From the inexhaustible imagination of Ian McEwan--a master ofcontemporary fiction and author of the Booker Prize-winningnational bestseller Amsterdam --an enchanting work of fictionthat appeals equally to children and adults. First published in England as a children's book, TheDaydreamer marks a delightful foray by one of our greatestnovelists into a new fictional domain. In these seven exquisitelyinterlinked episodes, the grown-up protagonist Peter Fortunereveals the secret journeys, metamorphoses, and adventures of hischildhood. Living somewhere between dream and reality, Peterexperiences fantastical transformations: he swaps bodies with thewise old family cat; exchanges existences with a cranky infant;encounters a very bad doll who has come to life and is out forrevenge; and rummages through a kitchen drawer filled with uselessobjects to discover some not-so-useless cream that actually makespeople vanish. Finally, he wakes up as an eleven-year-old inside agrown-up body and embarks on the truly fantast

Our Mutual Friend was the last novel Charles Dickenscompleted and is, arguably, his darkest and most complex. The basicplot is vintage Dickens: an inheritance up for grabs, a murder, arocky romance or two, plenty of skullduggery, and a host ofunforgettable secondary characters. But in this final outing theauthor's heroes are more flawed, his villains more sympathetic, andthe story as a whole more harrowing and less sentimental. The moodis set in the opening scene in which a riverman, Gaffer Hexam, andhis daughter Lizzie troll the Thames searching for drowned menwhose pockets Gaffer will rifle before turning the body over to theauthorities. On this particular night Gaffer finds a corpse that islater identified as that of John Harmon, who was returning fromabroad to claim a large fortune when he was apparently murdered andthrown into the river. Harmon's death is the catalyst for everything else that happensin the novel. It seems the fortune was left to the young man on thecondition that he marry a girl he'd

Read by millions of students over seven editions, The Norton Anthology of English Literature remains the most trusted undergraduate survey of English literature available and one of the most successful college texts ever published. Firmly grounded by the hallmark strengths of all Norton Anthologies—thorough and helpful introductory matter, judicious annotation, complete texts wherever possible—The Norton Anthology of English Literature has been revitalized in this Eighth Edition through the collaboration between six new editors and six seasoned ones. Under the direction of Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor, the editors have reconsidered all aspects of the anthology to make it an even better teaching tool.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Aanton Chekhov, widely hailedas the supreme master of the short story, also wrote five workslong enough to be called short novels-here brought together in onevolume for the first time, in a masterly new translation by theaward-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky."The Steppe"-the most lyrical of the five-is an account of anine-year-old boy's frightening journey by wagon train across thesteppe of southern Russia. "The Duel "sets two decadent figures-afanatical rationalist and a man of literary sensibility-on acollision course that ends in a series of surprising reversals. In"The Story of an Unknown Man," a political radical spying on animportant official by serving as valet to his son graduallydiscovers that his own terminal illness has changed his long-heldpriorities in startling ways. "Three Years" recounts a complexseries of ironies in the personal life of a rich but passive Moscowmerchant. In "My Life," a man renounces wealth and social positionfo

Nabokov's first novel. A tale of youth, first love andnostalgia. In a Berlin rooming house, a vigorous young officerpoised between his past and his future relives his first loveaffair.

Anne Frank's extraordinary diary, written in the Amsterdam attic where she and her family hid from the naxis for two years, has become a world classic and a timeless testament to the human spirit. Nowk, in a new edition enriched by many passages originally withheld by her father, we meet and Anne more real ,more human, and more vital than ever. Here she is first and foremost a teenage girl-stubbornly honest ,touchingly vulnerable, in love with life. She imparts her deeply secet world of sous-searching and hungering for affection,m rebllious clashes with her mother, romance and newly discovered sexuality, and wry candid observations of her companions. Facing hunger, fear of discovery and death ,and the petty frustrations of such confined puarters Anne writes with adult wisdom and views beyond her yeras. Her story is that of every teenager,lived out in conditions few teenagers have ever known. 作者简介： Anne Frank kept a diary from June 12, 1942,to August 1, 1944. Initially, she wrote it stric

In 1880 Dostoevsky completed "The Brothers Karamazov," theliterary effort for which he had been preparing all his life.Compelling, profound, complex, it is the story of a patricide andof the four sons who each had a motive for murder: Dmitry, thesensualist, Ivan, the intellectual; Alyosha, the mystic; andtwisted, cunning Smerdyakov, the bastard child. Frequently lurid,nightmarish, always brilliant, the novel plunges the reader into asordid love triangle, a pathological obsession, and a grippingcourtroom drama. But throughout the whole, Dostoevsky searhes forthe truth--about man, about life, about the existence of God. Aterrifying answer to man's eternal questions, this monumental workremains the crowning achievement of perhaps the finest novelist ofall time.

Often called the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace isat once an epic of the Napoleonic Wars, a philosophical study, anda celebration of the Russian spirit. Tolstoy's genius is seenclearly in the multitude of characters in this massivechronicle--all of them fully realized and equally memorable. Out ofthis complex narrative emerges a profound examination of theindividual's place in the historical process, one that makes itclear why Thomas Mann praised Tolstoy for his Homeric powers andplaced War and Peace in the same category as the Iliad": " "To readhim . . . is to find one's way home . . . to everything within usthat is fundamental and sane."

Jane Austen chronicles the subtleties and nuances of- and theaspirations and machinations at work in - her own social milieu.Through the stories of her spirited heroines and their circles,their interactions and rituals, their movements from ballrooms todrawing rooms, from London and Bath to parklands and gardens, sherecreates the life of The English gentry that she observed in thelate eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Each of her novels is a love story and a story about marriage -marriage for love, for financial security, for social status. Butthey are not romances; ironic, comic, wise and penetrating, theyare brilliant portrayals of the society Jane Austen knew.

Beowulf is not folk-song,but belongs to a much more conscious and devepoped stage of art than the popular.The exploits narrted in the poem belong to the life of Germanic peoples before they crossed the North Sea,and the least one of the characters can be identified whith a historical personage.Simple almple almost to bareness in style,withour subtlety or high imageination,the Song of Roland is yet not without grandeur;and its patriotic ardor gives it a place as the earliest of the truly national poems of the modern world,Of the lrish epic tales,The Destruction of DA Derga's Hostel is a specimen of remarkable beauty and power.The primitive nature of the story is shown by the fact that the plot turns upon the disasters that follow on the violation of tabus,or prohibitions often with a supernatural sanction,by the mostrous nature of many of the warrious,and by the utter absence of any attempt of rationalize or explain the beliefs implede or the marvels related in it.The powers and achievements of the heroes are

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.

Product De*ion Edited and with an Introduction by David Stuart Davies 'The figure of my wife came in... it came straight towards the bed... its wide eyes were open and looked at me with love unspeakable' Edith Nesbit, best known as the author of The Railway Children and other children's classics, was also the mistress of the ghost story and tales of terror. She was able to create genuinely chilling narratives in which the returning dead feature strongly. Sadly, these stories have been neglected for many years, but now, at last, they are back in print. In this wonderful collection of eerie, flesh-creeping yarns, we encounter love that transcends the grave, reanimated corpses, vampiric vines, vengeful ghosts and other dark delights to make you feel fearful. These vintage spooky stories, tinged with horror, are told in a bold, forthright manner that makes them seem as fresh and unsettling as today's headlines.

Set in sixteenth-century England, Mark Twain’s classic “talefor young people of all ages” features two identical-looking boys—aprince and a pauper—who trade clothes and step into each other’slives. While the urchin, Tom Canty, discovers luxury and power,Prince Edward, dressed in rags, roams his kingdom and experiencesthe cruelties inflicted on the poor by the Tudor monarchy. AsChristopher Paul Curtis observes in his Introduction, The Princeand the Pauper is “funny, adventurous, and exciting, yet alsochock-full of . . . exquisitely reasoned harangues againstsociety’s ills.” This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the Mark TwainProject edition, which is the approved text of the Center forScholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association.

In The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy fulfills the promise of Allthe Pretty Horses and at the same time give us a work that isdarker and more visionary, a novel with the unstoppable momentum ofa classic western and the elegaic power of a lost Americanmyth. In the late 1930s, sixteen-year-old Billy Parham captures ashe-wolf that has been marauding his family's ranch. But instead ofkilling it, he decides to take it back to the mountains of Mexico.With that crossing, he begins an arduous and often dreamlikejourney into a country where men meet ghosts and violence strikesas suddenly as heat-lightning--a world where there is no order"save that which death has put there." An essential novel by any measure, The Crossing is luminous andappalling, a book that touches, stops, and starts the heart andmind at once.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Aanton Chekhov, widely hailed asthe supreme master of the short story, also wrote five works longenough to be called short novels-here brought together in onevolume for the first time, in a masterly new translation by theaward-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky."The Steppe"-the most lyrical of the five-is an account of anine-year-old boy's frightening journey by wagon train across thesteppe of southern Russia. "The Duel "sets two decadent figures-afanatical rationalist and a man of literary sensibility-on acollision course that ends in a series of surprising reversals. In"The Story of an Unknown Man," a political radical spying on animportant official by serving as valet to his son graduallydiscovers that his own terminal illness has changed his long-heldpriorities in startling ways. "Three Years" recounts a complexseries of ironies in the personal life of a rich but passive Moscowmerchant. In "My Life," a man renounces wealth and social positionfor a li

Featuring the brilliantly drawn Roxanna, a mulatto slave whosuffers dire consequences after switching her infant son with hermaster's baby, and the clever Pudd'nhead Wilson, an ostracizedsmall-town lawyer, Twain's darkly comic masterpiece is aprovocative exploration of slavery and miscegenation. Leslie A.Fiedler described the novel as "half melodramatic detective story,half bleak tragedy," noting that "morally, it is one of the mosthonest books in our literature." "Those Extraordinary Twins," theslapstick story that evolved into Pudd'nhead Wilson, provides afascinating view of the author's process. The text for this ModernLibrary Paperback Classic was set from the 1894 first Americanedition.

"Transparent Things revolves around the four visits of thehero--sullen, gawky Hugh Person--to Switzerland . . . As a youngpublisher, Hugh is sent to interview R., falls in love with Armandeon the way, wrests her, after multiple humiliations, from agrinning Scandinavian and returns to NY with his bride. . . . Eightyears later--following a murder, a period of madness and a briefimprisonment--Hugh makes a lone sentimental journey to wheedle outhis past. . . . The several strands of dream, memory, and time[are] set off against the literary theorizing of R. and, morecentrally, against the world of observable objects." --MartinAmis

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 hero of Charlotte Bronte's first novel escapes a drearyclerkship in industrial Yorkshire by taking a job as a teacher inBelgium. There, however, his entanglement with the sensuous butmanipulative Zoraide Reuter, complicates his affections for apenniless girl who is both teacher and pupil in Reuter's school.Also included in this edition is Emma, Charlotte Bronte's last,unfinished novel. Both works are drawn from the original Clarendontexts. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable editionof this title.

This Norton Critical Edition is based on the Folio text of King Lear (carefully corrected prior to its printing in 1623). The editor has interpolated the best-known and most-often discussed passages from Quarto I (including the “mock-trial” scene) as is fully explained in both “A Note on the Text” and the annotations that accompany the play. “Sources” helps readers navigate King Lear’s rich history and includes the nine essential primary sources from which Shakespeare borrowed significantly in creating his play, along with two additional likely sources. “Criticism”provides thirteen major critical interpretations and three provocative adaptations and responses to King Lear. Critical interpretation is provided by Samuel Johnson, Charles Lamb, Peter Brook, Michael Warren, Lynda E. Boose, Janet Adelman, and R. A. Foakes, among others. The adaptations and responses are by Nahum Tate, John Keats, and Edward Bond. A Selected Bibliography is also included.

For many people watching football is mere entertainment；to Some it’S more like a ritual：but to others，its highs and lows provide a narrative to life itself. For Nick Hornby his devotion to the game has provided one of the few constants in a life where the meaningful things-like growing up，Leaving home and forming relationships．both parental and romantic-have rarely been as simple or as uncomplicated as his love for Arsenal．