A stunning novel by the widest-read Arab writer currentlypublished in the U.S. The age of Nasser has ushered in enormoussocial change, and most of the middle-aged and middle-class sonsand daughters of the old bourgeoisie find themselves trying torecreate the cozy, enchanted world they so dearly miss. One night,however, art and reality collide--with unforeseencircumstances.

Since the original prewar translation there has been nocompletely new rendering of the French original into English. Thistranslation brings to the fore a more sharply engaged, comic andlucid Proust. "In Search of Lost Time" is one of the greatest, mostentertaining reading experiences in any language. As the greatstory unfolds from its magical opening scenes to its devastatingend, it is the "Penguin Proust" that makes Proust accessible to anew generation. Each volume is translated by a different, superbtranslator working under the general editorship of ProfessorChristopher Prendergast, University of Cambridge.

The early masterpiece of V. S. Naipaul’s brilliant career, AHouse for Mr. Biswas is an unforgettable story inspired byNaipaul's father that has been hailed as one of the twentiethcentury's finest novels. In his forty-six short years, Mr. Mohun Biswas has been fightingagainst destiny to achieve some semblance of independence, only toface a lifetime of calamity. Shuttled from one residence to anotherafter the drowning death of his father, for which he isinadvertently responsible, Mr. Biswas yearns for a place he cancall home. But when he marries into the domineering Tulsi family onwhom he indignantly becomes dependent, Mr. Biswas embarks on anarduous–and endless–struggle to weaken their hold over him andpurchase a house of his own. A heartrending, dark comedy ofmanners, A House for Mr. Biswas masterfully evokes a man’s questfor autonomy against an emblematic post-colonial canvas.

Begun in the autumn of 1957 and published posthumously in 1964,Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast captures what it meantto be young and poor and writing in Paris during the 1920s. Acorrespondent for the Toronto Star, Hemingway arrived inParis in 1921, three years after the trauma of the Great War and atthe beginning of the transformation of Europe's cultural landscape:Braque and Picasso were experimenting with cubist forms; JamesJoyce, long living in self-imposed exile from his native Dublin,had just completed Ulysses; Gertude Stein held court at 27rue de Fleurus, and deemed young Ernest a member of ruegénération perdue; and T. S. Eliot was a bank clerk in London.It was during these years that the as-of-yet unpublished youngwriter gathered the material for his first novel, The Sun AlsoRises, and the subsequent masterpieces that followed.

George Orwell's celebrated and always timely 1948 vision of aworld subsumed in tyranny and war describes the process of eventsby which Winston Smith, a London clerk at the Ministry of Truth,comes to understand the true nature and aims of the government heworks for, and portrays his doomed attempt to create a private lifefor himself and his lover, Julia. One of the bleakest politicalnovels ever written, 1984 illustrates Orwell's despair thatdemocracy could ever summon the strength to overcometotalitarianism in his lifetime.

As a young man in the summer of 1897, Jack London joined theKlondike gold rush. From that seminal experience emerged thesegripping, inimitable wilderness tales, which have endured as someof London' s best and most defining work. With remarkable insightand unflinching realism, London describes the punishing adversitythat awaited men in the brutal, frozen expanses of the Yukon, andthe extreme tactics these adventurers and travelers adopted tosurvive. As Van Wyck Brooks observed, " One felt that the storieshad been somehow lived- that they were not merely observed- thatthe author was not telling tales but telling his life." Thisedition is unique to the Modern Library, featuring twenty-threecarefully chosen stories from London' s three collected Northlandvolumes and his later Klondike tales. It also includes two maps ofthe region, and notes on the text.

Readers and reviewers in the United Kingdom have hailed the newtranslations of Proust as a major literary event. Soon to appear inthe United States, Swann’s Way , along with the second volumeof In Search of Lost Time , In the Shadow of Young Girlsin Flower , will introduce a new century of American readers tothe literary riches of Proust. These superb editions—the firstcompletely new translation of Proust’s novel since the 1920s—bringus a more comic and lucid Proust than English readers havepreviously been able to enjoy. In the Shadow of Young Girls inFlower is a spectacular dissection of male and femaleadolescence, charged with the narrator’s memories of Paris and theNormandy seaside. In it, Proust introduces some of his greatestcomic inventions. As a meditation on different forms of love, Inthe Shadow of Young Girls in Flower has no equal. --Thistext refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of thistitle.

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed) Shakespeare'shistories--containing within their crowded tableaux all of thetragedies, confusions, and beauties of human life--are not onlydrama of the highest order. They also serve as windows throughwhich generations have made themselves familiar with crucialepisodes in English history. For an Elizabethan England that hadalready emerged onto the stage of world power and was hungry tounderstand the sources and nature of its identity, Shakespeareprovided a grandeur born of the transforming power of his art. Thisvolume contains Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3; Richard III; and KingJohn. The texts, authoritatively edited by Sylvan Barnet, aresupplemented with textual notes, bibliographies, a detailedchronology of Shakespeare's life and times, and a substantialintroduction in which Tony Tanner discusses each play individuallyand in the context of Shakespeare's work.

Steinbeck's first posthumously published work, "The Acts of KingArthur and His Noble Knights" is a reinterpretation of tales fromMalory's "Morte d'Arthur". In this highly successful attempt torender Malory into Modern English, Steinbeck recreated the rhythmand tone of the original Middle English.

'The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself a gift of anight of wild love with an adolescent virgin' He has never married,never loved and never gone to bed with a woman he didn't pay. Buton finding a young girl naked and asleep on the brothel owner'sbed, a passion is ignited in his heart - and he feels, for thefirst time, the urgent pangs of love. Each night, exhausted by herfactory work, 'Delgadina' sleeps peacefully whilst he watches herquietly. During these solitary early hours, his love for herdeepens and he finds himself reflecting on his newly found passionand the loveless life he has led. By day, his columns in the localnewspaper are read avidly by those who recognise in his outpouringsthe enlivening and transformative power of love. The publication of"Memories of My Melancholy Whores" spearheads "Penguin's"celebration of Marquez's 80th birthday in 2007.

A fascinating look at the history and grandeur of bullfighting,Death in the Afternoon is also a deeper contemplation on the natureof cowardice and bravery, sport and tragedy, and is enlivenedthroughout by Hemingway's pungent commentary on life andliterature. Seen through his eyes, bullfighting becomes an art, arichly choreographed ballet, with performers who range from awkwardamateurs to masters of great grace and cunning.

In the "brilliant novel" ("The New York Times") V.S. Naipaultakes us deeply into the life of one man--an Indian who, uprootedby the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in anisolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independentAfrican nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbingvision yet of what happens in a place caught between thedangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past andtraditions.

A classic work that has charmed generations of readers, thiscollection assembles Carson McCullers's best stories, including herbeloved novella The Ballad of the SadCaf . A haunting tale of a human triangle thatculminates in an astonishing brawl, the novella introduces readersto Miss Amelia, a formidable southern woman whose caf serves as the town's gathering place. Among other fine works, thecollection also includes Wunderkind, McCullers's first published story written when she was onlyseventeen about a musical prodigy who suddenly realizes she willnot go on to become a great pianist.

Winner of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature. Jean-Paul Sartre, philosopher, critic, novelist and dramatist, holda position of singular eminence in the world of French letters.Among readers and critics familiar with the whole of Sartre's work,it is generally recognized that his earliest novel, LeNausée (first published in 1938), is his finest and mostsignificant. It is unquestionably a key novel of the TwentiethCentury and a landmark in Existentialist fiction.

Set on the eve of the Sino-Japanese war, "Fortress Besieged"recounts the exuberant misadventures of the hapless hero FangHung-chien, who after aimlessly studying in Europe at his family'sexpense returns to Shanghai armed with a bogus degree from a fakeuniversity. On the liner back, Fang's life becomes deeply entangledwith those of two Chinese beauties - while when he does finallymake it home, he obtains a teaching post at a newly establisheduniversity, encounters effete pseudo-intellectuals, and falls intoa marriage of disastrous proportions. A glorious tale of love,marriage, war, calamity, disillusionment and hope, this is one ofthe greatest Chinese novels: combining Eastern philosophy, Westerntraditions, adventure, tragicomedy and satire to create a uniquefeast of delights.

Book De*ion Christopher Hibbert creates portraits of Napoleon and Wellington, of the French, English and Prussian armies, and a strategical, step-by-step reconstruction of the events that led up to the battle of Waterloo and the battle itself. Waterloo was the battle that ended Napoleon's dreams of a European empire unified under his rule. Christopher Hibbert creates portraits of Napoleon and Wellington, of the French, English and Prussian armies, and a strategical, step-by-step reconstruction of the events that led up to the battle and the battle itself. Divided into three parts, the first studies Napoleon and his rise to power, the second describes Wellington and the allied armies, while the third reconstructs the battle of Waterloo. A final summary investigates the significance of the battles on world history. Book Dimension : length: (cm)19.8 width:(cm)12.6

To Have and Have Not is the dramatic, brutal story ofHarry Morgan, an honest boat owner who is forced into runningcontraband between Cuba and Key West as a means of keeping hiscrumbling family financially afloat. His adventures lead him intothe world of the wealthy and dissipated yachtsmen who swarm theregion, and involve him in a strange and unlikely love affair. In this harshly realistic, yet oddly tender and wise novel,Hemingway perceptively delineates the personal struggles of boththe "haves" and the "have nots" and creates one of the most subtleand moving portraits of a love affair in his oeuvre. In turn funnyand tragic, lively and poetic, remarkable in its emotional impact, To Have and Have Not takes literary high adventure to a newlevel. As the Times Literary Supplement observed,"Hemingway's gift for dialogue, for effective understatement, andfor communicating such emotions the tough allow themselves, hasnever been more conspicuous."

In his long-awaited, vastly innovative new novel, Naipaul,"one of literature's great travelers" (Los Angles Times), spanscontinents and centuries to create what is at once an autobiographyand a fictional archaeology of colonialism. "Dickensian . . . abrilliant new prism through which to view (Naipaul's) life andwork."--New York Times.

This authoritative, accurate text of the first edition (1868—69) of Little Women is accompanied by textual variants and thorough explanatory annotations. "Backgrounds and Contexts" includes a wealth of archival materials, among them previously unpublished correspondence with Thomas Niles and Alcott's own precursors to Little Women. "Criticism" reprints twenty nineteenth-century reviews. Seven modern essays represent a variety of critical theories used to read and study the novel, including feminist (Catharine R. Stimpson, Elizabeth Keyser), new historicist (Richard H. Brodhead), psychoanalytic (Angela M. Estes and Kathleen Margaret Lant), and reader-response (Elizabeth Vincent) . A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included. About the series: No other series of classic texts equals the caliber of the Norton Critical Editions. Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with the comprehensive pedagogical apparatus necessary to appreciate the work fully. Carefu

First published in the 1920's, "The Prophet" an inspirational,allegorical guide to living, the book is perhaps the most famouswork of religious fiction of the Twentieth Century and has soldmillions of copies in more than twenty languages. Gibran'sprotagonist, called simply 'the "Prophet"', delivers spiritual, yetpractical, homilies on a wide variety of topics central to dailylife: love, marriage and children; work and play; possessions,beauty, truth, joy and sorrow, death and many more.