In The Tragedy of King Richard III, Shakespeare chronicles the rise and fall of one of history’s most repellent, and the theater’s most mesmerizing, figures. This Norton Critical Edition of Richard III is based on the First Quarto (1597) edition of the play with interpolations from the First Folio (1623). The play is accompanied by a preface, explanatory annotations, A Note on the Text, a list of Textual Variants, and eighteen illustrations of seminal scenes from major dramatic productions and film versions of the play. “Contexts” provides readers with the sources and analogues that informed Shakespeare’s composition of Richard III. These include excerpts from Robert Fabyan’s New Chronicles of England and France, Thomas More’s The History of King Richard III, Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York, A Mirror for Magistrates, and The True Tragedy of Richard III. A selection from Colley Cibber’s eighteenth-century adaptation records the compr
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.
Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of thegreatest modern writers presented in attractive, accessiblepaperback editions. “It was Nabokov’s gift to bring paradise wherever he alighted.”—John Updike, The New York Review of Books Novelist, poet, critic, translator, and, above all, a peerlessimaginer, Vladimir Nabokov was arguably the most dazzling prosestylist of the twentieth century. In novels like Lolita, Pale Fire,and Ada, or Ardor, he turned language into an instrument ofecstasy. Vintage Nabokov includes sections 1-10 of his most famous andcontroversial novel, Lolita; the stories “The Return of Chorb,”“The Aurelian,” “A Forgotten Poet,” “Time and Ebb,” “Signs andSymbols,” “The Vane Sisters,” and “Lance”; and chapter 12 from hismemoir Speak, Memory.
Slaughterhous-Five is one of the world's great anti-warbooks. Centering on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden, BillyPilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of ourown fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraidto know.
The Sorrow Gondola was the great Swedish poet TomasTranstromer's first collection of poems after his stroke in 1990.Translated by Michael McGriff, Transtromer's great work isavailable in its first single-volume English edition.
Pip, a poor orphan being raised by a cruel sister, does not havemuch in the way of great expectations between his terrifyingexperience in a graveyard with a convict named Magwitch and hishumiliating visits with the eccentric Miss Havisham's beautiful butmanipulative niece, Estella, who torments him until he is elevatedto wealth by an anonymous benefactor. Full of unforgettablecharacters, Great Expectations is a tale of intrigue, unattainablelove, and all of the happiness money can't buy. Great Expectationshas the most wonderful and most perfectly worked-out plot for anovel in the English language, according to John Irving, and J.Hillis Miller declares, Great Expectations is the most unified andconcentrated expression of Dickens's abiding sense of the world,and Pip might be called the archetypal Dickens hero.
Hilarious fun, this early comedy is filled with the merryviolence of slapstick and farce. When two sets of twins, separatedand apparently lost to each other, all end up in the rowdy,rollicking city of Ephesus, the stage is set for mix-ups, mayhem,and mistaken identity—plus the timeless puns, jokes, gags, andsuspense that makes this play a wonderful theatrical frolic and abrilliant tour de force of language and laughter. From the Paperback edition.
"I do not say there is no character as well drawn inShakespeare [as D'Artagnan]. I do say there is none that I love sowholly." "The lasting and universal popularity of The Three Musketeersshows that Dumas, by artlessly expressing his own nature in thepersons of his heroes, was responding to that craving for action,strength and generosity which is a fact in all periods and allplaces."
Hugely admired by Tolstoy, David Copperfield is the novel thatdraws most closely from Charles Dickens's own life. Its eponymoushero, orphaned as a boy, grows up to discover love and happiness,heartbreak and sorrow amid a cast of eccentrics, innocents, andvillains. Praising Dickens's power of invention, Somerset Maughamwrote: andquot; There were never such people as the Micawbers,Peggotty and Barkis, Traddles, Betsey Trotwood and Mr. Dick, UriahHeep and his mother. They are fantastic inventions of Dickens'sexultant imagination...you can never quite forget them.andquot;This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition includes a newIntroduction by Pulitzer Prize finalist David Gates, in addition tonew explanatory notes.
These controversial epic poems demonstrate Milton's genius forfusing sense and sound, classicism and innovation, narrative anddrama in profound explorations of the moral problems of God'sjustice-and what it truly means to be human.
EXCITEMENT AND SUSPENSE FROM THE HEART OF THE JUNGLE Archaeologist Leo Mallory is on a dig. But this is no ordinary assignment. He’s deep in the heart of the Mexican jungle uncovering another centuries-old Mayan city. Like a surgeon performing a most-intricate operation, Leo and his team skilfully remove each crumb of earth with the utmost precision. THE JAGUAR MASK In France, Declan Carberry is busy trying to solve a string of ritual serial murders. Horrific in the extreme, the questions are who and why? Declan needs to move fast, for time is running out. Delving into the history of the Conquistadors and the Maya of South America, this vertiginous tale of snaring and netting, old rituals and modern codes, blood-letting and immortality is Easterman at his dizzying best. “A master of spooky suspense and of the chapter cliffhanger”THE SCOTSMAN 'The Jaguar Mask' will satisfy anyone who appreciates an old-fashioned well plotted adventure thriller which has been given a hard moder
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
Set in sixteenth-century England, Mark Twain’s classic “talefor young people of all ages” features two identical-looking boys—aprince and a pauper—who trade clothes and step into each other’slives. While the urchin, Tom Canty, discovers luxury and power,Prince Edward, dressed in rags, roams his kingdom and experiencesthe cruelties inflicted on the poor by the Tudor monarchy. AsChristopher Paul Curtis observes in his Introduction, The Princeand the Pauper is “funny, adventurous, and exciting, yet alsochock-full of . . . exquisitely reasoned harangues againstsociety’s ills.” This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the Mark TwainProject edition, which is the approved text of the Center forScholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association.
Dickens's widely read satirical account of the IndustrialRevolution. Dickens creates the Victorian industrial city of Coketown, innorthern England, and its unforgettable citizens, such as theunwavering utilitarian Thomas Gradgrind and the factory ownerJosiah Bounderby, and the result is his famous critique ofcapitalist philosophy, the exploitative force he believed wasdestroying human creativity and joy. This edition includes newnotes to the text.
When Sir Francis Drake returned to England in 1580, manyquestions concerning his momentous voyage were left unanswered—hisjournals were impounded and his men were forbidden, on pain ofdeath, to divulge where they had been. Drawing on newly uncoveredevidence, geographer and maritime historian Samuel Bawlfmasterfully reconstructs Francis Drake’s historic round-the-worldexpedition, exploring the drama surrounding the voyage and offeringintriguing insights into life at sea in the sixteenth century. Butit is Bawlf’s assertion of Drake’s whereabouts in the summer of1579 that gives the book even greater originality: from anintensive study of maps of the period, Bawlf shows with certaintythat Drake sailed all the way to Alaska—much farther than anyonehas heretofore imagined—thereby rewriting the history ofexploration in North America.
On the eve of his ninetieth birthday a bachelor decides to give himself a wild night of love with a virgin. As is his habit he has purchased hundreds of women--he asks a madam for her assistance. The fourteen-year-old girl who is procured for him is enchanting, but exhausted as she is from caring for siblings and her job sewing buttons, she can do little but sleep. Yet with this sleeping beauty at his side, it is he who awakens to a romance he has never known. Tender, knowing, and slyly comic, Memories of My Melancholy Whores is an quisite addition to the master's work.
Hesse's novel of two medieval men, one quietly content with hisreligion and monastic life, the other in fervent search of moreworldly salvation. This conflict between flesh and spirit, betweenemotional and contemplative man, was a life study for Hesse. It isa theme that transcends all time. The Hesse Phenomenon "has turnedinto a vogue, the vogue into a torrent. . .He has appealed both to.. . an underground and to an establishment. . .and to thedisenchanted young sharing his contempt for our industrialcivilization."--"The New York Times Book Review"
