(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Three classic crime novels by amaster of the macabre appear here together in hardcover for thefirst time. Suave, agreeable, and completely amoral, PatriciaHighsmith's hero, the inimitable Tom Ripley, stops at nothing--noteven murder-- to accomplish his goals. In achieving for himself theopulent life that he was denied as a child, Ripley shows himself tobe a master of illusion and manipulation and a disturbinglysympathetic combination of genius and psychopath. As Highsmithnavigates the mesmerizing tangle of Ripley's deadly and sinistergames, she turns the mystery genre inside out and takes us into themind of a man utterly indifferent to evil. The Talented Mr.RipleyIn a chilling literary hall of mirrors, Patricia Highsmithintroduces Tom Ripley. Like a hero in a latter-day Henry Jamesnovel, is sent to Italy with a commission to coax a prodigal youngAmerican back to his wealthy father. But Ripley finds himself veryfond of Dickie Greenleaf. He wants to be like him--exactly likehim.

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.

Hermann Hesse's classic novel "Siddhartha" has delighted,inspired, and influenced generations of readers, writers, andthinkers. Though set in a place and time far removed from theGermany of 1922, the year of the book's debut, the novel is infusedwith the sensibilities of Hesse's time, synthesizing disparatephilosophies-Eastern religions, Jungian archetypes, Westernindividualism-into a unique vision of life as expressed through oneman's search for meaning. It is the story of the quest ofSiddhartha, a wealthy Indian Brahmin who casts off a life ofprivilege and comfort to seek spiritual fulfillment and wisdom. Onhis journey, Siddhartha encounters wandering ascetics, Buddhistmonks, and successful merchants, as well as a courtesan namedKamala and a simple ferryman who has attained enlightenment.Traveling among these people and experiencing life's vitalpassages-love, work, friendship, and fatherhood-Siddharthadiscovers that true knowledge is guided from within. SusanBernofsky's magnificent new translation br

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

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Introduction by Rosemary AshtonThe isolated, misanthropic, miserly weaver Silas Marner is one ofGeorge Eliot's greatest creations, and his presence casts astrange, otherworldly glow over the moral dramas, both large andsmall, that take place in the pastoral landscape that surroundshim. When Marner is wrongly accused of crime and expelled from hiscommunity, he vows to turn his back upon the world. He moves to thevillage of Raveloe, where he remains an outsider and an object ofsuspicion until an extraordinary sequence of events, including thetheft of his gold and the appearance of a tiny, golden-haired childin his cottage, transforms his life. Part beautifully realizedrural portraiture and part fairy tale, the story of Marner'sredemption and restoration to humanity has long been George Eliot'smost beloved and widely read work.

In this celebrated novel, Nobel Prize-winning author ToniMorrison created a new way of rendering the contradictory nuancesof black life in America. Its earthy poetic language and strikinguse of folklore and myth established Morrison as a major voice incontemporary fiction. Song of Solomon begins with one of the most arresting scenes inour century's literature: a dreamlike tableau depicting a manpoised on a roof, about to fly into the air, while cloth rosepetals swirl above the snow-covered ground and, in the astonishedcrowd below, one woman sings as another enters premature labor. Thechild born of that labor, Macon (Milkman) Dead, will eventuallycome to discover, through his complicated progress to maturity, themeaning of the drama that marked his birth. Toni Morrison's novelis at once a romance of self-discovery, a retelling of the blackexperience in America that uncovers the inalienable poetry of thatexperience, and a family saga luminous in its depth, imaginativegenerosity, and universality. I

Of the three late masterpieces that crown the extraordinaryliterary achievement of Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902) is at once the most personal and the most elemental. Jamesdrew on the memory of a beloved cousin who died young to create oneof the three central characters, Milly Theale, an heiress with ashort time to live and a passion for experiencing life to itsfullest. To the creation of the other two, Merton Densher and themagnificent, predatory Kate Croy, who conspire in an act of deceitand betrayal, he brought a lifetime's distilled wisdom about thefrailty of the human soul when it is trapped in the depths of needand desire. And he brought to the drama that unites these threecharacters, in the drawing rooms of London and on the storm-litpiazzas of Venice, a starkness and classical purity almostunprecedented in his work. Under its brilliant, coruscatingsurfaces, beyond the scrim of its marvelous rhetorical andpsychological devices, The Wings of the Dove offers anunfettered vision of our civi

(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.

(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

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.

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: 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."

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Nikolai Gogol's "Dead Souls" isthe great comic masterpiece of Russian literature-a satirical andsplendidly exaggerated epic of life in the benighted provinces.Gogol hoped to show the world "the untold riches of the Russiansoul" in this 1842 novel, which he populated with a Dickensianswarm of characters: rogues and scoundrels, landowners and serfs,conniving petty officials-all of them both utterly lifelike andalarmingly larger than life. Setting everything in motion is thewily antihero, Chichikov, the trafficker in "dead souls"-deceasedserfs who still represent profit to those clever enough to trade inthem. This lively, idiomatic English version by the award-winningtranslators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky makes accessiblethe full extent of the novel's lyricism, sulphurous humor, anddelight in human oddity and error.

Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises fourremarkable novels that explore social class in America and theinner lives of young Americans. As powerful and relevant today asit on its initial publication, them chronicles the tumultuous livesof a family living on the edge of ruin in the Detroit slums, fromthe 1930s to the 1967 race riots. Praised by The Nation for her“potent, life-gripping imagination,” Oates traces the aspirationsand struggles of Loretta Wendall, a dreamy young mother who isfilled with regret by the age of sixteen, and the subsequentdestinies of her children, Maureen and Jules, who must fight tosurvive in a world of violence and danger. Winner of the National Book Award, them is an enthralling novelabout love, class, race, and the inhumanity of urban life. It is,raves The New York Times, “a superbly accomplished vision.” Them is the third novel in the Wonderland Quartet. The books thatcomplete this acclaimed series, A Garden of Earthly Delights,Expensive Peo