Almayer’s Folly, Joseph Conrad’s first novel, is a tale ofpersonal tragedy as well as a broader meditation on the evils ofcolonialism. Set in the lush jungle of Borneo in the late 1800s, ittells of the Dutch merchant Kaspar Almayer, whose dreams of richesfor his beloved daughter, Nina, collapse under the weight of hisown greed and prejudice. Nadine Gordimer writes in herIntroduction, “Conrad’s writing is lifelong questioning . . . Whatwas ‘Almayer’s Folly’? The pretentious house never lived in? Hisobsession with gold? His obsessive love for his daughter, whoseprogenitors, the Malay race, he despised? All three?” Conradestablished in Almayer’s Folly the themes of betrayal, isolation,and colonialism that he would explore throughout the rest of hislife and work.

Sparkling with mischief, jumping with youthful adventure, MarkTwain's Tom Sawyer is one of the most splendid re-creations ofchildhood in all of literature. It is a lighthearted romp, full ofhumor and warmth. It shares with its sequel, Huckleberry Finn, notonly a set of unforgettable characters--Tom, Huck, Aunt Polly andothers--but a profound understanding of humanity as well. Throughsuch hilarious scenes as the famous fence-whitewashing incident,Twain gives a portrait--perceptive yet tender--of a humanityrendered foolish by his own aspirations and obsessions. Written asmuch for adults as for young boys and girls, Tom Sawyer is the workof a master storyteller performing in his shirt sleeves, using hisbest talents to everyone's delight.

Reason, Facts, and statistics... Dickens’ scathing portrait of Victorian industrial society andits misapplied utilitarian philosophy, Hard Times featuresschoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind, one of his most richly dimensional,memorable characters. Filled with the details and wonders ofsmall-town life, it is also a daring novel of ideas—and ultimately,a celebration of love, hope, and limitless possibilities of theimagination.

Hailed as one of Joseph Conrad's finest literary achievements,this is the story of a young man unwittingly caught in thepolitical turmoil of pre-Revolutionary czarist Russia. A grippingnovel that ultimately questions our capacity for moral strength andthe depths of human integrity. This new edition includes commentaryand a reading group guide.

As a student in college, David Kepesh styles himself " a rakeamong scholars, a scholar among rakes." Little does he realize howprophetic this motto will be-- or how damning. For as Philip Rothfollows Kepesh from the domesticity of childhood into the vastwilderness of erotic possibility, from a me nage a trois in Londonto the throes of loneliness in New York, he creates a supremelyintelligent, affecting, and often hilarious novel about the dilemmaof pleasure: where we seek it; why we flee it; and how we struggleto make a truce between dignity and desire.

(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.

Alex Jennings will be the reader for this unabridged recordingof the The Sonnets. --This text refers to the AudioCassette edition.

For deft plotting, riotous inventiveness, unforgettablecharacters, and language that brilliantly captures the livelyrhythms of American speech, no American writer comes close to MarkTwain. This sparkling anthology covers the entire span of Twain'sinimitable yarn-spinning, from his early broad comedy to the bitingsatire of his later years. Every one of his sixty stories is here:ranging from the frontier humor of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog ofCalaveras County," to the bitter vision of humankind in "The ManThat Corrupted Hadleyburg," to the delightful hilarity of "Is HeLiving or Is He Dead?" Surging with Twain's ebullient wit andpenetrating insight into the follies of human nature, this volumeis a vibrant summation of the career of-in the words of H. L.Mencken-"the father of our national literature."

New package for Austen's brilliant satire of the gothicnovel A sly commentary on the power of literature and a warning forwomen about being too innocent, here is a fresh, funny novel of ayoung woman receiving, as Margaret Drabble reveals in herilluminating introduction, "intensive instruction in the ways ofthe world."

In the tradition of Philippa Gregory's smart, transportingfiction comes this tale of dark suspense, love, and betrayal,featuring two star-crossed sisters, one lost and the othersearching. Bright and inquisitive, Hannah Powers was raised by afather who treated her as if she were his son. While her beautifuland reckless sister, May, pushes the limits of propriety in theirsmall English town, Hannah harbors her own secret: their father hasgiven her an education forbidden to women. But Hannah's secretserves her well when she journeys to colonial Maryland to reunitewith May, who has been married off to a distant cousin after hersexual misadventures ruined her marriage prospects in England. AsHannah searches for May, who has disappeared, she finds herselffalling in love with her brother-in-law. Alone in a wild,uncultivated land where the old rules no longer apply, Hannah isfreed from the constraints of the society that judged both her andMay as dangerous--too smart, too fearless, and too hungry for life.But Hannah

Here is the haunting drama of Quasimodo, the hunchback;Esmeralda, the gypsy dancer; and Claude Frollo, the priest torturedby his own damnation. Shaped by a profound sense of tragic irony,it is a work that gives full play to the author's brilliantimagination.

The "Guermantes Way," in this the third volume of "In Searchof Lost Time," refers to the path that leads to the Duc and Duchessde Guermantes's chateau near Combray. It also represents thenarrator's passage into the rarefied "social kaleidoscope" of theGuermantes's Paris salon, an important intellectual playground forParisian society, where he becomes a party to the wit and mannersof the Guermantes's drawing room. Here he encounters nobles,officers, socialites, and assorted consorts, including Robert deSaint Loup and his prostitute mistress Rachel, the Baron deCharlus, and the Prince de Borodino. For this authoritativeEnglish-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the lateTerence Kilmartin's acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff'stranslation to take into account the new definitive French editionsof "A la recherche du temps perdu" (the final volume of these neweditions was published by the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade in1989).

Play in three acts by Luigi Pirandello, produced and publishedin Italian in 1921 as Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore. IntroducingPirandello's device of the "theater within the theater," the playexplores various levels of illusion and reality. It had a greatimpact on later playwrights, particularly such practitioners of theTheater of the Absurd as Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and JeanGenet, as well as Jean Anouilh and Jean-Paul Sartre.

The first and best known volume of one of the landmarks ofworld literature. Available separately for those who want toapproach Proust carefully!

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Our ceaseless human quest forsomething larger than ourselves has never been represented withmore insight and love than in this story of "Don Quixote"-pursuinghis vision of glory in a ?mercantile age-and his shrewd, skepticalman?servant, Sancho Panza. As they set out to right the world'swrongs in knightly combat, the narrative moves from philosophicalspeculation to broad comedy, taking in pastoral, farce, and fantasyon the way. The first and still the greatest of all Europeannovels, "Don Quixote" has been as important for the modern world asthe poems of Homer were for the ancients. Translated by P. A.Motteux

Letting Go is Roth's first full-length novel, published justafter Goodbye, Columbus, when he was twenty-nine. Set in 1950sChicago, New York, and Iowa city, Letting Go presents as brillianta fictional portrait as we have of a mid-century America defined bysocial and ethical constraints and by moral compulsionsconspicuously different from those of today. Newly discharged fromthe Korean War army, reeling from his mother's recent death, freedfrom old attachments and hungrily seeking others, Gabe Wallach isdrawn to Paul Herz, a fellow graduate student in literature, and toLibby, Paul's moody, intense wife. Gabe's desire to be connected tothe ordered andquot; world of feelingandquot; that he finds inbooks is first tested vicariously by the anarchy of the Herzes'struggles with responsible adulthood and then by his own eager loveaffairs. Driven by the desire to live seriously and act generously,Gabe meets an impassable test in the person of Martha Reganhart, aspirited, outspoken, divorced mother of two, a formidable

"Time Regained," the final volume of "In Search of Lost Time,"begins in the bleak and uncertain years of World War I. Yearslater, after the war's end, Proust's narrator returns to Paris andreflects on time, reality, jealousy, artistic creation, and the rawmaterial of literature--his past life. This Modern Library editionalso includes the indispensable "Guide to Proust," compiled byTerence Kilmartin and revised by Joanna Kilmartin. For thisauthoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revisedthe late Terence Kilmartin's acclaimed reworking of C. K. ScottMoncrieff's translation to take into account the new definitiveFrench editions of "A la recherche du temps perdu" (the finalvolume of these new editions was published by the Bibliotheque dela Pleiade in 1989).

"The Star Rover" is the story of San Quentin death-row inmateDarrell Standing, who escapes the horror of prison life--and longstretches in a straitjacket--by withdrawing into vivid dreams ofpast lives, including incarnations as a French nobleman and anEnglishman in medieval Korea. Based on the life and imprisonment ofJack London's friend Ed Morrell, this is one of the author's mostcomplex and original works. As Lorenzo Carcaterra argues in hisIntroduction, "The Star Rover" is "written with energy and force,brilliantly marching between the netherworlds of brutality andbeauty." This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the textof the first American edition, published in 1915.

At the beginning of Pudd'nhead Wilson a young slavewoman, fearing for her infant's son's life, exchanges herlight-skinned child with her master's. From this rathersimple premise Mark Twain fashioned one of his most entertaining,funny, yet biting novels. On its surface, Pudd'nheadWilson possesses all the elements of an engrossingnineteenth-century mystery: reversed identities, ahorrible crime, an eccentric detective, a suspenseful courtroomdrama, and a surprising, unusual solution. Yet it is nota mystery novel. Seething with the undercurrents ofantebellum southern culture, the book is a savage indictment inwhich the real criminal is society, and racial prejudice andslavery are the crimes. Written in 1894, Pudd'nheadWilson glistens with characteristic Twain humor, with suspense,and with pointed irony: a gem among the author's laterworks.

First published in 1919, "Within a Budding Grove" was awardedthe Prix Goncourt, bringing the author immediate fame. In thissecond volume of "In Search of Lost Time," the narrator turns fromthe childhood reminiscences of "Swann's Way" to memories of hisadolescence. Having gradually become indifferent to Swann'sdaughter Gilberte, the narrator visits the seaside resort of Balbecwith his grandmother and meets a new object ofattention--Albertine, "a girl with brilliant, laughing eyes andplump, matt cheeks." For this authoritative English-languageedition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin'sacclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation to takeinto account the new definitive French editions of "A la recherchedu temps perdu" (the final volume of these new editions waspublished by the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade in 1989).