FROM THE WORLD FAMOUS ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY, THE FIRSTAUTHORITATIVE, MODERNIZED, AND CORRECTED EDITION OF SHAKESPEARE’SFIRST FOLIO IN THREE CENTURIES. Skillfully assembled by Shakespeare’s fellow actors in 1623,the First Folio was the original Complete Works. It is arguably themost important literary work in the English language. But startingwith Nicholas Rowe in 1709 and continuing to the present day,Shakespeare editors have mixed Folio and Quarto texts, graduallycorrupting the original Complete Works with errors and conflatedtextual variations. Now Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, two of today’s mostaccomplished Shakespearean scholars, have edited the First Folio asa complete book, resulting in a definitive Complete Works for thetwenty-first century. Combining innovative scholarship with brilliant commentary andtextual analysis that emphasizes performance history and values,this landmark edition will be indispensable to students, theaterprofessionals, and general readers alik

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.

The Lost Girl, D. H. Lawrence’s forgotten novel, is apassionate tale of longing and sexual defiance, of devastation anddestitution. Alvina Houghton, the daughter of a widowed Midlands draper, comesof age just as her father’s business is failing. In a desperateattempt to regain his fortune and secure his daughter’s properupbringing, James Houghton buys a theater. Among the travelingperformers he employs is Ciccio, a sensual Italian who immediatelycaptures Alvina’s attention. Fleeing with him to Naples, she leavesher safe world behind and enters one of sexual awakening, desire,and fleeting freedom.

V. S. Naipaul’s legendary command of broad comedy and acutesocial observation is on abundant display in these classic works offiction–two novels and a collection of stories–that capture therhythms of life in the Caribbean and England with impressivesubtlety and humor. The Suffrage of Elvira is Naipaul’s hilarious take on anelectoral campaign in the back country of Trinidad, where thecandidates’ tactics include blatant vote-buying and supernaturalsabotage. The eponymous protagonist of Mr. Stone and the KnightsCompanion is an aging Englishman of ponderously regular habitswhose life is thrown into upheaval by a sudden marriage andunanticipated professional advancement. And the stories in AFlag on the Island take us from a Chinese bakery inTrinidad–whose black proprietor faces bankruptcy until he takes aChinese name–to a rooming house in London–where the genteellandlady plays a nasty Darwinian game with her budgerigars.Unfailingly stylish, filled with intelligence and feeling, here isthe wo

A collection of the short stories of the Nobel Prize-winningauthor of Palace Walk represents thirty years of work andfeatures tales of the citizens of Cairo, who struggle to surviveamid the city's poverty. Reprint. PW. K.

Phaedra is consumed with passion for Hippolytus, her stepson.Believing her husband dead, she confesses her love to him and isrebuffed. When her husband returns alive, Phaedra convinces himthat it was Hippolytus who attempted to seduce her. In hisinterpretation, Racine replaced the stylized tragedy withhuman-scale characters and actions. Introduction by RichardWilbur.

Wishing she could enjoy the freedoms and pleasures so casuallyenjoyed by ordinary women, orthodox rabbi's daughter Rachelanticipates her arranged marriage and imagines what her life willbe like. Reprint.

Joyce Carol Oates's Wonderland Quartet comprises fourremarkable novels that explore social class in America and theinner lives of young Americans. In "A Garden of Earthly Delights,"Oates presents one of her most memorable heroines, Clara Walpole,the beautiful daughter of Kentucky-born migrant farmworkers.Desperate to rise above her haphazard existence of violence andpoverty, determined not to repeat her mother's life, Clarastruggles for independence by way of her relationships with fourvery different men: her father, a family man turned itinerantlaborer, smoldering with resentment; the mysterious Lowry, whorescues Clara as a teenager and offers her the possibility of love;Revere, a wealthy landowner who provides Clara with stability; andSwan, Clara's son, who bears the psychological and spiritual burdenof his mother's ambition. A masterly work from a writer with "theuncanny ability to give us a cinemascopic vision of her America"("National Review"), "A Garden of Earthly Delights "is the openingstanza i

These beautifully crafted poems - by turns dark, playful,intensely moving, tender, and intimate - make up Margaret Atwood'smost accomplished and versatile gathering to date, " setting footon the middle ground / between body and word." Some draw onhistory, some on myth, both classical and popular. Others, morepersonal, concern themselves with love, with the fragility of thenatural world, and with death, especially in the elegiac series ofmeditations on the death of a parent. But they also inhabit acontemporary landscape haunted by images of the past. Generous,searing, compassionate, and disturbing, this poetry rises out ofhuman experience to seek a level between luminous memory and therealities of the everyday, between the capacity to inflict and thestrength to forgive.

Adorno's frank and open challenge to directness, and the avoidance of language that 'gives itself over either to the market, to balderdash, or to the predominating vulgarity', is as timely today as it ever has been.

A stunning novel by the widest-read Arab writer currentlypublished in the U.S. The age of Nasser has ushered in enormoussocial change, and most of the middle-aged and middle-class sonsand daughters of the old bourgeoisie find themselves trying torecreate the cozy, enchanted world they so dearly miss. One night,however, art and reality collide--with unforeseencircumstances.

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.

Every night for three years the vengeful King Shahriyar sleepswith a different virgin, executing her the next morning. To endthis brutal pattern and to save her own life, the vizier'sdaughter, Shahrazad, begins to tell the king stories of adventure,love, riches and wonder - tales of mystical lands peopled withprinces and hunchbacks, the Angel of Death and magical spirits,tales of the voyages of Sindbad, of Ali Baba outwitting a band offorty thieves and of jinnis trapped in rings and in lamps. Thesequence of stories will last 1,001 nights.

In this extraordinary literary debut third-generationhomesteader Judy Blunt describes her hardscrabble life on theprairies of eastern Montana in prose as big and bold as thelandscape. On a ranch miles from nowhere, Judy Blunt grew up with cattle andsnakes, outhouse and isolation, epic blizzards and devastatingprairie fires. She also grew up with a set of rules and rolesprescribed to her sex long before she was born, a chafing set ofstrictures she eventually had no choice but to flee, taking alongthree children and leaving behind a confused husband and the onlylife she’d ever known. Gritty, lyrical, unsentimental and wise, Breaking Clean is at once informed by the myths of the Westand powerful enough to break them down.

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.

This major collection contains all of Doris Lessing's shortfiction, other than the stories set in Africa, from the beginningof her career until now. Set in London, Paris, the south of France,the English countryside, these thirty-five stories reflect thethemes that have always characterized Lessing's work: the bedrockrealities of marriage and other relationships between men andwomen; the crisis of the individual whose very psyche is threatenedby a society unattuned to its own most dangerous qualities; thefate of women.

Nabokov's third novel, The Defense, is a chilling story ofobsession and madness. As a young boy, Luzhin was unattractive,distracted, withdrawn, sullen--an enigma to his parents and anobject of ridicule to his classmates. He takes up chess as a refugefrom the anxiety of his everyday life. His talent is prodigious andhe rises to the rank of grandmaster--but at a cost: in Luzhin' sobsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants the world ofreality. His own world falls apart during a crucial championshipmatch, when the intricate defense he has devised withers under hisopponent's unexpected and unpredictabke lines of assault.

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.