(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Naguib Mahfouz's magnificentepic trilogy of colonial Egypt appears here in one volume for thefirst time. The Nobel Prize--winning writer's masterwork is theengrossing story of a Muslim family in Cairo during Britain'soccupation of Egypt in the early decades of the twentieth century.The novels of "The Cairo Trilogy" trace three generations of thefamily of tyrannical patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, whorules his household with a strict hand while living a secret lifeof self-indulgence. "Palace Walk" introduces us to his gentle,oppressed wife, Amina, his cloistered daughters, Aisha and Khadija,and his three sons-the tragic and idealistic Fahmy, the dissolutehedonist Yasin, and the soul-searching intellectual Kamal.Al-Sayyid Ahmad's rebellious children struggle to move beyond hisdomination in "Palace of Desire," as the world around them opens tothe currents of modernity and political and domestic turmoilbrought by the 1920s. "Sugar Street" brings Mahfouz's vividtapestr
A vibrant, new complete Shakespeare that brings readers closerthan ever before possible top Shakespeare's plays as they werefirst acted. The Norton Shakespeare, Based on the Oxford Editioninvites readers to rediscover Shakespeare-the working man of thetheater, not the universal bard-and to rediscover his plays as*s to be performed, not works to be immortalized. Combiningthe freshly edited texts of the Oxford Edition with livelyintroductions by Stephen Greenblatt and his co-editors, glossariesand annotations, and an elegant single-column page (that of theNorton Anthologies), this complete Shakespeare invites contemporaryreaders to see and read Shakespeare afresh. Greenblatt's fullintroduction creates a window into Shakespeare world-the culture,demographics, commerce, politics, and religion of early-modernEngland-Shakespeare's family background and professional life, theElizabethan industries of theater and printing, and the subsequentcenturies of Shakespeare textual editing.
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) It has been said that VictorHugo has a street named after him in virtually every town inFrance. A major reason for the singular celebrity of this mostpopular and versatile of the great French writers is "LesMiserables "(1862). In this story of the trials of the peasant JeanValjean--a man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and houndedby his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolentpolice detective Javert--Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginativeresonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre. "LesMiserables "is at once a tense thriller that contains one of themost compelling chase scenes in all literature, an epic portrayalof the nineteenth-century French citizenry, and a vitaldrama--highly particularized and poetic in its rendition butuniversal in its implications--of the redemption of one humanbeing.
Gathered together in one hardcover volume: three timeless novelsfrom the founding father of science fiction. The first great novelto imagine time travel, "The Time Machine" (1895) follows itsscientist narrator on an incredible journey that takes him finallyto Earth's last moments--and perhaps his own. The scientist whodiscovers how to transform himself in "The Invisible Man" (1897)will also discover, too late, that he has become unmoored fromsociety and from his own sanity. "The War of the Worlds"(1898)--the seminal masterpiece of alien invasion adapted by OrsonWelles for his notorious 1938 radio drama, and subsequently byseveral filmmakers--imagines a fierce race of Martians whodevastate Earth and feed on their human victims while theirvoracious vegetation, the red weed, spreads over the ruined planet.Here are three classic science fiction novels that, more than acentury after their original publication, show no sign of losingtheir grip on readers' imaginations.
