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

A satiric masterpiece about the allure and peril of money,"Our Mutual Friend" revolves around the inheritance of a dust-heapwhere the rich throw their trash. When the body of John Harmon, thedust-heap's expected heir, is found in the Thames, fortunes changehands surprisingly, raising to new heights "Noddy" Boffin, alow-born but kindly clerk who becomes "the Golden Dustman." CharlesDickens's last complete novel, "Our Mutual Friend" encompasses thegreat themes of his earlier works: the pretensions of the nouveauxriches, the ingenuousness of the aspiring poor, and the unfailingpower of wealth to corrupt all who crave it. With its flavorfulcast of characters and numerous subplots, "Our Mutual Friend" isone of Dickens's most complex--and satisfying--novels.

Written with burning intensity in the last years of Roberto Bolano's life, "2666" has been greeted across the world as the great writer's masterpiece, surpassing everything in imagination, beauty and scope. It is a novel on an astonishing scale from a passionate visionary. 'The best book of 2008 ...A masterpiece, the electrifying literary event of the year' - "Time". 'Readers who have snacked on Haruki Murakami will feast on Roberto Bolano'- "Sunday Times". 'Bolano makes you feel changed for having read him; he adjusts your angle of view on the world' - "Guardian".

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

Stephen Lewis, a successful writer of children's books, isconfronted with the unthinkable: his only child, three-year-oldKate, is snatched from him in a supermarket. In one horrifyingmoment that replays itself over the years that follow, Stephenrealizes his daughter is gone. With extraordinary tenderness andinsight, Booker Prize-winning author Ian McEwan takes us into thedark territory of a marriage devastated by the loss of a child.Kate's absence sets Stephen and his wife, Julie, on diverging pathsas they each struggle with a grief that only seems to intensifywith the passage of time. Eloquent and passionate, the novelconcludes in a triumphant scene of love and hope that gives fullrein to the author's remarkable gifts. The winner of the WhitbreadPrize, The Child in Time is an astonishing novel by one of thefinest writers of his generation.

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed) Introduction by JohnCarey

Widely regarded as Dickens' s masterpiece, Bleak House centerson the generations-long lawsuit Jarndyce and Jarndyce, throughwhich " whole families have inherited legendary hatreds." Focusingon Esther Summerson, a ward of John Jarndyce, the novel tracesEsther' s romantic coming-of-age and, in classic Dickensian style,the gradual revelation of long-buried secrets, all set against thefoggy backdrop of the Court of Chancery. Mixing romance, mystery,comedy, and satire, Bleak House limns the suffering caused by theintricate inefficiency of the law. The text of this Modern LibraryPaperback Classic was set from the first single-volume edition,published by Bradbury and Evans in 1853, and reproduces thirty-nineof H. K. Browne' s original illustrations for the book.

In The Tragedy of King Richard III, Shakespeare chronicles the rise and fall of one of history’s most repellent, and the theater’s most mesmerizing, figures. This Norton Critical Edition of Richard III is based on the First Quarto (1597) edition of the play with interpolations from the First Folio (1623). The play is accompanied by a preface, explanatory annotations, A Note on the Text, a list of Textual Variants, and eighteen illustrations of seminal scenes from major dramatic productions and film versions of the play. “Contexts” provides readers with the sources and analogues that informed Shakespeare’s composition of Richard III. These include excerpts from Robert Fabyan’s New Chronicles of England and France, Thomas More’s The History of King Richard III, Edward Hall’s The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York, A Mirror for Magistrates, and The True Tragedy of Richard III. A selection from Colley Cibber’s eighteenth-century adaptation records the compr

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Three classic crime novels by amaster of the macabre appear here together in hardcover for thefirst time. Suave, agreeable, and completely amoral, PatriciaHighsmith's hero, the inimitable Tom Ripley, stops at nothing--noteven murder-- to accomplish his goals. In achieving for himself theopulent life that he was denied as a child, Ripley shows himself tobe a master of illusion and manipulation and a disturbinglysympathetic combination of genius and psychopath. As Highsmithnavigates the mesmerizing tangle of Ripley's deadly and sinistergames, she turns the mystery genre inside out and takes us into themind of a man utterly indifferent to evil. The Talented Mr.RipleyIn a chilling literary hall of mirrors, Patricia Highsmithintroduces Tom Ripley. Like a hero in a latter-day Henry Jamesnovel, is sent to Italy with a commission to coax a prodigal youngAmerican back to his wealthy father. But Ripley finds himself veryfond of Dickie Greenleaf. He wants to be like him--exactly likehim.

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.

Charles Dickens's satirical masterpiece, "The PickwickPapers," catapulted the young writer into literary fame when it wasfirst serialized in 1836-37. It recounts the rollicking adventuresof the members of the Pickwick Club as they travel about Englandgetting into all sorts of mischief. Laugh-out-loud funny andendlessly entertaining, the book also reveals Dickens's burgeoninginterest in the parliamentary system, lawyers, the Poor Laws, andthe ills of debtors' prisons. As G. K. Chesterton noted, "BeforeDickens] wrote a single real story, he had a kind of vision . . . amap full of fantastic towns, thundering coaches, clamorousmarket-places, uproarious inns, strange and swaggering figures.That vision was Pickwick."

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

This is a film tie-in edition of the massive word-of-mouth hit novel, first published by Fig Tree in 2009 - to accompany the major new film starring Sissy Spacek, Allison Janney, Bryce Dallas Howard and Emma Stone. Enter a vanished and unjust world: Jackson, Mississippi, 1962. Where black maids raise white children, but aren't trusted not to steal the silver...There's Aibileen, raising her seventeenth white child and nursing the hurt caused by her own son's tragic death; Minny, whose cooking is nearly as sassy as her tongue; and, white Miss Skeeter, home from College, who wants to know why her beloved maid has disappeared. Skeeter, Aibileen and Minny. No one would believe they'd be friends; fewer still would tolerate it. But as each woman finds the courage to cross boundaries, they come to depend and rely upon one another. Each is in search of a truth. And together they have an extraordinary story to tell...

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.

The worst of American sophistication today is that it is sobored, so full of categorical aversion to things that writersshould never take for granted and never close their eyes to. Thefact that Salinger's work is particularly directed against the'well fed sun-burned' people at the summer theater, at the 'section men' incolleges...at the 'three-martini' men--this, indeed, is what iswrong. He hates them. They are no longer people, but symbols...Theproblem is not one of spiritual pride or of guilt; it is that inthe tearing of the 'sympathetic bond' it is not love that goes, butthe deepest possiblilites of literary art.

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

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Nikolai Gogol's "Dead Souls" isthe great comic masterpiece of Russian literature-a satirical andsplendidly exaggerated epic of life in the benighted provinces.Gogol hoped to show the world "the untold riches of the Russiansoul" in this 1842 novel, which he populated with a Dickensianswarm of characters: rogues and scoundrels, landowners and serfs,conniving petty officials-all of them both utterly lifelike andalarmingly larger than life. Setting everything in motion is thewily antihero, Chichikov, the trafficker in "dead souls"-deceasedserfs who still represent profit to those clever enough to trade inthem. This lively, idiomatic English version by the award-winningtranslators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky makes accessiblethe full extent of the novel's lyricism, sulphurous humor, anddelight in human oddity and error.

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.