The blind energies and defiant acts that bring an ambitiousmanto power can also destroy him. This is the theme thatThomas Hardyexplores through his greatest and mosttragic hero: MichaelHenchard, the driven grain merchant of Casterbridge. From hisdrunken sale of his wife and baby at a county fair to hissubjugation of a farming village, Henchard's life is an epicattempt to bring the world to heel as he hides, even from himself,all vestiges of emotionalvulnerability. Combining the suspense of amystery with the poetry of the most powerful English novels, TheMavyor of Casterbridge is a masterpiece of psychological insightand profound tragedy.
The series of which this title forms a part examines the wayin which all the major editions of Shakespeare's plays have beeninterpolated by a series of editors who have been systematicallychanging Shakespeare's texts from the 18th century onwards. Thistext looks at "Measure for Measure". --This text refers to anout of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells hissoul for eternal youth and beauty is one of his most popular works.Written in Wilde's characteristically dazzling manner, full ofstinging epigrams and shrewd observations, the tale of DorianGray's moral disintegration caused something of a scandal when itfirst appeared in 1890. Wilde was attacked for his decadence andcorrupting influence, and a few years later the book and theaesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trialsoccasioned by Wilde's homosexual liaisons, trials that resulted inhis imprisonment. Of the book's value as autobiography, Wilde notedin a letter, "Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry whatthe world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be--in other ages,perhaps."
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
From the incredible wizadry of Merlin to the passion of SirLancelot, these tales of Arthur and his knights offer epicadventures with the supernatural as well as timeless battles without own humanity.
Good. Light shelving wear with minimal damage to cover andbindings. Pages show minor use. Help save a tree. Buy all your usedbooks from Green Earth Books. Read. Recycle and Reuse!
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Virginia Woolf said of EmilyBronte that her writing could "make the wind blow and the thunderroar," and so it does in Wuthering Heights. Catherine Earnshaw,Heathcliff, and the windswept moors that are the setting of theirmythic love are as immediately stirring to the reader of today asthey have been for every generation of readers since the novel wasfirst published in 1847. With an introduction by KatherineFrank.
The 1920s novel of a passion threatened by convention andplayed outagainst a backdrop of New York City-s upper class,unimaginable wealth,and unavoidable tragedy.
A magnificent drama of vengeance, infidelity, and retribution,Anna Karenina portrays the moving story of people whose emotionsconflict with the dominant social mores of their time. Sensual,rebellious Anna falls deeply and passionately in love with thehandsome Count Vronsky. When she refuses to conduct the discreetaffair that her cold, ambitious husband (and Russian high society)would condone, she is doomed. Set against the tragic love of Annaand Vronsky, the plight of the melancholy nobleman KonstantineLevin unfolds. In doubt about the meaning of life, haunted bythoughts of suicide, Levin's struggles echo Tolstoy's own spiritualcrisis. But Anna's inner turmoil mirrors the own emotionalimprisonment and mental disintegration of a woman who dares totransgress the strictures of a patriarchal world. In Anna KareninaLeo Tolstoy brought to perfection the novel of social realism andcreated a masterpiece that bared the Russian soul. A magnificent drama of vengeance, infidelity, and retribution,Anna Kareni
From the Booker Prize-winning, bestselling author of Remains ofthe Day" "comes this stunning work of soaring imagination. Born inearly-twentieth-century Shanghai, Banks was orphaned at the age ofnine after the separate disappearances of his parents. Now, morethan twenty years later, he is a celebrated figure in Londonsociety; yet the investigative expertise that has garnered him famehas done little to illuminate the circumstances of his parents'alleged kidnappings. Banks travels to the seething, labyrinthinecity of his memory in hopes of solving the mystery of his own,painful past, only to find that war is ravaging Shanghai beyondrecognition-and that his own recollections are proving as difficultto trust as the people around him. Masterful, suspenseful andpsychologically acute, When We Were Orphans" "offers a profoundmeditation on the shifting quality of memory, and the possibilityof avenging one's past.
From the author who gave us THE SCARLET LETTER and THE HOUSEOF THE SEVEN GABLES, here is a comprehensive selection of hisbest short stories, including: Endicott and the Red Cross Young Goodman Brown Earth's Holocaust Ethan Brand My Kinsman, Major Molineux And more!
Edith Wharton's masterpiece brings to life the grandeur and hypocrisy of a gilded age. Set among the very rich in 1870s New York, it tells the story of Newland Archer, a young lawyer engaged to marry virginal socialite May Welland, when he meets her cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, a woman unbound by convention and surrounded by scandal. As all three are drawn into a love triangle filled with sensuality, subtlety, and betrayal, Archer faces a harrowing choice between happiness and the social code that has ruled his life. The resulting tale of thwarted love is filled with irony and surprise, struggle and acceptance. Recipient of the first Pulitzer Prize for fiction ever awarded to a woman, this great novel paints a timeless portrait of "society" still unmatched in American literature—an arbitrary, capricious social elite that professes inviolable standards but readily abandons them for greed and desire.
"What makes his work great is that it can be felt andunderstood...by anybody," said Leo Tolstoy of Chekhov's plays,which express life through subtle construction, everyday dialogue,and an electrically charged atmosphere.
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.
"My greatest thought in living is Heathcliff. If all elseperished, and he remained, I should still continue to be... Nelly,I "am" Heathcliff He's always, always in my mind: not as apleasure... but as my own being." "Wuthering Heights" is the onlynovel of Emily Bronte, who died a year after its publication, atthe age of thirty. A brooding Yorkshire tale of a love that isstronger than death, it is also a fierce vision of metaphysicalpassion, in which heaven and hell, nature and society, arepowerfully juxtaposed. Unique, mystical, with a timeless appeal, ithas become a classic of English literature.
Key Features: Study methods Introduction to the text Summaries with critical notes Themes and techniques Textual analysis of key passages Author biography Historical and literary background Modern and historical critical approaches Chronology Glossary of literary terms --This text refers to the Paperback edition.
With dramatic eloquence, this story of the French Revolutionbrings to life a time of terror and treason, and a starving peoplerising in frenzy and hate to overthrow a corrupt and decadentregime.
Volume two in a collection of tales representing distinctivegenres- from fairy tales to erotica-revealing the customs andsocieties in the medieval Middle East, as told by the mythicSheherazade.
This translation of Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann's work includeshis masterpiece, "Death in Venice," plus six of the author's shortstories: "Tristan," "Tonio Kroger," "Man and Dog: An Idyll," "Hourof Hardship," "Tobias Mindernickel," and "The Child Prodigy."
Upon its publication in 1857, "Little Dorrit" immediatelyoutsold any of Dickens's previous books. The story of WilliamDorrit, imprisoned for debt in Marshalsea Prison, and his daughterand helpmate, Amy, or Little Dorrit, the novel charts the progressof the Dorrit family from poverty to riches. In his Introduction,David Gates argues that "intensity of imagination is the gift fromwhich Dickens's other great attributes derive: his eye and ear, hisnear-universal empathy, his ability to entertain both a sense ofthe ridiculous and a sense of ultimate significance." This ModernLibrary Paperback Classic is set from the text of the 1857edition.
