books tagged “classic fiction”

The young Robert Louis Stevenson suffered from repeated nightmares of living a double life, in which by day he worked as a respectable doctor and by night he roamed the back alleys of old-town Edinburgh. In three days of furious writing, he produced a story about his dream existence. His wife found it too gruesome, so he promptly burned the manuscript. In another three days, he wrote it again. "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" was published as a "shilling shocker" in 1886, and became an instant classic. In the first six months 40,000 copies were sold. Queen Victoria read it. Sermons and editorials were written about it. When Stevenson and his family visited America a year later, they were mobbed by reporters at the dock in New York City. Compulsively readable from its opening pages, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is still one of the best tales ever written about the divided self. [via]

More than a century after the Norman Conquest, England remains a colony of foreign warlords. The dissolute Prince John plots to seize his brother's crown, his barons terrorize the country, and the mysterious outlaw Robin Hood haunts the ancient greenwood. The secret return of King Richard and the disinherited Saxon knight, Ivanhoe, heralds the start of a splendid and tumultuous romance, featuring the tournament at Ashby-de-la-Zouche, the siege of Torquilstone, and the clash of wills
between the wicked Templar Bois-Guilbert and the sublime Jewess Rebecca.

In Ivanhoe Scott fashioned an imperial myth of national cultural identity that has shaped the popular imagination ever since its first appearance at the end of 1819. The most famous of Scottish novelists drew on the conventions of Gothic fiction, including its risky sexual and racial themes, to explore the violent origins and limits of English nationality.

This edition uses the 1830 Magnum Opus text, corrected against the Interleaved Set, and incorporates readings from Scott's manuscript. The introduction examines the originality and cultural importance of Ivanhoe, and draws on current work by historians and cultural critics. [via]

The first of Scott's Waverley novels burst upon an astonished world in 1814. Its publication marked the emergence of the modern novel in the western world, influencing all the great nineteenth-century writers. This handsome new edition of Sir Walter Scott's novels captures the original power and freshness of his best-loved novels. [via]

SOFTBOUND - GLUED BINDING [via]

On The Road, the most famous of Jack Kerouac's works, is not only the soul of the Beat movement and literature, but one of the most important novels of the century. Like nearly all of Kerouac's writing, On The Road is thinly fictionalized autobiography, filled with a cast made of Kerouac's real life friends, lovers, and fellow travelers. Narrated by Sal Paradise, one of Kerouac's alter-egos, On the Road is a cross-country bohemian odyssey that not only influenced writing in the years since its 1957 publication but penetrated into the deepest levels of American thought and culture. [via]

Wild passion leads to tragedy as love is perverted by marriage. But the concerns of mortals are belittled by the sombre, immemorial presence of Egdon Heath, perhaps Hardy's finest evocation of his native landscape. The text is accompanied by a critical introduction. [via]

Described by Henry James as "much less a book than a state of vision," "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is probably the most influential work of fiction in American history. Stowe's moving Christian epic turned millions of Americans against slavery, bringing the "peculiar institution" immeasurably closer to its fiery destruction. In "The Minister's Wooing" and "Oldtown Folks," Stowe examines the interplay of religion, domesticity, and women's roles and choices in the shaping of American culture. [via]

The young Robert Louis Stevenson suffered from repeated nightmares of living a double life, in which by day he worked as a respectable doctor and by night he roamed the back alleys of old-town Edinburgh. In three days of furious writing, he produced a story about his dream existence. His wife found it too gruesome, so he promptly burned the manuscript. In another three days, he wrote it again. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published as a "shilling shocker" in 1886, and became an instant classic. In the first six months, 40,000 copies were sold. Queen Victoria read it. Sermons and editorials were written about it. When Stevenson and his family visited America a year later, they were mobbed by reporters at the dock in New York City. Compulsively readable from its opening pages, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is still one of the best tales ever written about the divided self.

This University of Nebraska Press edition is a small, exquisitely produced paperback. The book design, based on the original first edition of 1886, includes wide margins, decorative capitals on the title page and first page of each chapter, and a clean, readable font that is 19th-century in style. Joyce Carol Oates contributes a foreword in which she calls Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a "mythopoetic figure" like Frankenstein, Dracula, and Alice in Wonderland, and compares Stevenson's creation to doubled selves in the works of Plato, Poe, Wilde, and Dickens.

This edition also features 12 full-page wood engravings by renowned illustrator Barry Moser. Moser is a skillful reader and interpreter as well as artist, and his afterword to the book, in which he explains the process by which he chose a self-portrait motif for the suite of engravings, is fascinating. For the image of Edward Hyde, he writes, "I went so far as to have my dentist fit me out with a carefully sculpted prosthetic of evil-looking teeth. But in the final moments I had to abandon the idea as being inappropriate. It was more important to stay in keeping with the text and, like Stevenson, not show Hyde's face." (Also recommended: the edition of Frankenstein illustrated by Barry Moser) --Fiona Webster [via]

This story of a double-life in which the protagonist by day worked as a respectable doctor and by night roamed the back alleys of old-town London, was first published as a 'shilling shocker' in 1886 and became an instant classic. In the first six months of publication 40,000 copies were sold, and it remains one of the best tales ever written about the divided self. The story opens with Mr Utterson the lawyer learning of an inexplicable attack on a young girl by a certain Mr Hyde, who he knows to be a protege of his old friend Henry Jekyll. Deciding to discover more about the matter, he questions those who might know something and finally manages to speak to Hyde himself. Though it sounds like the beginning of a detective story, the reader is already aware that things are deeper than they might appear: those who meet Hyde feel an irrational hatred and are unable to describe him in any detail. And the language of the text itself seems to be hiding something: vague, ambiguous, at times opaque and full of repetitions. Something is going on here, but we're not sure what it is.In the end, after Hyde has committed a murder, a distressed Jekyll locks himself in his study; but when Utterson breaks down the door, he finds not Jekyll but the dead body of Hyde. He also discovers a document which, along with another already acquired from the last two chapters, explains many things -- but not all. This new edition contains a substantial introduction, with the story of composition (amid difficulties), first publication and early reception, followed by a survey of the main critical interpretations of this much-discussed work, a brief study of its language, and an overview of the most important derivative works: stage plays, films, comic books, graphic novels, and retellings of various kinds. Key Features: / The most complete, scholarly edition of Jekyll and Hyde -- with full introduction, notes, etc. / The story of the composition and publication reveals new details -- of interest to RLS biographers / Summarises the many various critical approaches to Jekyll and Hyde / Explanatory notes cover archaic and Scots words, the origins and meanings of characters' names, and comment on cultural and literary allusions [via]

The Stranger is not merely one of the most widely read novels of the 20th century, but one of the books likely to outlive it. Written in 1946, Camus's compelling and troubling tale of a disaffected, apparently amoral young man has earned a durable popularity (and remains a staple of U.S. high school literature courses) in part because it reveals so vividly the anxieties of its time. Alienation, the fear of anonymity, spiritual doubt--all could have been given a purely modern inflection in the hands of a lesser talent than Camus, who won the Nobel Prize in 1957 and was noted for his existentialist aesthetic. The remarkable trick of The Stranger, however, is that it's not mired in period philosophy.

The plot is simple. A young Algerian, Meursault, afflicted with a sort of aimless inertia, becomes embroiled in the petty intrigues of a local pimp and, somewhat inexplicably, ends up killing a man. Once he's imprisoned and eventually brought to trial, his crime, it becomes apparent, is not so much the arguably defensible murder he has committed as it is his deficient character. The trial's proceedings are absurd, a parsing of incidental trivialities--that Meursault, for instance, seemed unmoved by his own mother's death and then attended a comic movie the evening after her funeral are two ostensibly damning facts--so that the eventual sentence the jury issues is both ridiculous and inevitable.

Meursault remains a cipher nearly to the story's end--dispassionate, clinical, disengaged from his own emotions. "She wanted to know if I loved her," he says of his girlfriend. "I answered the same way I had the last time, that it didn't mean anything but that I probably didn't." There's a latent ominousness in such observations, a sense that devotion is nothing more than self-delusion. It's undoubtedly true that Meursault exhibits an extreme of resignation; however, his confrontation with "the gentle indifference of the world" remains as compelling as it was when Camus first recounted it. --Ben Guterson [via]

The Sun Also Rises first appeared in 1926, and yet it's as fresh and clean and fine as it ever was, maybe finer. Hemingway's famously plain declarative sentences linger in the mind like poetry: "Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover jersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's. She started all that." His cast of thirtysomething dissolute expatriates--Brett and her drunken fiancé, Mike Campbell, the unhappy Princeton Jewish boxer Robert Cohn, the sardonic novelist Bill Gorton--are as familiar as the "cool crowd" we all once knew. No wonder this quintessential lost-generation novel has inspired several generations of imitators, in style as well as lifestyle.

Jake Barnes, Hemingway's narrator with a mysterious war wound that has left him sexually incapable, is the heart and soul of the book. Brett, the beautiful, doomed English woman he adores, provides the glamour of natural chic and sexual unattainability. Alcohol and post-World War I anomie fuel the plot: weary of drinking and dancing in Paris cafés, the expatriate gang decamps for the Spanish town of Pamplona for the "wonderful nightmare" of a week-long fiesta. Brett, with fiancé and ex-lover Cohn in tow, breaks hearts all around until she falls, briefly, for the handsome teenage bullfighter Pedro Romero. "My God! he's a lovely boy," she tells Jake. "And how I would love to see him get into those clothes. He must use a shoe-horn." Whereupon the party disbands.

But what's most shocking about the book is its lean, adjective-free style. The Sun Also Rises is Hemingway's masterpiece--one of them, anyway--and no matter how many times you've read it or how you feel about the manners and morals of the characters, you won't be able to resist its spell. This is a classic that really does live up to its reputation. --David Laskin [via]

THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL is a classic and sometimes violent tale of love and betrayal, separation and reconciliation. It is narrated by a youthful gentleman farmer, Gilbert Markham, who falls in love with his new neighbour, Helen Graham, said to be a widow who, together with her young son, Arthur, has rented Wildfell Hall from a Mr Frederick Lawrence. Her youth, beauty and lack of a satisfactory explanation of her past, soon cause gossip which verges on scandal after visits from her landlord are discovered. In a fit of jealous rage Gilbert then violently assaults Lawrence. This incident causes Helen to reveal the secrets of her past in a diary. [via]

ENDURING LITERATURE ILLUMINATED BY PRACTICAL SCHOLARSHIP Harriet Beecher Stowe's scathing indictment of slavery in the Old South, a novel that has become a landmark of American literature. EACH ENRICHED CLASSIC EDITION INCLUDES: ? A concise introduction that gives readers important background information ? A chronology of the author's life and work ? A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical context ? An outline of key themes and plot points to help readers form their own interpretations ? Detailed explanatory notes ? Critical analysis, including contemporary and modern perspectives on the work ? Discussion questions to promote lively classroom and book group interaction ? A list of recommended related books and films to broaden the reader's experience Enriched Classics offer readers affordable editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and insightful commentary. The scholarship provided in Enriched Classics enables readers to appreciate, understand, and enjoy the world's finest books to their full potential. SERIES EDITED BY CYNTHIA BRANTLEY JOHNSON [via]

Uncle Tom's Cabin is an American classic written by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Harriet Beecher Stowe was appalled by slavery, and she took one of the few options open to nineteenth-century women who wanted to affect public opinion: she wrote a novel, a huge, enthralling narrative that claimed the heart, soul, and politics of pre-Civil War Americans. An overtly moralistic work of unabashed propaganda, it is an attempt to make whites North and South see slaves as mothers, fathers, and children as human beings. Her basic question remains penetrating even today: Is man ever a creature to be trusted with wholly irresponsible power? Uncle Tom's Cabin is an American classic that every American should read. [via]

When I was a girl I went to Bretton about twice a year, and well I liked the visit. The house and its inmates specially suited me. The large peaceful rooms, the well-arranged furniture, the clear wide windows, the balcony outside, looking down on a fine antique street, where Sundays and holidays seemed always to abide -- so quiet was its atmosphere, so clean its pavement -- these things pleased me well. One child in a household of grown people is usually made very much of, and in a quiet way I was a good deal taken notice of by Mrs. Bretton, who had been left a widow, with one son, before I knew her; her husband, a physician, having died while she was yet a young and handsome woman. . . . [via]

There, in the middle of the broad bright high-road -- there, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth or dropped from the heaven -- stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments, her face bent in grave inquiry on mine, her hand pointing to the dark cloud over London, as I faced her. I was far too seriously startled by the suddenness with which this extraordinary apparition stood before me, in the dead of night and in that lonely place, to ask what she wanted. The strange woman spoke first. "Is that the road to London?" she said. I looked attentively at her, as she put that singular question to me. It was then nearly one o'clock. All I could discern distinctly by the moonlight was a colorless, youthful face, meager and sharp to look at about the cheeks and chin; large, grave, wistfully attentive eyes; nervous, uncertain lips; and light hair of a pale, brownish-yellow hue. There was nothing wild, nothing immodest in her manner: it was quiet and self-controlled, a little melancholy and a little touched by suspicion; not exactly the manner of a lady, and, at the same time, not the manner of a woman in the humblest rank of life. [via]

The erotic sequel to The Rainbow chronicles the lives, loves, obsessions, and struggles of the Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, and their lovers, Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich, as they search for fulfillment in post-World War I society. Reprint. [via]

Odyssey, The: The World's Great Classics, by Homer; tr. by S.H. Butcher and Andrew Lang [via]