A vibrant, new complete Shakespeare that brings readers closerthan ever before possible top Shakespeare's plays as they werefirst acted. The Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford Editioninvites readers to rediscover Shakespeare-the working man of thetheater, not the universal bard-and to rediscover his plays as*s to be performed, not works to be immortalized. Combiningthe freshly edited texts of the Oxford Edition with livelyintroductions by Stephen Greenblatt and his co-editors, glossariesand annotations, and an elegant single-column page (that of theNorton Anthologies), this complete Shakespeare invites contemporaryreaders to see and read Shakespeare afresh. Greenblatt's fullintroduction creates a window into Shakespeare world-the culture,demographics, commerce, politics, and religion of early-modernEngland-Shakespeare's family background and professional life, theElizabethan industries of theater and printing, and the subsequentcenturies of Shakespeare textual editing.

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. As powerful and relevant today asit on its initial publication, them chronicles the tumultuous livesof a family living on the edge of ruin in the Detroit slums, fromthe 1930s to the 1967 race riots. Praised by The Nation for her“potent, life-gripping imagination,” Oates traces the aspirationsand struggles of Loretta Wendall, a dreamy young mother who isfilled with regret by the age of sixteen, and the subsequentdestinies of her children, Maureen and Jules, who must fight tosurvive in a world of violence and danger. Winner of the National Book Award, them is an enthralling novelabout love, class, race, and the inhumanity of urban life. It is,raves The New York Times, “a superbly accomplished vision.” Them is the third novel in the Wonderland Quartet. The books thatcomplete this acclaimed series, A Garden of Earthly Delights,Expensive Peo

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."

A tragic, spiritual portrait of a perfect English butler andhis reaction to his fading insular world in post-war England. Awonderful, wonderful book.

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

Joyce Carol Oates's Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkablenovels that explore social class in America and the inner lives ofyoung Americans. In Expensive People, Oates takes a provocative andsuspenseful look at the roiling secrets of America's affluentsuburbs. Set in the late 1960s, this first-person confession isnarrated by Richard Everett, a precocious and obese boy who seeshimself as a minor character in the alarming drama unfolding aroundhim. Fascinated by yet alienated from his attractive, self-absorbedparents and the privileged world they inhabit, Richard incisivelyanalyzes his own mismanaged childhood, his pretentious privateschooling, his "successful-executive" father, and his elusivemother. In an act of defiance and desperation, eleven-year-oldRichard strikes out in a way that presages the violence ofever-younger Americans in the turbulent decades to come. A NationalBook Award finalist, "Expensive People" is a stunning combinationof social satire and gothic horror. "You cannot put this novel a

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.

Like the celebrated Klondike Tales, the stories that compriseSouth Sea Tales derive their intensity from the author’s ownfar-flung adventures, conveying an impassioned, unsparing visionborne only of experience. The powerful tales gathered here vividlyevoke the turn-of-the-century colonial Pacific and its capricioustropical landscape, while also trenchantly observing the delicateinterplay between imperialism and the exotic. And as Tony Horwitzasserts in his Introduction, “When London’s stories click, we areutterly there, at the edge of the world and the limit of humanendurance.”

Shakespeare forged his tremendous art in the crucible of hiscomic imagination, which throughout his life enveloped andcontained his tragic one. His early comedies—with their baroquepoetic exuberance, intense theatricality, explosive bursts ofhumor, and superbly concrete realizations of the dialects oflove—capture as in a chrysalis all that he was to become. Theyprovide a complete inventory of the mind of our greatest writer inthe middle of his golden youth. This volume contains The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of theShrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labor's Lost, AMidsummer Night's Dream, and it's companion piece, Romeo andJuliet, which Tony Tanner describes in his introduction as "atragedy by less than one minute." The texts, authoritatively editedby Sylvan Barnet, are supplemented with textual notes,bibliographies, a detailed chronology of Shakespeare's life andtimes, and a substantial introduction in which Tanner discusseseach play individually and in the context of Shakespeare'so

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed) Lord Jim is a classic storyof one man's tragic failure and eventual redemption, told under thecircumstances of high adventure at the margins of the known worldwhich made Conrad's work so immediately popular. But it is also thebook in which its author, through a brilliant adaptation of hisstylistic apparatus to his obsessive moral, psychological andpolitical concerns, laid the groundwork for the modern novel as weknow it. With An Introduction By Norman Sherry An expert on theworks of Joseph Conrad, Professor Norman Sherry is the author ofConrad's Eastern World, Conrad's Western World and Conrad and HisWorld. He is also the editor of Conrad: The Critical Heritage, andthe official biographer of Graham Greene.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) A famous legend surrounding thecreation of "Anna Karenina" tells us that Tolstoy began writing acautionary tale about adultery and ended up falling in love withhis magnificent heroine. It is rare to find a reader of the bookwho doesn't experience the same kind of emotional upheaval. AnnaKarenina is filled with major and minor characters who exist intheir own right and fully embody their mid-nineteenth-centuryRussian milieu, but it still belongs entirely to the woman whosename it bears, whose portrait is one of the truest ever made by awriter. Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude

No matter what the occasion, this collection of poems is theperfect gift to cheer up a friend or family member. Here, in thiscompact volume, are 100 poems written by the world's greatestpoets, some inspiring, some hilarious, and all memorable. Eachdelightful poem is preceded by an illuminating headnote. Among thepoems included are classics, such as Schiller's "Ode to Joy,"Wordsworth's "My Heart Leaps Up," Longfellow's "A Psalm of Life,"and Dickinson's "'Hope is the Thing with Feathers." This collectionincludes many more captivating works that take as theirexhilarating theme the limitless possibilities of human existence.Whether it's through inspired nonsense or insightful commentary,these poems will leave readers feeling happier and enriched forhaving read them.

The story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone inEngland, dwelling on the recent suicide of her daughter. In a storywhere past and present confuse, she relives scenes of Japan'sdevastation in the wake of World War II.

"The Age of Innocence," one of Edith Wharton's mostrenowned novels and the first by a woman to win the Pulitzer Prize,exquisitely details the struggle between love and responsibilitythrough the experiences of men and women in Gilded Age New York.The novel follows Newland Archer, a young, aristocratic lawyerengaged to the cloistered, beautiful May Welland. When May'sdisgraced cousin Ellen arrives from Europe, fleeing her marriage toa Polish Count, her worldly, independent nature intrigues Archer,who soon falls in love with her. Trapped by his passionlessrelationship with May and the social conventions that forbid arelationship with Ellen, Archer finds himself torn betweenpossibility and duty. Wharton's profound understanding of hercharacters' lives makes the triangle of Archer, May, and Ellen cometo life with an irresistible urgency. A wry, incisive look at theways in which love and emotion must negotiate the complex rules ofhigh society, "The Age of Innocence" is one of Wharton's finest,most illuminative w

From the first tee to the nineteenth hole, here's a collection of above-par cartoons and comic strips featuring favorite cartoon characters on the links, in the rough, and out of luck when it comes to the game of golf!

This is the story of an artist as an aging man, strugglingthrough the wreckage of Japan's World War II experience. Ishiguro'sfirst novel.

Leo Tolstoy’s short works, like his novels, show readers his narrative genius, keen observation, and historical acumen—albeit on a smaller scale. This Norton Critical Edition presents twelve of Tolstoy’s best-known stories, based on the Louise and Aylmer Maude translations (except “Alyosha Gorshok”), which have been revised by the editor for enhanced comprehension and annotated for student readers. The Second Edition newly includes “A Prisoner in the Caucasus,” “Father Sergius,” and “After the Ball,” in addition to Michael Katz’s new translation of “Alyosha Gorshok.” Together these stories represent the best of the author’s short fiction before War and Peace and after Anna Karenina. “Backgrounds and Sources” includes two Tolstoy memoirs, A History of Yesterday (1851) and The Memoirs of a Madman (1884), as well as entries—expanded in the Second Edition—from Tolstoy’s “Diary for 1855” and selected letters (1858–95) that shed light on the author’s creative p

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) The story of the mysteriousindictment, trial, and reckoning forced upon Joseph K. in FranzKafka's "The Trial" is one of the twentieth century's masterparables, reflecting the central spiritual crises of modern life.Kafka's method-one that has influenced, in some way, almost everywriter of substance who followed him-was to render the absurd andthe terrifying convincing by a scrupulous, hyperrealmatter-of-factness of tone and treatment. He thereby imparted tohis work a level of seriousness normally associated withcivilization's most cherished poems and religious texts. Translatedby Willa and Edwin Muir

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed) Introduction by JohnBayley

An iconic novel dressed in a fierce design by acclaimedfashion illustrator Ruben Toledo Ruben Toledo's breathtakingdrawings have appeared in such high-fashion magazines as "Vogue,Harper's Bazaar," and "Visionaire." Now he's turning his talentedhand to illustrating the gorgeous deluxe editions of three of themost beloved novels in literature. Here Elizabeth Bennet'srejection of Mr. Darcy, Hester Prynne's fateful letter "A," andCatherine Earnshaw's wanderings on the Yorkshire moors aretransformed into witty and surreal landscapes to appeal to thenovels' aficionados and the most discerning designer's eyes.