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
In the hopeful 1950s, Frank and April Wheeler appear to be amodel cou-ple: bright, beautiful, talented, with two young childrenand a starter home in the suburbs. Perhaps they married too youngand started a family too early. Maybe Frank's job is dull. AndApril never saw herself as a housewife.Yet they have always livedon the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner.But now that certainty is about to crumble. With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, RichardYates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritualbirthright, betraying not only each other, but their bestselves.
Once in a lifetime, a writer puts it all together. This is JamesPatterson's best book ever Total For 36 years, James Patterson has writtenunputdownable, pulse-racing novels. Now, he has written a book thatsurpasses all of them. ZOO is the thriller he was born towrite. World All over the world, brutal attacks are cripplingentire cities. Jackson Oz, a young biologist, watches theescalating events with an increasing sense of dread. When hewitnesses a coordinated lion ambush in Africa, the enormity of theviolence to come becomes terrifyingly clear. Destruction With the help of ecologist Chloe Tousignant, Ozraces to warn world leaders before it's too late. The attacks aregrowing in ferocity, cunning, and planning, and soon there will beno place left for humans to hide. With wildly inventive imaginationand white-knuckle suspense that rivals Stephen King at his verybest, James Patterson's ZOO is an epic, non-stop thrill-ride from"One of the best of the best." (TIME)
Joseph Epstein demonstrates time and again his talent fortaking nearly any subject and polishing it into a gem of sparklingwit and fascination. In Narcissus Leaves the Pool, he displays hissignature verve and charm in sixteen agile, entertaining pieces.Among his targets in this collection are name-dropping, talentversus genius, the cult of youthfulness, and the informationrevolution.
From one of the 20th century's great writers comes one of thefinest autobiographies of our time. Speak, Memory was firstpublished by Vladimir Nabokov in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence andthen assiduously revised and republished in 1966. The Everyman'sLibrary edition includes, for the first time, the previouslyunpublished "Chapter 16"--the most significant unpublished piece ofwriting by the master, newly released by the Nabokov estate--whichprovided an extraordinary insight into Speak, Memory. Nabokov's memoir is a moving account of a loving, civilizedfamily, of adolescent awakenings, flight from Bolshevik terror,education in England, and émigré life in Paris and Berlin. TheNabokovs were eccentric, liberal aristocrats, who lived a lifeimmersed in politics and literature on splendid country estatesuntil their world was swept away by the Russian revolution when theauthor was eighteen years old. Speak, Memory vividly evokes avanished past in the inimitable prose of Nabokov at his best.
"For many days we had been tempest-tossed...the raging stormincreased in fury until on the seventh day all hope was lost." Fromthese dire opening lines, a timeless story of adventure begins. Onefamily will emerge alive from this terrible storm: the Robinsons--aSwiss pastor, his wife, and four sons, plus two dogs and a shiploadof livestock. Inspired by Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe," " thisheartwarming tale portrays a family's struggle to create a new lifeon a strange and fantastic tropical island. There each boy mustlearn to utilize his own unique nature as their adventures lead todifficult challenges and amazing discoveries, including a puzzlingmessage tied to an albatross's leg. But it is in the ingenuity andauthenticity of the family itself, and the natural wonders of thisexotic land that have made The Swiss Family Robinson," " firstpublished at the beginning of the nineteenth century, one of themost enduring and imitated stories of shipwreck and survival. "Fromthe Paperback edition."
The best-known novellas and stories of one of the seminalwriters of the twentieth century. Included are "The Judgment, " "ACountry Doctor, " and "A Hunger Artist." New Foreword by AnneRice.
In this bestselling compilation of essays, written in theclear-eyed, uncompromising language for which he is famous, Orwelldiscusses with vigor such diverse subjects as his boyhoodschooling, the Spanish Civil War, Henry Miller, Britishimperialism, and the profession of writing.
Based on the true story of Alexander Selkirk, who survivedalone for almost five years on an uninhabited island off the coastof Chile, "The Mysterious Island" is considered by many to be JulesVerne's masterpiece. "Wide-eyed mid-nineteenth-century humanisticoptimism in a breezy, blissfully readable translation by Stump"("Kirkus Reviews"), here is the enthralling tale of five men and adog who land in a balloon on a faraway, fantastic island ofbewildering goings-on and their struggle to survive as they uncoverthe island's secret.
Here are the best of Hawthorne's short stories. There aretwenty-four of them -- not only the most familiar, but also manythat are virtually unknown to the average reader. The selection wasmade by Professor Newton Arvin of Smith College, a recognizedauthority on Hawthorne and a distinguished literary critic as well.His fine introduction admirably interprets Hawthorne's mind andart.
Seventeen interlinked tales by the winner of the 1988 NobelPrize for Literature follow such themes as betrayal, intrigue,obsessive love, social injustice, reincarnations, and wrongsrighted or made worse. Reprint. K.
This new collection of Sandburgs finest and most representativepoetry draws on all of his previous volumes and includes fourunpublished poems about Lincoln. The Hendricks comprehensiveintroduction discusses how Sandburgs life and beliefs colored hiswork and why it continues to resonate so deeply with americanstoday. Edited and with an Introduction by George and WilleneHendrick.
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) Introduction by JohnBayley
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.
Leo Tolstoy’s short works, like his novels, show readers his narrative genius, keen observation, and historical acumen—albeit on a smaller scale. This Norton Critical Edition presents twelve of Tolstoy’s best-known stories, based on the Louise and Aylmer Maude translations (except “Alyosha Gorshok”), which have been revised by the editor for enhanced comprehension and annotated for student readers. The Second Edition newly includes “A Prisoner in the Caucasus,” “Father Sergius,” and “After the Ball,” in addition to Michael Katz’s new translation of “Alyosha Gorshok.” Together these stories represent the best of the author’s short fiction before War and Peace and after Anna Karenina. “Backgrounds and Sources” includes two Tolstoy memoirs, A History of Yesterday (1851) and The Memoirs of a Madman (1884), as well as entries—expanded in the Second Edition—from Tolstoy’s “Diary for 1855” and selected letters (1858–95) that shed light on the author’s creative p
(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
From the first tee to the nineteenth hole, here's a collection of above-par cartoons and comic strips featuring favorite cartoon characters on the links, in the rough, and out of luck when it comes to the game of golf!
In a small Pennsylvania town in the late 1940s, schoolteacherGeorge Caldwell yearns to find some meaning in his life. Alone withhis teenage son for three days in a blizzard, Caldwell sees his songrow and change as he himself begins to lost touch with his life.Interwoven with the myth of Chiron, the noblest centaur, and hisown relationship to Prometheus, The Centaur one of John Updike'smost brilliant and unusual novels.
At forty, the writer Nathan Zuckerman comes down with amysterious affliction--pure pain, beginning in his neck andshoulders, invading his torso, and taking possession of his spirit.Zuckerman, whose work was his life, is unable to write a line. Nowhis work is trekking from one doctor to another, but none can finda cause for the pain and nobody can assuage it. Zuckerman himselfwonders if the pain can have been caused by his own books. Andwhile he is wondering, his dependence on painkillers grows into anaddiction to vodka, marijuana, and Percodan. The Anatomy Lesson isa great comedy of illness written in what the English criticHermione Lee has described as "a manner at once...brash andthoughtful... lyrical and wry, which projects through comicexpostulations and confessions...a knowing, humane authority." Thethird volume of the trilogy and epilogue "Zuckerman Bound," TheAnatomy Lesson provides some of the funniest scenes in all ofRoth's fiction as well as some of the fiercest.
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) The story of HesterPrynne-found out in adultery, pilloried by her Puritan community,and abandoned, in different ways, by both her partner in sin andher vengeance-seeking husband-possesses a reality heightened byHawthorne's pure human sympathy and his unmixed devotion to hissupposedly fallen but fundamentally innocent heroine. In its moralforce and the beauty of its conciliations, "The Scarlet Letter"rightly deserves its stature as the first great novel written by anAmerican, the novel that announced an American literature equal toany in the world.
Portnoy's Complaint "n." after Alexander Portnoy (1933- )] Adisorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses areperpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of aperverse nature. Spielvogel says: 'Acts of exhibitionism,voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful;as a consequence of the patient's "morality," however, neitherfantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but ratherin overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution,particularly in the form of castration.' (Spielvogel, O. "ThePuzzled Penis," "Internationale Zeitschrift fur Psychoanalyse,"Vol. XXIV, p. 909.) It is believed by Spielvogel that many of thesymptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-childrelationship. With a new Afterword by the author for the 25thAnniversary edition.
