian Journey, written in theauthor’s old age, recalls his youth in Italy and the impact ofMediterranean culture on a young northerner.

A brilliant new translation of the work that Herman Hessecalled "the first great masterpiece of European storytelling." Inthe summer of 1348, with the plague ravaging Florence, ten youngmen and women take refuge in the countryside, where they entertainthemselves with tales of love, death, and corruption, featuring ahost of characters, from lascivious clergymen and mad kings todevious lovers and false miracle-makers. Named after the Greek for"ten days," Boccaccio's book of stories draws on ancient mythology,contemporary history, and everyday life, and has influenced thework of myriad writers who came after him. J. G. Nichols's newtranslation, faithful to the original but rendered in eminentlyreadable modern English, captures the timeless humor of one of thegreat classics of European literature.

(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.

The author's observations on the great nineteenth-centuryRussian writers-Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Gorky, Tolstoy, andTurgenev. "This volume... never once fails to instruct andstimulate. This is a great Russian talking of great Russians"(Anthony Burgess). Edited and with an Introduction by FredsonBowers; illustrations.