Purchase of this book includes free trial access towww.million-books.com where you can read more than a million booksfor free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IllSTEVE TREATS It was for several minutes, I suppose, that I stooddrawing these silent morals. No man occupied himself with me. Quietvoices, and games of chance, and glasses lifted to drink, continuedto be the peaceful order of the night. And into my thoughts brokethe voice of that card-dealer who had already spoken so sagely. Healso took his turn at moralizing. "What did I tell you?" heremarked to the man for whom he continued to deal, and whocontinued to lose money to him. "Tell me when?" " Didn't I tell youhe'd not shoot ? " the dealer pursued with complacence. " You gotready to dodge. You had no call to be concerned. He's not the kinda man need feel anxious about." The player looked over at theVirginian, doubtfully. " Well," he said, " I don't know what youfolks call a dangerous man." " Not him " exclaimed the dealer withadmi

Book De*ion This story begins in ashadowed forest on Good Friday in the year of our Lord 1300. Itproceeds on a journey that, in its intense re-creation of thedepths and the heights of human experience, has become the key withwhich Western civilization has sought to unlock the mystery of itsown identity. About Author DANTE ALIGHIERI was born in Florence, Italy in 1265. His earlypoetry falls into the tradition of love poetry that passed from theProvencal to such Italian poets as Guido Cavalcanti, Dante's friendand mentor. Dante's first major work is the Vita Nuova, 1293-1294.This sequence of lyrics, sonnets, and prose narrative describes hislove, first earthly, then spiritual, for Beatrice, whom he hadfirst seen as a child of nine, and who had died when Dante was 25.Dante married about 1285, served Florence in battle, and rose to aposition of leadership in the bitter factional politics of thecity-state. As one of the city's magistrates, he found it necessaryto banish leaders of the so-called "Black" facti

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.

Mike Lovett rents a room in a Brooklyn boarding house with theintention of writing a novel. Wounded during World War II, Lovettis an amnesiac, and much of his past is a secret to himself. ButLovett's housemates have secrets of their own. As these mysteriousfigures vie for Lovett's allegiance, Barbary Shore playshavoc with our certainties, combining Kafkaesque unease withOrwellian paranoia and delivering its effects with a power thatMailer has made all his own.

The earliest of her six major novels, NorthangerAbbey remained unpublished until after Jane Austen’s death. A deliciouslywitty satire of popular Gothic romances, it is perhaps Austen’slightest, most delightful excursion into a young woman’s world.Catherine Morland, an unlikely heroine—unlikely because she is soordinary—forsakes her English village for the pleasures and perilsof Bath. There, among a circle of Austen’s wonderfully vain,dissembling, and fashionable characters, she meets a potentialsuitor, Henry Tilney. But with her imagination fueled bymelodramatic novels, Catherine turns a visit to his home,Northanger Abbey, into a hunt for dark family secrets. The resultis a series of hilarious social gaffes and harsh awakenings thatfor all of Austen’s youthful exuberance nevertheless conveys hermature vision of literature and life—and the consequences ofmistaking one for the other.

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.

Anchor proudly presents a new omnibus volume of threenovels--previously published separately by Anchor--by NaguibMahfouz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. Assembled here isa collection of Mahfouz's artful meditations on the vicissitudes ofpost-Revolution Egypt. Diverse in style and narrative technique,together they render a rich, nuanced, and universally resonantvision of modern life in the Middle East. The Beggar is a complex tale of alienation and despair. In theaftermath of Nasser's revolution, a man sacrifices his work andfamily to a series of illicit love affairs. Released from jail inpost-Revolutionary times, the hero ofThe Thief and the Dogs blamesan unjust society for his ill fortune, eventually bringing himselfto destruction. Autumn Quail is a tale of moral responsibility,isolation, and political downfall about a corrupt bureaucrat who isone of the early victims of the purge after the 1952 revolution inEgypt.

From Library Journal The published editions of Women in Love , probably Lawrence'sgreatest novel, have always been remarkably corrupt due to alengthy, complex process of revision and tran*ion, athreatened libel suit, and numerous unauthorized bowdlerizations.The editors of this new Cambridge Edition have labored scrupulouslyto produce an authoritative text. What emerges, if not dramaticallydifferent, is fresher and more immediate. The introduction providesa valuable history of the novel's composition, revision,publication, and reception, and though the elaborate textualapparatus is strictly for advanced students of bibliography, thenotes are splendid. Lawrence's 1919 Foreword and two earlydiscarded chapters are also included. The recovery of a modernclassic. Keith Cushman, Univ. of North Carolina, Greensboro Download De*ion Privately printed in 1920 and published commercially in 1921,Women in Love is the novel Lawrence himself considered hismasterpiece. Set in the English Midla

"The Star Rover" is the story of San Quentin death-row inmateDarrell Standing, who escapes the horror of prison life--and longstretches in a straitjacket--by withdrawing into vivid dreams ofpast lives, including incarnations as a French nobleman and anEnglishman in medieval Korea. Based on the life and imprisonment ofJack London's friend Ed Morrell, this is one of the author's mostcomplex and original works. As Lorenzo Carcaterra argues in hisIntroduction, "The Star Rover" is "written with energy and force,brilliantly marching between the netherworlds of brutality andbeauty." This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the textof the first American edition, published in 1915.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood is a novel that is itself thesubject of one of literature's most enduring mysteries. The storyrecounts the troubled romance of Rosa Bud and the book's eponymouscharacter, who later vanishes. Was Drood murdered, and if so bywhom? All clues point to John Jasper, Drood's lugubrious uncle, whocoveted Rosa. Or did Drood orchestrate his own disappearance? AsCharles Dickens died before finishing the book, the ending isintriguingly ambiguous. In his Introduction, Matthew Pearlilluminates the 150-year-long quest to unravel" "The Mystery ofEdwin Drood and lends new insight into the novel, the literarymilieu of 1870s England, and the private life of Charles Dickens.This Modern Library edition includes new endnotes and a fulltran* of "The Trial of John Jasper for the Murder of EdwinDrood," the 1914 mock court case presided over and argued by thelikes of G. K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw. Now diehardfans, new readers, and armchair detectives have another opportunityto solve the mys

No career in modern American letters is at once so brilliant,varied, and controversial as that of Norman Mailer. In a span ofmore than six decades, Mailer has searched into subjects rangingfrom World War II to Ancient Egypt, from the march on the Pentagonto Marilyn Monroe, from Henry Miller and Mohammad Ali to JesusChrist. Now, in The Castle in the Forest, his first majorwork of fiction in more than a decade, Mailer offers what may behis consummate literary endeavor: He has set out to explore theevil of Adolf Hitler. The narrator, a mysterious SS man who is later revealed to be anexceptional presence, gives us young Adolf from birth, as well asHitler’s father and mother, his sisters and brothers, and theintimate details of his childhood and adolescence. A tapestry of unforgettable characters, The Castle in theForest delivers its playful twists and surprises withastonishing insight into the nature of the struggle between goodand evil that exists in us all. At its core is a hypothesis t

On Christmas Eve, a party of friends descends on a purportedlyhaunted country retreat, charged with the task of discoveringevidence of the supernatural. Sequestered in their rooms for theholiday, the friends reconvene on Twelfth Night at a great feastand share their stories of spectral encounter. “Conducted” byCharles Dickens and counting Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collinsamong its contributors, The Haunted House examinesquintessentially Victorian themes–sex and longing, nostalgia andloss–in ways that continue to resonate today. Ingeniously conceivedand written, and spiked with flashes of Dickensian humor, thisvolume is a strange and sheer delight.

A continuation of the major series of individual Shakespeareplays from the world renowned Royal Shakespeare Company, edited bytwo brilliant, younger generation Shakespearean scholars JonathanBate and Eric Rasmussen Incorporating definitive text and cutting-edge notes fromWilliam Shakespeare: Complete Works-the first authoritative,modernized edition of Shakespeare's First Folio in more than 300years-this remarkable series of individual plays combines JonathanBate's insightful critical analysis with Eric Rasmussen's textualexpertise.

Twenty-two-year-old Karla is thrilled to be hired as anentertainer on the Sound of Music cruise ship where the rum punchis 80 percent Kool-Aid, the ice sculp- tures are plastic, and her"fake it till you make it" M.O. seems adventuresome. Karla is lessthrilled when her new boyfriend, Jack, suggests that they form asinging duo on land, but by now faking enthusiasm has become a wayof life. She and Jack buy backing tracks, crib lyrics from theradio, and embark on a not-as-glamorous-as-it-should-be careerperforming in the luxury hotel bars of the Middle East and China.But after a thousand and one nights on the road, Karla and Jackfind themselves struggling to keep their act both personal andprofessional together. Funny, fast-paced, and incisive, A Thousandand One Nights captures the performances, large and small, we useto make it through life.

Amid the cactus wilds some two hudred miles from Hollywoodlies a privileged oasis called Desert D'Or. It is a place forstarlets and would-be starlets, directors, studio execs, and thewell-groomed lowlifes who cater to them. And, as imagined by NormanMailer in this blistering classic of 1950s Hollywood, Desert D'Oris a moral proving ground, where men and women discover what theyreally want--and how far the are willing to go to get it. "The DeerPark" is the story of two interlacing love affairs. SergiusO'Shaugnessy is a young ex-Air Force pilot whose good looks and airof indifference launch him into the orbit of the radiant actressLulu Meyers. Charles Eitel is a brilliant director wounded byaccusations of communism--and whose liaison with the volatile ElenaEsposito may supply the coup de grace to his career. As Mailertraces their couplings and uncouplings, their uneasy flirtationwith success and self-extinction, he creates a legendary portraitof America's machinery of desire.

In this gripping and suspenseful novella from the EgyptianNobel Prize-winner, three young friends survive interrogation bythe secret police, only to find their lives poisoned by suspicion,fear, and betrayal. At a Cairo cafe in the 1960s, a legendaryformer belly dancer lovingly presides over a boisterous family ofregulars, including a group of idealistic university students. Oneday, amid reports of a wave of arrests, three of the studentsdisappear: the excitable Hilmi, his friend Ismail, and Ismail'sbeautiful girlfriend Zaynab. When they return months later, theyare apparently unharmed and yet subtly and profoundly changed. Itis only years later, after their lives have been further shattered,that the narrator pieces together the young people's horrificstories and learns how the government used them against oneanother. In a riveting final chapter, their torturer himself entersthe Cafe and sits among his former victims, claiming a right tojoin their society of the disillusioned. Now translated intoEnglish

A dying man cautiously unravels the mysteries of memory and creation. Vadim is a Russian emigre who, like Nabokov, is a novelist, poet and critic. There are threads linking the fictional hero with his creator as he reconstructs the images of his past from young love to his serious illness.

"American writing, before and after Dreiser's time, differedalmost as much as biology before and after Darwin," said H. L.Mencken. Sister Carrie, Dreiser's great first novel, transformedthe conventional "fallen woman" story into a bold and trulyinnovative piece of fiction when it appeared in 1900. Na?ve youngCaroline Meeber, a small-town girl seduced by the lure of themodern city, becomes the mistress of a traveling salesman and thenof a saloon manager, who elopes with her to New York. Both itssubject matter and Dreiser's unsparing, nonjudgmental approach madeSister Carrie a controversial book in its time, and the workretains the power to shock readers today.