books tagged “20th c” (20th C / 20th c.)

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Aldous Huxley's Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley, Aaron Tillman

ISBN 0791070492 (0-7910-7049-2)
Hardcover, Facts on File

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- Aldous Huxley's Brave New World: ISBN 0791070492 (0-7910-7049-2)
  Hardcover, Facts on File
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World
by Harold Bloom

ISBN 0791040844 (0-7910-4084-4)
Softcover, Chelsea House Pub

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- Aldous Huxley's Brave New World: ISBN 0791040844 (0-7910-4084-4)
  Softcover, Chelsea House Pub
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The Annotated Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov

ISBN 0679727299 (0-679-72729-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
In 1954 Vladimir Nabokov asked one American publisher to consider "a firebomb that I have just finished putting together." The explosive device: Lolita, his morality play about a middle-aged European's obsession with a 12-year-old American girl. Two years later, the New York Times called it "great art." Other reviewers staked a higher moral ground (the editor of the London Sunday Express declaring it "the filthiest book I've ever read"). Since then, the sinuous novel has never ceased to astound. Even Nabokov was astonished by its place in the popular imagination. One biographer writes that "he was quite shocked when a little girl of eight or nine came to his door for candy on Halloween, dressed up by her parents as Lolita." And when it came time to casting the film, Nabokov declared, "Let them find a dwarfess!"
The character Lolita's power now exists almost separately from the endlessly inventive novel. If only it were read as often as it is alluded to. Alfred Appel Jr., editor of the annotated edition, has appended some 900 notes, an exhaustive, good-humored introduction, and a recent preface in which he admits that the "reader familiar with Lolita can approach the apparatus as a separate unit, but the perspicacious student who keeps turning back and forth from text to Notes risks vertigo." No matter. The notes range from translations to the anatomical to the complex textual. Appel is also happy to point out the Great Punster's supposedly unintended word play: he defends the phrase "Beaver Eaters" as "a portmanteau of 'Beefeaters' (the yeoman of the British royal guard) and their beaver hats." [via]
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- The Annotated Lolita: ISBN 0679727299 (0-679-72729-9)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
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Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley

ISBN 156000522X (1-56000-522-X)
Hardcover, Transaction Pub Large Print

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Book summary:
"Community, Identity, Stability" is the motto of Aldous Huxley's utopian World State. Here everyone consumes daily grams of soma, to fight depression, babies are born in laboratories, and the most popular form of entertainment is a "Feelie," a movie that stimulates the senses of sight, hearing, and touch. Though there is no violence and everyone is provided for, Bernard Marx feels something is missing and senses his relationship with a young women has the potential to be much more than the confines of their existence allow. Huxley foreshadowed many of the practices and gadgets we take for granted today--let's hope the sterility and absence of individuality he predicted aren't yet to come. [via]
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Cat's Cradle
by Kurt Vonnegut

ISBN 0805013199 (0-8050-1319-9)
Hardcover, Holt & Company, Henry

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Cat's Cradle, one of Vonnegut's most entertaining novels, is filled with scientists and G-men and even ordinary folks caught up in the game. These assorted characters chase each other around in search of the world's most important and dangerous substance, a new form of ice that freezes at room temperature. At one time, this novel could probably be found on the bookshelf of every college kid in America; it's still a fabulous read and a great place to start if you're young enough to have missed the first Vonnegut craze. [via]
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A Clockwork Orange
by Anthony Burgess

ISBN 1568495110 (1-56849-511-0)
Hardcover, Buccaneer Books

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Book summary:
"Penguin Decades" bring you the novels that helped shape modern Britain. When they were published, some were bestsellers, some were considered scandalous, and others were simply misunderstood. All represent their time and helped define their generation, while today each is considered a landmark work of storytelling. Anthony Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange" was published in 1962 and has been controversial ever since. It tells the story of fifteen-year-old Alex - whose chief preoccupations are Beethoven's Ninth and ultra-violence - as he and his droogs rampage though a dystopian future seeking thrills, until they come under the control of the state's sinister apparatus. [via]
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A Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole

ISBN 0802130208 (0-8021-3020-8)
Softcover, Grove Pr

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"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs."
Meet Ignatius J. Reilly, the hero of John Kennedy Toole's tragicomic tale, A Confederacy of Dunces. This 30-year-old medievalist lives at home with his mother in New Orleans, pens his magnum opus on Big Chief writing pads he keeps hidden under his bed, and relays to anyone who will listen the traumatic experience he once had on a Greyhound Scenicruiser bound for Baton Rouge. ("Speeding along in that bus was like hurtling into the abyss.") But Ignatius's quiet life of tyrannizing his mother and writing his endless comparative history screeches to a halt when he is almost arrested by the overeager Patrolman Mancuso--who mistakes him for a vagrant--and then involved in a car accident with his tipsy mother behind the wheel. One thing leads to another, and before he knows it, Ignatius is out pounding the pavement in search of a job.
Over the next several hundred pages, our hero stumbles from one adventure to the next. His stint as a hotdog vendor is less than successful, and he soon turns his employers at the Levy Pants Company on their heads. Ignatius's path through the working world is populated by marvelous secondary characters: the stripper Lana Lee and her talented cockatoo; the septuagenarian secretary Miss Trixie, whose desperate attempts to retire are constantly, comically thwarted; gay blade Dorian Greene; sinister Miss Lee, proprietor of the Night of Joy nightclub; and Myrna Minkoff, the girl Ignatius loves to hate. The many subplots that weave through A Confederacy of Dunces are as complicated as anything you'll find in a Dickens novel, and just as beautifully tied together in the end. But it is Ignatius--selfish, domineering, and deluded, tragic and comic and larger than life--who carries the story. He is a modern-day Quixote beset by giants of the modern age. His fragility cracks the shell of comic bluster, revealing a deep streak of melancholy beneath the antic humor. John Kennedy Toole committed suicide in 1969 and never saw the publication of his novel. Ignatius Reilly is what he left behind, a fitting memorial to a talented and tormented life. --Alix Wilber [via]
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Der Process [sic]
by Franz Kafka, Malcolm Pasley, Hans-Gerd Koch

ISBN 3100381300 (3-10-038130-0)
Hardcover, S. Fischer

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- Der Process [sic]: ISBN 3100381300 (3-10-038130-0)
  Hardcover, S. Fischer
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E.M. Forster: A Passage to India
by Betty Jay

ISBN 184046027X (1-84046-027-X)
Softcover, Palgrave Macmillan

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Book summary:
In this Readers' Guide, Betty Jay considers the establishment of Forster's reputation and the various attempts of critics to decipher the complex codes that are a feature of his novel. Successive chapters focus on debates around Forster's liberal-humanism, with essays from F. R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling and Malcolm Bradbury; on the indeterminacy and ambiguity of the text, with extracts from essays by Gillian Beer, Robert Barratt, Wendy Moffat and Jo-Ann Hoeppner Moran; and on the sexual politics of Forster's work, with writings from Elaine Showalter, Frances L. Restuccia and Eve Dawkins Poll. The Guide concludes with essays from Jeffrey Meyers and Jenny Sharpe, who read A Passage to India in terms of its engagement with British imperialism.
[via]
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- E.M. Forster: A Passage to India: ISBN 184046027X (1-84046-027-X)
  Softcover, Palgrave Macmillan
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The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
by Tom Wolfe

ISBN 0808501518 (0-8085-0151-8)
Hardcover, Bt Bound

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Book summary:
They say if you remember the '60s, you weren't there. But, fortunately, Tom Wolfe was there, notebook in hand, politely declining LSD while Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters fomented revolution, turning America on to a dangerously playful way of thinking as their Day-Glo conveyance, Further, made the most influential bus ride since Rosa Parks's. By taking On the Road's hero Neal Cassady as his driver on the cross-country revival tour and drawing on his own training as a magician, Kesey made Further into a bully pulpit, and linked the beat epoch with hippiedom. Paul McCartney's Many Years from Now cites Kesey as a key influence on his trippy Magical Mystery Tour film. Kesey temporarily renounced his literary magic for the cause of "tootling the multitudes"--making a spectacle of himself--and Prankster Robert Stone had to flee Kesey's wild party to get his life's work done. But in those years, Kesey's life was his work, and Wolfe infinitely multiplied the multitudes who got tootled by writing this major literary-journalistic monument to a resonant pop-culture moment.
Kesey's theatrical metamorphosis from the distinguished author of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest to the abominable shaman of the "Acid Test" soirees that launched The Grateful Dead required Wolfe's Day-Glo prose account to endure (though Kesey's own musings in Demon Box are no slouch either). Even now, Wolfe's book gives what Wolfe clearly got from Kesey: a contact high. --Tim Appelo [via]
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- The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test: ISBN 0808501518 (0-8085-0151-8)
  Hardcover, Bt Bound
Ernest Hemingway's a Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway

ISBN 1555460445 (1-55546-044-5)
Hardcover, Facts on File

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Book summary:
A guide to reading "A Farewell to Arms" with a critical and appreciative mind. Includes background on the author's life and times, sample tests, term paper suggestions, and a reading list. [via]
More editions of Ernest Hemingway's a Farewell to Arms:
- Ernest Hemingway's a Farewell to Arms: ISBN 0812034120 (0-8120-3412-0)
  Softcover, Barrons Educational Series Inc
- Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms: ISBN 1555460445 (1-55546-044-5)
  Hardcover, Facts on File
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F Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby

ISBN 1874166676 (1-874166-67-6)
Softcover, Totem Books

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F. Scott Fitzgerald has become something of a defining figure of the twenties - the decade he so famously described as 'The Jazz Age'. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald's writing is at its finest, exposing a society's tendency towards decadence and moral collapse through a decade of hedonism. Regarded as the most searching and tightly written of his novels, The Great Gatsby was the work that assured Fitzgerald's place amongst the major writers of the twentieth century. In this Readers' Guide, Nicolas Tredell introduces and sets in context the key critical debates surrounding a novel about which more critical material exists than any other work of American fiction. The extracts and essays included here reflect on The Great Gatsby's place as one of the first American novels to make significant use of modernist techniques, and explore the influence of the work on later American writings. Considering secondary sources from the Twenties to the present, the Guide offers readers an invaluable resource for the study of this complex rendering of a moment in American history. [via]
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- F Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby: ISBN 1874166676 (1-874166-67-6)
  Softcover, Totem Books
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F. Scott Fitzgerald's the Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anthony S. Abbott

ISBN 0812034155 (0-8120-3415-5)
Softcover, Barrons Educational Series Inc

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Book summary:
A guide to reading "The Great Gatsby" with a critical and appreciative mind encouraging analysis of plot, style, form, and structure. Also includes background on the author's life and times, sample tests, term paper suggestions, and a reading list. [via]
More editions of F. Scott Fitzgerald's the Great Gatsby:
- F. Scott Fitzgerald's the Great Gatsby: ISBN 0812034155 (0-8120-3415-5)
  Softcover, Barrons Educational Series Inc
A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway

ISBN 1556512759 (1-55651-275-9)
Hardcover, Cram Cassettes

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Book summary:
As a youth of 18, Ernest Hemingway was eager to fight in the Great War. Poor vision kept him out of the army, so he joined the ambulance corps instead and was sent to France. Then he transferred to Italy where he became the first American wounded in that country during World War I. Hemingway came out of the European battlefields with a medal for valor and a wealth of experience that he would, 10 years later, spin into literary gold with A Farewell to Arms. This is the story of Lieutenant Henry, an American, and Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. The two meet in Italy, and almost immediately Hemingway sets up the central tension of the novel: the tenuous nature of love in a time of war. During their first encounter, Catherine tells Henry about her fiancé of eight years who had been killed the year before in the Somme. Explaining why she hadn't married him, she says she was afraid marriage would be bad for him, then admits:
I wanted to do something for him. You see, I didn't care about the other thing and he could have had it all. He could have had anything he wanted if I would have known. I would have married him or anything. I know all about it now. But then he wanted to go to war and I didn't know.
The two begin an affair, with Henry quite convinced that he "did not love Catherine Barkley nor had any idea of loving her. This was a game, like bridge, in which you said things instead of playing cards." Soon enough, however, the game turns serious for both of them and ultimately Henry ends up deserting to be with Catherine.
Hemingway was not known for either unbridled optimism or happy endings, and A Farewell to Arms, like his other novels (For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, and To Have and Have Not), offers neither. What it does provide is an unblinking portrayal of men and women behaving with grace under pressure, both physical and psychological, and somehow finding the courage to go on in the face of certain loss. --Alix Wilber [via]
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The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

ISBN 1551113945 (1-55111-394-5)
Softcover, Broadview Pr

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The Great Gatsby, a novel by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald that takes place from spring to autumn 1922, during the Roaring Twenties and Prohibition. [via]
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The Great Gatsby
by Hoffman, Frederick John, Ed

ISBN 0684412845 (0-684-41284-5)
Softcover, Macmillan Pub Co

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Book summary:
An assortment of articles treating issues surrounding the Great Gatsby. Part I - From This Side of Paradise to Great Gatsby, Part II, The Great Gatsby and its world, Part III, The Great Gatsby, and Part IV, The Permanence of the Great Gatsby. Includes a bibliography. [via]
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- The Great Gatsby: ISBN 0684412845 (0-684-41284-5)
  Softcover, Macmillan Pub Co
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The Latest Answers to the Oldest Questions: A Philosophical Adventure With the World's Greatest Thinkers
by Nicholas Fearn

ISBN 0802143474 (0-8021-4347-4)
Softcover, Grove Pr

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Book summary:
The work of the classic philosophers is well known. But what do contemporary thinkers say about what it is to be a human being? In his serious, challenging, and remarkably accessible new book, Nicholas Fearn turns to contemporary philosophers to ask the age old questions: Who am I? What do I know? What should I do? In his search for higher meaning, Fearn consults with thinkers from around the world (including John Searle, Martha Nussbaum, Peter Singer, Richard Rorty, Daniel Dennett, Noam Chomsky, Derek Parfit, Nick Bostrom, among many others) to create an impressive survey of recent thought. Variously, they believe that free will, identity, and consciousness are not what they seem; that the difference between virtue and wickedness can be a matter of sheer luck; and that, one day, we will all be vegetarians. Fearn discovers that the topics havent changed, though our world has. Or has it? Moving deftly from pop culture to the writings of Plato, Philosophy is a brilliant and entertaining guide to the current state of the philosophical thought.
[via]
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- The Latest Answers to the Oldest Questions: A Philosophical Adventure With the World's Greatest Thinkers: ISBN 0802143474 (0-8021-4347-4)
  Softcover, Grove Pr
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Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov

ISBN 0679723161 (0-679-72316-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Despite its lascivious reputation, the pleasures of Lolita are as much intellectual as erogenous. It is a love story with the power to raise both chuckles and eyebrows. Humbert Humbert is a European intellectual adrift in America, haunted by memories of a lost adolescent love. When he meets his ideal nymphet in the shape of 12-year-old Dolores Haze, he constructs an elaborate plot to seduce her, but first he must get rid of her mother. In spite of his diabolical wit, reality proves to be more slippery than Humbert's feverish fantasies, and Lolita refuses to conform to his image of the perfect lover.
Playfully perverse in form as well as content, riddled with puns and literary allusions, Nabokov's 1955 novel is a hymn to the Russian-born author's delight in his adopted language. Indeed, readers who want to probe all of its allusive nooks and crannies will need to consult the annotated edition. Lolita is undoubtedly, brazenly erotic, but the eroticism springs less from the "frail honey-hued shoulders ... the silky supple bare back" of little Lo than it does from the wantonly gorgeous prose that Humbert uses to recount his forbidden passion:
She was musical and apple-sweet ... Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice ... and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty--between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.
Much has been made of Lolita as metaphor, perhaps because the love affair at its heart is so troubling. Humbert represents the formal, educated Old World of Europe, while Lolita is America: ripening, beautiful, but not too bright and a little vulgar. Nabokov delights in exploring the intercourse between these cultures, and the passages where Humbert describes the suburbs and strip malls and motels of postwar America are filled with both attraction and repulsion, "those restaurants where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended upon the cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads." Yet however tempting the novel's symbolism may be, its chief delight--and power--lies in the character of Humbert Humbert. He, at least as he tells it, is no seedy skulker, no twisted destroyer of innocence. Instead, Nabokov's celebrated mouthpiece is erudite and witty, even at his most depraved. Humbert can't help it--linguistic jouissance is as important to him as the satisfaction of his arrested libido. --Simon Leake [via]
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Lolita
by Harold Bloom

ISBN 0791009610 (0-7910-0961-0)
Hardcover, Facts on File

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- Lolita: ISBN 0791009610 (0-7910-0961-0)
  Hardcover, Facts on File
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Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel García Márquez, Edith Grossman

ISBN 140003468X (1-4000-3468-X)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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Book summary:
In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs--yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.With humorous sagacity and consummate craft, García Márquez traces an exceptional half-century story of unrequited love. Though it seems never to be conveniently contained, love flows through the novel in many wonderful guises--joyful, melancholy, enriching, ever surprising. [via]
More editions of Love in the Time of Cholera:
- Love in the Time of Cholera: ISBN 0816147175 (0-8161-4717-5)
  Hardcover, Thorndike Pr
- Love in the Time of Cholera: ISBN 140003468X (1-4000-3468-X)
  Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Marie and Bruce: A Play
by Wallace Shawn

ISBN 0802130186 (0-8021-3018-6)
Softcover, Grove Pr

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Book summary:
When Marie decides to leave Bruce, she delivers herself of a torrent of ferocious humor and foul-mouthed vituperation concerning him and their marriage, not to mention love, hate, caring, commitment, and all the other current clichés about relationships. As he follows Marie and Bruce through breakfast, a friends party, and dinner, Wallace Shawn brilliantly orchestrates her savage attacks and his slyly passive defenses into a symphony of subversive propositions about the nature of the marital state.
[via]
More editions of Marie and Bruce: A Play:
- Marie and Bruce: A Play: ISBN 0802130186 (0-8021-3018-6)
  Softcover, Grove Pr
Monarch Great Gatsby
by Stanley Cooperman

ISBN 0671006673 (0-671-00667-3)
Hardcover, Pearson Education, Limited

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- Monarch Great Gatsby: ISBN 0671006673 (0-671-00667-3)
  Hardcover, Pearson Education, Limited
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Mrs Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf

ISBN 155111397X (1-55111-397-X)
Softcover, Broadview Pr

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As Clarissa Dalloway walks through London on a fine June morning, a sky-writing plane captures her attention. Crowds stare upwards to decipher the message while the plane turns and loops, leaving off one letter, picking up another. Like the airplane's swooping path, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway follows Clarissa and those whose lives brush hers--from Peter Walsh, whom she spurned years ago, to her daughter Elizabeth, the girl's angry teacher, Doris Kilman, and war-shocked Septimus Warren Smith, who is sinking into madness.
As Mrs. Dalloway prepares for the party she is giving that evening, a series of events intrudes on her composure. Her husband is invited, without her, to lunch with Lady Bruton (who, Clarissa notes anxiously, gives the most amusing luncheons). Meanwhile, Peter Walsh appears, recently from India, to criticize and confide in her. His sudden arrival evokes memories of a distant past, the choices she made then, and her wistful friendship with Sally Seton.
Woolf then explores the relationships between women and men, and between women, as Clarissa muses, "It was something central which permeated; something warm which broke up surfaces and rippled the cold contact of man and woman, or of women together.... Her relation in the old days with Sally Seton. Had not that, after all, been love?" While Clarissa is transported to past afternoons with Sally, and as she sits mending her green dress, Warren Smith catapults desperately into his delusions. Although his troubles form a tangent to Clarissa's web, they undeniably touch it, and the strands connecting all these characters draw tighter as evening deepens. As she immerses us in each inner life, Virginia Woolf offers exquisite, painful images of the past bleeding into the present, of desire overwhelmed by society's demands. --Joannie Kervran Stangeland [via]
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A Passage to India: Library Edition
by E. M. Forster

ISBN 0679405496 (0-679-40549-6)
Hardcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
What really happened in the Marabar caves? This is the mystery at the heart of E.M. Forster's 1924 novel, A Passage to India, the puzzle that sets in motion events highlighting an even larger question: Can an Englishman and an Indian be friends?
"It is impossible here," an Indian character tells his friend, Dr. Aziz, early in the novel.
"They come out intending to be gentlemen, and are told it will not do.... Why, I remember when Turton came out first. It was in another part of the Province. You fellows will not believe me, but I have driven with Turton in his carriage--Turton! Oh yes, we were once quite intimate. He has shown me his stamp collection.
"He would expect you to steal it now. Turton! But red-nosed boy will be far worse than Turton!
"I do not think so. They all become exactly the same, not worse, not better. I give any Englishman two years, be he Turton or Burton. It is only the difference of a letter. And I give any Englishwoman six months. All are exactly alike."
Written while England was still firmly in control of India, Forster's novel follows the fortunes of three English newcomers to India--Miss Adela Quested, Mrs. Moore, and Cyril Fielding--and the Indian, Dr. Aziz, with whom they cross destinies. The idea of true friendship between the races was a radical one in Forster's time, and he makes it abundantly clear that it was not one that either side welcomed. If Aziz's friend, Hamidullah, believed it impossible, the British representatives of the Raj were equally discouraging.
"Why, the kindest thing one can do to a native is to let him die," said Mrs. Callendar.
"How if he went to heaven?" asked Mrs. Moore, with a gentle but crooked smile.
"He can go where he likes as long as he doesn't come near me. They give me the creeps."
Despite their countrymen's disapproval, Miss Quested, Mrs. Moore, and Mr. Fielding are all eager to meet Indians, and in Dr. Aziz they find a perfect companion: educated, westernized, and open-minded. Slowly, the friendships ripen, especially between Aziz and Fielding. Having created the possibility of esteem based on trust and mutual affection, Forster then subjects it to the crucible of racial hatred: during a visit to the famed Marabar caves, Miss Quested accuses Dr. Aziz of sexually assaulting her, then later recants during the frenzied trial that follows. Under such circumstances, affection proves to be a very fragile commodity indeed.
Arguably Forster's greatest novel, A Passage to India limns a troubling portrait of colonialism at its worst, and is remarkable for the complexity of its characters. Here the personal becomes the political and in the breach between Aziz and his English "friends," Forster foreshadows the eventual end of the Raj. --Alix Wilber [via]
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston

ISBN 0821927361 (0-8219-2736-1)
Hardcover, Emc Pub

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Book summary:
At the height of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston was the preeminent black woman writer in the United States. She was a sometime-collaborator with Langston Hughes and a fierce rival of Richard Wright. Her stories appeared in major magazines, she consulted on Hollywood screenplays, and she penned four novels, an autobiography, countless essays, and two books on black mythology. Yet by the late 1950s, Hurston was living in obscurity, working as a maid in a Florida hotel. She died in 1960 in a Welfare home, was buried in an unmarked grave, and quickly faded from literary consciousness until 1975 when Alice Walker almost single-handedly revived interest in her work.
Of Hurston's fiction, Their Eyes Were Watching God is arguably the best-known and perhaps the most controversial. The novel follows the fortunes of Janie Crawford, a woman living in the black town of Eaton, Florida. Hurston sets up her characters and her locale in the first chapter, which, along with the last, acts as a framing device for the story of Janie's life. Unlike Wright and Ralph Ellison, Hurston does not write explicitly about black people in the context of a white world--a fact that earned her scathing criticism from the social realists--but she doesn't ignore the impact of black-white relations either:
It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.
One person the citizens of Eaton are inclined to judge is Janie Crawford, who has married three men and been tried for the murder of one of them. Janie feels no compulsion to justify herself to the town, but she does explain herself to her friend, Phoeby, with the implicit understanding that Phoeby can "tell 'em what Ah say if you wants to. Dat's just de same as me 'cause mah tongue is in mah friend's mouf."
Hurston's use of dialect enraged other African American writers such as Wright, who accused her of pandering to white readers by giving them the black stereotypes they expected. Decades later, however, outrage has been replaced by admiration for her depictions of black life, and especially the lives of black women. In Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston breathes humanity into both her men and women, and allows them to speak in their own voices. --Alix Wilber [via]
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The Trial
by Franz Kafka, Breon Mitchell

ISBN 0805209999 (0-8052-0999-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis--an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life--including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door--becomes increasingly unpredictable. As K. tries to gain control, he succeeds only in accelerating his own excruciating downward spiral. [via]
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The Trial ; Metamorphosis ; In the Penal Colony: Three Theatre Adaptations from Franz Kafka
by Franz Kafka, Steven Berkoff

ISBN 090639984X (0-906399-84-X)
Hardcover, Amber Lane Press

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More editions of The Trial ; Metamorphosis ; In the Penal Colony: Three Theatre Adaptations from Franz Kafka:
- The Trial ; Metamorphosis ; In the Penal Colony: Three Theatre Adaptations from Franz Kafka: ISBN 090639984X (0-906399-84-X)
  Hardcover, Amber Lane Press
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Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places
by Peter Nabokov

ISBN 0670034320 (0-670-03432-0)
Hardcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

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Book summary:
From the author of Native American Testimony comes a revelatory new look at the hallowed, diverse, and threatened landscapes of the American Indian

For thousands of years Native Americans have told stories about the powers of revered landscapes and sought spiritual direction at mysterious locations in their homelands. In Where the Lightning Strikes, Peter Nabokov offers sixteen "biographies of place" that dramatize the rich diversity of Indian cultures and their religious systems across North America. From the mountains of Maine to Tennessees Tellico Valley, from the Black Hills of South Dakota to Rainbow Canyon in Arizona to the high country of northwestern California, each chapter explores a host of relationships between Indian cultures and their environments and describes the myths, legends, practices, and rituals that sustained them.
Based on years of research and personal experience, Where the Lightning Strikes reveals a range of holy lands containing beneficial as well as malevolent forces and reminds us of the stubborn persistence of Indian beliefs in the sacredness of the American earth. [via]
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- Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places: ISBN 0670034320 (0-670-03432-0)
  Hardcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

Spanish

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El Amor en Los Tiempos de Colera
by Gabriel García Márquez

ISBN 1400034671 (1-4000-3467-1)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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Book summary:
La historia de amor entre Fermina Daza y Florentino Ariza, en el escenario de un pueblecito portuario del Caribe y a lo largo de mas de sesenta anos, podria parecer un melodrama de amantes contrariados que al final vencen por la gracia del tiempo y la fuerza de sus propios sentimientos, ya que Garcia Marquez se complace en utilizar los mas clasicos recursos de los folletines tradicionales. Pero este tiempo -por una vez sucesivo, y no circular-, este escenario y estos personajes son como una mezcla tropical de plantas y arcillas que la mano del maestro modela y fantasea a su placer, para al final ir a desembocar en los territorios del mito y la leyenda. Los zumos, olores y sabores del tropico alimentan una prosa alucinatoria que en esta ocasion llega al puerto oscilante del final feliz. [via]
More editions of El Amor en Los Tiempos de Colera:
- El Amor En Los Tiempos Del Colera: ISBN 8401242304 (84-01-24230-4)
  Softcover, Lectorum Pubns Inc
- El Amor en Los Tiempos de Colera: ISBN 1400034671 (1-4000-3467-1)
  Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Un Mundo Feliz
by Aldous Huxley

ISBN 840142321X (84-01-42321-X)
Softcover, Plaza & Janes Editories, S.A.

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Book summary:
Un mundo feliz es posiblemente la novela mas leida de Huxley, y su influencia es evidente tanto en buena parte de la novela de ciencia ficcion de calidad como en las novelas filosoficas. Presenta un mundo en el que el Estado controla hasta el mas minimo detalle de la vida de los individuos, a los que mantiene en una ignorancia, producto de un depurado lavado de cerebro. Mas tarde el autor escribiria Nueva visita a un mundo feliz, donde analizaria lo que habia escrito anos antes y sacaria conclusiones muy distintas sobre el destino de la humanidad. [via]
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- Un Mundo Feliz: ISBN 840142321X (84-01-42321-X)
  Softcover, Plaza & Janes Editories, S.A.

French

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Le Meilleur Des Mondes
by Aldous Huxley

ISBN 2266113135 (2-266-11313-5)
Softcover, Distribooks Inc

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Book summary:
16,8x10,8x1,8cm. Poche. [via]
More editions of Le Meilleur Des Mondes:
- Le Meilleur Des Mondes: ISBN 2266113135 (2-266-11313-5)
  Softcover, Distribooks Inc

German

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Der Gross Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

ISBN 3257201834 (3-257-20183-4)
Softcover, Diogenes Verlag AG

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Book summary:
»Der große Gatsby« bietet ein Sittengemälde der amerikanischen 1920er Jahre und beleuchtet den Zwiespalt zwischen Geld und Liebe, Machtgier und Treue. Sprache und Erzählstil machen den Roman zu einem der herausragenden poetischen Werke Amerikas in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts. [via]
More editions of Der Gross Gatsby:
- Der Gross Gatsby: ISBN 3257201834 (3-257-20183-4)
  Softcover, Diogenes Verlag AG

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