Phaedra is consumed with passion for Hippolytus, her stepson.Believing her husband dead, she confesses her love to him and isrebuffed. When her husband returns alive, Phaedra convinces himthat it was Hippolytus who attempted to seduce her. In hisinterpretation, Racine replaced the stylized tragedy withhuman-scale characters and actions. Introduction by RichardWilbur.
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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
Letting Go is Roth's first full-length novel, published justafter Goodbye, Columbus, when he was twenty-nine. Set in 1950sChicago, New York, and Iowa city, Letting Go presents as brillianta fictional portrait as we have of a mid-century America defined bysocial and ethical constraints and by moral compulsionsconspicuously different from those of today. Newly discharged fromthe Korean War army, reeling from his mother's recent death, freedfrom old attachments and hungrily seeking others, Gabe Wallach isdrawn to Paul Herz, a fellow graduate student in literature, and toLibby, Paul's moody, intense wife. Gabe's desire to be connected tothe ordered andquot; world of feelingandquot; that he finds inbooks is first tested vicariously by the anarchy of the Herzes'struggles with responsible adulthood and then by his own eager loveaffairs. Driven by the desire to live seriously and act generously,Gabe meets an impassable test in the person of Martha Reganhart, aspirited, outspoken, divorced mother of two, a formidable
One of the last plays Shakespeare penned on his own, TheWinter’s Tale is a transcendent work of death and rebirth,exploring irrational sexual jealousy, the redemptive world ofnature, and the magical power of art. Under the editorial supervision of Jonathan Bate and EricRasmussen, two of today’s most accomplished Shakespearean scholars,this Modern Library series incorporates definitive texts andauthoritative notes from William Shakespeare: Complete Works. Eachplay includes an Introduction as well as an overview ofShakespeare’s theatrical career; commentary on past and currentproductions based on interviews with leading directors, actors, anddesigners; scene-by-scene analysis; key facts about the work; achronology of Shakespeare’s life and times; and black-and-whiteillustrations. Ideal for students, theater professionals, and general readers,these modern and accessible editions from the Royal ShakespeareCompany set a new standard in Shakespearean literature for thetwenty-first century
Stories that trace the decline and fall of a marriage, ahistory made up of the happiness of growing children and sharedlife, and the sadness of growing estrangement and themisunderstandings of love.
In the tradition of Philippa Gregory's smart, transportingfiction comes this tale of dark suspense, love, and betrayal,featuring two star-crossed sisters, one lost and the othersearching. Bright and inquisitive, Hannah Powers was raised by afather who treated her as if she were his son. While her beautifuland reckless sister, May, pushes the limits of propriety in theirsmall English town, Hannah harbors her own secret: their father hasgiven her an education forbidden to women. But Hannah's secretserves her well when she journeys to colonial Maryland to reunitewith May, who has been married off to a distant cousin after hersexual misadventures ruined her marriage prospects in England. AsHannah searches for May, who has disappeared, she finds herselffalling in love with her brother-in-law. Alone in a wild,uncultivated land where the old rules no longer apply, Hannah isfreed from the constraints of the society that judged both her andMay as dangerous--too smart, too fearless, and too hungry for life.But Hannah
In this powerful book we enter the world of Jurgis Rudkus, ayoung Lithuanian immigrant who arrives in America fired with dreamsof wealth, freedom, and opportunity. And we discover, with him, theastonishing truth about "packingtown," the busy, flourishing,filthy Chicago stockyards, where new world visions perish in ajungle of human suffering. Upton Sinclair, master of the"muckraking" novel, here explores the workingman's lot at the turnof the century: the backbreaking labor, the injustices of"wage-slavery," the bewildering chaos of urban life. The Jungle, astory so shocking that it launched a government investigation,recreates this startling chapter if our history in unflinchingdetail. Always a vigorous champion on political reform, Sinclair isalso a gripping storyteller, and his 1906 novel stands as one ofthe most important -- and moving -- works in the literature ofsocial change. --This text refers to an alternate Mass MarketPaperback edition.
A ferocious political satire in the great tradition, Our Gangis Philip Roth’s brilliantly indignant response to the phenomenonof Richard M. Nixon. In the character of Trick E. Dixon, Roth shows us a man whooutdoes the severest cynic, a peace-loving Quaker and believer inthe sanctity of human life who doesn’t have a problem with killingunarmed women and children in self-defense. A master politicianwith an honest sneer, he finds himself battling the Boy Scouts,declaring war on Pro-Pornography Denmark, all the time trusting inthe basic indifference of the voting public.
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."
Here are Masters's dramatic monologues written in free verseabout a fictional Midwestern town called Spoon River. The dead,"sleeping on the hill" in their village cemetery, awaken to tellthe truth about their lives, toppling the myth of the moralsuperiority of small-town life.
In the hopeful 1950s, Frank and April Wheeler appear to be amodel cou-ple: bright, beautiful, talented, with two young childrenand a starter home in the suburbs. Perhaps they married too youngand started a family too early. Maybe Frank's job is dull. AndApril never saw herself as a housewife.Yet they have always livedon the assumption that greatness is only just around the corner.But now that certainty is about to crumble. With heartbreaking compassion and remorseless clarity, RichardYates shows how Frank and April mortgage their spiritualbirthright, betraying not only each other, but their bestselves.
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...
From its spectacular opening–the astonishing scene in whichdrunken Michael Henchard sells his wife and daughter to a passingsailor at a county fair–to the breathtaking series of discoveriesat its conclusion, The Mayor of Casterbridge claims a unique placeamong Thomas Hardy’s finest and most powerful novels. Rooted in an actual case of wife-selling in earlynineteenth-century England, the story build into an awesomeSophoclean drama of guilt and revenge, in which the strong, willfulHenchard rises to a position of wealth and power–only to suffer amost bitter downfall. Proud, obsessed, ultimately committed to hisown destruction, Henchard is, as Albert Guerard has said, “Hardy’sLord Jim…his only tragic hero and one of the greatest tragic heroesin all fiction.
To me,' D. H. Lawerence once wrote to E. M. forster, 'you arethe last Englishman.' Indeed, Forster's novels offer contemporaryreaders clear, vibrant portraits of life in Edwardian England.Published in 1908 to both critical and popular acclaim, A Room witha View is a whimsical comedy of manners that owes more to JaneAusten that perhaps any other of his works. The central characteris a muddled young girl named Lucy Honeychurch, who runs away fromthe man who stirs her emotions, remaining engaged to a rich snob.Forster considered it his 'nicest' novel, and today it remainsprobably his most well liked. Its moral is utterly simple. Throwaway your etiquette book and listen to your heart. But it wasForster's next book, Howards End, a story about who would inhabit acharming old country house (and who, in a larger sense, wouldinherit England), that earned him recognition as a major writer.Centered around the conflict between the wealthy, materialisticWilcox family and the cultured, idealistic Schlegel sisters-andinfor
Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies avision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dreamcountry, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death bybeheading for andquot; gnostical turpitude.andquot; an imaginarycrime that defies definition. Cincinnatus spends his last days inan absurd jail, where he is visited by chimerical jailers. anexecutioner who masquerades as a fellow prisoner, and by hisin-laws. who lug their furniture with them into his cell. WhenCincinnatus is led out to be executed. he simply wills hisexecutioners out of existence: they disappear, along with the wholeworld they inhabit.
Naguib Mahfouz's haunting novella of post-revolutionary Egyptcombines a vivid pychological portrait of an anguished man with thesuspense and rapid pace of a detective story. After four years in prison, the skilled young thief Said Mahranemerges bent on revenge. He finds a world that has changed in moreways than one. Egypt has undergone a revolution and, on a morepersonal level, his beloved wife and his trusted henchman, whoconspired to betray him to the police, are now married to eachother and are keeping his six-year-old daughter from him. But inthe most bitter betrayal, his mentor, Rauf Ilwan, once a firebrandrevolutionary who convinced Said that stealing from the rich in aunjust society is an act of justice, is now himself a rich man, arespected newspaper editor who wants nothing to do with thedisgraced Said. As Said's wild attempts to achieve his idea ofjustice badly misfire, he becomes a hunted man so driven by hatredthat he can only recognize too late his last chance atredemption.
In this extraordinary literary debut third-generationhomesteader Judy Blunt describes her hardscrabble life on theprairies of eastern Montana in prose as big and bold as thelandscape. On a ranch miles from nowhere, Judy Blunt grew up with cattle andsnakes, outhouse and isolation, epic blizzards and devastatingprairie fires. She also grew up with a set of rules and rolesprescribed to her sex long before she was born, a chafing set ofstrictures she eventually had no choice but to flee, taking alongthree children and leaving behind a confused husband and the onlylife she’d ever known. Gritty, lyrical, unsentimental and wise, Breaking Clean is at once informed by the myths of the Westand powerful enough to break them down.
