Ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary, TarBaby is Toni Morrison’s reinvention of the love story. JadineChilds is a black fashion model with a white patron, a whiteboyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son isa black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires.As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from theCaribbean to Manhattan and the deep South, she charts all thenuances of obligation and betrayal between blacks and whites,masters and servants, and men and women.
The time: 2000 to 2005, the years of neoconservatism, terrorism,the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the ascension of Bush, Blair, andBerlusconi, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. In thisseries of provocative, passionate, and wittyessays, Umberto Ecoexamines a wide range of phenomena,from Harry Potter, the Tower ofBabel, talk shows, and the Enlightenment to The Da Vinci Code/ Whatled us, he asks,into this age of hot wars and media populism, andhow was it sold to us as progress? In Turning Back the Clock, thebestselling author and respected scholar turns his famous intellecttoward events both local and global to look at where our troubledworld is headed.
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.
A new selection for the NEA's Big Read program A compact selection of Poe's greatest stories and poems, chosenby the National Endowment for the Arts for their Big Readprogram. This selection of eleven stories and seven poems contains suchfamously chilling masterpieces of the storyteller's art as "TheTell-tale Heart," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Cask ofAmontillado," and "The Pit and the Pendulum," and suchunforgettable poems as "The Raven," "The Bells," and "Annabel Lee."Poe is widely credited with pioneering the detective story,represented here by "The Purloined Letter," "The Mystery of MarieRoget," and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." Also included is his essay "The Philosophy of Composition," inwhich he lays out his theory of how good writers write, describinghow he constructed "The Raven" as an example.
This complete collection includes all the published stories ofEudora Welty. There are forty-one stories in all, including theearlier collections A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The GoldenApples, and The Bride of the Innisfallen, as well as previouslyuncollected stories. With a Preface written by the Authorespecially for this edition.
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.
George Eliot's last and most unconventional novel isconsidered by many to be her greatest. First published ininstallments in 1874-76, "Daniel Deronda" is a richly imagined epicwith a mysterious hero at its heart. Deronda, a high-minded youngman searching for his path in life, finds himself drawn by a seriesof dramatic encounters into two contrasting worlds: the Englishcountry-house life of Gwendolen Harleth, a high-spirited beautytrapped in an oppressive marriage, and the very different lives ofa poor Jewish girl, Mirah, and her family. As Deronda uncovers thelong-hidden secret of his own parentage, Eliot's moving andsuspenseful narrative opens up a world of Jewish experiencepreviously unknown to the Victorian novel.
Masterfully crafted, Treasure Island is a stunning yarn ofpiracy on the fiery tropic seas--an unforgettable tale of treacherythat embroils a host of legendary swashbucklers from honest youngJim Hawkins to sinister, two-timing Israel Hands to evil incarnate,blind Pew. But above all, Treasure Island is a complex study ofgood and evil, as embodied by that hero-villain, Long John Silver;the merry unscrupulous buccaneer-rogue whose greedy lust for goldcannot help but win the heart of every one who ever longed forromance, treasure, and adventure. Since its publication in 1883,Treasure Island has provided an enduring literary model for sucheminent writers as Anthony Hope, Graham Greene, and Jorge LuisBorges. As David Daiches wrote: "Robert Louis Stevenson transformedthe Victorian boys' adventure into a classic of its kind."
When Meaulnes first arrives at the local school in Sologne,everyone is captivated by his good looks, daring and charisma. Butwhen Meaulnes disappears for several days, and returns with talesof a strange party at a mysterious house and a beautiful girlhidden within it, he has been changed forever. In his restlesssearch for his Lost Estate and the happiness he found there,Meaulnes, observed by his loyal friend Francois, may risk losingeverything he ever had. Poised between youthful admiration andadult resignation, Alain-Fournier's compelling narrator carries thereader through this evocative and unbearably poignant portrayal ofdesperate friendship and vanished adolescence.
"Nineteen Eighty-Four" revealed George Orwell as one of thetwentieth century's greatest mythmakers. While the totalitariansystem that provoked him into writing it has since passed intooblivion, his harrowing cautionary tale of a man trapped in apolitical nightmare has had the opposite fate: its relevance andpower to disturb our complacency seem to grow decade by decade. InWinston Smith's desperate struggle to free himself from anall-encompassing, malevolent state, Orwell zeroed in on tendenciesapparent in every modern society, and made vivid the universalpredicament of the individual.
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) In "Madame Bovary," hisstory of a shallow, deluded, unfaithful, but consistentlycompelling woman living in the provinces of nineteenth-centuryFrance, Gustave Flaubert invented not only the modern novel butalso a modern attitude toward human character and human experiencethat remains with us to this day. One of the rare works of art thatit would be fair to call perfect, "Madame Bovary" has had anincal?culable influence on the literary culture that followed it.This translation, by Francis Steeg?muller, is acknowledged bycommon consensus as the definitive English rendition of Flaubert'stext.
A mix of writers historical and modern, male and female, thisanthology includes works by such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin,Martin Luther King, Jr., Erma Bombeck, Sandra Cisneros, AlbertEinstein, Abigail Adams, Mark Twain, Eudora Welty, and John F.Kennedy.
In the "brilliant novel" ("The New York Times") V.S. Naipaultakes us deeply into the life of one man--an Indian who, uprootedby the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in anisolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independentAfrican nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbingvision yet of what happens in a place caught between thedangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past andtraditions.
Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentrichurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For therest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With thisbrilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures thecoming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel Garcia Ma rquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to theplace of his family's origins, Morrison introduces an entire castof strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants ofa fully realized black world.
"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.
Kafka's first and funniest novel, Amerika tells the story ofthe young immigrant Karl Rossmann who, after an embarrassing sexualmisadventure, finds himself "packed off to America" by his parents.Expected to redeem himself in this magical land of opportunity,young Karl is swept up instead in a whirlwind of dizzyingreversals, strange escapades, and picaresque adventures. Although Kafka never visited America, images of its vastlandscape, dangers, and opportunities inspired this saga of the"golden land." Here is a startlingly modern, fantastic andvisionary tale of America "as a place no one has yet seen, in ahistorical period that can't be identified," writes E. L. Doctorowin his new foreword. "Kafka made his first novel from his ownmind's mythic elements," Doctorow explains, "and the research datathat caught his eye were bent like light rays in a field ofgravity."
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.
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Introduction by Rosemary AshtonThe isolated, misanthropic, miserly weaver Silas Marner is one ofGeorge Eliot's greatest creations, and his presence casts astrange, otherworldly glow over the moral dramas, both large andsmall, that take place in the pastoral landscape that surroundshim. When Marner is wrongly accused of crime and expelled from hiscommunity, he vows to turn his back upon the world. He moves to thevillage of Raveloe, where he remains an outsider and an object ofsuspicion until an extraordinary sequence of events, including thetheft of his gold and the appearance of a tiny, golden-haired childin his cottage, transforms his life. Part beautifully realizedrural portraiture and part fairy tale, the story of Marner'sredemption and restoration to humanity has long been George Eliot'smost beloved and widely read work.
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.
From the author of "Chatterton" and "Shakespeare: A Biography"comes a gripping novel set in London that re-imagines an infamous19th-century Shakespeare forgery. Charles and Mary Lamb, who willin time achieve lasting fame as the authors of "Tales fromShakespeare for Children," are still living at home, caring fortheir dotty and maddening parents. Reading Shakespeare is thesiblings' favorite reprieve, and they are delighted when anambitious young bookseller comes into their lives claiming topossess a 'lost' Shakespearea play. Soon all of London is eagerlyanticipating opening night of a star-studded production of the playnot knowing that they have all been duped by charlatan and afraud.
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Penelope Fitzgerald, who diedin 2000, emerged late in life as one of the most remarkable Englishwrit ers of the last century. She began her writing career in 1975at the age of fifty-nine, and over the next two decades shepublished three biographies, nine novels, and a collection of shortstories. Now three of her acclaimed novels are gathered here in onevolume. "The Bookshop "is a postwar tragicomedy of manners, set inan isolated seaside town where an enterprising woman opens abookstore only to find it beset by poltergeists, weather, andhostile townsfolk. "The Gate of Angels "is an Edwardian romancewithin a novel of ideas: a young doctor devoted to science and tohis all-male Cambridge college finds his life and views disruptedby a nurse named Daisy. "The Blue Flower," " "which won theNational Book Critics Circle Award, revitalizes historical dramathrough the story of Novalis, an eighteenth-century German romanticpoet and visionary genius, and his unlikely love affair wit
The four plays selected for this collection--The Taming of theShrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, and TheTempest--represent a significant stage in the development of theworld's greatest dramatist.
