books tagged “english”

books tagged “english”

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  • Airframe
    by Michael Crichton
    ISBN 0679446486 (0-679-44648-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Cruising 35,000 feet above the earth, a twin-engine commercial jet encounters an accident that leaves 3 dead, 56 wounded, and the cabin in shambles. What happened? With a multi-billion-dollar company-saving deal on the line, Casey Singleton is sent by her hard-driving boss to uncover the mysterious circumstances that led to the disaster before more people die. But someone doesn't want her to find the truth. Airframe bristles with authentic information, technical jargon, and the command of detail Crichton's readers have come to expect. Check out Amazon.com's Airframe feature and read an excerpt from the book! [via]

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  • Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
    by Anne Frank
    ISBN 0679601244 (0-679-60124-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Anne Frank's diaries have always been among the most moving and eloquent documents of the Holocaust. This new edition restores diary entries omitted from the original edition, revealing a new depth to Anne's dreams, irritations, hardships, and passions. Anne emerges as more real, more human, and more vital than ever. If you've never read this remarkable autobiography, do so. If you have read it, you owe it to yourself to read it again. [via]

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  • Winterson, Jeanette: Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery
    Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery
    by Jeanette Winterson
    ISBN 0679446443 (0-679-44644-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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  • Highet, Gilbert: The Art of Teaching
    The Art of Teaching
    by Gilbert Highet
    ISBN 0679723145 (0-679-72314-5)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Bend Sinister
    by Vladimir Nabokov
    ISBN 0679727272 (0-679-72727-2)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic.  While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and foremost, a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man caught in the tyranny of a police state. It is first and foremost a compelling narrative about a civilized man and his child caught up in the tyranny of a police state.  Professor Adam Krug, the country's foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man.  In a folly of bureaucratic bungling and ineptitude, the government attempts to co-opt Krug's support in order to validate the new regime. [via]

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  • Potter, Dennis: Blackeyes
    Blackeyes
    by Dennis Potter
    ISBN 0679720472 (0-679-72047-2)
    Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • Breakfast at Tiffany's
    by Truman Capote
    ISBN 067960085X (0-679-60085-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Contains:

    Breakfast at Tiffany's
    House of Flowers
    A Diamond Guitar
    A Christmas Memory [via]

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  • Buckley : Usage; Style and Speaking; Fiction, Diction and Dictionaries; Reviews and Interviews; A Lexicon
    by Buckley, William F., Jr., Samuel S. Vaughan
    ISBN 0679452141 (0-679-45214-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    The book his readers have asked for--on the uses and abuses of language, vocabulary, diction and dictionaries, journals and journalists, style, eloquence, interviews and reviews--Buckley: The Right Word includes interviews with Charlie Rose and The Paris Review, verbal encounters with Borges, le Carre, Galbraith, Schlesinger, Playboy, Cosmopolitan, The New York Times, essays on formality and style--even a Buckley lexicon. Online promo. [via]

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  • London, Jack: The Call of the Wild
    The Call of the Wild
    by Jack London, E. L. Doctorow, Donald Pizer, Library of America Staff
    ISBN 0679725350 (0-679-72535-0)
    Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • Kingston, Maxine: China Men
    China Men
    by Maxine Kingston
    ISBN 0679723285 (0-679-72328-5)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
    by Edgar Allan Poe
    ISBN 0679600078 (0-679-60007-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most original writers in the history of American letters, a genius who was tragically misunderstood in his lifetime. He was a seminal figure in the development of science fiction and the detective story, and exerted a great influence on Dostoyevsky, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, and Charles Baudelaire, who championed him long before Poe was appreciated in his own country. Baudelaire's enthusiasm brought Poe a wide audience in Europe, and his writing came to have enormous importance for modern French literature. This edition includes his most well-known works--"The Raven," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "Annabel Lee," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"--as well as less-familiar stories, poems, and essays. [via]

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  • Comedies
    by William Shakespeare, Tony Tanner, Sylvan Barnet
    ISBN 0679447202 (0-679-44720-2)
    Hardcover, Everymans Library

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    (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

    Shakespeares later comedies were written at the astonishing pace of about two plays a year. In them, he moves beyond the farce of his earlier comedies to richer and more varied dramas. These range from the famous problem plays, which blend humor with tragedy, to the idyllic romances set in such timeless locales as the Forest of Arden. They contain some of his wittiest and most memorable characters, from cross-dressing heroines, bantering lovers, and wisecracking fools to the villainous but sympathetic Shylock and the boisterous and bawdy Falstaff.

    This volume contains The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Alls Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure. The authoritatively edited text of the plays is supplemented with footnotes, bibliographies, a detailed chronology of Shakespeares life and times, and a substantial introduction in which Tony Tanner discusses each play individually and in the context of Shakespeares work. [via]

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  • The Comedies of William Shakespeare
    by William Shakespeare
    ISBN 0679601074 (0-679-60107-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. [via]

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  • The Complete Monty Python's Flying Circus: All the Words
    by Graham Chapamn, Monty Python (Comedy troupe)
    ISBN 0679726470 (0-679-72647-0)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    The complete scripts from the four Monty Python series, first shown on BBC television between 1969 and 1974, have been collected in two companion volumes.

    Characters' names, often not spoken, are given as in the original scripts, along with the names of the actual performer added on their first appearance in each sketch.

    This second volume contains twenty-two classic episodes, featuring some of the most entertaining writing to have gone into television anywhere. The minister of silly walks, the dead parrot, banter in a cheese shop - here is every silly, satirical skit, every snide insult, every saucy aside. [via]

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  • Complete Novels of Jane Austen
    by Jane Austen
    ISBN 0679600256 (0-679-60025-6)
    Hardcover, Modern Library

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    "How Jane Austen can write!...She is a miniaturist, but never two-dimensional....All Jane Austen characters are ready for an extended life, for a life which the scheme of her books seldom requires them to lead, and that is why they lead their actual lives so satisfactorily." --E. M. Forster [via]

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  • The Confessions of Nat Turner
    by William Styron
    ISBN 0679601015 (0-679-60101-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    In the late summer of 1831, in a remote section of southeastern Virginia, there took place the only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery...

    The revolt was led by a remarkable Negro preacher named Nat Turner, an educated slave who felt himself divinely ordained to annihilate all the white people in the region.

    The Confessions of Nat Turner is narrated by Nat himself as he lingers in jail through the cold autumnal days before his execution. The compelling story ranges over the whole of Nat's Life, reaching its inevitable and shattering climax that bloody day in August.

    The Confessions of Nat Turner is not only a masterpiece of storytelling; is also reveals in unforgettable human terms the agonizing essence of Negro slavery. Through the mind of a slave, Willie Styron has re-created a catastrophic event, and dramatized the intermingled miseries, frustrations--and hopes--which caused this extraordinary black man to rise up out of the early mists of our history and strike down those who held his people in bondage. [via]

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  • Confessions of Zeno
    by Italo Svevo, Beryl de Zoete
    ISBN 0679722343 (0-679-72234-3)
    Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    The pliant protagonist of Italo Svevo's 1923 classic Confessions of Zeno is, among other things, a bumbling businessman, a guilt-ridden adulterer, and a hardcore nicotine addict. What Zeno Cosini most definitely is not is wordless. For the novel is in fact a dense and comically excruciating exercise in self-revelation, undertaken by the narrator as part of his psychoanalytic treatment. Zeno never finds a cure for his affliction, which seems to be a strain of continental angst. Yet his reflections remain as audacious as they are exhaustive--and, much of the time, masterfully absorbing.

    As we soon discover, Zeno is a master is the convoluted rationalization. He concocts numerous reasons why his "last cigarette" needn't truly become his last; he strives endlessly to convince himself that he loves his wife; he tirelessly justifies an awkward affair, all the while vacillating between a paralysis of action and a lazy submission. "My resolutions are less drastic and, as I grow older, I become more indulgent to my weaknesses," Zeno proclaims early on. (Later he backpedals even further, confessing that his "resolutions existed for their own sake and had no practical results whatever.") As a last-ditch tactic, he transmutes his disappointments into inevitabilities--an act of creative bookkeeping that becomes steadily creepier as the narrative unfolds.

    There are times, to be sure, when Zeno seems to grasp that life isn't merely feints and games, that subterfuge and dark motivation aren't the whole of human transaction. Yet he always retreats back into his extravagant, consoling fantasies. Perhaps that's why Svevo's book still has the power to discomfit: Zeno's ingenious whitewashing of an indifferent world feels alarmingly like the fictions we tell ourselves on a daily basis. --Ben Guterson [via]

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  • Consilience : The Unity of Knowledge
    by Edward O. Wilson
    ISBN 0679450777 (0-679-45077-7)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    The biologist Edward O. Wilson is a rare scientist: having over a long career made signal contributions to population genetics, evolutionary biology, entomology, and ethology, he has also steeped himself in philosophy, the humanities, and the social sciences. The result of his lifelong, wide-ranging investigations is Consilience (the word means "a jumping together," in this case of the many branches of human knowledge), a wonderfully broad study that encourages scholars to bridge the many gaps that yawn between and within the cultures of science and the arts. No such gaps should exist, Wilson maintains, for the sciences, humanities, and arts have a common goal: to give understanding a purpose, to lend to us all "a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws." In making his synthetic argument, Wilson examines the ways (rightly and wrongly) in which science is done, puzzles over the postmodernist debates now sweeping academia, and proposes thought-provoking ideas about religion and human nature. He turns to the great evolutionary biologists and the scholars of the Enlightenment for case studies of science properly conducted, considers the life cycles of ants and mountain lions, and presses, again and again, for rigor and vigor to be brought to bear on our search for meaning. The time is right, he suggests, for us to understand more fully that quest for knowledge, for "Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us.... Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become." Wilson's wisdom, eloquently expressed in the pages of this grand and lively summing-up, will be of much help in that search. [via]

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  • Gross, Kim Johnson: Cooking Tools (Chic Simple)
    Cooking Tools (Chic Simple)
    by Kim Johnson Gross, Jeff Stone, Cheryl Merser
    ISBN 067944579X (0-679-44579-X)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • Count of Monte Cristo
    by Alexandre Dumas
    ISBN 0679601996 (0-679-60199-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    A wonderful children's book filled with great illustrations. [via]

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  • The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror
    by Bernard Lewis
    ISBN 0679642811 (0-679-64281-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    After the terrorist attacks of September 11, many Americans yearned to understand why Muslim extremists felt such passionate animosity toward the Western world, particularly the United States. Since that historic attack there have been many books and discussions about this very question, but few of them offer such a readable and relevant response as this excellent offering by renowned historian Bernard Lewis (What Went Wrong?). For modern Westerners, Islam is an especially foreign religion and culture to understand. For instance, Westerners typically dismiss things as unimportant when using the expression "thats history." But for those raised in Muslim households, historyeven ancient historyis just as important (if not more important) as the present. And to better understand the hostilities rooted in this historyone could start with recognizing the long-standing resentment the Islamic community harbors from having its homelands torn apart and re-packaged into random political states by occupying Europeans (Westerners). Or stretch back in time to the brutality of the Crusades. Or go straight to the U.S. political meddling in the region throughout the latter 20th century.

    This is not a pity fest for Muslims. Lewis even-handedly explores the sources of Islamic antagonism toward the West while also explaining how a supposedly peace-worshipping religion could be so distorted by violent extremism. He notes that the American way of lifeespecially that of fulfillment through material gain and sexual freedomis a direct threat to Islamic values (which is why night clubsplaces where men and women publicly touch one anotherare targets of bombings). But it is basic Western democracy that especially threatens Islamic extremists, notes Lewis, because within its own community more and more Muslims are coming to value the freedom that political democracy allows. For anyone wanting an intelligent and accessible primer on the Islamic-Western conflict, this is an excellent place to begin. Gail Hudson [via]

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  • Darwin for Beginners
    by Jonathan Miller
    ISBN 0679725113 (0-679-72511-3)
    Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    The Beginner Books -- "Their cartoon format and irreverent wit make difficult ideas accessible and entertaining."

    -- Newsday

    aking us through the upheavals in biological thought which made The Origins of Species possible, Jonathan Miller introduces us to that odd revolutionary, Charles Darwin -- a remarkably timid man who spent most of his life in seclusion; a semi-invalid riddled with doubts, fearing the controversy his theories might unleash; yet also the man who finally undermined belief in God's creation. Along the way we meet a fascinating cast of characters: Darwin's scientific predecessors, his contemporaries (including Alfred Russell Wallace, whose anticipation of natural selection forced Darwin to publish), his opponents, and his successors whose work in modern genetics provided necessary modifications to Darwin's own work.

    Splendidly illustrated, this clever, witty, highly informative book is the perfect introduction to Darwin's life and thought. [via]

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  • Death Comes for the Archbishop
    by Willa Cather
    ISBN 0679600507 (0-679-60050-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

    Introduction by A. S. Byatt

    Willa Cathers story of the missionary priest Father Jean Marie Latour and his work of faith in the wilderness of the Southwest is told with a spare but sensuous directness and profound artistry. When Latour arrives in 1851 in the territory of New Mexico, newly acquired by the United States, what he finds is a vast desert region of red hills and tortured arroyos that is American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. Over the next four decades, Latour works gently and tirelessly to spread his faith and to build a soaring cathedral out of the local golden rockwhile contending with unforgiving terrain, derelict and sometimes rebellious priests, and his own loneliness.

    DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP shares a limitless, craggy beauty with the New Mexico landscape of desert, mountain, and canyon in which its central action takes place, and its evocations of that landscape and those who are drawn to it suggest why Cather is acknowledged without question as the most poetically exact chronicler of the American frontier. [via]

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  • Diary Of Samuel Pepys: Selected Passages
    by Samuel Pepys, Richard Le Gallienne, Robert Louis Stevenson
    ISBN 0679642218 (0-679-64221-8)
    Hardcover, Modern Library

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    Book summary:

    The diary which Samuel Pepys kept from January 1660 to May 1669 ...is one of our greatest historical records and... a major work of English literature, writes the renowned historian Paul Johnson. A witness to the coronation of Charles II, the Great Plague of 1665, and the Great Fire of 1666, Pepys chronicled the events of his day. Originally written in a cryptic shorthand, Pepys's diary provides an astonishingly frank and diverting account of political intrigues and naval, church, and cultural affairs, as well as a quotidian journal of daily life in London during the Restoration.

    In 1825, when Pepys's memoirs were first published, Francis Jeffrey of The Edinburgh Review declared, "We can scarcely say that we wish it a page shorter... it is very entertaining thus to be transported into the very heart of a time so long gone by; and to be admitted into the domestic intimacy, as well as the public councils of a man of great activity and circulation in the reign of Charles II." Edited and abridged by literary critic and author Richard Le Gallienne, this edition features an Introduction by Robert Louis Stevenson. [via]

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  • Don Quixote
    by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra, Samuel Putnam
    ISBN 0679602860 (0-679-60286-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    "        Don Quixote is practically unthinkable as a living being," said novelist Milan Kundera. "And yet, in our memory, what character is more alive?"
    ----Widely regarded as the world's first
    modern novel, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote de La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. This Modern Library edition presents the acclaimed Samuel Putnam translation of the epic tale, complete with notes, variant readings, and an Introduction by the translator.
    ----The debt owed to Cervantes by literature is immense. From Milan Kundera: "Cervan-
    tes is the founder of the Modern Era. . . . The novelist need answer to no one but
    Cervantes." Lionel Trilling observed: "It can be said that all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote." Vladmir Nabo-kov wrote: "Don Quixote is greater today than he was in Cervantes's womb. [He] looms so wonderfully above the skyline of literature, a gaunt giant on a lean nag, that the book lives and will live through [his] sheer vitality. . . . He stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish, and gallant. The parody has become a paragon." And V. S. Pritchett observed: "Don Quixote begins as a province, turns into Spain, and ends as a universe. . . . The true spell of Cervantes is that he is a natural magician in pure story-telling."


    The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun-
    dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices. [via]

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  • Ellen Foster
    by Kaye Gibbons
    ISBN 067972866X (0-679-72866-X)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Oprah Book Club® Selection, October 1997: Kaye Gibbons is a writer who brings a short story sensibility to her novels. Rather than take advantage of the novel's longer form to paint her visions in broad, sweeping strokes, Gibbons prefers to concentrate on just one corner of the canvas and only a few colors to produce her small masterpieces. In Gibbons's case, her canvas is the American South and her colors are all the shades of gray.

    In Ellen Foster, the title character is an 11-year-old orphan who refers to herself as "old Ellen," an appellation that is disturbingly apt. Ellen is an old woman in a child's body; her frail, unhappy mother dies, her abusive father alternately neglects her and makes advances on her, and she is shuttled from one uncaring relative's home to another before she finally takes matters into her own hands and finds herself a place to belong. There is something almost Dickensian about Ellen's tribulations; like Oliver Twist, David Copperfield or a host of other literary child heroes, Ellen is at the mercy of predatory adults, with only her own wit and courage--and the occasional kindness of others--to help her through. That she does, in fact, survive her childhood and even rise above it is the book's bittersweet victory. [via]

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  • Eminent Victorians
    by Lytton Strachey
    ISBN 0679640126 (0-679-64012-6)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    The four biographical essays that make up Eminent Victorians created something of a stir when they were first published in the spring of 1918, bringing their author instant fame. In his flamboyant collection, Lytton Strachey chose to stray far from the traditional mode of biography: "Those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead--who does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of design?" Instead he provided impressionistic but acute (and, some said, skewed) portraits. Rarely does Strachey explore the details of a subject's daily or family life unless they point directly to an issue of character. In short, he pioneered a deeply sardonic and often scathingly funny biographical style.

    None of Strachey's Victorians emerge unscathed. In his hands, Florence Nightingale is not a gentle archangel descended from heaven to minister sweetly to wounded soldiers, but rather an exacting, dictatorial, and judgmental crusader. Her "pen, in the virulence of its volubility, would rush ... to the denunciation of an incompetent surgeon or the ridicule of a self-sufficient nurse. Her sarcasm searched the ranks of the officials with the deadly and unsparing precision of a machine-gun. Her nicknames were terrible. She respected no one." Dr. Thomas Arnold, the man appointed to revamp the very private British public school system, fares little better: in Strachey's acid ink, he became "the founder of the worship of athletics and the worship of good form." In this same vain, military hero General Gordon is portrayed as a temperamental, irascible hermit, occasionally drunk and often found in the company of young boys--a man who tended to forget and forgo the tenets found in the Bible he kept with him always. And the powerful and popular Cardinal Manning, who came within a hair's breadth of succeeding Pope Pius IX, belonged, Strachey writes, "to that class of eminent ecclesiastics ... who have been distinguished less for saintliness and learning than for practical ability."

    As he offered up indelible sketches of his less-than-fab four, Strachey was intent on critiquing established mores. This effortlessly superior wit knew full well that deep convictions and good deeds often go hand in hand with hypocrisy, arrogance, and egomania. His task was to pique those who pretended they did not. --Jordana Moskowitz [via]

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  • The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill
    by Edwin A. Burtt
    ISBN 0679601317 (0-679-60131-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    The thirteen essays in this Modern Library edition comprise a complete survey of the golden age of English philosophy.  The anthology begins in the early seventeenth century with Francis Bacon's comprehensive program for the total reorganization of all knowledge; it culminates, some two hundred and fifty years later, with John Stuart Mill.  The thinkers represented here are the creators of the twentieth-century world.  Indebted to them is a long line of economists, sociologists, and political leaders whose work has profoundly influenced the life and thought of our own time.  

    Included are the excerpts from Francis Bacon's The Great Instauration, Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, Jeremy Bentham's An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, and John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.  The complete texts are provided for Locke's second "Treatise of Government", George Berkeley's "Treatise Concerning the Principle's of Human Knowledge", David Hume's "Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" and "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion", John Gay's "Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality", James Mill's "Government", and John Stuart Mill's "Utilitarianism" and "On Liberty".  With an introduction as well as nine biographical prefaces by Edwin A. Burtt. [via]

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  • The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States
    by John Fay, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison, Robert Scigliano
    ISBN 0679603255 (0-679-60325-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    The series of essays that comprise The Federalist constitutes one of the key texts of the American Revolution and the democratic system created in the wake of independence. Written in 1787 and 1788 by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay to promote the ratification of the proposed Constitution, these papers stand as perhaps the most eloquent testimonial to democracy that exists. They describe the ideas behind the American system of government: the separation of powers; the organization of Congress; the respective positions of the executive, legislative, and judiciary; and much more. The Federalist remains essential reading for anyone interested in politics and government, and indeed for anyone seeking a foundational statement about democracy and America.

    This new edition of The Federalist is edited by Robert Scigliano, a professor in the political science department at Boston College. His substantive Introduction sheds clarifying new light on the historical context and meaning of The Federalist. Scigliano also provides a fresh and definitive analysis of the disputed authorship of several sections of this crucial work. [via]

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  • Fury: A Novel
    by Salman Rushdie
    ISBN 067946333X (0-679-46333-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    life is fury. Fury-sexual, oedipal, political, magical, brutal- drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise-the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untrammeled lord of creation. We raise each other to the heights of joy. We tear each other limb from bloody limb." malik solanka, historian of ideas and dollmaker extraordinaire, steps out of his life one day, abandons his family without a word of explanation, and flees london for new york. There's a fury within him, and he fears he has become dangerous to those he loves. He arrives in new york at a time of unprecedented plenty, in the highest hour of america's wealth and power, seeking to "erase" himself. Eat me, america, he prays, and give me peace.but fury is all around him. Cabdrivers spout invective. A serial killer is murdering women with a lump of concrete. The petty spats and bone-deep resentments of the metropolis engulf him. His own thoughts, emotions, and desires, meanwhile, are also running wild. A tall, green-eyed young blonde in a d'angelo voodoo baseball cap is in store for him. As is another woman, with whom he will fall in love and be drawn toward a different fury, whose roots lie on the far side of the world. Fury is a work of explosive energy, at once a pitiless and pitch-black comedy, a profoundly disturbing inquiry into the darkest side of human nature, and a love story of mesmerizing force. It is also an astonishing portrait of new york. Not since the bombay of midnight's children have a time and place been so intensely and accurately captured in a novel. In his eighth novel, salman rushdie brilliantly entwines moments of anger and frenzy with those of humor, honesty, and intimacy. Fury is, above all, a masterly chronicle of the human condition [via]

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  • The Gift
    by Vladimir Nabokov, Michael Scammel
    ISBN 0679727256 (0-679-72725-6)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    For most of his life, Vladimir Nabokov was quite literally a man without a country. It's a small irony, then, that his career falls so neatly into national phases: Russian, German, French, and American, plus the protracted coda he spend in a Swiss luxury hotel during his final decade. The Gift, which he wrote between 1935 and 1937 in Berlin, is the grand summation of his second phase. It describes, for starters, the sentimental education of a young Russian writer, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev. This hyphenated creation has more than a few things in common with the author, despite Nabokov's vehement denial in the novel's foreword. Still, only a nitwit would read The Gift for its autobiographical revelations. What this early masterpiece does offer is a wealth of lyrical, witty, heartbreaking prose, beautifully translated from the Russian by Michael Scammell (with an assist from Nabokov himself). Who else would note the way a street rises "at a barely perceptible angle, beginning with a post office and ending with a church, like an epistolary novel"? Who else has ever administered the satirical shiv to his characters with such deadly, almost affectionate aplomb?

    Shirin himself was a thickset man with a reddish crew cut, always badly shaved and wearing large spectacles behind which, as in two aquariums, swam two tiny, transparent eyes--which were completely impervious to visual impressions. He was blind like Milton, deaf like Beethoven, and a blockhead to boot.
    Of course, only a fraction of The Gift is taken up with this sort of demolition derby. Fyodor's romance with Zina, for example, occasions the most ardent prose of Nabokov's career: "And not only was Zina cleverly and elegantly made to measure for him by a very painstaking fate, but both of them, forming a single shadow, were made to the measure of something not quite comprehensible, but wonderful and benevolent and continuously surrounding them." (Shades of Volodya and Véra? Only the deceased husband and wife, and perhaps Stacy Schiff, know for sure.)

    At the same time, The Gift is a brilliant, mesmerizing riff on the history of Russian literature, with elaborate bouquets tossed to Pushkin and Gogol. There's also a hilarious yet somehow tender evisceration of the do-gooding polemicist Nikolai Chernyshevski--which was suppressed, in fact, when the novel was originally serialized by a Russian émigré magazine. As should be clear by now, The Gift defies any attempt at quick-and-dirty summary. But the book plays the most pleasurable kind of havoc with our stuffy notions of narrative structure and linguistic protocol. And as Nabokov repeatedly wraps the reader's consciousness around his little finger, he never holds back on that ultimate literary gift: pleasure. --James Marcus [via]

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  • Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural
    by Herbert A. Wise, Phyllis Cerf Wagner
    ISBN 0679601287 (0-679-60128-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    This bargain of a book is a thick hardcover anthology--more than 1,000 pages long--containing stories of naturalistic and supernatural terror. First published in 1944, it has stood the test of time and become a classic in the field. Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural is rivaled only by David G. Hartwell's The Dark Descent as the essential horror anthology. Fortunately, there's little overlap: of the 52 tales in this anthology, only 5 are duplicated in The Dark Descent. Included here are such memorable stories as W.W. Jacobs's "The Monkey's Paw"; Saki's "Sredni Vashtar" and "The Open Window"; Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game"; Conrad Aiken's "Silent Snow, Secret Snow"; Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan"; along with gems by E.F. Benson, H.G. Wells, Ambrose Bierce, Rudyard Kipling, Walter de la Mare, M.R. James, Guy de Maupassant, and O. Henry. [via]

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  • Grendel
    by Emil Antonucci, John Champlin Gardner
    ISBN 0679723110 (0-679-72311-0)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Grendel is a beautiful and heartbreaking modern retelling of the Beowulf epic from the point of view of the monster, Grendel, the villain of the 8th-century Anglo-Saxon epic. This book benefits from both of Gardner's careers: in addition to his work as a novelist, Gardner was a noted professor of medieval literature and a scholar of ancient languages. [via]

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  • Shakespeare, William: The Histories and Poems of William Shakespeare
    The Histories and Poems of William Shakespeare
    by William Shakespeare
    ISBN 0679601430 (0-679-60143-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • The History of the Conquest of Mexico
    by William H. Prescott
    ISBN 0679602992 (0-679-60299-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

            =


    "It is a magnificent epic," said William H. Prescott after the publication of History of the Conquest of Mexico in 1843. Since then, his sweeping account of Cortés's subjugation of the Aztec people has endured as a landmark work of scholarship and dramatic storytelling. This pioneering study presents a compelling view of the clash of civilizations that reverberates in Latin America to this day.
    ----"Regarded simply from the standpoint of literary criticism, the Conquest of Mexico is Prescott's masterpiece," judged his biographer Harry Thurston Peck. "More than that, it is one of the most brilliant examples which the English language possesses of literary art applied to historical narration. . . . Here, as nowhere else, has Prescott succeeded in delineating character. All the chief actors of his great historic drama not only live and breathe, but they are as distinctly differentiated as they must have been in life. Cortés and his lieutenants are persons whom we actually come to know in the pages of Pres-cott. . . . Over against these brilliant figures stands the melancholy form of Montezuma, around whom, even from the first, one feels gathering the darkness of his coming fate. He reminds one of some hero of Greek tragedy, doomed to destruction and intensely conscious of it, yet striving in vain against the decree of an inexorable des-
    tiny. . . . [Prescott] transmuted the acquisitions of laborious research into an enduring monument of pure literature." [via]

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  • A History of Venice
    by John Julius Norwich
    ISBN 0679721975 (0-679-72197-5)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Traces the rise ot empire of this city from its 5th century beginnings all the way through until 1797 when Napolean put an end to the thousand year-old Republic. 32 pages of black and white photos, 4 maps and charts. [via]

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  • Howards End
    by E. M. Forster
    ISBN 0679600698 (0-679-60069-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • I Promise to Be Good : The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud
    by Arthur Rimbaud, Wyatt Mason
    ISBN 067964301X (0-679-64301-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    One of the most written-about literary figures in the past decade, Arthur Rimbaud left few traces when he abandoned poetry at age twenty-one and disappeared into the African desert. Although the dozen biographies devoted to Rimbauds life depend on one main source for informationhis own correspondencea complete edition of these remarkable letters has never been published in English. Until now.

    A moving document of decline, Rimbauds letters begin with the enthusiastic artistic pronouncements of a fifteen-year-old genius, and end with the bitter what-ifs of a man whose life has slipped disastrously away. But whether soapboxing on the essence of art, or struggling under the yoke of self-imposed exile in the desert of his later years, Rimbaud was incapable of writing an uninteresting sentence. As translator and editor Wyatt Mason makes clear in his engaging Introduction, the letters reveal a Rimbaud very different from our expectations. Rimbaudpresented by many biographers as a bohemian wild manis unveiled as diligent in his pursuit of his goals . . . wildly, soberly ambitious, in poetry, in everything.

    I Promise to Be Good: The Letters of Arthur Rimbaud is the second and final volume in Masons authoritative presentation of Rimbauds writings. Called by Edward Hirsch the definitive translation for our time, Masons first volume, Rimbaud Complete (Modern Library, 2002), brought Rimbauds poetry and prose into vivid focus. In I Promise to Be Good, Mason adds the missing epistolary pieces to our picture of Rimbaud. These letters, he writes, are proofs in all their varietyof impudence and precocity, of tenderness and ragefor the existence of Arthur Rimbaud. I Promise to Be Good allows English-language readers to see with new eyes one of the most extraordinary poets in history. [via]

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  • I Served the King of England
    by Bohumil Hrabal
    ISBN 0679727868 (0-679-72786-8)
    Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    A comic, picaresque novel set against the backdrop of twentieth-century Czech history, about the rise and fall of an ambitious busboy in Prague. [via]

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  • In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences
    by Truman Capote
    ISBN 067960023X (0-679-60023-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    "Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans--in fact, few Kansans--had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there." If all Truman Capote did was invent a new genre--journalism written with the language and structure of literature--this "nonfiction novel" about the brutal slaying of the Clutter family by two would-be robbers would be remembered as a trail-blazing experiment that has influenced countless writers. But Capote achieved more than that. He wrote a true masterpiece of creative nonfiction. The images of this tale continue to resonate in our minds: 16-year-old Nancy Clutter teaching a friend how to bake a cherry pie, Dick Hickock's black '49 Chevrolet sedan, Perry Smith's Gibson guitar and his dreams of gold in a tropical paradise--the blood on the walls and the final "thud-snap" of the rope-broken necks. [via]

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  • Killer Angels
    by Michael Shaara
    ISBN 0679643249 (0-679-64324-9)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    This novel reveals more about the Battle of Gettysburg than any piece of learned nonfiction on the same subject. Michael Shaara's account of the three most important days of the Civil War features deft characterizations of all of the main actors, including Lee, Longstreet, Pickett, Buford, and Hancock. The most inspiring figure in the book, however, is Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, whose 20th Maine regiment of volunteers held the Union's left flank on the second day of the battle. This unit's bravery at Little Round Top helped turned the tide of the war against the rebels. There are also plenty of maps, which convey a complete sense of what happened July 1-3, 1863. Reading about the past is rarely so much fun as on these pages. [via]

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  • Laughter in the Dark
    by Vladimir Nabokov
    ISBN 0679724508 (0-679-72450-8)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Albinus, a respectable, middle-aged man and aspiring filmmaker, abandons his wife for a lover half his age: Margot, who wants to become a movie star herself. When Albinus introduces her to Rex, an American movie producer, disaster ensues. What emerges is an elegantly sardonic and irresistibly ironic novel of desire, deceit, and deception, a curious romance set in the film world of Berlin in the 1930s. [via]

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  • Les Miserables
    by Victor Hugo, Charles E. Wilbour
    ISBN 0679600124 (0-679-60012-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Sensational, dramatic, packed with rich excitement and filled with the sweep and violence of human passions, LES MISERABLES is not only superb adventure but a powerful social document. The story of how the convict Jean-Valjean struggled to escape his past and reaffirm his humanity, in a world brutalized by poverty and ignorance, became the gospel of the poor and the oppressed.


    From the Paperback edition. [via]

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  • Nabokov, Vladimir: Look at the Harlequins!
    Look at the Harlequins!
    by Vladimir Nabokov
    ISBN 0679727280 (0-679-72728-0)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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  • Mann, Thomas: The Magic Mountain
    The Magic Mountain
    by Thomas Mann, Helen T. Lowe-Porter
    ISBN 0679600418 (0-679-60041-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Lessing, Doris: The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
    The Making of the Representative for Planet 8
    by Doris Lessing
    ISBN 0679720154 (0-679-72015-4)
    Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • Baker, Nicholson: The Mezzanine
    The Mezzanine
    by Nicholson Baker
    ISBN 0679725768 (0-679-72576-8)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil: A Savannah Story
    by John Berendt
    ISBN 0679643419 (0-679-64341-9)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil has been heralded as a "lyrical work of nonfiction," and the book's extremely graceful prose depictions of some of Savannah, Georgia's most colorful eccentrics--remarkable characters who could have once prospered in a William Faulkner novel or Eudora Welty short story--were certainly a critical factor in its tremendous success. (One resident into whose orbit Berendt fell, the Lady Chablis, went on to become a minor celebrity in her own right.) But equally important was Berendt's depiction of Savannah socialite Jim Williams as he stands trial for the murder of Danny Hansford, a moody, violence-prone hustler--and sometime companion to Williams--characterized by locals as a "walking streak of sex." So feel free to call it a "true crime classic" without a trace of shame. [via]

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  • Milton, John: Milton: Poems
    Milton: Poems
    by John Milton
    ISBN 0679450998 (0-679-45099-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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  • On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo
    by R. J. Hollingdale, Walter Arnold Kaufmann, Friedrich Nietzsche
    ISBN 0679724621 (0-679-72462-1)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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    Book summary:

    The great philosopher's major work on ethics, along with ECCE HOMO, Nietzche's remarkable review of his life and works. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. [via]

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  • Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass
    by Isak Dinesen
    ISBN 0679724753 (0-679-72475-3)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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    Book summary:

    With classic simplicity and a painter's feeling for atmosphere and detail, Isak Dinesen tells of the years she spent from 1914 to 1931 managing a coffee plantation in Kenya. [via]

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  • The Palm at the End of the Mind
    by Wallace Stevens, Holly Stevens
    ISBN 0679724451 (0-679-72445-1)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Paradise
    by Dante Alighieri, Anthony M. Esolen, Gustave Dore
    ISBN 0679642692 (0-679-64269-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    The Divine Comedy is a complete scale of the depths and heights of human emotion," wrote T.S. Eliot.  "The last canto of the Paradiso is to my thinking the highest point that poetry has ever reached or ever can reach."

    The Divine Comedy stands as one of the towering creations of world literature, and its climactic section, the Paradiso, is perhaps the most ambitious poetic attempt ever made to represent the merging of individual destiny with universal order.  Having passed through Hell and Purgatory, Dante is led by his beloved Beatrice to the upper sphere of Paradise, wherein lie the sublime truths of Divine will and eternal salvation, to at last experience a rapturous vision of God.

    "A spectacular achievement," said poet and critic Archibald MacLeish of John Ciardi's version of Dante's masterpiece.  "A text with the clarity and sobriety of a first-rate prose translation which at the same time suggests in powerful and unmistakable ways the run and rhythm of the great original." [via]

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  • Paradiso
    by Dante Alighieri, John Ciardi
    ISBN 0679602119 (0-679-60211-9)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    The Divine Comedy is a complete scale of the depths and heights of human emotion," wrote T.S. Eliot.  "The last canto of the Paradiso is to my thinking the highest point that poetry has ever reached or ever can reach."

    The Divine Comedy stands as one of the towering creations of world literature, and its climactic section, the Paradiso, is perhaps the most ambitious poetic attempt ever made to represent the merging of individual destiny with universal order.  Having passed through Hell and Purgatory, Dante is led by his beloved Beatrice to the upper sphere of Paradise, wherein lie the sublime truths of Divine will and eternal salvation, to at last experience a rapturous vision of God.

    "A spectacular achievement," said poet and critic Archibald MacLeish of John Ciardi's version of Dante's masterpiece.  "A text with the clarity and sobriety of a first-rate prose translation which at the same time suggests in powerful and unmistakable ways the run and rhythm of the great original." [via]

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  • The Plague
    by Albert Camus, Stuart Gilbert
    ISBN 0679720219 (0-679-72021-9)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    The Nobel prize-winning Albert Camus, who died in 1960, could not have known how grimly current his existentialist novel of epidemic and death would remain. Set in Algeria, in northern Africa, The Plague is a powerful study of human life and its meaning in the face of a deadly virus that sweeps dispassionately through the city, taking a vast percentage of the population with it. [via]

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  • A Prayer for Owen Meany
    by John Irving
    ISBN 0679642595 (0-679-64259-5)
    Hardcover, Modern Library

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    Book summary:

    Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mom with a baseball and believes--accurately--that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom. John Irving's novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movie Simon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel since Flannery O'Connor's work. Irving fans will find much that is familiar: the New England prep-school-town setting, symbolic amputations of man and beast, the Garp-like unknown father of the narrator (Owen's orphaned best friend), the rough comedy. The scene of doltish the doltish headmaster driving a trashed VW down the school's marble staircase is a marvelous set piece. So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in. But it's all, as Highlights magazine used to put it, "fun with a purpose." When Owen plays baby Jesus in the pageants, and glimpses a tombstone with his death date while enacting A Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn't cancel the fact that he was born to be martyred. The book's countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy--from Vietnam to the Contras.

    The book's mystic religiosity is steeped in Robertson Davies's Deptford trilogy, and the fatal baseball relates to the fatefully misdirected snowball in the first Deptford novel, Fifth Business. Tiny, symbolic Owen echoes the hero of Irving's teacher Günter Grass's The Tin Drum--the two characters share the same initials. A rollicking entertainment, Owen Meany is also a meditation on literature, history, and God. --Tim Appelo [via]

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  • Princesses: The Six Daughters Of George III
    by Flora Fraser
    ISBN 0679451188 (0-679-45118-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    From acclaimed biographer Flora Fraser, a brilliant group biography of the six daughters of Mad King George III.
    Fraser takes us into the heart of the British royal family during the tumultuous period of the American and French revolutions and beyond, illuminating the complicated lives of these exceptional women: Princess Royal, the eldest, constantly at odds with her mother; home-loving, family-minded Augusta; plump Elizabeth, a gifted amateur artist; Mary, the bland beauty of the family; Sophia, emotional and prone to take refuge in illness; and Amelia, the most turbulent and tempestuous of all the Princesses. Weaving together letters and historical accounts, Fraser re-creates their world in all its frustrations and excitements.

    The six sisters, though handsome, accomplished and extremely well educated, were kept from marrying by George III, and Fraser describes how they remained subject to their father for many years, while he teetered on the brink of mental collapse. The King may have believed that his six daughters were happy to live celibately at Windsor, but secretly, as Frasers absorbing narrative of royal repression and sexual license shows, the sisters enjoyed startling freedom. Several of them, torn between love for their ailing father and longing for independence, forged their own scandalous and subversive lives within the castle walls. With a discerning eye for psychological detail and a keen feminist sensibility, Fraser delves into these clandestine love affairs, revealing the truth about Sophias illegitimate baby; examining Amelia's intimate correspondence with her soldier-lover; and investigating the eventual marriages of Princesses Royal, Elizabeth and Mary.

    Never before has the historical searchlight been turned with such sympathy and acuity on George III and his family. With unparalleled access to royal and private family papers, Flora Fraser has created a revelatory portrait of six fascinating women and their place in history. [via]

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  • Purgatorio
    by Dante Alighieri, John Ciardi
    ISBN 0679602100 (0-679-60210-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Purgatory
    by Anthony M. Esolen, Dante, Gustave Dore
    ISBN 0679642684 (0-679-64268-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    A brilliant new translation of the centerpiece of The Divine Comedy

    Purgatory, the mountain that straightens souls made crooked by the world, is Dantes single most conceptually brilliant creation. Anthony Esolens vivid and innovative new rendering unearths Dantes own voice with unprecedented vigor, accuracy, and a masterly use of English meter. It will set the standard for years to come.

    Esolens Introduction incisively explores Dantes theological universe: the nature of Purgatory, how Dante came to invent it, and how Purgatory is finally about restoration, liberation, and friendship. Special features, from an appendix that reproduces key sources to extensive explanatory notes, make this a particularly illuminating edition for both expert and newcomer. [via]

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  • Lewin, Esther: Random House Thesaurus of Slang
    Random House Thesaurus of Slang
    by Esther Lewin, Random House Staff
    ISBN 0679727000 (0-679-72700-0)
    Softcover, Random House Information Group

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  • Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich: Real Life of Sebastian Knight
    Real Life of Sebastian Knight
    by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
    ISBN 0679727264 (0-679-72726-4)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Red Harvest
    by Dashiell Hammett
    ISBN 0679722610 (0-679-72261-0)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    When the last honest citizen of Poisonville was murdered, the Continental Op stayed on to punish the guilty--even if that meant taking on an entire town. Red Harvest is more than a superb crime novel: it is a classic exploration of corruption and violence in the American grain. [via]

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  • Smullyan, Raymond M.: The Riddle of Scheherazade : And Other Amazing Puzzles, Ancient and Modern
    The Riddle of Scheherazade : And Other Amazing Puzzles, Ancient and Modern
    by Raymond M. Smullyan
    ISBN 0679446346 (0-679-44634-6)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • Rimbaud, Arthur: Rimbaud Complete
    Rimbaud Complete
    by Arthur Rimbaud, Wyatt Mason
    ISBN 0679642307 (0-679-64230-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • The Road To Reality: A Complete Guide To The Laws Of The Universe
    by Roger Penrose
    ISBN 0679454438 (0-679-45443-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    From one of our greatest living scientists, a magnificent book that provides, for the serious lay reader, the most comprehensive and sophisticated account we have yet had of the physical universe and the essentials of its underlying mathematical theory.

    Since the earliest efforts of the ancient Greeks to find order amid the chaos around us, there has been continual accelerated progress toward understanding the laws that govern our universe. And the particularly important advances made by means of the revolutionary theories of relativity and quantum mechanics have deeply altered our vision of the cosmos and provided us with models of unprecedented accuracy.

    What Roger Penrose so brilliantly accomplishes in this book is threefold. First, he gives us an overall narrative description of our present understanding of the universe and its physical behaviorsfrom the unseeable, minuscule movement of the subatomic particle to the journeys of the planets and the stars in the vastness of time and space.


    Second, he evokes the extraordinary beauty that lies in the mysterious and profound relationships between these physical behaviors and the subtle mathematical ideas that explain and interpret them.

    Third, Penrose comes to the arresting conclusionas he explores the compatibility of the two grand classic theories of modern physicsthat Einsteins general theory of relativity stands firm while quantum theory, as presently constituted, still needs refashioning.

    Along the way, he talks about a wealth of issues, controversies, and phenomena; about the roles of various kinds of numbers in physics, ideas of calculus and modern geometry, visions of infinity, the big bang, black holes, the profound challenge of the second law of thermodynamics, string and M theory, loop quantum gravity, twistors, and educated guesses about science in the near future. In The Road to Reality he has given us a work of enormous scope, intention, and achievementa complete and essential work of science [via]

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  • Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? Teaching Great Poetry to Children.: Teaching Great Poetry to Children
    by Kenneth Koch
    ISBN 0679724710 (0-679-72471-0)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    In 'Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?' the celebrated poet Kenneth Koch conveys the imaginative splendor of great poetry--by Blake, Donne, Stevens, Lorca, and others--and then shows how it may be taught so as to help children write poetry of their own. [via]

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  • Sanditon and Other Stories
    by Jane Austen, Peter Washington
    ISBN 0679447199 (0-679-44719-9)
    Hardcover, Everymans Library

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    Book summary:

    (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

    Readers of Jane Austens six great novels are left hungering for more, and more there is: the marvelous unpublished manuscripts she left behind, collected here.

    Sanditon might have been Austens greatest novel had she lived to finish it. Its subject matter astonishes: here is Austen observing the birth pangs of the culture of commerce, as her country-bred heroine, a foolish baronet, a family of hypochondriacs, and a mysterious West Indian heiress collide against the background hum of real-estate development at a seaside resort.

    The Watsons, begun in 1804 but never completed, tells the story of a young woman who was raised by a rich aunt and who finds herself shipped back to the comparative poverty and social clumsiness of her own family.

    The novella Lady Susan is a miniature masterpiece, featuring Austens only villainous protagonist. Lady Susans subtle, single-minded, and ruthless pursuit of power makes the reader regret that Austen never again wrote a novel with a scheming widow for its heroine.

    The special joy of this collection lies in Austens juveniliatiny novels, the enchantingly funny Love and Freindship, comic fragments, and a (very) partial history of Englandromping miniatures that she wrote in her teens. Their high spirits, hilarity, and control offer delicious proof that Austen was an artist born, not made. [via]

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  • The Second Sex
    by Simone De Beauvoir, H.M. Parshley
    ISBN 0679724516 (0-679-72451-6)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir posed questions many men, and women, had yet to ponder when the book was released in 1953. "One wonders if women still exist, if they will always exist, whether or not it is desirable that they should ...," she says in this comprehensive treatise on women. She weaves together history, philosophy, economics, biology, and a host of other disciplines to show women's place in the world and to postulate on the power of sexuality. This is a powerful piece of writing in a time before "feminism" was even a phrase, much less a movement. [via]

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  • Hardwick, Elizabeth: Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature
    Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature
    by Elizabeth Hardwick
    ISBN 0679724273 (0-679-72427-3)
    Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • The Selected Poetry
    by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Nancy Milford
    ISBN 0679642374 (0-679-64237-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    "These are the poems that made Edna St. Vincent Millays reputation when she was young. Saucy, insolent, flip, and defiant, her little verses sting the page," writes Nancy Milford in the Introduction to The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. As one of Americas most beloved poetsand the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1923Millay defined a generation with her intoxicating voice of liberation. Most remembered for her passionate, lyrical voice and mastery of the sonnet form, Millay explores love, death, and nature in her poetry while deftly employing allusions to the classical and the romantic. In 1917, at the age of twenty, she burst onto the New York literary scene with the publication of her first book of poetry, Renascence and Other Poems, which is included in this volume.

    Edited by Millay biographer Nancy Milford, The Selected Poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay also includes the collections A Few Figs from Thistles and Second April, as well as "The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver" and eight of Millays sonnets from the early twenties. [via]

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  • Seven Gothic Tales
    by Isak Dinesen
    ISBN 0679600868 (0-679-60086-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Originally published in 1934, Seven Gothic Tales, the first book by "one of the finest and most singular artists of our time" (The Atlantic), is a modern classic. Here are seven exquisite tales combining the keen psychological insight characteristic of the modern short story with the haunting mystery of the nineteenth-century Gothic tale, in the tradition of writers such as Goethe, Hoffmann, and Poe.


    From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]

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  • Shalimar The Clown
    by Salman Rushdie
    ISBN 0679463356 (0-679-46335-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Shalimar the Clown is a masterpiece from one of our greatest writers, a dazzling novel that brings together the fiercest passions of the heart and the gravest conflicts of our time into an astonishingly powerful, all-encompassing story.

    Max Ophuls memorable life ends violently in Los Angeles in 1993 when he is murdered by his Muslim driver Noman Sher Noman, also known as Shalimar the Clown. At first the crime seems to be politically motivated  Ophuls was previously ambassador to India, and later US counterterrorism chief  but it is much more.

    Ophuls is a giant, an architect of the modern world: a Resistance hero and best-selling author, brilliant economist and clandestine US intelligence official. But it is as Ambassador to India that the seeds of his demise are planted, thanks to another of his great roles  irresistible lover. Visiting the Kashmiri village of Pachigam, Ophuls lures an impossibly beautiful dancer, the ambitious (and willing) Boonyi Kaul, away from her husband, and installs her as his mistress in Delhi. But their affair cannot be kept secret, and when Boonyi returns home, disgraced and obese, it seems that all she has waiting for her is the inevitable revenge of her husband: Noman Sher Noman, Shalimar the Clown. He was an acrobat and tightrope walker in their villages traditional theatrical troupe; but soon Shalimar is trained as a militant in Kashmirs increasingly brutal insurrection, and eventually becomes a terrorist with a global remit and a deeply personal mission of vengeance.

    With sweeping brilliance, Salman Rushdie portrays fanatical mullahs as fully as documentary filmmakers, rural headmen as completely as British spies; he describes villages that compete to make the most splendid feasts, the mentality behind martial law, and the celebrity of Los Angeles policemen, all with the same genius.

    But the main story is only part of the story. In this stunningly rich book everything is connected, and everyone is a part of everyone else. Shalimar the Clown is a true work of the era of globalization, intricately mingling lives and countries, and finding unexpected and sometimes tragic connections between the seemingly disparate. The violent fate of Kashmir recalls Strasbourgs experience in World War Two; Resistance heroism against the Nazis counterpoints Al-Qaedas terror in Pakistan, North Africa and the Philippines. 1960s Pachigam is not so far from post-war London, or the Hollywood-driven present-day Los Angeles where Maxs daughter by Boonyi, India Ophuls, beautiful, strong-willed, modern, waits, as vengeance plays itself out.

    A powerful love story, intensely political and historically informed, Shalimar the Clown is also profoundly human, an involving story of peoples lives, desires and crises  India Ophuls desperate search for her real mother, for example; Maxs wifes attempts to deal with his philandering  as well as, in typical Rushdie fashion, a magical tale where the dead speak and the future can be foreseen.

    Shalimar the Clown is steeped in both the Hindu epic Ramayana and the great European novelists, melding the storytelling traditions of east and west into a magnificently fruitful blend  and serves, itself, as a corrective to the destructive clashes of values it scorchingly depicts. Enthralling, comic and amazingly abundant, it will no doubt come to be seen as one of the key books of our time.


    The second portent came on the morning of the murder, when Shalimar the driver approached Max Ophuls at breakfast, handed him his schedule card for the day, and gave in his notice. The ambassadors drivers tended to be short-term appointees, inclined to move on to new adventures in pornography or hairdressing, and Max was inured to the cycle of acquisition and loss. This time, however, he was shaken, though he did not care to show it. He concentrated on his days appointments, trying not to let the card shake. He knew Shalimars real name. He knew the village he came from and the story of his life. He knew the intimate connection between his own scandalous past and this grave unscandalous man who never laughed in spite of the creased eyes that hinted at a happier past, this man with a gymnasts body and a tragedians face who had slowly become more of a valet than a mere driver, a silent yet utterly solicitous body servant who understood what Max needed before he knew it himself, the lighted cigar that materialized just as he was reaching for the humidor, the right cuff-links that were laid out on his bed each morning with the perfect shirt, the ideal temperature for his bathwater, the right times to be absent as well as the correct moments to appear. The ambassador was carried back to his Strasbourgeois childhood years in a Belle Époque mansion near the now-destroyed old synagogue, and found himself marvelling at the rebirth in this man from a distant mountain valley. . . .
    from Shalimar the Clown [via]

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  • Rushdie, Salman: Shame
    Shame
    by Salman Rushdie
    ISBN 0679722041 (0-679-72204-1)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior
    by David Sibley, Chris Elphick, John B. Dunning
    ISBN 0679451234 (0-679-45123-4)
    Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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    Book summary:

    From the creator of the seminal field guide, The Sibley Guide to Birds, comes another indispensable book for bird watchers. This veritable bible to the world of birds is the collaborative effort of 48 expert birders and biologists, who combine scientific accuracy and detail with an easily readable and well-organized format. How does a tiny chickadee survive subzero temperatures? How do flocks of birds synchronize their flights? How can an albatross cross miles of ocean without flapping its wings? Which bird brains are actually intelligent? It's all here in essays giving an overview of avian evolution, biology, and the aerodynamics of flight and in chapters devoted to the 80 bird families of North America, each one detailing taxonomy, habitats, feeding, breeding, vocalizations, migrations, and more. Concerned about declining populations, Sibley also discusses the conservation status of each species and the factors that threaten them. This fascinating source of information is destined to be a well-thumbed companion. -- Lesley Reed [via]

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  • The Sibley Guide to Birds
    by David Sibley, Audubon Society
    ISBN 0679451226 (0-679-45122-6)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    More than 10 years in the making, David Sibley's Guide to Birds is a monumental achievement. The beautiful watercolor illustrations (6,600, covering 810 species in North America) and clear, descriptive text place Sibley and his work squarely in the tradition of John James Audubon and Roger Tory Peterson; more than a birdwatcher and evangelizer, he is one of the foremost bird painters and authorities in the U.S. Still, his field guide will no doubt spark debate. Unlike Kenn Kaufman's Focus Guide, Sibley's is unapologetically aimed at the converted. Beginning birders may want to keep a copy of Sibley at home as a reference, but the wealth of information will have the same effect on novices as trying to pick out a single sandpiper in a wheeling flock of thousands. The familiar yellow warbler, for instance, gets no less than nine individual illustrations documenting its geographic, seasonal, and sex variations--plus another eight smaller illustrations showing it in flight. Of course, more experienced birders will appreciate this sort of detail, along with Sibley's improvements on both Peterson and the National Geographic guide:

    • As in Peterson, Sibley employs a pointer system for key field markings--but additional text blurbs are included alongside the illustrations to facilitate identification.
    • Descriptive passages on identification are more detailed than those in most other field guides. For example, Sibley includes extensive information on the famously hard-to-distinguish hawks in the genus Accipiter (sharp-shinned, Cooper's, and northern goshawk), noting differences in leg thickness and wing beat that will be of use to more advanced birders. A section on the identification of "peeps" (small sandpipers) includes tips about seasonal molting and bill length. Confusing fall warblers, Empidonax flycatchers, and Alcids receive similar treatment.
    • As previously mentioned, ample space is given to illustrations that show plumage variations by age, sex, and geography within a single species. Thus, an entire page is devoted to the red-shouldered hawk and its differing appearances in the eastern U.S., Florida, and California; similarly, gulls are distinguished by age and warblers by sex.
    • Range maps are detailed and accurate, with breeding, wintering, and migration routes clearly depicted; rare but regular geographic occurrences are denoted by green dots.
    • The binding and paper stock are of exceptional quality. Despite its 544 pages, a reinforced paperback cover and sewn-in binding allow the book to be spread out flat without fear of breaking the binding.

    Some birders will be put off by the book's size. Slightly larger than the National Geographic guide, it's less portable than most field guides and will likely spend more time in cars and desks than on a birder's person while in the field. For some it will be a strictly stay-at-home companion guide to consult after a field trip; others may want to have it handy in a fannypack or backpack. But regardless of how it is used, Sibley's Guide to Birds is a significant addition to any birding library. "Birds are beautiful," the author writes in the preface, "their colors, shapes, actions, and sounds are among the most aesthetically pleasing in nature." Pleasing, too, is this comprehensive guide to their identification. --Langdon Cook [via]

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  • Siddhartha
    by Hermann Hesse, Susan Bernofsky, Tom Robbins
    ISBN 0679643362 (0-679-64336-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Hermann Hesses classic novel Siddhartha has delighted, inspired, and influenced generations of readers, writers, and thinkers. Though set in a place and time far removed from the Germany of 1922, the year of the books debut, the novel is infused with the sensibilities of Hesses time, synthesizing disparate philosophiesEastern religions, Jungian archetypes, Western individualisminto a unique vision of life as expressed through one mans search for meaning.

    It is the story of the quest of Siddhartha, a wealthy Indian Brahmin who casts off a life of privilege and comfort to seek spiritual fulfillment and wisdom. On his journey, Siddhartha encounters wandering ascetics, Buddhist monks, and successful merchants, as well as a courtesan named Kamala and a simple ferryman who has attained enlightenment. Traveling among these people and experiencing lifes vital passageslove, work, friendship, and fatherhoodSiddhartha discovers that true knowledge is guided from within.

    Susan Bernofskys magnificent new translation brings out Hesses inspired lyricism and his elegant, melodious cadences, illuminating the novels universal themes and timeless wisdom about the human condition.

    This original Modern Library edition includes a lively new Introduction by Tom Robbins and a glossary of Indian terms. [via]

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  • Potter, Dennis: The Singing Detective
    The Singing Detective
    by Dennis Potter
    ISBN 0679720464 (0-679-72046-4)
    Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • Sophie's Choice
    by William Styron
    ISBN 0679602895 (0-679-60289-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Three stories are told: a young Southerner wants to become a writer; a turbulent love-hate affair between a brilliant Jew and a beautiful Polish woman; and of an awful wound in that woman's past--one that impels both Sophie and Nathan toward destruction.


    From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]

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  • The Sparrow : A Novel
    by Mary Doria Russell
    ISBN 0679451501 (0-679-45150-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    In 2019, humanity finally finds proof of extraterrestrial life when a listening post in Puerto Rico picks up exquisite singing from a planet which will come to be known as Rakhat. While United Nations diplomats endlessly debate a possible first contact mission, the Society of Jesus quietly organizes an eight-person scientific expedition of its own. What the Jesuits find is a world so beyond comprehension that it will lead them to question the meaning of being "human." When the lone survivor of the expedition, Emilio Sandoz, returns to Earth in 2059, he will try to explain what went wrong... Words like "provocative" and "compelling" will come to mind as you read this shocking novel about first contact with a race that creates music akin to both poetry and prayer. [via]

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  • Speak, Memory
    by Vladimir Nabokov
    ISBN 0679723390 (0-679-72339-0)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    The late Vladimir Nabokov always did things his way, and his classic autobiography is no exception. No dry recital of dates, names, and addresses for this linguistic magician--instead, Speak, Memory is a succession of lapidary episodes, in which the factoids play second fiddle to the development of Nabokov's sensibility. There is, to be sure, an impressionistic whirl through the author's family history (including a gallery of Tartar princes and fin-de-siècle oddities). And Nabokov's account of his tenure at St. Petersburg's famous Tenishev School--where he counted Osip Mandelstam among his schoolmates--offers a lovely glimpse into the heart of Russia's silver age. Still, Nabokov is much too artful an autobiographer to present Speak, Memory as a slice of reality--a word, by the way, that he insisted must always be surrounded by quotation marks. [via]

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  • Spring Snow
    by Yukio Mishima
    ISBN 0679722416 (0-679-72241-6)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    The first novel of Mishima's landmark tetralogy, The Sea of fertility

    Spring Snow is set in Tokyo in 1912, when the hermetic world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders -- rich provincial families unburdened by tradition, whose money and vitality make them formidable contenders for social and political power.

    Among this rising new elite are the ambitious Matsugae, whose son has been raised in a family of the waning aristocracy, the elegant and attenuated Ayakura. Coming of age, he is caught up in the tensions between old and new -- fiercely loving and hating the exquisite, spirited Ayakura Satoko. He suffers in psychic paralysis until the shock of her engagement to a royal prince shows him the magnitude of his passion, and leads to a love affair that is as doomed as it was inevitable. [via]

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  • The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor: Who Drifted on a Life Raft for Ten Days Without Food or Water, Was Proclaimed a National Hero, Kissed by Beauty Queens, Made rich Through Publicity, a
    by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
    ISBN 067972205X (0-679-72205-X)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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    Book summary:

    Translated by Randolf Hogan. In 1955, Garcia Marquez was working for El Espectador, a newspaper in Bogota, when in February of that year eight crew members of the Caldas, a Colombian destroyer, were washed overboard and disappeared. Ten days later one of them turned up, barely alive, on a deserted beach in northern Colombia. This book, which originally appeared as a series of newspaper articles, is Garcia Marquez's account of that sailor's ordeal. [via]

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  • The Stranger
    by Albert Camus, Matthew Ward
    ISBN 0679720200 (0-679-72020-0)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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    Book summary:

    Through the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd." First published in 1946; now in a new translation by Matthew Ward. [via]

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  • Tales from Watership Down
    by Richard Adams, Susan Ralston
    ISBN 0679451250 (0-679-45125-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Watership Down was one of this century's best-loved works of imaginative literature. Now Richard Adams returns, to tell us what happened to the rabbits after their defeat of General Woundwort. Tales From Watership Down begins with some of the great folk stories well known to all rabbits. Then we listen in as Dandelion, the rabbits' master storyteller, relates the thrilling adventures experienced by Al-ahrairah, the mythical rabbit hero, and his stalwart, Rabscuttle, during the long journey home after their terrible encounter with the Black Rabbit of Inlé (as narrated in Watership Down ). Finally, in the principal part of the book, we are told eight enchanting stories about the rabbits of the Down-- Hazel, Fiver, Bigwig, and their companions--including the impact on the warren of the obsessive doe Flyairth, and the appointment of Hyzenthlay as a female Chief Rabbit and partner to Hazel. All readers-- the millions who remember Watership Down with the deepest affection, and also those for whom this volume will be their first encounter with the rabbits-- will find these nineteen tales utterly compelling, the fruit of Richard Adam's spellbinding narrative power and ability to conjure up a world that is at the same time both real and unreal. [via]

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  • Cain, James M.: Three by Cain
    Three by Cain
    by James M. Cain
    ISBN 0679723234 (0-679-72323-4)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Tin Drum
    by Gunter Grass, Ralph Manheim
    ISBN 067972575X (0-679-72575-X)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Meet Oskar Matzerath, "the eternal three-year-old drummer." On the morning of his third birthday, dressed in a striped pullover and patent leather shoes, and clutching his drumsticks and his new tin drum, young Oskar makes an irrevocable decision: "It was then that I declared, resolved, and determined that I would never under any circumstances be a politician, much less a grocer; that I would stop right there, remain as I was--and so I did; for many years I not only stayed the same size but clung to the same attire." Here is a Peter Pan story with a vengeance. But instead of Never-Never Land, Günter Grass gives us Danzig, a contested city on the Polish-German border; instead of Captain Hook and his pirates, we have the Nazis. And in place of Peter himself is Oskar, a twisted puer aeternis with a scream that can shatter glass and a drum rather than a shadow. First published in 1959, The Tin Drum's depiction of the Nazi era created a furor in Germany, for the world of Grass's making is rife with corrupt politicians and brutal grocers in brown shirts:

    There was once a grocer who closed his store one day in November, because something was doing in town; taking his son Oskar by the hand, he boarded a Number 5 streetcar and rode to the Langasser Gate, because there as in Zoppot and Langfuhr the synagogue was on fire. The synagogue had almost burned down and the firemen were looking on, taking care that the flames should not spread to other buildings. Outside the wrecked synagogue, men in uniform and others in civilian clothes piled up books, ritual objects, and strange kinds of cloth. The mound was set on fire and the grocer took advantage of the opportunity to warm his fingers and his feelings over the public blaze.
    As Oskar grows older (though not taller), portents of war transform into the thing itself. Danzig is the first casualty when, in the summer of 1939, residents turn against each other in a pitched battle between Poles and Germans. In the years that follow, Oskar goes from one picaresque adventure to the next--he joins a troupe of traveling musicians; he becomes the leader of a group of anarchists; he falls in love; he becomes a recording artist--until some time after the war, he is convicted of murder and confined to a mental hospital.

    The Tin Drum uses savage comedy and a stiff dose of magical realism to capture not only the madness of war, but also the black cancer at the heart of humanity that allows such degradations to occur. Grass wields his humor like a knife--yes, he'll make you laugh, but he'll make you bleed, as well. There have been many novels written about World War II, but only a handful can truly be called great; The Tin Drum, without a doubt, is one. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • Tripmaster Monkey
    by Maxine Hong Kingston
    ISBN 0679727892 (0-679-72789-2)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Driven by his dream to write and stage an epic stage production of interwoven Chinese novelsWittman Ah Sing, a Chinese-American hippie in the late '60s. [via]

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  • Iyer, Pico: Video Night in Kathmandu: And Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East
    Video Night in Kathmandu: And Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East
    by Pico Iyer
    ISBN 0679722165 (0-679-72216-5)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Virginia Woolf
    by Hermione Lee
    ISBN 0679447075 (0-679-44707-5)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    "Woolf's story is reformulated by each generation," writes Hermione Lee, a professor of English literature. But her richly human portrait, so respectful of the complexities of her subject's life, seems unlikely to be surpassed. Lee extricates Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) from clichés about madness and modernism to reveal a vigorous artist whose work is politically probing as well as psychologically delicate. She makes brilliant use of the formidable Woolf archives to let the writer speak directly to us, then comments shrewdly on her words' hidden significances. Biographies don't get much better than this. [via]

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  • Washington Square
    by Henry James
    ISBN 0679602763 (0-679-60276-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    "Washington Square is perhaps the only novel in which a man has successfully invaded the feminine field and produced work comparable to Jane Austen's," said Graham Greene.
        Inspired by a story Henry James heard at a dinner party, Washington Square tells how the rakish but idle Morris Townsend tries to win the heart of heiress Catherine Sloper against the objections of her father. Precise and understated, the book endures as a matchless social study of New York in the mid-nineteenth century.
       The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with afford-
    able hardbound editions of impor-
    tant works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-
    fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring
    as its emblem the running torch-
    bearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau-
    gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices. [via]

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  • The Waste Land and Other Writings
    by T. S. Eliot, Mary Karr
    ISBN 0679641017 (0-679-64101-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    First published in 1922, "The Waste Land" is T.S. Eliot's masterpiece, and is not only one of the key works of modernism but also one of the greatest poetic achievements of the twentieth century. A richly allusive pilgrimage of spiritual and psychological torment and redemption, Eliot's poem exerted a revolutionary influence on his contemporaries, summoning forth a rich new poetic language, breaking decisively with Romantic and Victorian poetic traditions. Kenneth Rexroth was not alone in calling Eliot "the representative poet of the time, for the same reason that Shakespeare and Pope were of theirs. He articulated the mind of an epoch in words that seemed its most natural expression."

    As influential as his verse, T.S. Eliot's criticism also exerted a transformative effect on twentieth-century letter, and this new edition of The Waste Land and Other Writings includes a selection of Eliot's most important essays.

    In her new Introduction, Mary Karr dispels some of the myths of the great poem's inaccessibility and sheds fresh light on the ways in which "The Waste Land" illuminates contemporary experience. [via]

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  • The Wings of the Dove
    by Henry James, Grey Gowrie
    ISBN 0679455124 (0-679-45512-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    The Wings of the Dove is a classic example of Henry James's morality tales that play off the naiveté of an American protagonist abroad. In early-20th-century London, Kate Croy and Merton Densher are engaged in a passionate, clandestine love affair. Croy is desperately in love with Densher, who has all the qualities of a potentially excellent husband: he's handsome, witty, and idealistic--the one thing he lacks is money, which ultimately renders him unsuitable as a mate. By chance, Croy befriends a young American heiress, Milly Theale. When Croy discovers that Theale suffers from a mysterious and fatal malady, she hatches a plan that can give all three characters something that they want--at a price. Croy and Densher plan to accompany the young woman to Venice where Densher, according to Croy's design, will seduce the ailing heiress. The two hope that Theale will find love and happiness in her last days and--when she dies--will leave her fortune to Densher, so that he and Croy can live happily ever after. The scheme that at first develops as planned begins to founder when Theale discovers the pair's true motives shortly before her death. Densher struggles with unanticipated feelings of love for his new paramour, and his guilt may obstruct his ability to avail himself of Theale's gift. James deftly navigates the complexities and irony of such moral treachery in this stirring novel. [via]

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