books tagged “Fic”

books tagged “Fic”

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  • The Age of Reason
    by Jean Paul Sartre
    ISBN 0679738959 (0-679-73895-9)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    The first novel of Sartre's monumental Roads to Freedom series, The Age of Reason is set in 1938 and tells of Mathieu, a French professor of philosophy who is obsessed with the idea of freedom. As the shadows of the Second World War draw closer -- even as his personal life is complicated by his mistress's pregnancy -- his search for a way to remain free becomes more and more intense. [via]

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  • Angels & Insects
    by A. S. Byatt
    ISBN 0679751343 (0-679-75134-3)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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    In these breathtaking novellas, A.S. Byatt returns to the territory she explored in Possession: the landscape of Victorian England, where science and spiritualism are both popular manias, and domestic decorum coexists with brutality and perversion. Angels and Insects is "delicate and confidently ironic.... Byatt perfectly blends laughter and sympathy [with] extraordinary sensuality" (San Francisco Examiner). [via]

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  • Anna Karenina
    by Leo Tolstoy, Constance Garnett, Leonard J. Kent, Nina Berberova
    ISBN 0679600795 (0-679-60079-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    This edition, the famous Constance Garnett translation, has been revised throughout by Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova.

    "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."  So begins Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy's great modern novel of an adulterous affair set against the backdrop of Moscow and St. Petersburg high society in the later half of the nineteenth century.  A sophisticated woman who is respectably married to a government bureaucrat, Anna begins a passionate, all-consuming involvement with a rich army officer.  Refusing to conduct a discreet affair, she scandalizes society by abandoning both her husband and her young son for Count Vronsky--with tragic consequences.  Running parallel is the story of the courtship and marriage of Konstantin Levin (the melancholy nobleman who is Tolstoy's stand-in) and Princess Kitty Shcherbatsky.  

    Levin's spiritual searching and growth reflect the religious ideals that at the time Tolstoy was evolving for himself.  Taken together, the two plots embroider a vast canvas that ultimately encompasses all levels of Russian society.  "Now and then Tolstoy's novel writes its own self, is produced by its matter, but its subject," noted Vladimir Nabokov.  "Anna Karenina is one of the greatest love stories in world literature."  As Matthew Arnold wrote in his celebrated essay on Tolstoy:  "We are not to take Anna Karenina as a work of art; we are to take it as a piece of life."   [via]

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  • The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, Or, The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night
    by Bennett Alfred Cerf, Richard Francis Burton
    ISBN 0679602356 (0-679-60235-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Full of mischief and valor, ribaldry and romance, The Arabian Nights is a work that has enthralled readers for centuries. The text presented here is that of the 1932 Modern Library edition for which Bennett A. Cerf chose the "most famous and representative" of the stories from the multivolume translation of Richard F. Burton.

       The origins of The Arabian Nights are obscure. About a thousand years ago a vast number of stories in Arabic from various countries began to be brought together; only much later was the collection called The Arabian Nights or the Thousand and One Nights. All the stories are told by Shahrazad (Scheherazade), who entertains her husband, King Shahryar, whose custom it was to execute his wives after a single night. Shahrazad begins a story each night but withholds the ending until the following night, thus postponing her execution.

       This selection includes many of the stories that are universally known though seldom read in this authentic form:
    "Alaeddin; or, the Wonderful Lamp," "Sindbad the Seaman and Sindbad the Landsman," and "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves." These, and the tales that accompany them, make delightful reading, demonstrating, as the Modern Library noted in 1932, that Shahrazad's spell remains unbroken. [via]

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  • An Artist of the Floating World
    by Kazuo Ishiguro
    ISBN 0679722661 (0-679-72266-1)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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    In An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro offers readers of the English language an authentic look at postwar Japan, "a floating world" of changing cultural behaviors, shifting societal patterns and troubling questions. Ishiguro, who was born in Nagasaki in 1954 but moved to England in 1960, writes the story of Masuji Ono, a bohemian artist and purveyor of the night life who became a propagandist for Japanese imperialism during the war. But the war is over. Japan lost, Ono's wife and son have been killed, and many young people blame the imperialists for leading the country to disaster. What's left for Ono? Ishiguro's treatment of this story earned a 1986 Whitbread Prize. [via]

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  • Stein, Gertrude: Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
    Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
    by Gertrude Stein
    ISBN 067972463X (0-679-72463-X)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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  • Didion, Joan: Book of Common Prayer
    Book of Common Prayer
    by Joan Didion
    ISBN 0679754865 (0-679-75486-5)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Buddenbrooks
    by Thomas Mann, John E. Woods
    ISBN 0679752609 (0-679-75260-9)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    A Major Literary Event: a brilliant new translation of Thomas Mann's first great novel, one of the two for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929.

    Buddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1900, when Mann was only twenty-five, has become a classic of modem literature -- the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany. With consummate skill, Mann draws a rounded picture of middle-class life: births and christenings; marriages, divorces, and deaths; successes and failures. These commonplace occurrences, intrinsically the same, vary slightly as they recur in each succeeding generation. Yet as the Buddenbrooks family eventually succumbs to the seductions of modernity -- seductions that are at variance with its own traditions -- its downfall becomes certain.

    In immensity of scope, richness of detail, and fullness of humanity, Buddenbrooks surpasses all other modem family chronicles; it has, indeed, proved a model for most of them. Judged as the greatest of Mann's novels by some critics, it is ranked as among the greatest by all. Thomas Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929.


    From the Hardcover edition. [via]

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  • Cancer Ward
    by Nicholas Bethell, David Burg, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
    ISBN 0679601635 (0-679-60163-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn the hero, Oldg Kostoglotov, spent many years in labour camps and was eventually transferred to a cancer ward. This study of how people confront terminal illness is also a dissection of the "cancerous" Soviet police state. [via]

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  • The Canterbury Tales
    by Geoffrey Chaucer
    ISBN 0679601252 (0-679-60125-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    On a spring day in April--sometime in the waning years of the 14th century--29 travelers set out for Canterbury on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Thomas Beckett. Among them is a knight, a monk, a prioress, a plowman, a miller, a merchant, a clerk, and an oft-widowed wife from Bath. Travel is arduous and wearing; to maintain their spirits, this band of pilgrims entertains each other with a series of tall tales that span the spectrum of literary genres. Five hundred years later, people are still reading Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. If you haven't yet made the acquaintance of the Franklin, the Pardoner, or the Squire because you never learned Middle English, take heart: this edition of the Tales has been translated into modern idiom.

    From the heroic romance of "The Knight's Tale" to the low farce embodied in the stories of the Miller, the Reeve, and the Merchant, Chaucer treated such universal subjects as love, sex, and death in poetry that is simultaneously witty, insightful, and poignant. The Canterbury Tales is a grand tour of 14th-century English mores and morals--one that modern-day readers will enjoy. [via]

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  • MacDonald, Ross: The Chill
    The Chill
    by Ross MacDonald
    ISBN 0679768076 (0-679-76807-6)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Doctorow, E.L.: City of God
    City of God
    by E.L. Doctorow
    ISBN 0679447830 (0-679-44783-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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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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    Book summary:

    "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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  • Confessions of Felix Krull
    by Thomas Mann
    ISBN 0679739041 (0-679-73904-1)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Recounts the enchanted career of the con man extraordinaire Felix Krull--a man unhampered by the moral precepts that govern the conduct of ordinary people. [via]

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  • Crime and Punishment
    by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Constance Black Garnett
    ISBN 0679601007 (0-679-60100-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Translated by Constance Garnett, Introduction by Ernest J. Simmons [via]

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  • Crime and Punishment
    by Richard Pevear, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Larissa Volokhonsky
    ISBN 0679734503 (0-679-73450-3)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Mired in poverty, the student Raskolnikov nevertheless thinks well of himself. Of his pawnbroker he takes a different view, and in deciding to do away with her he sets in motion his own tragic downfall. Dostoyevsky's penetrating novel of an intellectual whose moral compass goes haywire, and the detective who hunts him down for his terrible crime, is a stunning psychological portrait, a thriller and a profound meditation on guilt and retribution. [via]

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  • Dead Souls
    by Nikolai Gogol, Bernard G. Guerney
    ISBN 0679602658 (0-679-60265-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    A socially adept newcomer fluidly inserts himself into an unnamed Russian town, conquering first the drinkers, then the dignitaries. All find him amiable, estimable, agreeable. But what exactly is Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov up to?--something that will soon throw the town "into utter perplexity."

    After more than a week of entertainment and "passing the time, as they say, very pleasantly," he gets down to business--heading off to call on some landowners. More pleasantries ensue before Chichikov reveals his bizarre plan. He'd like to buy the souls of peasants who have died since the last census. The first landowner looks carefully to see if he's mad, but spots no outward signs. In fact, the scheme is innovative but by no means bonkers. Even though Chichikov will be taxed on the supposed serfs, he will be able to count them as his property and gain the reputation of a gentleman owner. His first victim is happy to give up his souls for free--less tax burden for him. The second, however, knows Chichikov must be up to something, and the third has his servants rough him up. Nonetheless, he prospers.

    Dead Souls is a feverish anatomy of Russian society (the book was first published in 1842) and human wiles. Its author tosses off thousands of sublime epigrams--including, "However stupid a fool's words may be, they are sometimes enough to confound an intelligent man," and is equally adept at yearning satire: "Where is he," Gogol interrupts the action, "who, in the native tongue of our Russian soul, could speak to us this all-powerful word: forward? who, knowing all the forces and qualities, and all the depths of our nature, could, by one magic gesture, point the Russian man towards a lofty life?" Flannery O'Connor, another writer of dark genius, declared Gogol "necessary along with the light." Though he was hardly the first to envision property as theft, his blend of comic, fantastic moralism is sui generis.--Kerry Fried [via]

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  • Dead Souls
    by Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky
    ISBN 0679776443 (0-679-77644-3)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    A socially adept newcomer fluidly inserts himself into an unnamed Russian town, conquering first the drinkers, then the dignitaries. All find him amiable, estimable, agreeable. But what exactly is Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov up to?--something that will soon throw the town "into utter perplexity."

    After more than a week of entertainment and "passing the time, as they say, very pleasantly," he gets down to business--heading off to call on some landowners. More pleasantries ensue before Chichikov reveals his bizarre plan. He'd like to buy the souls of peasants who have died since the last census. The first landowner looks carefully to see if he's mad, but spots no outward signs. In fact, the scheme is innovative but by no means bonkers. Even though Chichikov will be taxed on the supposed serfs, he will be able to count them as his property and gain the reputation of a gentleman owner. His first victim is happy to give up his souls for free--less tax burden for him. The second, however, knows Chichikov must be up to something, and the third has his servants rough him up. Nonetheless, he prospers.

    Dead Souls is a feverish anatomy of Russian society (the book was first published in 1842) and human wiles. Its author tosses off thousands of sublime epigrams--including, "However stupid a fool's words may be, they are sometimes enough to confound an intelligent man," and is equally adept at yearning satire: "Where is he," Gogol interrupts the action, "who, in the native tongue of our Russian soul, could speak to us this all-powerful word: forward? who, knowing all the forces and qualities, and all the depths of our nature, could, by one magic gesture, point the Russian man towards a lofty life?" Flannery O'Connor, another writer of dark genius, declared Gogol "necessary along with the light." Though he was hardly the first to envision property as theft, his blend of comic, fantastic moralism is sui generis.--Kerry Fried [via]

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  • Death in Venice : And Seven Other Stories
    by Thomas Mann, H.T. Lowe-Porter
    ISBN 0679722068 (0-679-72206-8)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Eight complex stories illustrative of the author's belief that "a story must tell itself," highlighted by the high art style of the famous title novella. [via]

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  • The Defense: A Novel
    by Michael Scammell, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokvov
    ISBN 0679727221 (0-679-72722-1)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Nabokov's third novel, The Luzhin Defense, is a chilling story of obsession and madness. As a young boy, Luzhin was unattractive,  distracted, withdrawn, sullen--an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates. He takes up chess as a refuge from the anxiety of his everyday life.  His talent is prodigious and he rises to the rank of grandmaster--but at a cost:  in Luzhin' s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants the world of reality.   His own world falls apart during a crucial championship match, when the intricate defense he has devised withers  under his opponent's unexpected and unpredictabke lines of assault. [via]

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  • The Demolished Man
    by Alfred Bester
    ISBN 0679767819 (0-679-76781-9)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    In a world policed by telepaths, Ben Reich plans to commit a crime that hasn't been heard of in 70 years: murder. That's the only option left for Reich, whose company is losing a 10-year death struggle with rival D'Courtney Enterprises. Terrorized in his dreams by The Man With No Face and driven to the edge after D'Courtney refuses a merger offer, Reich murders his rival and bribes a high-ranking telepath to help him cover his tracks. But while police prefect Lincoln Powell knows Reich is guilty, his telepath's knowledge is a far cry from admissible evidence. [via]

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  • Dubliners
    by James Joyce, Walter Hettche, Hans Walter Gabler
    ISBN 0679739904 (0-679-73990-4)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Dubliners was completed in 1905, but a series of British and Irish publishers and printers found it offensive and immoral, and it was suppressed.  The book finally came out in London in 1914, just as Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man began to appear in the journal Egoist under the auspices of Ezra Pound.  The first three stories in Dubliners might be incidents from a draft of Portrait of the Artist, and many of the characters who figure in Ulysses have their first appearance here, but this is not a book of interest only because of its relationship to Joyce's life and mature work.  It is one of the greatest story collections in the English language--an unflinching, brilliant, often tragic portrait of early twentieth-century Dublin.  The book, which begins and ends with a death, moves from "stories of my childhood" through tales of public life.  Its larger purpose, Joyce said, was as a moral history of Ireland. [via]

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  • The Education of Henry Adams
    by Henry Adams, Edmund Morris
    ISBN 067964010X (0-679-64010-X)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Many great artists have had at least intermittent doubts about their own abilities. But The Education of Henry Adams is surely one of the few masterpieces to issue directly from a raging inferiority complex. The author, to be sure, had bigger shoes to fill than most of us. Both his grandfather and great-grandfather were U.S. presidents. His father, a relative underachiever, scraped by as a member of Congress and ambassador to the Court of St. James. But young Henry, born in Boston in 1838, was destined for a walk-on role in his nation's history--and seemed alarmingly aware of the fact from the time he was an adolescent.

    It gets worse. For the author could neither match his exalted ancestors nor dismiss them as dusty relics--he was an Adams, after all, formed from the same 18th-century clay. "The atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial," we are told,

    revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped, from his greatest grandmother's birth, in the odor of political crime. Resistance to something was the law of New England nature; the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged.
    Here, as always, Adams tells his story in a third-person voice that can seem almost extraplanetary in its detachment. Yet there's also an undercurrent of melancholy and amusement--and wonder at the specific details of what was already a lost world.

    Continuing his uphill conquest of the learning curve, Adams attended Harvard, which didn't do much for him. ("The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.") Then, after a beer-and-sausage-scented spell as a graduate student in Berlin, he followed his father to Washington, D.C., in 1860. There he might have remained--bogged down in "the same rude colony ... camped in the same forest, with the same unfinished Greek temples for workrooms, and sloughs for roads"--had not the Civil War sent Adams père et fils to London. Henry sat on the sidelines throughout the conflict, serving as his father's private secretary and anxiously negotiating the minefields of English society. He then returned home and commenced a long career as a journalist, historian, novelist, and peripheral participant in the political process--a kind of mouthpiece for what remained of the New England conscience.

    He was not, by any measure but his own, a failure. And the proof of the pudding is The Education of Henry Adams itself, which remains among the oddest and most enlightening books in American literature. It contains thousands of memorable one-liners about politics, morality, culture, and transatlantic relations: "The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest." There are astonishing glimpses of the high and mighty: "He saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kid gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism..." (That would be Abraham Lincoln; the "melancholy function" his Inaugural Ball.) But most of all, Adams's book is a brilliant account of how his own sensibility came to be. A literary landmark from the moment it first appeared, the Autobiography confers upon its author precisely that prize he felt had always eluded him: success. --James Marcus [via]

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  • El Doctor Zhivago / The Doctor Zhivago
    by Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, Max Hayward, Manya Harari
    ISBN 0679774386 (0-679-77438-6)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    This new trade paperback edition of Pasternak's classic evokes the life and loves of the poet-physician Zhivago during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. This edition features a thorough introduction by Oxford University scholar John Bayley. [via]

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  • The Elephant Vanishes
    by Haruki Murakami
    ISBN 0679750533 (0-679-75053-3)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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    With the same deadpan mania and genius for dislocation that he brought to his internationally acclaimed novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami makes this collection of stories a determined assault on the normal. A man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald's in the middle of the night; and a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster who burrows up through her backyard.

    By turns haunting and hilarious, The Elephant Vanishes is further proof of Murakami's ability to cross the border between separate realities -- and to come back bearing treasure. [via]

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  • Farewell, My Lovely
    by Raymond Chandler
    ISBN 0679740902 (0-679-74090-2)
    Hardcover, Vintage Books

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    Book summary:

    Private Detective Philip Marlow is in trouble. He witnesses a murder and knows who the killer is, but for some reason the police don't want to find the murderer, so Marlowe decides to find out for himself. "Penguin Readers" is a series of simplified novels, film novelizations and original titles that introduce students at all levels to the pleasures of reading in English. Originally designed for teaching English as a foreign language, the series' combination of high interest level and low reading age makes it suitable for both English-speaking teenagers with limited reading skills and students of English as a second language. Many titles in the series also provide access to the pre-20th century literature strands of the National Curriculum English Orders. "Penguin Readers" are graded at seven levels of difficulty, from "Easystarts" with a 200-word vocabulary, to Level 6 (Advanced) with a 3000-word vocabulary. In addition, titles fall into one of three sub-categories: "Contemporary", "Classics" or "Originals". At the end of each book there is a section of enjoyable exercises focusing on vocabulary building, comprehension, discussion and writing. Some titles in the series are available with an accompanying audio cassette, or in a book and cassette pack. Additionally, selected titles have free accompanying "Penguin Readers Factsheets" which provide stimulating exercise material for students, as well as suggestions for teachers on how to exploit the Readers in class. [via]

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  • The Game
    by A. S. Byatt
    ISBN 0679742565 (0-679-74256-5)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    The Game is a lush and disturbing novel portraying a sibling rivalry which compels the reader to reconsider the uses and misuses of imagination. when they were little girls, Cassandra and Julia played a game in which they entered an alternate world modeled on the landscapes of Arthurian romance. Now the sisters are grown, and hostile strangers--until a figure from their past, a man they once both loved and suffered over, reenters their lives. [via]

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  • Zola, Emile: Germinal
    Germinal
    by Emile Zola, Havelock Ellis
    ISBN 067975430X (0-679-75430-X)
    Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • Ghostwritten
    by David Mitchell
    ISBN 0679463046 (0-679-46304-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    "What is real and what is not?" David Mitchell's Ghostwritten: A Novel in Nine Parts plays with precisely this question throughout its elaborately compartmentalized narrative. (That there are 10 chapters in this 9-part invention is just one more aspect of the author's mysterious schema.) With its multitude of voices and globe-girdling locations--Tokyo, Hong Kong, Mongolia, Petersburg, London--this first novel offers readers a vertiginous, sometimes seductive, display of persona and place.

    At the heart of Mitchell's book is the global extension of the postmodern city, and the networks (cultural, technological, phantasmagoric) to which it gives rise. A metropolis like Tokyo is quite literally beyond our comprehension:

    Twenty million people live and work in Tokyo. It's so big that nobody really knows where it stops. It's long since filled up the plain, and now it's creeping up the mountains to the west and reclaiming land from the bay in the east. The city never stops rewriting itself. In the time one street guide is produced, it's already become out of date. It's a tall city, and a deep one, as well as a spread-out one.
    At this level, urban sprawl becomes an epistemological condition. On one hand it leads to a Japanese death cult, purging the "unclean" from the city's subway with nerve gas. And on the other, it produces a certain splintering of the human personality. "I'm this person, I'm this person, I'm that person, I'm that person too," chants Neal, the narrator of the book's second part. "No wonder it's all such a ... mess." He's talking about his life as a Hong Kong trader, a "man of departments, compartments, apartments." But he might also be describing the experience of reading Ghostwritten. At once loquacious and knowing, leisurely and frantic, Mitchell offers a huge, but fragmentary, portmanteau. And while he's labored diligently to solder together the many parts--the aching bodies, the reality police, the impossibly complex machinery of contemporary life--his novel, too, may suffer from an excess of split personality. --Vicky Lebeau [via]

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  • The God of Small Things
    by Arundhati Roy
    ISBN 0679457313 (0-679-45731-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    "They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. " The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, a skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins is stranded on the highway amid a Marxist workers' demonstration. Inside the car sit two-egg twins Rahel and Esthappen, and so begins their tale. . . . Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family--their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologist's moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts). When their English cousin, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive on a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river "graygreen."  With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it. The brilliantly plotted story uncoils with an agonizing sense of foreboding and inevitability. Yet nothing prepares you for what lies at the heart of it. The God of Small Things takes on the Big Themes--Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite Joy. Here is a writer who dares to break the rules. To dislocate received rhythms and create the language she requires, a language that is at once classical and unprecedented. Arundhati Roy has given us a book that is anchored to anguish, but fueled by wit and magic. [via]

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  • Busch, Frederick: Harry and Catherine : A Love Story
    Harry and Catherine : A Love Story
    by Frederick Busch
    ISBN 0679730761 (0-679-73076-1)
    Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
    by Julian Barnes
    ISBN 0679731377 (0-679-73137-7)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    This is, in short, a complete, unsettling, and frequently exhilarating vision of the world, starting with the voyage of Noah's ark and ending with a sneak preview of heaven! [via]

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  • Howards End
    by E. M. Forster
    ISBN 0679722556 (0-679-72255-6)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Margaret Schlegel, engaged to the much older, widowed Henry Wilcox, meets her intended the morning after accepting his proposal and realizes that he is a man who has lived without introspection or true self-knowledge. As she contemplates the state of Wilcox's soul, her remedy for what ails him has become one of the most oft-quoted passages in literature:

    Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.
    Like all of Forster's work, Howards End concerns itself with class, nationality, economic status, and how each of these affects personal relationships. It follows the intertwined fortunes of the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, and the Wilcox family over the course of several years. The Schlegels are intellectuals, devotees of art and literature. The Wilcoxes, on the other hand, can't be bothered with the life of the mind or the heart, leading, instead, outer lives of "telegrams and anger" that foster "such virtues as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second rank, no doubt, but they have formed our civilization." Helen, after a brief flirtation with one of the Wilcox sons, has developed an antipathy for the family; Margaret, however, forms a brief but intense friendship with Mrs. Wilcox, which is cut short by the older woman's death. When her family discovers a scrap of paper requesting that Henry give their home, Howards End, to Margaret, it precipitates a spiritual crisis among them that will take years to resolve.

    Forster's 1910 novel begins as a collection of seemingly unrelated events--Helen's impulsive engagement to Paul Wilcox; a chance meeting between the Schlegel sisters and an impoverished clerk named Leonard Bast at a concert; a casual conversation between the sisters and Henry Wilcox in London one night. But as it moves along, these disparate threads gradually knit into a tightly woven fabric of tragic misunderstandings, impulsive actions, and irreparable consequences, and, eventually, connection. Though set in the early years of the 20th century, Howards End seems even more suited to our own fragmented era of e-mails and anger. For readers living in such an age, the exhortation to "only connect" resonates ever more profoundly. --Alix Wilber [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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  • Intensity
    by Dean Koontz
    ISBN 0679765034 (0-679-76503-4)
    Softcover, Random House Large Print

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    A young woman staying as a guest in a Napa Valley farmhouse becomes trapped in a fight for survival with a self-proclaimed "homicidal adventurer", and races to warn his next intended victim. Unrelentingly terrifying, this book lives up to its name. [via]

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  • Invisible Man
    by Ralph Ellison
    ISBN 0679732764 (0-679-73276-4)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    A classic from the moment it first appeared in 1952, The Invisible Man chronicles the travels of its narrator, a young, nameless black man, as he moves through the hellish levels of American intolerance and cultural blindness. Searching for a context in which to know himself, he exists in a very peculiar state. "I am an invisible man," he says in his prologue, "When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me." But this is hard-won self-knowledge, earned over the course of many years.

    As the book gets started, the narrator is expelled from his Southern Negro college for inadvertently showing a white trustee the reality of black life in the south, including an incestuous farmer and a rural whorehouse. The college director chastises him: "Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie! What kind of an education are you getting around here?" Mystified, the narrator moves north to New York City, where the truth, at least as he perceives it, is dealt another blow when he learns that his former headmaster's recommendation letters are, in fact, letters of condemnation.

    What ensues is a search for what truth actually is, which proves to be supremely elusive. The narrator becomes a spokesman for a mixed-race band of social activists called "The Brotherhood" and believes he is fighting for equality. Once again, he realises he's been duped into believing what hethought was the truth, when in fact it is only another variation. Of the Brothers, he eventually discerns: "They were blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their voices. And because they were blind they would destroy themselves.... Here I thought they accepted me because they felt that colour made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn't see either colour or men".

    Invisible Man is certainly a book about race in America, andsadly enough, few of the problems it chronicles have disappeared even now. But Ellison's first novel transcends such a narrow definition. It's also a book about the human race stumbling down the path to identity, challenged and successful to varying degrees. None of us can ever be sure of the truth beyond ourselves, and possibly not even there. The world isa tricky place, and no one knows this better than the invisible man, who leaves us with these chilling, provocative words: "And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" --Melanie Rehak, Amazon.com [via]

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  • The Island of Dr. Moreau
    by H. G. Wells
    ISBN 0679602305 (0-679-60230-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    A shipwreck in the South Seas, a palm-tree paradise where a mad doctor conducts vile experiments, animals that become human and then "beastly" in ways they never were before--it's the stuff of high adventure. It's also a parable about Darwinian theory, a social satire in the vein of Jonathan Swift (Gulliver's Travels), and a bloody tale of horror. Or, as H. G. Wells himself wrote about this story, "The Island of Dr. Moreau is an exercise in youthful blasphemy. Now and then, though I rarely admit it, the universe projects itself towards me in a hideous grimace. It grimaced that time, and I did my best to express my vision of the aimless torture in creation." This colorful tale by the author of The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds lit a firestorm of controversy at the time of its publication in 1896. [via]

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  • Jane Eyre
    by Charlotte Bronte
    ISBN 0679602690 (0-679-60269-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Jane Eyre is a wildly emotional romance with a lonely heroine and a tormented Byronic hero, pathetic orphans, dark secrets, and a madwoman in the attic. When it was
    published in 1847, it was a great popular success. The power of the writing, the masterly
    handling of the narrative, and the boldly realistic style were much admired. But many found it difficult to believe that Currer Bell, the pseudonymous author, was Charlotte Brontë, a young woman from a bleak Yorkshire parsonage.
        Time has served Jane Eyre well. Charlotte Brontë's social commentary still fascinates; the novel is still powerful, full of erotic tension, passion, and irony. It can be read as an astonishing paradigm of feminist writing. At its heart is the assertion that a woman has the right to be independent, and its insistence on that fact and on the equality of the sexes makes it a truly revolutionary work of art. Above all, Jane Eyre is a marvelous love story, as affecting as any in fiction.
       Diane Johnson has provided a new Introduction to this Modern Library edition, which is the companion volume to the A&E television presentation. The Modern Library also publishes Charlotte Brontë's three other completed novels: The Professor, Shirley, and Villette.

    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 hard-bound editions of important works of liter-ature 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 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 Joy Luck Club
    by Amy Tan
    ISBN 067972768X (0-679-72768-X)
    Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue.

    With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery. [via]

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  • Kim
    by Rudyard Kipling
    ISBN 0679443606 (0-679-44360-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    One of the particular pleasures of reading Kim is the full range of emotion, knowledge, and experience that Rudyard Kipling gives his complex hero. Kim O'Hara, the orphaned son of an Irish soldier stationed in India, is neither innocent nor victimized. Raised by an opium-addicted half-caste woman since his equally dissolute father's death, the boy has grown up in the streets of Lahore:

    Though he was burned black as any native; though he spoke the vernacular by preference, and his mother-tongue in a clipped uncertain sing-song; though he consorted on terms of perfect equality with the small boys of the bazar; Kim was white--a poor white of the very poorest.
    From his father and the woman who raised him, Kim has come to believe that a great destiny awaits him. The details, however, are a bit fuzzy, consisting as they do of the woman's addled prophecies of "'a great Red Bull on a green field, and the Colonel riding on his tall horse, yes, and'--dropping into English--'nine hundred devils.'"

    In the meantime, Kim amuses himself with intrigues, executing "commissions by night on the crowded housetops for sleek and shiny young men of fashion." His peculiar heritage as a white child gone native, combined with his "love of the game for its own sake," makes him uniquely suited for a bigger game. And when, at last, the long-awaited colonel comes along, Kim is recruited as a spy in Britain's struggle to maintain its colonial grip on India. Kipling was, first and foremost, a man of his time; born and raised in India in the 19th century, he was a fervid supporter of the Raj. Nevertheless, his portrait of India and its people is remarkably sympathetic. Yes, there is the stereotypical Westernized Indian Babu Huree Chander with his atrocious English, but there is also Kim's friend and mentor, the Afghani horse trader Mahub Ali, and the gentle Tibetan lama with whom Kim travels along the Grand Trunk Road. The humanity of his characters consistently belies Kipling's private prejudices, and raises Kim above the mere ripping good yarn to the level of a timeless classic. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • Last Chronicle of Barset
    by Anthony Trollope
    ISBN 0679443665 (0-679-44366-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    (Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed) [via]

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  • The Longest Journey
    by E. M. Forster
    ISBN 0679748156 (0-679-74815-6)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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    Book summary:

    In this searching tragicomedy of manners, personalities, and world views, E. M. Forster explores the "idea of England" he would later develop in Howard's End. Bookish, sensitive, and given to wild enthusiasms, Rickie Elliot is virtually made for a life at Cambridge, where he can subsist on a regimen of biscuits and philosophical debate. But the love-smitten Rickie leaves his natural habitat to marry the devastatingly practical Agnes Pembroke, who brings with her  as a sort of dowry  a teaching position at the abominable Sawston School. [via]

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  • Brookner, Anita: Look at Me
    Look at Me
    by Anita Brookner
    ISBN 0679738134 (0-679-73813-4)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • May, Julian: Magnificat
    Magnificat
    by Julian May
    ISBN 0679441778 (0-679-44177-8)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • The Magus
    by John Fowles
    ISBN 0679602836 (0-679-60283-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    The Magus was originally published in 1965 and reissued in a revised version twelve years later. The story of Nicholas Urfe and his friendship with a demonic millionaire which leads to an elaborate series of staged hallucinations, riddles, and psychological traps, The Magus endures as the most enigmatic and magical novel in the Fowles canon, a work rich in symbols, conundrums, and labyrinthine twists of events. This Modern Library edition includes a new introduction by the author. [via]

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  • Mansfield Park
    by Jane Austen
    ISBN 0679601945 (0-679-60194-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Though Jane Austen was writing at a time when Gothic potboilers such as Ann Ward Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto were all the rage, she never got carried away by romance in her own novels. In Austen's ordered world, the passions that ruled Gothic fiction would be horridly out of place; marriage was, first and foremost, a contract, the bedrock of polite society. Certain rules applied to who was eligible and who was not, how one courted and married and what one expected afterwards. To flout these rules was to tear at the basic fabric of society, and the consequences could be terrible. Each of the six novels she completed in her lifetime are, in effect, comic cautionary tales that end happily for those characters who play by the rules and badly for those who don't. In Mansfield Park, for example, Austen gives us Fanny Price, a poor young woman who has grown up in her wealthy relatives' household without ever being accepted as an equal. The only one who has truly been kind to Fanny is Edmund Bertram, the younger of the family's two sons.

    Into this Cinderella existence comes Henry Crawford and his sister, Mary, who are visiting relatives in the neighborhood. Soon Mansfield Park is given over to all kinds of gaiety, including a daring interlude spent dabbling in theatricals. Young Edmund is smitten with Mary, and Henry Crawford woos Fanny. Yet these two charming, gifted, and attractive siblings gradually reveal themselves to be lacking in one essential Austenian quality: principle. Without good principles to temper passion, the results can be disastrous, and indeed, Mansfield Park is rife with adultery, betrayal, social ruin, and ruptured friendships. But this is a comedy, after all, so there is also a requisite happy ending and plenty of Austen's patented gentle satire along the way. Describing the switch in Edmund's affections from Mary to Fanny, she writes: "I purposely abstain from dates on this occasion, that everyone may be at liberty to fix their own, aware that the cure of unconquerable passions, and the transfer of unchanging attachments, must vary much as to time in different people." What does not vary is the pleasure with which new generations come to Jane Austen. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • Middlemarch
    by George Eliot
    ISBN 0679600191 (0-679-60019-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    One of the most accomplished and prominent novels of the Victorian era, Middlemarch is an unsurpassed portrait of nineteenth-century English provincial life. Dorothea Brooke is a young woman of fervent ideals who yearns to effect social change yet faces resistance from the society she inhabits. In this epic in a small landscape, Eliot's large cast of precisely delineated characters and the rich tapestry of their stories result in a wise, compassionate, and astute vision of human nature. As Virginia Woolf declared, George Eliot "was one of the first English novelists to discover that men and women think as well as feel, and the discovery was of great artistic moment."


    From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]

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  • Middlemarch : A Study of Provincial Life
    by George Eliot
    ISBN 067960118X (0-679-60118-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    On April 10, 1994, PBS stations nationwide will air the first episode of a lavish six-part Masterpiece Theatre production of Eliot's brilliant work, Middlemarch, hosted by Russell Baker and produced by Louis Marks. The Modern Library is pleased to offer this official companion edition, complete with tie-in art and printed on acid-free paper. Unabridged. [via]

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  • Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
    by John Berendt
    ISBN 0679751521 (0-679-75152-1)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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    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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  • 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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  • Moby Dick Or, the Whale
    by Herman Melville, Rockwell Kent
    ISBN 0679600108 (0-679-60010-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Avec Moby Dick, Melville a donné naissance à un livre-culte et inscrit dans la mémoire des hommes un nouveau mythe : celui de la baleine blanche. Fort de son expérience de marin, qui a nourri ses romans précédents et lui a assuré le succès, l'écrivain américain, alors en pleine maturité, raconte la folle quête du capitaine Achab et sa dernière rencontre avec le grand cachalot. Véritable encyclopédie de la mer, nouvelle Bible aux accents prophétiques, parabole chargée de thèmes universels, Moby Dick n'en reste pas moins construit avec une savante maîtrise, maintenant un suspense lent, qui s'accélère peu à peu jusqu'à l'apocalypse finale. L'écriture de Melville, infiniment libre et audacieuse, tour à tour balancée, puis hachée au rythme des houles, des vents et des passions humaines, est d'une richesse exceptionnelle. Il faut remonter à Shakespeare pour trouver l'exemple d'une langue aussi inventive, d'une poésie aussi grandiose. --Scarbo [via]

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  • Moby-Dick
    by Herman Melville, Edward W. Said, Library of America Staff
    ISBN 0679725253 (0-679-72525-3)
    Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Avec Moby Dick, Melville a donné naissance à un livre-culte et inscrit dans la mémoire des hommes un nouveau mythe : celui de la baleine blanche. Fort de son expérience de marin, qui a nourri ses romans précédents et lui a assuré le succès, l'écrivain américain, alors en pleine maturité, raconte la folle quête du capitaine Achab et sa dernière rencontre avec le grand cachalot. Véritable encyclopédie de la mer, nouvelle Bible aux accents prophétiques, parabole chargée de thèmes universels, Moby Dick n'en reste pas moins construit avec une savante maîtrise, maintenant un suspense lent, qui s'accélère peu à peu jusqu'à l'apocalypse finale. L'écriture de Melville, infiniment libre et audacieuse, tour à tour balancée, puis hachée au rythme des houles, des vents et des passions humaines, est d'une richesse exceptionnelle. Il faut remonter à Shakespeare pour trouver l'exemple d'une langue aussi inventive, d'une poésie aussi grandiose. --Scarbo [via]

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  • The Mysterious Island
    by Jules Verne, Jordan Stump, Caleb Carr, Jules-Descartes Ferat
    ISBN 0679642366 (0-679-64236-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Based on the true story of Alexander Selkirk, a man who survived by himself for almost five years on an uninhabited Pacific island off the coast of Chile, Jules Vernes page-turner The Mysterious Island is a tale of five men and a dog who escape Civil War Richmond in a balloon during a storm and land on a faraway and uncharted island where they must overcome natures harsh elements to create from scratch a civilization for themselves.

    Currently available only in an abridged 1970s translation and, in full, only in a dated nineteenth-century translation that is stuffy and limp, turning the muscular, breathless tone of the original into something overwrought and melodramatic, The Mysterious Island is restored here to its original robustness in Jordan Stumps striking new rendition. This major re-presentation also features an Introduction by Caleb Carr, and over eighty illustrations reprinted from the original 1875 French edition. [via]

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  • The Periodic Table
    by Primo Levi, Raymond Rosenthal, Neal Ascherson
    ISBN 0679444637 (0-679-44463-7)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Writer Primo Levi (1919-1987), an Italian Jew, did not come to the wide attention of the English-reading audience until the last years of his life. A survivor of the Holocaust and imprisonment in Auschwitz, Levi is considered to be one of the century's most compelling voices, and The Periodic Table is his most famous book. Springboarding from his training as a chemist, Levi uses the elements as metaphors to create a cycle of linked, somewhat autobiographical tales, including stories of the Piedmontese Jewish community he came from, and of his response to the Holocaust. [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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    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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  • Dibdin, Michael: Ratking
    Ratking
    by Michael Dibdin
    ISBN 0679768548 (0-679-76854-8)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Remains of the Day
    by Kazuo Ishiguro
    ISBN 0679731725 (0-679-73172-5)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    A must read. [via]

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  • The Reprieve
    by Jean Paul Sartre
    ISBN 0679740783 (0-679-74078-3)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    An extraordinary picture of life in France during the critical eight days before the signing of the fateful Munich Pact and the subsequent takeover of Czechoslovakia in September 1938. Translated from the French by Eric Sutton. [via]

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  • Alpert, Cathryn: Rocket City
    Rocket City
    by Cathryn Alpert
    ISBN 067977016X (0-679-77016-X)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Baker, Nicholson: Room Temperature
    Room Temperature
    by Nicholson Baker
    ISBN 0679734406 (0-679-73440-6)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Forster, E. M.: A Room With a View
    A Room With a View
    by E. M. Forster
    ISBN 0679724761 (0-679-72476-1)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Selected Short Stories of Franz Kafka
    by Franz Kafka, Wilma Muir, Edwin Muir, Philip Rahv
    ISBN 0679600612 (0-679-60061-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    no dust jacket [via]

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  • Snow Falling on Cedars
    by David Guterson
    ISBN 067976402X (0-679-76402-X)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award American Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award San Piedro Island, north of Puget Sound, is a place so isolated that no one who lives there can afford to make enemies.  But in 1954 a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American named Kabuo Miyamoto is charged with his murder.  In the course of the ensuing trial, it becomes clear that what is at stake is more than a man's guilt. For on San Pedro, memory grows as thickly as cedar trees and the fields of ripe strawberries--memories of a charmed love affair between a white boy and the Japanese girl who grew up to become Kabuo's wife; memories of land desired, paid for, and lost. Above all, San Piedro is haunted by the memory of what happened to its Japanese residents during World War II, when an entire community was sent into exile while its neighbors watched.  Gripping, tragic, and densely atmospheric, Snow Falling on Cedars is a masterpiece of suspense-- one that leaves us shaken and changed. "Haunting.... A whodunit complete with courtroom maneuvering and surprising turns of evidence and at the same time a mystery, something altogether richer and deeper."--Los Angeles Times "Compelling...heartstopping. Finely wrought, flawlessly written."--The New York Times Book Review [via]

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  • Koontz, Dean: Sole Survivor
    Sole Survivor
    by Dean Koontz
    ISBN 0679774157 (0-679-77415-7)
    Softcover, Random House Large Print

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  • Morrison, Toni: Song Of Solomon
    Song Of Solomon
    by Toni Morrison
    ISBN 0679445048 (0-679-44504-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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  • The Stars My Destination
    by Phyllis Eisenstein, Alfred Bester, Alexander Eisenstein
    ISBN 0679767800 (0-679-76780-0)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    When it comes to pop culture, Alfred Bester (1913-1987) is something of an unsung hero. He wrote radio scripts, screenplays, and comic books (in which capacity he created the original Green Lantern Oath). But Bester is best known for his science-fiction novels, and The Stars My Destination may be his finest creation. First published in 1956 (as Tiger! Tiger!), the novel revolves around a hero named Gulliver Foyle, who teleports himself out of a tight spot and creates a great deal of consternation in the process. With its sly potshotting at corporate skullduggery, The Stars My Destination seems utterly contemporary, and has maintained its status as an underground classic for forty years. (Bester fans should also note that Vintage has reprinted The Demolished Man, which won the very first Hugo Award in 1953.) [via]

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  • The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
    by Robert Louis Stevenson
    ISBN 0679734767 (0-679-73476-7)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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

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

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

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

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    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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  • Tess of the D'urbervilles : A Pure Woman
    by Thomas Hardy
    ISBN 0679603182 (0-679-60318-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Etched against the background of a dying rural society, Tess of the d'Urbervilles was Thomas Hardy's "bestseller," and Tess Durbeyfield remains his most striking and tragic heroine. Of all the characters he created, she meant the most to him. Hopelessly torn between two men--Alec d'Urberville, a wealthy, dissolute young man who seduces her in a lonely wood, and Angel Clare, her provincial, moralistic, and unforgiving husband--Tess escapes from her vise of passion through a horrible, desperate act.
    ----"Like the greatest characters in literature, Tess lives beyond the final pages of the book as a permanent citizen of the imagination," said Irving Howe. "In Tess he stakes everything on his sensuous apprehension of a young woman's life, a girl who is at once a simple milkmaid and an archetype of feminine strength. . . . Tess is that rare creature in literature: goodness made interesting."
    ----Now Tess of the d'Urbervilles has been brought to television in a magnificent new co-production from A&E Network and London Weekend Television. Justine Waddell (Anna Karenina) stars as the tragic heroine, Tess; Oliver Milburn (Chandler & Co.) is Angel Clare; and Jason Flemyng is Alec d'Urberville. The cast also includes John McEnery (Black Beauty) as Jack Durbeyfield and Lesley Dunlop (The Elephant Man) as Joan Durbeyfield. Tess of the d'Urbervilles is directed by Ian Sharp and produced by Sarah Wilson, with a screenplay by Ted Whitehead; it was filmed in Hardy country, the beautiful English countryside in Dorset where Thomas Hardy set his novels.

    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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  • The Three Musketeers: Being the First of the D'artagnan Romances; and Twenty Years After, a Sequel
    by Alexandre Dumas, Jacques Le Clercq
    ISBN 0679603328 (0-679-60332-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    "We read The Three Musketeers to experience a sense of romance and for the sheer excitement of the story," reflected Clifton Fadiman. "In these violent pages all is action, intrigue, suspense, surprise--an almost endless chain of duels, murders, love affairs, unmaskings, ambushes, hairbreadth escapes, wild rides. It is all impossible and it is all magnificent."
            First published in 1844, Alexandre Dumas's swashbuckling epic chronicles the adventures of D'Artagnan, a gallant young nobleman who journeys to Paris in 1625 hoping to join the ranks of musketeers guarding Louis XIII. He soon finds himself fighting alongside three
    heroic comrades--Athos, Porthos, and Aramis--who seek to uphold the honor of the king by foiling the wicked plots of Cardinal Richelieu and the beautiful spy "Milady."
            "Dumas will be read a hundred, nay, three hundred years on," wrote John Galsworthy. "His greatest creation is undoubtedly D'Artagnan, type at once of the fighting adventurer and of the trusty servant, whose wily blade is ever at the back of those whose hearts have neither his magnanimity nor his courage. Few, if any, characters in fiction inspire one with such belief in their
    individual existences. . . . To one who made D'Artagnan all shall be forgiven." Clifton Fadiman agreed: "Dumas enjoyed writing his stories. . . . The pleasure he must have felt in
    creating D'Artagnan's troubles and triumphs
    flashes out of these pages. . . . Dumas rampaged through the history of France, inventing, changing, distorting--doing whatever was needed to produce a tale to hold the reader breathless." [via]

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  • Chandler, Raymond: Trouble Is My Business
    Trouble Is My Business
    by Raymond Chandler
    ISBN 0679740864 (0-679-74086-4)
    Hardcover, Vintage Books

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  • Sartre, Jean-Paul: Troubled Sleep: A Novel
    Troubled Sleep: A Novel
    by Jean-Paul Sartre, Gerard Manley Hopkins
    ISBN 0679740791 (0-679-74079-1)
    Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • Ulysses
    by James Joyce
    ISBN 0679722769 (0-679-72276-9)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book--although he found it sufficiently unobscene to allow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession." None of these adjectives, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in a close-focus sort of way) suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book. Even the verbal vaudeville of the final chapters can be navigated with relative ease, as long as you're willing to be buffeted, tickled, challenged, and (occasionally) vexed by Joyce's sheer command of the English language.

    Among other things, a novel is simply a long story, and the first question about any story is: What happens?. In the case of Ulysses, the answer might be Everything. William Blake, one of literature's sublime myopics, saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of indelible Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets, argue, and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. And thanks to the book's stream-of-consciousness technique--which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river--we're privy to their thoughts, emotions, and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordian folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism.

    Both characters add their glorious intonations to the music of Joyce's prose. Dedalus's accent--that of a freelance aesthetician, who dabbles here and there in what we might call Early Yeats Lite--will be familiar to readers of Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man. But Bloom's wistful sensualism (and naive curiosity) is something else entirely. Seen through his eyes, a rundown corner of a Dublin graveyard is a figure for hope and hopelessness, mortality and dogged survival: "Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland's hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really?" --James Marcus [via]

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  • Vanity Fair : A Novel Without a Hero
    by William Makepeace Thackeray
    ISBN 0679603212 (0-679-60321-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    "I do not say there is no character as well drawn in Shakespeare [as D'Artagnan]. I do say there is none that I love so wholly."
    --Robert Louis Stevenson

    "The lasting and universal popularity of The Three Musketeers shows that Dumas, by artlessly expressing his own nature in the persons of his heroes, was responding to that craving for action, strength and generosity which is a fact in all periods and all places."
    --Andreé Maurois [via]

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  • Dibdin, Michael: Vendetta
    Vendetta
    by Michael Dibdin
    ISBN 067976853X (0-679-76853-X)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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  • Bradbury, Ray: The Vintage Bradbury
    The Vintage Bradbury
    by Ray Bradbury
    ISBN 0679729461 (0-679-72946-1)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • The Virgin in the Garden
    by A. S. Byatt
    ISBN 0679738290 (0-679-73829-0)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    The Virgin in the Garden is a wonderfully erudite entertainment in which enlightenment and sexuality, Elizabethan drama and contemporary comedy, intersect richly and unpredictably. [via]

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  • Walden
    by Henry David Thoreau
    ISBN 0679735747 (0-679-73574-7)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    In 1845 Henry David Thoreau left his pencil-manufacturing business and began building a cabin on the shore of Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. This lyrical yet practical-minded book is at once a record of the 26 months Thoreau spent in withdrawal from society -- an account of the daily minutiae of building, planting, hunting, cooking, and, always, observing nature -- and a declaration of independence from the oppressive mores of the world he left behind. Elegant, witty, and quietly searching, Walden remains the most persuasive American argument for simplicity of life clarity of conscience.

    For the first time, the authoritative editions of works by major American novelists, poets, scholars, and essayists collected in the hardcover volumes of The Library of America are being published singly in a series of handsome paperback books. A distinguished writer has contributed an introduction for each volume, which also includes a chronology of the author's life and career, an essay on the text, and notes. [via]

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  • War and Peace
    by Leo Tolstoy, Constance Black Garnett
    ISBN 0679600841 (0-679-60084-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    (Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)

    Three-Volume Boxed Set [via]

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  • Waterland
    by Graham Swift
    ISBN 0679739793 (0-679-73979-3)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Set in the bleak Fen Country of East Anglia, and spanning some 240 years in the lives of its haunted narrator and his ancestors, Waterland is a book that takes in eels and incest, ale-making and madness, the heartless sweep of history and a family romance as tormented as any in Greek tragedy.

    "Waterland, like the Hardy novels, carries with all else a profound knowledge of a people, a place, and their interweaving.... Swift tells his tale with wonderful contemporary verve and verbal felicity.... A fine and original work."--Los Angeles Times [via]

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  • The Way We Live Now
    by Anthony Trollope
    ISBN 067960183X (0-679-60183-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Trollope's 1875 tale of a great financier's fraudulent machinations in the railway business, and his daughter's ill-use at the hands of a grasping lover (for whom she steals funds in order to elope) is a classic in the literature of money and a ripping good read as well. [via]

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  • The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
    by Haruki Murakami, Jay Rubin
    ISBN 0679775439 (0-679-77543-9)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Bad things come in threes for Toru Okada. He loses his job, his cat disappears, and then his wife fails to return from work. His search for his wife (and his cat) introduces him to a bizarre collection of characters, including two psychic sisters, a possibly unbalanced teenager, an old soldier who witnessed the massacres on the Chinese mainland at the beginning of the Second World War, and a very shady politician.

    Haruki Murakami is a master of subtly disturbing prose. Mundane events throb with menace, while the bizarre is accepted without comment. Meaning always seems to be just out of reach, for the reader as well as for the characters, yet one is drawn inexorably into a mystery that may have no solution. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is an extended meditation on themes that appear throughout Murakami's earlier work. The tropes of popular culture, movies, music, detective stories, combine to create a work that explores both the surface and the hidden depths of Japanese society at the end of the 20th century.

    If it were possible to isolate one theme in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, that theme would be responsibility. The atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China keep rising to the surface like a repressed memory, and Toru Okada himself is compelled by events to take responsibility for his actions and struggle with his essentially passive nature. If Toru is supposed to be a Japanese Everyman, steeped as he is in Western popular culture and ignorant of the secret history of his own nation, this novel paints a bleak picture. Like the winding up of the titular bird, Murakami slowly twists the gossamer threads of his story into something of considerable weight. --Simon Leake [via]

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