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.

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."

Set in the magical Wessex landscape so familiar from ThomasHardy’s early work, Tess of the D’Urbervilles is uniqueamong his great novels for the intense feeling that he lavishedupon his heroine, Tess, a pure woman betrayed by love. Hardy pouredall of his profound empathy for both humanity and the rhythms ofnatural life into this story of her beauty, goodness, and tragicfate. In so doing, he created a character who, like Emma Bovary andAnna Karenina, has achieved classic stature.

The Trial is one of the most important novels of the twentiethcentury: the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bankofficer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defendhimself against a charge about which he can get no information.Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy ofthe excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness oftotalitarianism, Kafka's nightmare has resonated with chillingtruth for generations of readers. This new edition is based uponthe work of an international team of experts who have restored thetext, the sequence of chapters, and their division to create aversion that is as close as possible to the way the author left it.In his brilliant translation, Breon Mitchell masterfully reproducesthe distinctive poetics of Kafka's prose, revealing a novel that isas full of energy and power as it was when it was firstwritten.

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.

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.

Random's Modern Library is reproducing this Hardy standard as atie-in to a Masterpiece Theater presentation and offering a qualityhardcover for a reasonable price. Copyright 1998Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out ofprint or unavailable edition of this title.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Arriving in a village to takeup the position of land surveyor for the mysterious lord of acastle, the character known as K. finds himself in a bitter andbaffling struggle to contact his new employer and go about hisduties. As the villagers and the Castle officials block his effortsat every turn, K.'s consuming quest-quite possibly a self-imposedone-to penetrate the inaccessible heart of the Castle and take itsmeasure is repeatedly frustrated. Kafka once suggested that thewould-be surveyor in "The Castle" is driven by a wish "to get clearabout ultimate things," an unrealizable desire that provided thedriving force behind all of Kafka's dazzlingly uncanny fictions.Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir "From the Hardcoveredition."

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

In this classic novel by John Updike, we return to a characteras compelling and timeless as Rabbit Angstrom: the inimitable HenryBech. Famous for his writer's block, Bech is a Jew adrift in aworld of Gentiles. As he roams from one adventure to the next, heviews life with a blend of wonder and cynicism that will make youlaugh with delight and wince in recognition.

From her humble beginnings as the daughter of a countrysideblacksmith, Emy Lyon went on to claim the undying love of navalhero Admiral Nelson, England’s most famous native son. She servedas model and muse to eighteenth-century Europe’s most renownedartists, and consorted with kings and queens at the royal court ofNaples. Yet she would end her life in disgraced exile, pennilessand alone. In this richly drawn portrait, Flora Fraser maps thespectacular rise and fall of legendary eighteenth-century beautyEmma, Lady Hamilton—as she came to be called—a woman of abundantaffection and overwhelming charm, whose eye for opportunity wasrivaled only by her propensity for overindulgence and scandal.Wonderfully intimate and lavishly detailed, Beloved Emma brings to life the incomparable Lady Hamilton and the politics,passions, and enchantments of her day.

Because of its frank treatment of human sexuality and itsunflinching fatalism, Jude the Obscure aroused such a stormof controversy upon its publication in 1895 that, partly inresponse, Thomas Hardy abandoned the art of novel-writingaltogether and devoted the rest of his life to poetry. Though wehave come a long way in our social attitudes in the ensuingcentury, nothing about Hardy's masterpiece has lost its power toshock us and disturb our dreams.

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!

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

Every night for three years the vengeful King Shahriyar sleepswith a different virgin, executing her next morning. To end thisbrutal pattern and to save her own life, the vizier's daughter,Shahrazad, begins to tell the king tales of adventure, love, richesand wonder - tales of mystical lands peopled with princes andhunchbacks, the Angel of Death and magical spirits, tales of thevoyages of Sindbad, of Ali Baba's outwitting a band of fortythieves and of jinnis trapped in rings and in lamps. The sequenceof stories will last 1,001 nights.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Evelyn Waugh's 1934 novel is abitingly funny vision of aristocratic decadence in England betweenthe wars. It tells the story of Tony Last, who, to the irritationof his wife, is inordinately obsessed with his Victorian Gothiccountry house and life. When Lady Brenda Last embarks on an affairwith the worthless John Beaver out of boredom with her husband, shesets in motion a sequence of tragicomic disasters that reveal Waughat his most scathing. The action is set in the brittle social worldrecognizable from Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, darkened anddeepened by Waugh's own experience of sexual betrayal. As Tony isdriven by the urbane savagery of this world to seek solace in thewilds of the Brazilian jungle, "A Handful of Dust " demonstratesthe incomparably brilliant and wicked wit of one of the twentiethcentury's most accomplished novelists.

This new collection of Sandburgs finest and most representativepoetry draws on all of his previous volumes and includes fourunpublished poems about Lincoln. The Hendricks comprehensiveintroduction discusses how Sandburgs life and beliefs colored hiswork and why it continues to resonate so deeply with americanstoday. Edited and with an Introduction by George and WilleneHendrick.

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed) Introduction by E. S.Shaffer

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) The most famous day inliterature is June 16, 1904, when a certain Mr. Leopold Bloom ofDublin eats a kidney for breakfast, attends a funeral, admires agirl on the beach, contemplates his wife's imminent adultery, and,late at night, befriends a drunken young poet in the city'sred-light district. An earthy story, a virtuoso technical display,and a literary revolution all rolled into one, James Joyce's"Ulysses" is a touchstone of our modernity and one of the toweringachievements of the human mind.

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.