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.

"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.

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aNo other popular writer of his time did any better writingthan you will find in The Call of the Wild.a--H. L. Mencken One ofthe greatest American storytellers, Jack London enjoyed phenomenalpopularity in his own time and remains widely read throughout theworld. His work is characterized by thrilling action, an intuitivefeeling for animal life, and a sense of justice that oftenmanifests itself through violence. "The Call of the Wild," perhapsthe best novel ever written about animals, traces a dogas suddenentry into the wild and his education in survival among the wolves.Library of America Paperback Classics feature authoritative textsdrawn from the acclaimed Library of America series and introducedby todayas most distinguished scholars and writers. Each bookfeatures a detailed chronology of the authoras life and career, andessay on the choice of the text, and notes. The contents of thisPaperback Classic are drawn from "Jack London: Novels and Stories,"volume number 6 in The Library of America series. I

For this novel of French bourgeois life in all its ingloriousbanality, Flaubert invented a paradoxically original and whollymodern style. His heroine, Emma Bovary, a bored provincialhousewife, abandons her husband to pursue the libertine Rodolphe ina desperate love affair. A succA]s de scandale in its day, "MadameBovary" remains a powerful and arousing novel. Translated with anIntroduction by Geoffrey Wall New Preface by MichA]le Roberts

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.

Published to coincide with the centenary of Tolstoy's death,here is an exciting new edition of one of the great literary worksof world literature. Tolstoy's epic masterpiece captures withunprecedented immediacy the broad sweep of life during theNapoleonic wars and the brutal invasion of Russia. Balls andsoirées, the burning of Moscow, the intrigues of statesmen andgenerals, scenes of violent battles, the quiet moments of everydaylife--all in a work whose extraordinary imaginative power has neverbeen surpassed. The Maudes' translation of Tolstoy's epicmasterpiece has long been considered the best English version, andnow for the first time it has been revised to bring it fully intoline with modern approaches to the text. French passages arerestored, Anglicization of Russian names removed, and outmodedexpressions updated. A new introduction by Amy Mandelker considersthe novel's literary and historical context, the nature of thework, and Tolstoy's artistic and philosophical aims. New, expandednotes provid

With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a novel every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and around the world for its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing popularity suggests that it will be read and admired for decades to come. This magnificent new novel has a similarly extraordinary scope and the same capacity to amaze, entertain, and bewitch the reader. A tour de force of metaphysical reality, it is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and peopl

From the author who gave us THE SCARLET LETTER and THE HOUSEOF THE SEVEN GABLES, here is a comprehensive selection of hisbest short stories, including: Endicott and the Red Cross Young Goodman Brown Earth's Holocaust Ethan Brand My Kinsman, Major Molineux And more!

An immediate bestseller when it was first published in December1843, A Christmas Carol has endured ever since as a perennialYuletide favorite. Charles Dickens's beloved tale about the miserlyEbenezer Scrooge, who comes to know the meaning of kindness,charity, and goodwill through a haunting Christmas Eve encounterwith four ghosts, is a heartwarming celebration of the spirit ofChristmas. This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition alsoincludes two other popular Christmas stories by Dickens: "TheChimes," in which a man, persuaded by hypocritical cant that thepoor deserve their misery, is shown what his pessimisticresignation might lead to in a vision conjured by the pealing ofbells, and "The Haunted Man," Dickens's last Christmas tale, whichfeatures one of his great comic families, the Tetterbys.

In many ways this is a wonderful novel with interesting,alive, characters. The medical aspects are absorbing and relevant,and the plot, the story, is grandiose, immense, and fascinating.Before you read the book, read the author's acknowledgements at theend. Irving's grandfather was a leading gynecologist, and he hadhis medical facts checked by experts. (There are other interestingtidbits in the acknowledgements.) John Irving is obviously a masternovelist and he has lavished intense energy and creativity on thisbook. I just cannot help carping a bit. My qualm is that the"political" aspects are all a little too pat and comforting. Amongthe many characters we have the active, involved, and livelycripple (opps, sorry, I mean "differently abled person"); theabusive husband; the dignified, poor but honest negroes; thelovable orphans; the tough but ultimately gentle and sexuallyconfused lesbian; the sad but dedicated and kindly illegalabortionists; and so on. For anyone other than a devoutanti-abortion

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.

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"

These three masterworks placed the great seventeenth-centuryEnglish poet Milton beside Shakespeare, Dante, Homer, andVirgil in the pantheon of world literature. A monumental achievement,Parudise Lost is the epic poem about the magnificent Lucifer, whose failed rebellion against Heaven's tyranny casts him into thedarkness of Hell and leads to man's fall from grace. SamsonAgonistes, the greatest English drama modeled on the Greekclassics, depicts blinded, once-mighty Samson regaining his strength as God's champion and delivering his people-whilede-stroying himself and his captors. And "Lycidas" is animmortal elegy on lost hopes and the nature of fate. Written in a grandstyle of superb power, these works display a majesty of lan- guage, a sublime wealth of detail, and the unmistakable genius ofone of literature's greatest minds.

Three Early Comedies Love's Labor's Lost Farce and fun follow when ayoung king and his three friends vow to give up women for ayear—just as a pretty princess and her three ladies-in-waitingarrive—in a delightful play that ends with one of Shakespeare’sloveliest songs. The Two Gentlemen of Verona In this lyricalcomedy, two friends are infatuated with the same woman, while ajilted girl disguised as a boy and a clownish servant with araffish mutt set the scene for laughter and a timeless story oflove. The Merry Wives of Windsor Shakespeare’s famousrogue, Falstaff, woos two married women with identical loveletters—and becomes the focus of a hilarious comedy when the womenconspire to teach him a lesson.

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.

Mike Gayle has carved a whole new literary niche out of the male confessional novel. He's a publishing phenomenon'EVENING STANDARD 'Delightfully observant nostalgia.., will strike a chord with both sexes' SHE 'A warm, funny romantic comedy' DAILY MAIL 'Gayle's chatty style sustains a cracking pace' THE TIMES "Thirty means only going to the pub if there,s somewhere to sit down, Thiity means owning at least one classical CD, even if it's New That's What I Call Classical Vol 6. Thirty means calling off the search for the perfect partner because now, after al! thee years in the wilderness, you've finally found what you've been looking for." Unlike most people Matt Beckford is actually looking forward to turning thirty. After struggling through most of his twenties he thinks his career, finances and love life are finally sorted. But when he splits up with his girlfriend, he realises that life has different plans for him.and Matt temporarily moves back home to his parents. Within hours,his mum and dad

New chronology and further reading. Edited with an introduction by Marilyn Butler.

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.

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.

New chronology and further reading; Tony Tanner's originalintroduction reinstated Edited with an introduction by Kathryn Sutherland.

Shakespeare became famous as a dazzling poet before most peopleeven knew that he wrote plays. His sonnets are the Englishlanguage's most extraordinary anatomy of love in all itsdimensions-desire and despair, longing and loss, adoration anddisgust. To read them is to confront morality and eternity in thesame breath. Produced under the editorial supervision of JonathanBate and Eric Rasmussen, two of today's most accomplishedShakespearean scholars, The Sonnets and Other Poems includes all ofShakespeare's sonnets, the long narrative poems "Venus and Adonis"and "The Rape of Lucrece," and several other shorter works.Incorporating definitive texts and authoritative notes from WilliamShakespeare: Complete Works, this unique volume also includes anexpanded Introduction by Jonathan Bate that places the poems inliterary and historical context and illuminates their relationshipto Shakespeare's dramatic writing. Also featured are key factsabout the individual selections; an index of the first lines of thesonnets; a chron