Purchase of this book includes free trial access towww.million-books.com where you can read more than a million booksfor free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IllSTEVE TREATS It was for several minutes, I suppose, that I stooddrawing these silent morals. No man occupied himself with me. Quietvoices, and games of chance, and glasses lifted to drink, continuedto be the peaceful order of the night. And into my thoughts brokethe voice of that card-dealer who had already spoken so sagely. Healso took his turn at moralizing. "What did I tell you?" heremarked to the man for whom he continued to deal, and whocontinued to lose money to him. "Tell me when?" " Didn't I tell youhe'd not shoot ? " the dealer pursued with complacence. " You gotready to dodge. You had no call to be concerned. He's not the kinda man need feel anxious about." The player looked over at theVirginian, doubtfully. " Well," he said, " I don't know what youfolks call a dangerous man." " Not him " exclaimed the dealer withadmi

Robert Prentice has spent all his life attempting to escape hismother's stifling presence. His mother, Alice, for her part,struggles with her own demons as she attempts to realize her dreamsof prosperity and success as a sculptor. As Robert goes off tofight in Europe, hoping to become his own man, Richard Yatesportrays a soldier in the depths of war striving to live up to hisheroic ideals. With haunting clarity, Yates crafts an unforgettableportrait of two people who cannot help but hope for more even aslife challenges them both.

The shortest and probably earliest of Shakespeare's comedies, The Comedy of Errors is the story of identical twin brotherswho are raised apart-and then mistaken for each other.

"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.

When this classic collection of stories first appeared in 1962, on the author s thirtieth birthday Arthur Mizener wrote in The New York Times Book Review: Updike is a romantic [and] like all American romantics, that is, he has an irresistible impulse to go in memory home again in order to find himself. . . . The precise recollection of his own family-love, parental and marital, is vital to him; it is the matter in which the saving truth is incarnate. . . . Pigeon Feathers is not just a book of very brilliant short stories; it is a demonstration of how the most gifted writer of his generation is coming to maturity; it shows us that Mr. Updike s fine verbal talent is no longer pirouetting, however gracefully, out of a simple delight in motion, but is beginning to serve his deepest insight.

Twenty-two-year-old Karla is thrilled to be hired as anentertainer on the Sound of Music cruise ship where the rum punchis 80 percent Kool-Aid, the ice sculp- tures are plastic, and her"fake it till you make it" M.O. seems adventuresome. Karla is lessthrilled when her new boyfriend, Jack, suggests that they form asinging duo on land, but by now faking enthusiasm has become a wayof life. She and Jack buy backing tracks, crib lyrics from theradio, and embark on a not-as-glamorous-as-it-should-be careerperforming in the luxury hotel bars of the Middle East and China.But after a thousand and one nights on the road, Karla and Jackfind themselves struggling to keep their act both personal andprofessional together. Funny, fast-paced, and incisive, A Thousandand One Nights captures the performances, large and small, we useto make it through life.

The earliest of her six major novels, NorthangerAbbey remained unpublished until after Jane Austen’s death. A deliciouslywitty satire of popular Gothic romances, it is perhaps Austen’slightest, most delightful excursion into a young woman’s world.Catherine Morland, an unlikely heroine—unlikely because she is soordinary—forsakes her English village for the pleasures and perilsof Bath. There, among a circle of Austen’s wonderfully vain,dissembling, and fashionable characters, she meets a potentialsuitor, Henry Tilney. But with her imagination fueled bymelodramatic novels, Catherine turns a visit to his home,Northanger Abbey, into a hunt for dark family secrets. The resultis a series of hilarious social gaffes and harsh awakenings thatfor all of Austen’s youthful exuberance nevertheless conveys hermature vision of literature and life—and the consequences ofmistaking one for the other.

Anchor proudly presents a new omnibus volume of threenovels--previously published separately by Anchor--by NaguibMahfouz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Assembled here isa collection of Mahfouz's artful meditations on the vicissitudes ofpost-Revolution Egypt. Diverse in style and narrative technique,together they render a rich, nuanced, and universally resonantvision of modern life in the Middle East. The Beggar is a complex tale of alienation and despair. In theaftermath of Nasser's revolution, a man sacrifices his work andfamily to a series of illicit love affairs. Released from jail inpost-Revolutionary times, the hero ofThe Thief and the Dogs blamesan unjust society for his ill fortune, eventually bringing himselfto destruction. Autumn Quail is a tale of moral responsibility,isolation, and political downfall about a corrupt bureaucrat who isone of the early victims of the purge after the 1952 revolution inEgypt.

Jailbird takes us into a fractured and comic, pure Vonnegut world of high crimes and misdemeanors in government and in the heart. This wry tale follows bumbling bureaucrat Walter F. Starbuck from Harvard to the Nixon White House to the penitentiary as Watergate s least known co-conspirator. But the humor turns dark when Vonnegut shines his spotlight on the cold hearts and calculated greed of the mighty, giving a razor-sharp edge to an unforgettable portrait of power and politics in our times.

在线阅读本书 During the French Revolution's reign of terror, the mysteriousScarlet Pimpernel rescues helpless men, women, and children fromtheir doom in this unique, wonderfully colorful adventureclassic.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a novel that is itself thesubject of one of literature's most enduring mysteries. The storyrecounts the troubled romance of Rosa Bud and the book's eponymouscharacter, who later vanishes. Was Drood murdered, and if so bywhom? All clues point to John Jasper, Drood's lugubrious uncle, whocoveted Rosa. Or did Drood orchestrate his own disappearance? AsCharles Dickens died before finishing the book, the ending isintriguingly ambiguous. In his Introduction, Matthew Pearlilluminates the 150-year-long quest to unravel" "The Mystery ofEdwin Drood and lends new insight into the novel, the literarymilieu of 1870s England, and the private life of Charles Dickens.This Modern Library edition includes new endnotes and a fulltran* of "The Trial of John Jasper for the Murder of EdwinDrood," the 1914 mock court case presided over and argued by thelikes of G. K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw. Now diehardfans, new readers, and armchair detectives have another opportunityto solve the mys

Naguib Mahfouz's haunting novella of post-revolutionary Egyptcombines a vivid pychological portrait of an anguished man with thesuspense and rapid pace of a detective story. After four years in prison, the skilled young thief Said Mahranemerges bent on revenge. He finds a world that has changed in moreways than one. Egypt has undergone a revolution and, on a morepersonal level, his beloved wife and his trusted henchman, whoconspired to betray him to the police, are now married to eachother and are keeping his six-year-old daughter from him. But inthe most bitter betrayal, his mentor, Rauf Ilwan, once a firebrandrevolutionary who convinced Said that stealing from the rich in aunjust society is an act of justice, is now himself a rich man, arespected newspaper editor who wants nothing to do with thedisgraced Said. As Said's wild attempts to achieve his idea ofjustice badly misfire, he becomes a hunted man so driven by hatredthat he can only recognize too late his last chance atredemption.

A dying man cautiously unravels the mysteries of memory and creation. Vadim is a Russian emigre who, like Nabokov, is a novelist, poet and critic. There are threads linking the fictional hero with his creator as he reconstructs the images of his past from young love to his serious illness.

Spine-tingling and entertaining, "The Invisible Man" is ascience fiction classic-and a penetrating, unflinching look intothe heart of human nature. To its author, H. G. Wells, the novelwas as compelling as "a good gripping dream." But to generations ofreaders, the terrible and evil experiment of the dementedscientist, Griffin, has conveyed a chilling nightmare of believablehorror. An atmosphere of ever-increasing suspense begins with thearrival of a mysterious stranger at an English village inn andbuilds relentlessly to the stark terror of a victim pursued by amaniacal invisible man. The result is a masterwork: a dazzlingdisplay of the brilliant imagination, psychological insight, andliterary craftsmanship that made H. G. Wells one of the mostinfluential writers of his time.

Mike Lovett rents a room in a Brooklyn boarding house with theintention of writing a novel. Wounded during World War II, Lovettis an amnesiac, and much of his past is a secret to himself. ButLovett's housemates have secrets of their own. As these mysteriousfigures vie for Lovett's allegiance, Barbary Shore playshavoc with our certainties, combining Kafkaesque unease withOrwellian paranoia and delivering its effects with a power thatMailer has made all his own.

Mostly set in Milan, this comedy is the story of twonewly-arrived Veronese friends, Valentine and Proteus. Both vie forthe Duke's daughter's hand, with lots of laughter ensuing.

In this gripping and suspenseful novella from the EgyptianNobel Prize-winner, three young friends survive interrogation bythe secret police, only to find their lives poisoned by suspicion,fear, and betrayal. At a Cairo cafe in the 1960s, a legendaryformer belly dancer lovingly presides over a boisterous family ofregulars, including a group of idealistic university students. Oneday, amid reports of a wave of arrests, three of the studentsdisappear: the excitable Hilmi, his friend Ismail, and Ismail'sbeautiful girlfriend Zaynab. When they return months later, theyare apparently unharmed and yet subtly and profoundly changed. Itis only years later, after their lives have been further shattered,that the narrator pieces together the young people's horrificstories and learns how the government used them against oneanother. In a riveting final chapter, their torturer himself entersthe Cafe and sits among his former victims, claiming a right tojoin their society of the disillusioned. Now translated intoEnglish

They meet by chance on Copacabana Beach:Tristao Raposo, a poor black teen from the Rio slums, surviving dayto day on street smarts and the hustle, and Isabel Leme, anupper-class white girl, treated like a pampered slave by her absentthough very powerful father. Convinced that fate brought themtogether, betrayed by families who threaten to tear them apart,Tristao and Isabel flee to the farthest reaches of Brazil's wildwest -- unaware of the astonishing destiny that awaits them . . .Spanning twenty-two years, from the mid-sixties to the lateeighties, BRAZIL surprises and embraces the reader with itscelebration of passion, loyalty, and New World innocence. "A tourde force . . . Spectacular." -- Time "Updike's novel, as tender asit is erotic, becomes a magnificently wrought love story . . . .Beautifully written." -- Detroit Free Press "From the Paperbackedition."

No career in modern American letters is at once so brilliant,varied, and controversial as that of Norman Mailer. In a span ofmore than six decades, Mailer has searched into subjects rangingfrom World War II to Ancient Egypt, from the march on the Pentagonto Marilyn Monroe, from Henry Miller and Mohammad Ali to JesusChrist. Now, in The Castle in the Forest, his first majorwork of fiction in more than a decade, Mailer offers what may behis consummate literary endeavor: He has set out to explore theevil of Adolf Hitler. The narrator, a mysterious SS man who is later revealed to be anexceptional presence, gives us young Adolf from birth, as well asHitler’s father and mother, his sisters and brothers, and theintimate details of his childhood and adolescence. A tapestry of unforgettable characters, The Castle in theForest delivers its playful twists and surprises withastonishing insight into the nature of the struggle between goodand evil that exists in us all. At its core is a hypothesis t

On Christmas Eve, a party of friends descends on a purportedlyhaunted country retreat, charged with the task of discoveringevidence of the supernatural. Sequestered in their rooms for theholiday, the friends reconvene on Twelfth Night at a great feastand share their stories of spectral encounter. “Conducted” byCharles Dickens and counting Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collinsamong its contributors, The Haunted House examinesquintessentially Victorian themes–sex and longing, nostalgia andloss–in ways that continue to resonate today. Ingeniously conceivedand written, and spiked with flashes of Dickensian humor, thisvolume is a strange and sheer delight.