books tagged “american lit” (American lit)

books tagged “american lit”

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The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton, Michael Everett Nowlin

ISBN 1551113368 (1-55111-336-8)
Softcover, Broadview Pr

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Book summary:
Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, The Age of Innocence is an elegant, masterful portrait of desire and betrayal in old New York. With vivid power, Wharton evokes a time of gaslit streets, formal dances held in the ballrooms of stately brownstones, and society people "who dreaded scandal more than disease." This is Newland Archer's world as he prepares to many the docile May Welland. Then, suddenly, the mysterious, intensely nonconformist Countess Ellen Olenska returns to New York after a long absence, turning Archer's world upside down.
This classic Wharton tale of thwarted love is an exuberantly comic and profoundly moving look at the passions of the human heart, as well as a literary achievement of the highest order. [via]
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All the King's Men
by Robert Penn Warren

ISBN 0899662900 (0-89966-290-0)
Hardcover, Buccaneer Books

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- All the King's Men: ISBN 0899662900 (0-89966-290-0)
  Hardcover, Buccaneer Books
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The Awakening
by Kate Chopin

ISBN 1419153366 (1-4191-5336-6)
Softcover, Kessinger Pub Co

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Book summary:
An American classic of sexual expression that paved the way for the modern novel, The Awakening is both a remarkable novel in its own right and a startling reminder of how far women in this century have come. The story of a married woman who pursues love outside a stuffy, middle-class marriage, the novel portrays the mind of a woman seeking fulfillment of her essential nature. [via]
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Babbitt
by Sinclair Lewis

ISBN 1406505544 (1-4065-0554-4)
Softcover, Dodo Pr

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1919. Lewis, was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Possibly the greatest satirist of his age, Lewis wrote novels that present a devastating picture of middle-class American life in the 1920s. Although he ridiculed the values, the lifestyles, and even the speech of his characters, there is often affection behind the irony. Lewis began his career as a journalist, editor, and hack writer. He became an important literary figure with the publication of Main Street. His seventh novel, Babbitt, is considered by many critics to be his greatest work. The story follows George Babbitt, a middle-aged realtor who is unimaginative, self-important, and hopelessly middle class. Vaguely dissatisfied with his position, he tries to alter the pattern of his life by flirting with liberalism and by having an affair with an attractive widow, only to find that his dread of ostracism is greater than his desire for escape. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing. [via]
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The Beautiful and Damned
by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pagan Harleman

ISBN 1593082452 (1-59308-245-2)
Softcover, Barnes & Noble

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The Beautiful and Damned is the story of Anthony Patch and his wife, Gloria. Harvard-educated and an aspiring aesthete, Patch is waiting for his inheritance upon his grandfathers death. His reckless marriage to Gloria is fueled by alcohol and destroyed by greed. The Patches race through a series of alcohol-induced fiascoesfirst in hilarity, then in despair. The Beautiful and Damned, a devastating portrait of the nouveaux riches, New York nightlife, reckless ambition, and squandered talent, was published in 1922 on the heels of Fitzgeralds first novel, This Side of Paradise. It signaled his maturity as a storyteller and confirmed his enormous talent as a novelist. [via]
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Complete Novels and Stories
by Kate Chopin, Sandra M. Gilbert

ISBN 1931082219 (1-931082-21-9)
Hardcover, Library of America

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Book summary:
From ruined Louisiana plantations to bustling, cosmopolitan New Orleans, Kate Chopin wrote with unflinching honesty about propriety and its strictures, the illusions of love and the realities of marriage, and the persistence of a past scarred by slavery and war. Her stories of fiercely independent women, culminating in her masterpiece The Awakening (1899), challenged contemporary mores as much by their sensuousness as their politics, and today seem decades ahead of their time. Now, The Library of America collects all of Chopin's novels and stories as never before in one authoritative volume.

The explosive novel At Fault (1890) centers on a love triangle between a strong-willed young widow, a stiff St. Louis businessman, and the man's alcoholic wife. In the story collections Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897), Chopin transforms the local color sketch into taut, perfectly calibrated tales of post-Civil War bayou culture. In The Awakening, the now-classic novel that scandalized many of her contemporaries and effectively ended her writing career, Chopin tells the story of a restless, unsatisfied woman who embarks on a quixotic search for fulfillment.

The volume also includes all the stories not collected by Chopin, including those meant for "A Vocation and a Voice," a projected volume that her publisher canceled in 1900, and three stories that were found in 1992 in a long-lost cache of Chopin's papers. [via]
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- Complete Novels and Stories: ISBN 1931082219 (1-931082-21-9)
  Hardcover, Library of America
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A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
by Mark Twain, Justin Kaplan

ISBN 0140430644 (0-14-043064-4)
Softcover, Puffin

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Book summary:
When A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court was published in 1889, Mark Twain was undergoing a series of personal and professional crises. In his Introduction, M. Thomas Inge shows how what began as a literary burlesque of British chivalry and culture developed to tragedy and into a novel that remains a major literary and cultural text for generations of new readers. This edition reproduces a number of the original drawings by Dan Beard, of whom Twain said "He not only illustrates the text but he illustrates my thoughts." [via]
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A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889
by Mark Twain, Shelley Fisher Fishkin

ISBN 0195114108 (0-19-511410-8)
Hardcover, Oxford Univ Pr

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One of Twain's best-loved stories next to his classic tales of Huck and Tom, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court vibrates with slapstick comedy and serious social commentary. While Hank Morgan, Twain's time-displaced Yankee traveler, keeps up a steady stream of flippancies, founding the first tabloid, the Camelot Weekly Hosannah and Literary Volcano, and organizing a game of baseball between armor-clad knights, he also keeps up a steady commentary on the social mores of King Arthur's court, criticizing the hereditary social classes and state church still strong in the Victorian England of Twain's own day, and championing women's suffrage and union labor organization. Widely regarded as one of the first science fiction novels, this edition also features an introduction by Kurt Vonnegut, our own twentieth century master of satiric social commentary and science fiction. It also features the original illustrations by Dan Beard, chosen by Twain himself to illustrate the book, whose drawings brilliantly mix buffoonery with sharp social satire: sharp-eyed readers, for instance, will spot that the model for Merlin, Hank's nemesis, is none other than Tennyson, whose Idylls of the King made the romantic vision of King Arthur's court nearly a sacred Victorian cult. By turns side-splittingly funny and somberly thought-provoking, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is Twain at his finest. [via]
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- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889: ISBN 0195114108 (0-19-511410-8)
  Hardcover, Oxford Univ Pr
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The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon

ISBN 006091307X (0-06-091307-X)
Softcover, Harpercollins

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Book summary:
The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters, and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self knowledge.
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Death Comes for the Archbishop
by Willa Cather

ISBN 1417904232 (1-4179-0423-2)
Softcover, Kessinger Publishing, LLC

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Book summary:
In 1851 Bishop Latour and his friend Father Valliant are despatched to New Mexico to reawaken its slumbering Catholicism. Moving along the endless prairies, Latour spreads his faith the only way he knowsgently, although he must contend with the unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. Over nearly 40 years, they leave converts and enemies, crosses, and occasionally ecstasy in their wake. But it takes a death for them to make their mark on the landscape forever.
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Dharma Bums
by Jack Kerouac

ISBN 0140042520 (0-14-004252-0)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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One of the best and most popular of Kerouac's autobiographical novels, The Dharma Bums is based on experiences the writer had during the mid-1950s while living in California, after he'd become interested in Buddhism's spiritual mode of understanding. One of the book's main characters, Japhy Ryder, is based on the real poet Gary Snyder, who was a close friend and whose interest in Buddhism influenced Kerouac. This book is a must-read for any serious Kerouac fan. [via]
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- Dharma Bums: ISBN 0143039601 (0-14-303960-1)
  Softcover, Penguin Group USA
- Dharma Bums: ISBN 0140042520 (0-14-004252-0)
  Softcover, Penguin Group USA
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For Whom the Bell Tolls
by Ernest Hemingway

ISBN 0020518501 (0-02-051850-1)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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Book summary:
For Whom the Bell Tolls begins and ends in a pine-scented forest, somewhere in Spain. The year is 1937 and the Spanish Civil War is in full swing. Robert Jordan, a demolitions expert attached to the International Brigades, lies "flat on the brown, pine-needled floor of the forest, his chin on his folded arms, and high overhead the wind blew in the tops of the pine trees." The sylvan setting, however, is at sharp odds with the reason Jordan is there: he has come to blow up a bridge on behalf of the antifascist guerrilla forces. He hopes he'll be able to rely on their local leader, Pablo, to help carry out the mission, but upon meeting him, Jordan has his doubts: "I don't like that sadness, he thought. That sadness is bad. That's the sadness they get before they quit or before they betray. That is the sadness that comes before the sell-out." For Pablo, it seems, has had enough of the war. He has amassed for himself a small herd of horses and wants only to stay quietly in the hills and attract as little attention as possible. Jordan's arrival--and his mission--have seriously alarmed him.
"I am tired of being hunted. Here we are all right. Now if you blow a bridge here, we will be hunted. If they know we are here and hunt for us with planes, they will find us. If they send Moors to hunt us out, they will find us and we must go. I am tired of all this. You hear?" He turned to Robert Jordan. "What right have you, a foreigner, to come to me and tell me what I must do?"
In one short chapter Hemingway lays out the blueprint for what is to come: Jordan's sense of duty versus Pablo's dangerous self-interest and weariness with the war. Complicating matters even more are two members of the guerrilla leader's small band: his "woman" Pilar, and Maria, a young woman whom Pablo rescued from a Republican prison train. Unlike her man, Pilar is still fiercely devoted to the cause and as Pablo's loyalty wanes, she becomes the moral center of the group. Soon Jordan finds himself caught between the two, even as his own resolve is tested by his growing feelings for Maria.
For Whom the Bell Tolls combines two of the author's recurring obsessions: war and personal honor. The pivotal battle scene involving El Sordo's last stand is a showcase for Hemingway's narrative powers, but the quieter, ongoing conflict within Robert Jordan as he struggles to fulfill his mission perhaps at the cost of his own life is a testament to his creator's psychological acuity. By turns brutal and compassionate, it is arguably Hemingway's most mature work and one of the best war novels of the 20th century. --Alix Wilber [via]
More editions of For Whom the Bell Tolls:
- For Whom the Bell Tolls: ISBN 0020518501 (0-02-051850-1)
  Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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Go Down, Moses
by William Faulkner

ISBN 0394718844 (0-394-71884-4)
Hardcover, Vintage Books

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Book summary:
I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. William Faulkner, on receiving the Nobel Prize

Go Down, Moses is composed of seven interrelated stories, all of them set in Faulkners mythic Yoknapatawpha County. From a variety of perspectives, Faulkner examines the complex, changing relationships between blacks and whites, between man and nature, weaving a cohesive novel rich in implication and insight.
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- Go Down, Moses: ISBN 0394718844 (0-394-71884-4)
  Hardcover, Vintage Books
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Gone With the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell

ISBN 0380001098 (0-380-00109-8)
Softcover, Harpercollins

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Book summary:
Spoiled Southern belle Scarlett O'Hara never stops loving the married Ashley Wilkes even as she faces the hardships of life during the Civil War and the changes brought about by Reconstruction. Reprint. [via]
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The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
by Carson McCullers

ISBN 0395079780 (0-395-07978-0)
Hardcover, Houghton Mifflin

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- The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter: ISBN 0395079780 (0-395-07978-0)
  Hardcover, Houghton Mifflin
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Henry David Thoreau
by Henry David Thoreau

ISBN 0940450275 (0-940450-27-5)
Hardcover, Library of America

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Book summary:
Henry David Thoreau wrote four full-length works, collected here for the first time in a single volume. Subtly interweaving natural observation, personal experience, and historical lore, they reveal his brilliance not only as a writer, but as a naturalist, scholar, historian, poet, and philosopher. "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" is based on a boat trip taken with his brother from Concord, Massachusetts to Concord, New Hampshire. "Walden," one of America's great books, is at once a personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, manual of self-reliance, and masterpiece of style. "The Maine Woods" and "Cape Cod" portray landscapes changing irreversibly even as he wrote. The first combines close observation of the unexplored Maine wilderness with a far-sighted plea for conservation; the second is a brilliant and unsentimental account of survival on a barren peninsula in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay. [via]
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- Henry David Thoreau: ISBN 0940450275 (0-940450-27-5)
  Hardcover, Library of America
The Little Friend
by Donna Tartt

ISBN 1400031699 (1-4000-3169-9)
Softcover, Vintage Books

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- The Little Friend: ISBN 1400031699 (1-4000-3169-9)
  Softcover, Vintage Books
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Novels, 1942-1952
by John Steinbeck, Robert Demott

ISBN 1931082073 (1-931082-07-3)
Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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Book summary:
This third volume in The Library of America's authoritative edition of John Steinbeck's writings shows one of America's most enduring popular writers continuing restlessly to explore new subject matter and new approaches to storytelling.

The Moon Is Down (1942), set in an unnamed Scandinavian country under German occupation, dramatizes the transformation of ordinary life under totalitarian rule and the underground struggle against the Nazi invaders. In Cannery Row (1945) Steinbeck paid tribute to his closest friend, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts, in the central character of Doc, proprietor of the Western Biological Laboratory and spiritual and financial mainstay of a cast of philosophical drifters and hangers-on. The comic and bawdy evocation of the main street of Monterey's sardine-canning district has made this one of the most popular of all Steinbeck's novels. Steinbeck's long involvement with Mexican culture is distilled in The Pearl (1947). Expanding on an anecdote he had heard about a boy who found a pearl of unusual size, Steinbeck turned it into an allegory of the corrupting influence of sudden wealth. The Pearl appears here with the original illustrations by José Clemente Orozco.

Ambitious in scale and original in structure, East of Eden (1952) recounts the violent and emotionally turbulent history of a Salinas Valley family through several generations. Drawing on Biblical parallels, East of Eden is an epic that explores the writer's deepest and most anguished concerns within a landscape that for him had mythic resonance.
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- Novels, 1942-1952: ISBN 1931082073 (1-931082-07-3)
  Hardcover, Penguin Group USA
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The Oxford Mark Twain
by Mark Twain, Shelley Fisher Fishkin

ISBN 0195090888 (0-19-509088-8)
Hardcover, Oxford Univ Pr

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Nearly nine decades after his death, Mark Twain remains an international icon. His white-maned, mustachioed image is instantly identifiable throughout the world, the very picture of probity and high spirits (which explains why he's become the poster boy for products as diverse as beer, billiard tables, sewing machines, pizza, and real estate). Perhaps more importantly, Twain's books have retained all their power to amuse and enrage. How is it possible for the creator of a 19th-century "boy's holiday book" (Twain's own description of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) to raise so many contemporary hackles? The answer is that Twain is a contemporary writer. Not, of course, from a chronological point of view--he was born in Missouri in 1835 and died in 1910 (having insisted that "annihilation has no terrors for me"). But Twain was the first writer to elevate the American vernacular to a high art. Sidestepping the starched-shirt diction of his peers, he created an idiom that resembled (but did not precisely duplicate) the wayward, slangy, ungrammatical music of American conversation. No serious reader of Twain will want to do without the Oxford Mark Twain. This 29-volume leviathan includes not only the major works but also a treasure trove of essays and short pieces, many of them unavailable for decades. Throw in the introductions to each volume (by such heavyweights as Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut, Cynthia Ozick, Gore Vidal, George Plimpton, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Walter Mosley), as well as the original illustrations, and you've got the book bargain of the millennium. [via]
More editions of The Oxford Mark Twain:
- The Oxford Mark Twain: ISBN 0195090888 (0-19-509088-8)
  Hardcover, Oxford Univ Pr
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Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver

ISBN 0060512822 (0-06-051282-2)
Softcover, HarperCollins Canada, Limited

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Book summary:
Oprah Book Club® Selection, June 2000: As any reader of The Mosquito Coast knows, men who drag their families to far-off climes in pursuit of an Idea seldom come to any good, while those familiar with At Play in the Fields of the Lord or Kalimantaan understand that the minute a missionary sets foot on the fictional stage, all hell is about to break loose. So when Barbara Kingsolver sends missionary Nathan Price along with his wife and four daughters off to Africa in The Poisonwood Bible, you can be sure that salvation is the one thing they're not likely to find. The year is 1959 and the place is the Belgian Congo. Nathan, a Baptist preacher, has come to spread the Word in a remote village reachable only by airplane. To say that he and his family are woefully unprepared would be an understatement: "We came from Bethlehem, Georgia, bearing Betty Crocker cake mixes into the jungle," says Leah, one of Nathan's daughters. But of course it isn't long before they discover that the tremendous humidity has rendered the mixes unusable, their clothes are unsuitable, and they've arrived in the middle of political upheaval as the Congolese seek to wrest independence from Belgium. In addition to poisonous snakes, dangerous animals, and the hostility of the villagers to Nathan's fiery take-no-prisoners brand of Christianity, there are also rebels in the jungle and the threat of war in the air. Could things get any worse?
In fact they can and they do. The first part of The Poisonwood Bible revolves around Nathan's intransigent, bullying personality and his effect on both his family and the village they have come to. As political instability grows in the Congo, so does the local witch doctor's animus toward the Prices, and both seem to converge with tragic consequences about halfway through the novel. From that point on, the family is dispersed and the novel follows each member's fortune across a span of more than 30 years.
The Poisonwood Bible is arguably Barbara Kingsolver's most ambitious work, and it reveals both her great strengths and her weaknesses. As Nathan Price's wife and daughters tell their stories in alternating chapters, Kingsolver does a good job of differentiating the voices. But at times they can grate--teenage Rachel's tendency towards precious malapropisms is particularly annoying (students practice their "French congregations"; Nathan's refusal to take his family home is a "tapestry of justice"). More problematic is Kingsolver's tendency to wear her politics on her sleeve; this is particularly evident in the second half of the novel, in which she uses her characters as mouthpieces to explicate the complicated and tragic history of the Belgian Congo.
Despite these weaknesses, Kingsolver's fully realized, three-dimensional characters make The Poisonwood Bible compelling, especially in the first half, when Nathan Price is still at the center of the action. And in her treatment of Africa and the Africans she is at her best, exhibiting the acute perception, moral engagement, and lyrical prose that have made her previous novels so successful. --Alix Wilber [via]
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The Prince and the Pauper
by Mark Twain

ISBN 0140367497 (0-14-036749-7)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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Book summary:
Set in sixteenth-century England, Mark Twain's classic "tale for young people of all ages" features two identical-looking boys-a prince and a pauper-who trade clothes and step into each other's lives. While the urchin, Tom Canty, discovers luxury and power, Prince Edward, dressed in rags, roams his kingdom and experiences the cruelties inflicted on the poor by the Tudor monarchy. As Christopher Paul Curtis observes in his Introduction, The Prince and the Pauper is "funny, adventurous, and exciting, yet also chock-full of . . . exquisitely reasoned harangues against society's ills."This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the Mark Twain Project edition, which is the approved text of the Center for Scholarly Editions of the Modern Language Association. [via]
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Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men
by Robert Penn Warren

ISBN 1555460631 (1-55546-063-1)
Hardcover, Facts on File

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- Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men: ISBN 1555460631 (1-55546-063-1)
  Hardcover, Facts on File
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She's Come Undone
by Wally Lamb

ISBN 1568954603 (1-56895-460-3)
Hardcover, Wheeler Pub Inc

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Oprah Book Club® Selection, January 1997: "Mine is a story of craving; an unreliable account of lusts and troubles that began, somehow, in 1956 on the day our free television was delivered." So begins the story of Dolores Price, the unconventional heroine of Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone. Dolores is a class-A emotional basket case, and why shouldn't she be? She's suffered almost every abuse and familial travesty that exists: Her father is a violent, philandering liar; her mother has the mental and emotional consistency of Jell-O; and the men in her life are probably the gender's most loathsome creatures. But Dolores is no quitter; she battles her woes with a sense of self-indulgence and gluttony rivaled only by Henry VIII. Hers is a dysfunctional Wonder Years, where growing up in the golden era was anything but ideal. While most kids her age were dealing with the monumental importance of the latest Beatles single and how college turned an older sibling into a long-haired hippie, Dolores was grappling with such issues as divorce, rape, and mental illness. Whether you're disgusted by her antics or moved by her pathetic ploys, you'll be drawn into Dolores's warped, hilarious, Mallomar-munching world. [via]
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- She's Come Undone: ISBN 1568954603 (1-56895-460-3)
  Hardcover, Wheeler Pub Inc
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Sister Carrie
by Theodore Dreiser, Neda M. Westlake, James L. W. West

ISBN 0140188282 (0-14-018828-2)
Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser's revolutionary first novel, was published in 1900--sort of. The story of Carrie Meeber, an 18-year-old country girl who moves to Chicago and becomes a kept woman, was strong stuff at the turn of the century, and what Dreiser's wary publisher released was a highly expurgated version. Times change, and we now have a restored "author's cut" of Sister Carrie that shows how truly ahead of his time Dreiser was. First and foremost, he has written an astute, nonmoralizing account of a woman and her limited options in late-19th-century America. That's impressive in and of itself, but Dreiser doesn't stop there. Digging deeply into the psychological underpinnings of his characters, he gives us people who are often strangers to themselves, drifting numbly until fate pushes them on a path they can later neither defend nor even remember choosing.
Dreiser's story unfolds in the measured cadences of an earlier era. This sometimes works brilliantly as we follow the choices, small and large, that lead some characters to doom and others to glory. On the other hand, the middle chapters--of which there are many--do drag somewhat, even when one appreciates Dreiser's intentions. If you can make it through the sagging midsection, however, you'll be rewarded by Sister Carrie's last 150 pages, which depict the harrowing downward spiral of one of the book's central characters. Here Dreiser portrays with brutal power how the wrong decision--or lack of decision--can lay waste to a life. --Rebecca Gleason [via]
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith

ISBN 0060736267 (0-06-073626-7)
Softcover, Harpercollins

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Book summary:
Francie Nolan, avid reader, penny-candy connoisseur, and adroit observer of human nature, has much to ponder in colorful, turn-of-the-century Brooklyn. She grows up with a sweet, tragic father, a severely realistic mother, and an aunt who gives her love too freely--to men, and to a brother who will always be the favored child. Francie learns early the meaning of hunger and the value of a penny. She is her father's child--romantic and hungry for beauty. But she is her mother's child, too--deeply practical and in constant need of truth. Like the Tree of Heaven that grows out of cement or through cellar gratings, resourceful Francie struggles against all odds to survive and thrive. Betty Smith's poignant, honest novel created a big stir when it was first published over 50 years ago. Her frank writing about life's squalor was alarming to some of the more genteel society, but the book's humor and pathos ensured its place in the realm of classics--and in the hearts of readers, young and old. (Ages 10 and older) --Emilie Coulter [via]
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Walden
by Henry David Thoreau

ISBN 1420922610 (1-4209-2261-0)
Softcover, Digireads.Com

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Book summary:
Henry David Thoreau El 4 de julio de 1845, Thoreau se traslada a vivir en la cabana que el mismo habia construido en Walden Pond. Durante dos anos escribe alli la obra homonima en la que describe su economia domestica, sus experimentos en agricultura, sus visitantes y vecinos, las plantas y la vida salvaje. La obra de Thoreau es la historia de un experimento original, sin precedentes literarios. Walden es un modo de escribir, de ponerse a disposicion de las palabras, pero tambien es una Escritura, una forma de aprender lo que la vida tiene que ensenar. [via]
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Walden and Other Writings
by Henry David Thoreau, William L. Howarth

ISBN 0075542676 (0-07-554267-6)
Softcover, McGraw-Hill College

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Book summary:
With their call for "simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!, for self-honesty, and for harmony with nature, the writings of Henry David Thoreau are perhaps the most influential philosophical works in all American literature.

The selections in this volume represent Thoreau at his best. Included in their entirety are Walden, his indisputable masterpiece, and his two great arguments for nonconformity, Civil Disobedience and Life Without Principle. A lifetime of brilliant observation of nature--and of himself--is recorded in selections from A Week On The Concord And Merrimack Rivers, Cape Cod, The Maine Woods and The Journal. [via]
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Walden; Or, Life in the Woods
by Henry David Thoreau, Terry Tempest Williams

ISBN 1590300882 (1-59030-088-2)
Hardcover, Shambhala Pubns

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Book summary:
In July 1845, Henry David Thoreau built a small cottage in the woods near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. During the two years and two months he spent there, he began to write Walden, his most important work, a chronicle of his communion with nature that became one of the most influential and compelling books in American literature. Since its first publication on August 9, 1854, by Ticknor and Fields, the work has become a classic, beloved for its message of living simply and in harmony with nature.

This special 150th anniversary edition of Walden features exquisite wood engravings by Michael McCurdy, one of America's leading engravers and woodblock artists. McCurdy's engravings bring the text to lifeand illuminate the spirit of Thoreau's prose. Also included is a foreword by noted author, environmentalist, and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams, who reflects upon Thoreau's message that as we explore our world and ourselves, we draw ever closer to the truth of our connectedness. [via]
More editions of Walden; Or, Life in the Woods:
- Walden; Or, Life in the Woods: ISBN 1590300882 (1-59030-088-2)
  Hardcover, Shambhala Pubns
The Works of Emily Dickinson
by Emily Dickinson

ISBN 1853264199 (1-85326-419-9)
Softcover, Lb May & Assoc Inc

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More editions of The Works of Emily Dickinson:
- The Works of Emily Dickinson: ISBN 1853264199 (1-85326-419-9)
  Softcover, Lb May & Assoc Inc

Spanish

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La Conjura De Los Necios
by T.j. Kennedy

ISBN 8433920421 (84-339-2042-1)
Softcover, Ld Books Inc

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Book summary:
El protagonista de esta novela es uno de los personajes mas memorables de la literatura norteamericana: Ignatius Reilly, quien a los treinta anos vive con una estrafalaria madre, ocupado en escribir una extensa y demoledora denuncia contra nuestro siglo, tan carente de "teologia y geometria" como de "decencia y buen gusto". Un alegato desquiciado contra una sociedad desquiciada. Por una inesperada necesidad de dinero, se ve "catapultado en la fiebre de la existencia contemporanea", fiebre a la que Igantius anadira unos cuantos grados mas. En Francia, esta novela fue galardonada como la mejor del ano en lengua extranjera. [via]
More editions of La Conjura De Los Necios:
- La Conjura De Los Necios: ISBN 8433920421 (84-339-2042-1)
  Softcover, Ld Books Inc
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La Conjura De Los Necios/a Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole

ISBN 8496333604 (84-96333-60-4)
Softcover, Quinteto

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Book summary:
El protagonista de esta novela es uno de los personajes mas memorables de la literatura norteamericana: Ignatius Reilly, quien a los treinta anos vive con una estrafalaria madre, ocupado en escribir una extensa y demoledora denuncia contra nuestro siglo, tan carente de "teologiÂa y geometriÂa" como de "decencia y buen gusto". Un alegato desquiciado contra una sociedad desquiciada. Por una inesperada necesidad de dinero, se ve "catapultado en la fiebre de la existencia contemporanea", fiebre a la que Igantius anadira unos cuantos grados mas. En Francia, esta novela fue galardonada como la mejor del ano en lengua extranjera. [via]
More editions of La Conjura De Los Necios/a Confederacy of Dunces:
- La Conjura De Los Necios/a Confederacy of Dunces: ISBN 8496333604 (84-96333-60-4)
  Softcover, Quinteto
via
Virgenes Suicidas/ Suicidals Virgins
by Eugenides Jeffrey

ISBN 8433966820 (84-339-6682-0)
Softcover, Ld Books Inc

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Book summary:
En menos de un ano y medio, las cinco hermanas Lisbon, adolescentes, se suicidan. Los jovencitos del bario habian estado siempre fascinados por esas inalcanzables jovenes en flor, y veinte anos despues, aquellos chicos ya en la frontera de la mediana edad, intentan desentranar el enigma de aquellas lolitas muertas que siguen fascianndolos. [via]
More editions of Virgenes Suicidas/ Suicidals Virgins:
- Virgenes Suicidas/ Suicidals Virgins: ISBN 8433966820 (84-339-6682-0)
  Softcover, Ld Books Inc

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