books tagged “General fiction”

books tagged “General fiction”

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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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  • Angle of Repose
    by Wallace Stegner
    ISBN 0679603387 (0-679-60338-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Winner of the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published in 1971, Angle of Repose has also been selected by the editorial board of the Modern Library as one of the hundred best novels of the twentieth century.
            
    Wallace Stegner's uniquely American classic centers on Lyman Ward, a noted historian who relates a fictionalized biography of his pioneer grandparents at a time when he has become estranged from his own family. Through a combination of research, memory, and exaggeration, Ward voices ideas concerning the relationship between history and the present, art and life, parents and children, husbands and wives. Set in many parts of the West, Angle of Repose is a story of discovery--personal, historical, and geographical--that endures as Wallace Stegner's masterwork: an illumination of yesterday's reality that speaks to today's.

            "Angle of Repose is a long, intricate, deeply rewarding novel," wrote William Abrahams in the Atlantic Monthly. "[It] is neither the predictable historical-regional Western epic, nor the equally predictable four-decker family saga, the Forsytes in California, so to speak. . . . For all [its] breadth and sweep, Angle of Repose achieves an effect of intimacy, hence of immediacy, and, though much of the material is 'historical,' an effect of discovery also, of experience newly minted rather than a pageantlike re-creation. . . . Wallace Stegner has written a superb novel, with an amplitude of scale and richness of detail altogether uncommon in contemporary fiction."


    "Angle of Repose is a novel about Time, as much as anything--about people who live through time, who believe in both a past and a future. . . . It reveals how even the most rebellious crusades of our time follow paths that our great-grandfathers' feet beat dusty."
            --Wallace Stegner [via]

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  • Anne of Green Gables
    by L.M. Montgomery, M.A. Claus, Sybil Tawse
    ISBN 0679444750 (0-679-44475-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    When Marilla Cuthbert's brother, Matthew, returns home to Green Gables with a chatty redheaded orphan girl, Marilla exclaims, "But we asked for a boy. We have no use for a girl." It's not long, though, before the Cuthberts can't imagine how they could ever do without young Anne of Green Gables--but not for the original reasons they sought an orphan. Somewhere between the time Anne "confesses" to losing Marilla's amethyst pin (which she never took) in hopes of being allowed to go to a picnic, and when Anne accidentally dyes her hated carrot-red hair green, Marilla says to Matthew, "One thing's for certain, no house that Anne's in will ever be dull." And no book that she's in will be, either. This adapted version of the classic, Anne of Green Gables, introduces younger readers to the irrepressible heroine of L.M. Montgomery's many stories. Adapter M.C. Helldorfer includes only a few of Anne's mirthful and poignant adventures, yet manages to capture the freshness of one of children's literature's spunkiest, most beloved characters. There's just enough to make beginning readers want more--luckily, there's a lot more in the originals! Illustrator Ellen Beier creates vibrant pictures to portray the beauty of the land around Green Gables and the spirited nature of Anne herself. (Ages 5 to 8) --Emilie Coulter [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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  • Harris, Robert: Archangel
    Archangel
    by Robert Harris
    ISBN 0679428887 (0-679-42888-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Blood Meridian
    by Cormac McCarthy, Harold Bloom
    ISBN 0679641041 (0-679-64104-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    "The men as they rode turned black in the sun from the blood on their clothes and their faces and then paled slowly in the rising dust until they assumed once more the color of the land through which they passed." If what we call "horror" can be seen as including any literature that has dark, horrific subject matter, then Blood Meridian is, in this reviewer's estimation, the best horror novel ever written. It's a perverse, picaresque Western about bounty hunters for Indian scalps near the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s--a ragged caravan of indiscriminate killers led by an unforgettable human monster called "The Judge." Imagine the imagery of Sam Peckinpah and Heironymus Bosch as written by William Faulkner, and you'll have just an inkling of this novel's power. From the opening scenes about a 14-year-old Tennessee boy who joins the band of hunters to the extraordinary, mythic ending, this is an American classic about extreme violence. [via]

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  • A Boy's Own Story
    by Edmund White, Allan Gurganus
    ISBN 0679642544 (0-679-64254-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    For more than two decades, Edmund White has been widely recognized as Americas preeminent gay writer. He has a novelists eye for the telling detail or the remarkable phrase and, like Proust himself, concentrates upon the minutiae of the past so that it might live again, wrote The New York Times Book Review. White possesses the rare combination of a po-etic sense of language and an ironic sense of humor, declared Newsweek. [He] is unquestionably the foremost American gay novelist. Commemorating the twentieth anni-versary of A Boys Own Story, this Modern Library edition presents Whites autobiographical novel together with an Introduction by prizewinning novelist Allan Gurganus and a new Afterword by the author himself.

    A Boys Own Story, with equal parts stunning lyricism and unabashed humor, traces a nameless narrators coming-of-age in the 1950s. Struggling with his homosexuality, the narrator seeks the consolations of a fantastic imagination and fills his head with romantic expectations (I believed without a doubt in a better world, which was adulthood or New York or Paris or love.) His distant, divorced parents exacerbate his hunger for emotional connection, and he endures the unhelpful attentions of a priest and a psychoanalyst. In time, he recognizes the need to be loved by the men in his life and, in the surprising conclusion, escapes his childhood forever with one unforgettable act.

    With A Boys Own Story, American literature is larger by one classic novel, wrote The Washington Post Book World. No reader, straight or gay . . . can fail to experience shock after shock of recognition in these pages, and few, I would bet, will be able to withhold a one-to-one sympathy from the unnamed narrator, even when he is being, by the standards of only yesterday, shocking. [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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    Book summary:

    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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  • The Choir
    by Joanna Trollope
    ISBN 0679444548 (0-679-44454-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Cider House Rules
    by John Irving
    ISBN 0679603352 (0-679-60335-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    First published in 1985, The Cider House Rules is John Irving's sixth novel. Set in rural Maine in the first half of this century, it tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch--saint and obstetrician, founder and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Cloud's, ether addict and abortionist. It is also the story of Dr. Larch's favorite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted. [via]

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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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  • Doyle, Roddy: Commitments
    Commitments
    by Roddy Doyle
    ISBN 0679721746 (0-679-72174-6)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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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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  • De Bernieres, Louis: Corelli's Mandolin: A Novel
    Corelli's Mandolin: A Novel
    by Louis De Bernieres
    ISBN 0679436448 (0-679-43644-8)
    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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  • Barnes, Julian: Cross Channel
    Cross Channel
    by Julian Barnes
    ISBN 0679446915 (0-679-44691-5)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • Hall, Karen: Dark Debts
    Dark Debts
    by Karen Hall
    ISBN 0679451463 (0-679-45146-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
    by William Styron
    ISBN 0679643524 (0-679-64352-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    In 1985 William Styron fell victim to a crippling and almost suicidal depression, the same illness that took the lives of Randall Jarrell, Primo Levi and Virginia Woolf. That Styron survived his descent into madness is something of a miracle. That he manages to convey its tortuous progression and his eventual recovery with such candor and precision makes Darkness Visible a rare feat of literature, a book that will arouse a shock of recognition even in those readers who have been spared the suffering it describes. [via]

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  • Dead Souls
    by Nikolai Gogol, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky
    ISBN 0679430229 (0-679-43022-9)
    Hardcover, Knopf 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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  • 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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  • Dracula
    by Bram Stoker
    ISBN 0679602291 (0-679-60229-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Of the many admiring reviews Bram Stoker's Dracula received when it first appeared in 1897, the most astute praise came from the author's mother, who wrote her son: "It is splendid. No book since Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein or indeed any other at all has come near yours in originality, or terror."

    A popular bestseller in Victorian England, Stoker's hypnotic tale of the bloodthirsty Count Dracula, whose nocturnal atrocities are symbolic of an evil ages old yet forever new, endures as the quintessential story of suspense and horror. The unbridled lusts and desires, the diabolical cravings that Stoker dramatized with such mythical force, render Dracula resonant and unsettling a century later. [via]

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  • Russo, Richard: Empire Falls
    Empire Falls
    by Richard Russo
    ISBN 0679432477 (0-679-43247-7)
    Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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  • Far from the Madding Crowd
    by Thomas Hardy
    ISBN 0679603077 (0-679-60307-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Set in his fictional Wessex countryside in southwest England, Far from the Madding Crowd was Thomas Hardy's breakthrough work. Though it was first published anonymously in 1874, the quick and tremendous success of Far from the Madding Crowd persuaded Hardy to give up his first profession, architecture, to concentrate on writing fiction. The story of the ill-fated passions of the beautiful Bathsheba Everdene and her three suitors offers a spectacle of country life brimming with an energy and charm not customarily associated with Hardy. ("When Farmer Oak smiled," the novel begins, "the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears. . . .")
    ----The text is based on the authoritative Wessex Edition of 1912, revised and corrected by Hardy himself.
    ----This edition is the companion volume to the Mobil Masterpiece Theatre WGBH television presentation broadcast on PBS. It stars Paloma Baeza as Bathsheba Everdene, Nathaniel Parker as Gabriel Oak, Nigel Terry as Mr. Boldwood, and Jonathan Firth as Frank Troy. Adapted by Philomena
    McDonagh, Far from the Madding Crowd is directed by Nick Renton.
    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 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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  • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories, Tie-In Edition
    by Hunter S. Thompson
    ISBN 0679602984 (0-679-60298-4)
    Hardcover, Modern Library

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    Book summary:

    Dr. Thompson made the list of inspirational scribes when I polled in a recent writing workshop, and why not? Back in a spiffy Modern Library edition, replete with additional essays, I find in this iconographic work that HST both invoked--and provoked--an era that was not so much the '60s proper, but rather the mean, shadow-filled death of that time, which is still playing out. Thank God Thompson was there to explode the myth of "objective" journalism and help pave the way for the pens and voices that followed. [via]

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  • Fine Balance
    by Rohinton Mistry
    ISBN 0679446087 (0-679-44608-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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  • Frankenstein : Or, the Modern Prometheus
    by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
    ISBN 0679600590 (0-679-60059-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Frankenstein, loved by many decades of readers and praised by such eminent literary critics as Harold Bloom, seems hardly to need a recommendation. If you haven't read it recently, though, you may not remember the sweeping force of the prose, the grotesque, surreal imagery, and the multilayered doppelgänger themes of Mary Shelley's masterpiece. As fantasy writer Jane Yolen writes of this (the reviewer's favorite) edition, "The strong black and whites of the main text [illustrations] are dark and brooding, with unremitting shadows and stark contrasts. But the central conversation with the monster--who owes nothing to the overused movie image & but is rather the novel's charnel-house composite--is where [Barry] Moser's illustrations show their greatest power ... The viewer can all but smell the powerful stench of the monster's breath as its words spill out across the page. Strong book-making for one of the world's strongest and most remarkable books." Includes an illuminating afterword by Joyce Carol Oates. [via]

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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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  • Gut Symmetries
    by Jeanette Winterson
    ISBN 0679454756 (0-679-45475-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    ailed in the Washington Post as "one of our most important writers in English, " Jeanette Winterson has firmly established her reputation as an extraordinarily daring and original novelist. In Gut Symmetries, lives and universes run parallel in a complex contemporary love story set in New York and Liverpool, and aboard the QE2. [via]

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  • The Hippopotamus
    by Stephen Fry
    ISBN 0679438793 (0-679-43879-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Ted Wallace is an old, sour, womanising, cantankerous, whisky-sodden beast of a failed poet and drama critic, but he has his faults too.

    Fired from his newspaper, months behind on his alimony payments and disgusted with a world that undervalues him, Ted seeks a few months repose and free drink at Swafford Hall, the country mansion of his old friend Lord Logan.

    But strange things have been going on at Swafford.  Miracles, Healings, Phenomena beyond the comprehension of a mud-caked hippopotamus like Ted... [via]

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  • The House on Mango Street
    by Sandra Cisneros
    ISBN 067943335X (0-679-43335-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    In hardcover for the first time--on the tenth anniversary of its initial publication--the greatly admired and bestselling book about a young girl growing up in the Latino section of Chicago. Sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous, this novel depicts a new American landscape through its multiple characters. [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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    Book summary:

    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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  • 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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  • In Search of Lost Time
    by Marcel Proust
    ISBN 0679600280 (0-679-60028-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    The Guermantes Way, in this the third volume of In Search of Lost Time, refers to the path that leads to the Duc and Duchess de Guermantess château near Combray. It also represents the narrators passage into the rarefied social kaleidoscope of the Guermantess Paris salon, an important intellectual playground for Parisian society, where he becomes a party to the wit and manners of the Guermantess drawing room. Here he encounters nobles, officers, socialites, and assorted consorts, including Robert de Saint Loup and his prostitute mistress Rachel, the Baron de Charlus, and the Prince de Borodino.

    For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartins acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieffs translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of Á la recherché du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989). [via]

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  • Brookner, Anita: Incidents in the Rue Laugier
    Incidents in the Rue Laugier
    by Anita Brookner
    ISBN 0679439153 (0-679-43915-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • The Informers
    by Bret Easton Ellis
    ISBN 0679435875 (0-679-43587-5)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    The City Is Los Angeles, in the very recent past. The birthplace and graveyard of American myths and dreams, it harbors a group of people trapped between the sybaritic beauty of their surroundings and their own damning moral impoverishment. The Informers is a chronicle of their voices -- fused into an intense, impressionistic narrative that spans and blurs genders, generations and even identities -- all of them suffering from nothing less than the death of the soul.

    Each of the characters in this extraordinary book describes connections between people (classmates and best friends, sometimes dead; a decrepit rock star and his retinue; estranged or ex-husbands and wives, as well as their current, often improbable partners; sex dates and vampires) who remain in every important way strangers. A father inveigles his distant son into a holiday jaunt to Hawaii ... a car crashes in the desert, a plane goes down in the mountains ... a girl returns home to her future by cross-country train, while another spends her final days on the beach ... a couple visits the zoo, for the last time or not. In telling these stories, they escape or condemn or resign themselves, knowing that the bright veneer of their lives, blinding as sunshine, is not enough to help them; knowing also that they have little else to justify their presence in the world.

    Bret Easton Ellis writes with absolute clarity and great depth of feeling about the struggle to find coherence in an environment that might well have lost it entirely. Savagely funny, poignant and uncompromising, The Informers unmasks both a city and an age. [via]

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  • Interview with the Vampire
    by Anne Rice
    ISBN 067945084X (0-679-45084-X)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    This is the book that started it all. We are in a small room with the vampire, face to face, as he speaks--as he pours out the hypnotic, shocking, moving, and erotically charged confessions of his first two hundred years as one of the living dead. [via]

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  • Jack Maggs
    by Peter Carey
    ISBN 0679440089 (0-679-44008-9)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    "Jack Maggs is a dazzling tale of obsession, and Jack Maggs stands as a remarkable character, a resurrected antipodean lag returned to England for vengeance and reconciliation."
    --Thomas Keneally

    From the Booker Prize-winning author, a vivid and robust novel of Dickensian London--a place and a story teeming with mystery, science, and passion.

    The time, the 1830s. Jack Maggs, a foundling trained in the fine arts of thievery, cruelly betrayed and deported to Australia, has now reversed his fortunes--and seeks to fulfill his well-concealed, innermost desire. Returning "home" under threat of execution, he inveigles his way into a household in Great Queen Street, where he's quickly embroiled in various emotional entanglements--and where he falls under the hypnotic scrutiny of Tobias Oates, a celebrated young writer fascinated by the process of mesmerism and obsessed with the criminal mind.

    From this volatile milieu emerges a handful of vividly drawn characters in the dangerous pursuit of love, whether romantic or familial--each of them with secrets, and secret longings, that could spell certain ruin. And as their various schemes converge, the captivating figure at the center is Jack Maggs himself, at once frightening, mystifying, and utterly compelling.


    "Imaginative and audacious . . . A twentieth-century, post-colonial Dickens novel . . . This strange, bold, gripping, and wonderful novel is the story of a power struggle, a double love story, a quest story, and a story of trickery and disguise. It's about taking possession--of an inheritance, of another person's soul, of your own destiny--and being taken possession of. Not least, it's the story of one writer's being possessed by another."
    --Hermione Lee, The Observer

    "Uncommonly exciting and engaging. As much as anyone now writing, Peter Carey is a master of storytelling. His empathy with his characters, combined with his psychological sharp-sightedness, has them almost jumping off the page in full human complexity. An especial bonus is his style . . . Vivid, exact, unexpected images and language match the quick, witty intelligence flickering through this novel, and make it a triumph of ebullient indictment, humane insight, and creative generosity."
    --Peter Kemp, Sunday Times (London)

    "Writing and philosophical contemplations of the highest order . . . On a par with, and more interesting than, his two earlier masterpieces . . . An absorbing, beautifully written novel finished off with a most satisfactory happy ending, and with incidents, an atmosphere, and ideas that linger in the mind."
    --Carmen Callil, The Daily Telegraph [via]

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  • Berg, Elizabeth: Joy School
    Joy School
    by Elizabeth Berg
    ISBN 0679449434 (0-679-44943-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Crichton, Michael: Jurassic Park
    Jurassic Park
    by Michael Crichton
    ISBN 0679430628 (0-679-43062-8)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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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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  • 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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  • Didion, Joan: The Last Thing He Wanted
    The Last Thing He Wanted
    by Joan Didion
    ISBN 0679433317 (0-679-43331-7)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • The Little Friend
    by Donna Tartt
    ISBN 0679439382 (0-679-43938-2)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    The hugely anticipated new novel by the author of The Secret Historya best-seller nationwide and around the world, and one of the most astonishing debuts in recent timesThe Little Friend is even more transfixing and resonant.

    In a small Mississippi town, Harriet Cleve Dusfresnes grows up in the shadow of her brother, whowhen she was only a babywas found hanging dead from a black-tupelo tree in their yard. His killer was never identified, nor has his family, in the years since, recovered from the tragedy.

    For Harriet, who has grown up largely unsupervised, in a world of her own imagination, her brother is a link to a glorious past she has only heard stories about or glimpsed in photograph albums. Fiercely determined, precocious far beyond her twelve years, and steeped in the adventurous literature of Stevenson, Kipling, and Conan Doyle, she resolves, one summer, to solve the murder and exact her revenge. Harriets sole ally in this quest, her friend Hely, is devoted to her, but what they soon encounter has nothing to do with childs play: it is dark, adult, and all too menacing.

    A revelation of familial longing and sorrow, The Little Friend explores crime and punishment, as well as the hidden complications and consequences that hinder the pursuit of truth and justice. A novel of breathtaking ambition and power, it is rich in moral paradox, insights into human frailty, and storytelling brilliance. [via]

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  • Burnett, Frances Hodgson: Little Lord Fauntleroy
    Little Lord Fauntleroy
    by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Charles E. Brock
    ISBN 0679444742 (0-679-44474-2)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • Little Men : Life at Plumfield with Jo's Boys
    by Louisa May Alcott, Frank T. Merrill
    ISBN 067944503X (0-679-44503-X)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Follows the adventures of Jo March and her husband Professor Bhaer as they try to make their school for boys a happy, comfortable, and stimulating place. [via]

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  • Crichton, Michael: The Lost World
    The Lost World
    by Michael Crichton
    ISBN 067945540X (0-679-45540-X)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Written in the wake of Jurassic Park's phenomenal box-office success, The Lost World seems as much a guidebook for Hollywood types hard at work on the franchise's followup as it is a legitimate sci-fi thriller. Which begs the inevitable questions: Is the plot a rehash of the first book? Sure it is, with the action unfolding on yet another secluded island, the mysterious "Site B." Is the cast of characters basically the same? Absolutely, from a freshly minted pair of cute, compu-savvy kids right down to the neatly exhumed chaos theorist Ian Malcolm (who was presumed dead at the close of JP). But is it fun to read? You betcha. Hollywood (and Michael Crichton) keeps telling us the same old stories for a very good reason: we like them. And the pulp SF formula Crichton has mastered with Jurassic Park and The Lost World is no exception. --Paul Hughes [via]

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  • Madame Bovary
    by Gustave Flaubert, Francis Steegmuller
    ISBN 0679600132 (0-679-60013-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Madame Bovary is perhaps the first "modern" novel.  It has always been the most popular of Flaubert's books, and the character of Emma Bovary, a beautiful young woman longing to escape from her dull husband and the constrictions of bourgeois life, is one of the most compelling figures in all literature.  The story of her adulteries and financial ruin was so shocking to mid-nineteenth-century readers that the author was charged with "offenses against public morals and religion."  Flaubert's style, with its elegant, sculpted sentences and passionately observed detail, is rendered here in the classic translation by Francis Steegmuller, who has written widely on Flaubert and is the editor and translator of his letters. [via]

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  • Making History : A Novel
    by Stephen Fry
    ISBN 0679459553 (0-679-45955-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Those of us who have already discovered Stephen Fry know him as the brilliant British comedian behind TV series such as Jeeves & Wooster and Blackadder, and the author of two enormously funny novels, The Liar and The Hippopotamus. But his new film (in which he plays Oscar Wilde) and his new novel (this one) represent a somewhat alarming departure from his previous work: They're more serious. Though humor is still an essential ingredient of both, Fry's fans are finally getting to witness the emotional depth that this brilliant polymath usually keeps hidden.

    In Making History, Fry has bitten off a rather meaty chunk by tackling an at first deceptively simple premise: What if Hitler had never been born? An unquestionable improvement, one would reason--and so an earnest history grad student and an aging German physicist idealistically undertake to bring this about by preventing Adolf's conception. And with their success is launched a brave new world that is in some ways better than ours--but in most ways even worse. Fry's experiment in history makes for his most ambitious novel yet, and his most affecting. His first book to be set mostly in America, it is a thriller with a funny streak, a futuristic fantasy based on one of mankind's darkest realities. It is, in every sense, a story of our times. [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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  • Midnight's Children
    by Salman Rushdie
    ISBN 0679444629 (0-679-44462-9)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Anyone who has spent time in the developing world will know that one of Bombay's claims to fame is the enormous film industry that churns out hundreds of musical fantasies each year. The other, of course, is native son Salman Rushdie--less prolific, perhaps than Bollywood, but in his own way just as fantastical. Though Rushdie's novels lack the requisite six musical numbers that punctuate every Bombay talkie, they often share basic plot points with their cinematic counterparts. Take, for example, his 1980 Booker Prize-winning Midnight's Children: two children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947--the moment at which India became an independent nation--are switched in the hospital. The infant scion of a wealthy Muslim family is sent to be raised in a Hindu tenement, while the legitimate heir to such squalor ends up establishing squatters' rights to his unlucky hospital mate's luxurious bassinet. Switched babies are standard fare for a Hindi film, and one can't help but feel that Rushdie's world-view--and certainly his sense of the fantastical--has been shaped by the films of his childhood. But whereas the movies, while entertaining, are markedly mediocre, Midnight's Children is a masterpiece, brilliant written, wildly unpredictable, hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure.

    Rushdie's narrator, Saleem Sinai, is the Hindu child raised by wealthy Muslims. Near the beginning of the novel, he informs us that he is falling apart--literally:

    I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug--that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of an acceleration.
    In light of this unfortunate physical degeneration, Saleem has decided to write his life story, and, incidentally, that of India's, before he crumbles into "(approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust." It seems that within one hour of midnight on India's independence day, 1,001 children were born. All of those children were endowed with special powers: some can travel through time, for example; one can change gender. Saleem's gift is telepathy, and it is via this power that he discovers the truth of his birth: that he is, in fact, the product of the illicit coupling of an Indian mother and an English father, and has usurped another's place. His gift also reveals the identities of all the other children and the fact that it is in his power to gather them for a "midnight parliament" to save the nation. To do so, however, would lay him open to that other child, christened Shiva, who has grown up to be a brutish killer. Saleem's dilemma plays out against the backdrop of the first years of independence: the partition of India and Pakistan, the ascendancy of "The Widow" Indira Gandhi, war, and, eventually, the imposition of martial law.

    We've seen this mix of magical thinking and political reality before in the works of Günter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez. What sets Rushdie apart is his mad prose pyrotechnics, the exuberant acrobatics of rhyme and alliteration, pun, wordplay, proper and "Babu" English chasing each other across the page in a dizzying, exhilarating cataract of words. Rushdie can be laugh-out-loud funny, but make no mistake--this is an angry book, and its author's outrage lends his language wings. Midnight's Children is Salman Rushdie's irate, affectionate love song to his native land--not so different from a Bombay talkie, after all. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locust
    by Nathanael West
    ISBN 067960278X (0-679-60278-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    "Somehow or other I seem to have slipped in between all the 'schools,' " observed Nathanael West the year before his untimely death in 1940. "My books meet no needs except my own, their circulation is practically private and I'm lucky to be published." Yet today, West is widely recognized as a prophetic writer whose dark and comic vision of
    a society obsessed with mass-
    produced fantasies foretold much
    of what was to come in American life.
         Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), which West envisioned as "a novel in the form of a comic strip," tells of an advice-to-the-lovelorn columnist who becomes tragically embroiled in the desperate lives of his readers. The Day of the Locust (1939) is West's great dystopian Hollywood novel based on his experiences at the seedy fringes of the movie industry.
       "The work of Nathanael West, savagely, comically, tragically original, has come into its own," said novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg. "A new public [has] discovered in the writings of West a brilliant reflection of its own sense of chaos and helplessness in a world running more to madness than to reason." [via]

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  • Nightwood
    by Djuna Barnes, Dorothy Allison
    ISBN 067964024X (0-679-64024-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Nightwood is not only a classic of lesbian literature, but was also acknowledged by no less than T. S. Eliot as one of the great novels of the 20th century. Eliot admired Djuna Barnes' rich, evocative language. Lesbian readers will admire the exquisite craftsmanship and Barnes' penetrating insights into obsessive passion. Barnes told a friend that Nightwood was written with her own blood "while it was still running." That flowing wound was the breakup of an eight-year relationship with the lesbian love of her life. [via]

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  • Northanger Abbey
    by Jane Austen
    ISBN 0679601929 (0-679-60192-9)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Though Northanger Abbey is one of Jane Austen's earliest novels, it was not published until after her death--well after she'd established her reputation with works such as Pride and Prejudice, Emma, and Sense and Sensibility. Of all her novels, this one is the most explicitly literary in that it is primarily concerned with books and with readers. In it, Austen skewers the novelistic excesses of her day made popular in such 18th-century Gothic potboilers as Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho. Decrepit castles, locked rooms, mysterious chests, cryptic notes, and tyrannical fathers all figure into Northanger Abbey, but with a decidedly satirical twist. Consider Austen's introduction of her heroine: we are told on the very first page that "no one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine." The author goes on to explain that Miss Morland's father is a clergyman with "a considerable independence, besides two good livings--and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters." Furthermore, her mother does not die giving birth to her, and Catherine herself, far from engaging in "the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a rose-bush" vastly prefers playing cricket with her brothers to any girlish pastimes.

    Catherine grows up to be a passably pretty girl and is invited to spend a few weeks in Bath with a family friend. While there she meets Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor, who invite her to visit their family estate, Northanger Abbey. Once there, Austen amuses herself and us as Catherine, a great reader of Gothic romances, allows her imagination to run wild, finding dreadful portents in the most wonderfully prosaic events. But Austen is after something more than mere parody; she uses her rapier wit to mock not only the essential silliness of "horrid" novels, but to expose the even more horrid workings of polite society, for nothing Catherine imagines could possibly rival the hypocrisy she experiences at the hands of her supposed friends. In many respects Northanger Abbey is the most lighthearted of Jane Austen's novels, yet at its core is a serious, unsentimental commentary on love and marriage, 19th-century British style. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • Conrad, Joseph: Nostromo : A Tale of the Seaboard
    Nostromo : A Tale of the Seaboard
    by Joseph Conrad
    ISBN 067960202X (0-679-60202-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Of Love and Other Demons
    by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Edith Grossman
    ISBN 067943853X (0-679-43853-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    From the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera comes an extraordinary reading experience, the story of a doomed love affair between a twelve-year-old girl and a bookish priest, three times her age, who's been sent to oversee her exorcism. [via]

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  • One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich
    by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, H.T. Willetts
    ISBN 0679444645 (0-679-44464-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Solzhenitsyn's first book, this economical, relentless novel is one of the most forceful artistic indictments of political oppression in the Stalin-era Soviet Union. The simply told story of a typical, grueling day of the titular character's life in a labor camp in Siberia, is a modern classic of Russian literature and quickly cemented Solzhenitsyn's international reputation upon publication in 1962. It is painfully apparent that Solzhenitsyn himself spent time in the gulags--he was imprisoned for nearly a decade as punishment for making derogatory statements about Stalin in a letter to a friend. [via]

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  • Munro, Alice: Open Secrets: Stories
    Open Secrets: Stories
    by Alice Munro
    ISBN 0679435751 (0-679-43575-1)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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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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  • Persuasion
    by Jane Austen
    ISBN 0679601910 (0-679-60191-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

    Of all Jane Austens great and delightful novels, Persuasion is widely regarded as the most moving. It is the story of a second chance.

    Anne Elliot, daughter of the snobbish, spendthrift Sir Walter Elliot, is a woman of quiet charm and deep feelings. When she was nineteen, she fell in love withand was engaged toa naval officer, the fearless and headstrong Captain Wentworth. But the young man had no fortune, and Anne allowed herself to be persuaded, against her profoundest instinct, to give him up.Now, at twenty-seven, and believing that she has lost her bloom, Anne is startled to learn that Captain Wentworth has returned to the neighborhood, a rich man and still unwed. Her never-diminished love is muffled by her pride. He seems cold and unforgiving. Even worse, he appears to be infatuated by the flighty and pretty Louisa Musgrove.

    What happens as Anne and Wentworth are thrown together in the social world of Bathand as an eager new suitor appears for Anneis touchingly and wittily told in a masterpiece that is also one of the most entrancing novels in the English language. [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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  • Pride and Prejudice
    by Jane Austen
    ISBN 0679601686 (0-679-60168-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."

    Next to the exhortation at the beginning of Moby-Dick, "Call me Ishmael," the first sentence of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice must be among the most quoted in literature. And certainly what Melville did for whaling Austen does for marriage--tracing the intricacies (not to mention the economics) of 19th-century British mating rituals with a sure hand and an unblinking eye. As usual, Austen trains her sights on a country village and a few families--in this case, the Bennets, the Philips, and the Lucases. Into their midst comes Mr. Bingley, a single man of good fortune, and his friend, Mr. Darcy, who is even richer. Mrs. Bennet, who married above her station, sees their arrival as an opportunity to marry off at least one of her five daughters. Bingley is complaisant and easily charmed by the eldest Bennet girl, Jane; Darcy, however, is harder to please. Put off by Mrs. Bennet's vulgarity and the untoward behavior of the three younger daughters, he is unable to see the true worth of the older girls, Jane and Elizabeth. His excessive pride offends Lizzy, who is more than willing to believe the worst that other people have to say of him; when George Wickham, a soldier stationed in the village, does indeed have a discreditable tale to tell, his words fall on fertile ground.

    Having set up the central misunderstanding of the novel, Austen then brings in her cast of fascinating secondary characters: Mr. Collins, the sycophantic clergyman who aspires to Lizzy's hand but settles for her best friend, Charlotte, instead; Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mr. Darcy's insufferably snobbish aunt; and the Gardiners, Jane and Elizabeth's low-born but noble-hearted aunt and uncle. Some of Austen's best comedy comes from mixing and matching these representatives of different classes and economic strata, demonstrating the hypocrisy at the heart of so many social interactions. And though the novel is rife with romantic misunderstandings, rejected proposals, disastrous elopements, and a requisite happy ending for those who deserve one, Austen never gets so carried away with the romance that she loses sight of the hard economic realities of 19th-century matrimonial maneuvering. Good marriages for penniless girls such as the Bennets are hard to come by, and even Lizzy, who comes to sincerely value Mr. Darcy, remarks when asked when she first began to love him: "It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley." She may be joking, but there's more than a little truth to her sentiment, as well. Jane Austen considered Elizabeth Bennet "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print". Readers of Pride and Prejudice would be hard-pressed to disagree. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • Anonymous: Primary Colors : A Novel of Politics
    Primary Colors : A Novel of Politics
    by Anonymous
    ISBN 0679448594 (0-679-44859-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate : Two Novels
    by Nancy Mitford
    ISBN 0679600906 (0-679-60090-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Few aristocratic English families of the 20th century have enjoyed quite the delicious notoriety that the Mitford sisters courted in the years bracketed by two world wars. For a start, two of the girls, Unity and Diana, were Fascists (the former was a friend of Hitler and Goebbels, and the latter married Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists). Two others took the writing route: Jessica ran away from home and became a famous muckraking journalist, and Nancy composed maliciously witty--and transparently autobiographical--novels as well as several biographies. The Pursuit of Love (1945), her greatest fictional success, and its companion, Love in a Cold Climate (1949), keep closely to the spirit (and details) of their youthful amusements and more grown-up adventures.

    Seen through the adoring eyes of Fanny Logan, the self-effacing cousin who records their shenanigans with a wicked sincerity, the Radletts of Alconleigh shine with Gloucestershire glamour: apoplectic Uncle Matthew; Lord Alconleigh (modeled to a fine nuance after Mitford's father, Lord Redesdale, who like Uncle Matthew used to hunt his children with bloodhounds); his kind, rather vague wife, Aunt Sadie; as well as Fanny's favorite cousin Linda and the other six Radlett children. The Radlett daughters and Fanny wait impatiently for life to become interesting. Because of their station, however, nothing but marriage is expected of them, so they hurl themselves at love like crusaders, with varied and always fascinating results. At one point Fanny recounts:

    A few minutes only after Linda had left me to go back to London, Christian and the comrades, I had another caller. This time it was Lord Merlin...."This is a bad business," he said, abruptly, and without preamble, though I had not seen him for several years. "I'm just back from Rome, and what do I find--Linda and Christian Talbot. It's an extraordinary thing that I can't ever leave England without Linda getting herself mixed up with some thoroughly undesirable character. This is a disaster--how far has it gone? Can nothing be done?"
    The Pursuit of Love follows the romantic fortunes of Linda Radlett, while Love in a Cold Climate ventures further afield with the story of Polly Hampton's shocking love affair and its unexpectedly funny aftermath. Fanny's inexhaustible narration is a pleasant buffer for Mitford's deft teasing, which dances along just this side of mockery. The author of U and Non-U, a famous tongue-in-cheek treatise on the shibboleths of upper-class mores, Mitford often leaves the reader wondering just where she stands in the class wars, and much of her humor arises in the fine distinctions of aristocratic manners and speech. Still, there's an inimitable tart sweetness to these stories of true love and its pallid imitators, making them perfect snapshots of a vanished world. --Barrie Trinkle [via]

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  • Quite a Year for Plums
    by Bailey White
    ISBN 0679445315 (0-679-44531-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Bailey White's intimate vignettes of small-town life are loosely held together by their subjects, who are themselves tightly held together by love, family, and idiosyncrasy. This episodic mode, which has made her a favorite on National Public Radio, suits her just as well as a novelist. In Quite a Year for Plums, even the temporary denizens of her fictional southern Georgia town have their oddities: a bird artist is obsessed by a vanishing breed of chickens and has nightmares about chicken feet, while another dreams night and day of typography. He compares, for instance, the Mistral font to George Hamilton and laments the bastardization of Bodoni. It is perhaps the Gill Sans typeface that most raises his aesthetic hackles: "They shorten the uppers, they enlarge the counters, they round off the angles, they make it soft and slack. They castrate it!" (Suffice it to say that his partner in lamentation is a woman who fervently believes in little spacemen of the nonhuman variety.)

    In addition to the extraterrestrialite, the permanent townsfolk include a pair of retired schoolteachers who have been reading aloud to each other for 50 years each Thursday in May. Why Thursday? Why only May? White doesn't let us in on that secret: she's reluctant to intrude too much on her characters' habits and hobby horses, even though they are happy enough to intrude on one another. What concerns these eccentrics above all is plant pathologist and banjo picker Roger Meadows, whom men and women alike admire. "Perhaps because of his years of walking in densely planted fields of tobacco and peanuts," White describes him at one social event, "Roger had a graceful way of moving through a crowd, gently slipping between the people as if they were sticky, floppy leaves that he must not bruise." A photo of him comparing sick and healthy peanut plants is the closest thing the place has to a pin-up. Even his ex-wife's aunt has one on her refrigerator: "On the white of Roger's shirt Eula printed R-O-G-E-R in proud capital letters, with the final R dipping down out of consideration for the roots of the healthy peanut plant."

    Above all, his peers would like Roger to settle down with the right woman, in the wake of his failed marriage to the town's belle dame sans merci. Alas, when he falls under the spell of an inappropriate candidate--the aforementioned bird artist--they seem to know it won't last. But White describes this unusual romance with such sweetness and generosity that the reader hopes differently. Quite a Year for Plums is filled with strange social convergences, quiet comedy, and understated tragedy. The author has an eye--and, of course, ear--for the telling detail and the decisive, domestic moment. [via]

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  • Updike, John: Rabbit Angstrom
    Rabbit Angstrom
    by John Updike
    ISBN 0679444599 (0-679-44459-9)
    Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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  • A Rage in Harlem
    by Chester B. Himes
    ISBN 0679720405 (0-679-72040-5)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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    Book summary:

    A Rage in Harlem is a ripping introduction to Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, patrolling New York Citys roughest streets in Chester Himess groundbreaking Harlem Detectives series. 
     
    For love of fine, wily Imabelle, hapless Jackson surrenders his life savings to a con man who knows the secret of turning ten-dollar bills into hundredsand then he steals from his boss, only to lose the stolen money at a craps table. Luckily for him, he can turn to his savvy twin brother, Goldy, who earns a livingdisguised as a Sister of Mercyby selling tickets to Heaven in Harlem.  With Goldy on his side, Jackson is ready for payback.

    [via]

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  • Ragtime
    by E.L. Doctorow
    ISBN 0679602976 (0-679-60297-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Published in 1975, Ragtime changed our very concept of what a novel could be. An extraordinary tapestry, Ragtime captures the spirit of America in the era between the turn of the century and the First World War.
       The story opens in 1906 in New Rochelle, New York, at the home
    of an affluent American family.
    One lazy Sunday afternoon, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini swerves his car into a telephone pole outside their house. And almost magically, the line between fantasy and historical fact, between real and imaginary characters, disap-
    pears. Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Sig- mund Freud, and Emiliano Zapata slip in and out of the tale, crossing paths with Doctorow's imagined family and other fictional characters, including an immigrant peddler and a ragtime musician from Harlem whose insistence on a point of justice drives him to revolutionary violence.
    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 Red Badge of Courage
    by Stephen Crane, Shelby Foote
    ISBN 0679602968 (0-679-60296-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    The Red Badge of Courage was published in 1895, when its author, an impoverished writer living a bohemian life in New York, was only twenty-three. It immediately became a bestseller, and Stephen Crane became famous. Crane set out to create "a psychological portrayal of fear." Henry Fleming, a Union Army volunteer in the Civil War, thinks "that perhaps in a battle he might run....As far as war was concerned he knew nothing of himself." And he does run in his first battle, full of fear and then remorse. He encounters a grotesquely rotting corpse propped against a tree, and a column of wounded men, one of whom is a friend who dies horribly in front of him. Fleming receives his own "red badge" when a fellow soldier hits him in the head with a gun. "The idea of falling like heroes on ceremonial battlefields," Ford Madox Ford remarked later, "was gone forever." Shelby Foote, author of The Civil
    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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  • Robinson Crusoe
    by Daniel Defoe, W.J. Linton
    ISBN 0679428194 (0-679-42819-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    This classic story of a shipwrecked mariner on a deserted island is perhaps the greatest adventure in all of English literature. Fleeing from pirates, Robinson Crusoe is swept ashore in a storm possessing only a knife, a box of tobacco, a pipe-and the will to survive. His is the saga of a man alone: a man who overcomes self-pity and despair to reconstruct his life; who painstakingly teaches himself how to fashion a pot, bake bread, build a canoe; and who, after twenty-four agonizing years of solitude, discovers a human footprint in the sand... Consistently popular since its first publication in 1719, Daniel Defoe's story of human endurance in an exotic, faraway land exerts a timeless appeal. The first important English novel, Robinson Crusoe has taken its rightful place among the great myths of Western civilization.


    From the Paperback edition. [via]

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  • Munro, Alice: Selected Stories
    Selected Stories
    by Alice Munro
    ISBN 0679446273 (0-679-44627-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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  • Sense And Sensibility
    by Jane Austen
    ISBN 0679601953 (0-679-60195-3)
    Hardcover, Modern Library

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    Book summary:

    Though not the first novel she wrote, Sense and Sensibility was the first Jane Austen published. Though she initially called it Elinor and Marianne, Austen jettisoned both the title and the epistolary mode in which it was originally written, but kept the essential theme: the necessity of finding a workable middle ground between passion and reason. The story revolves around the Dashwood sisters, Elinor and Marianne. Whereas the former is a sensible, rational creature, her younger sister is wildly romantic--a characteristic that offers Austen plenty of scope for both satire and compassion. Commenting on Edward Ferrars, a potential suitor for Elinor's hand, Marianne admits that while she "loves him tenderly," she finds him disappointing as a possible lover for her sister:

    Oh! Mama, how spiritless, how tame was Edward's manner in reading to us last night! I felt for my sister most severely. Yet she bore it with so much composure, she seemed scarcely to notice it. I could hardly keep my seat. To hear those beautiful lines which have frequently almost driven me wild, pronounced with such impenetrable calmness, such dreadful indifference!
    Soon however, Marianne meets a man who measures up to her ideal: Mr. Willoughby, a new neighbor. So swept away by passion is Marianne that her behavior begins to border on the scandalous. Then Willoughby abandons her; meanwhile, Elinor's growing affection for Edward suffers a check when he admits he is secretly engaged to a childhood sweetheart. How each of the sisters reacts to their romantic misfortunes, and the lessons they draw before coming finally to the requisite happy ending forms the heart of the novel. Though Marianne's disregard for social conventions and willingness to consider the world well-lost for love may appeal to modern readers, it is Elinor whom Austen herself most evidently admired; a truly happy marriage, she shows us, exists only where sense and sensibility meet and mix in proper measure. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • Servant of the Bone
    by Anne Rice
    ISBN 0679433015 (0-679-43301-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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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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  • Sons and Lovers
    by D. H. Lawrence
    ISBN 0679602682 (0-679-60268-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Sons and Lovers was the first modern portrayal of a phenomenon that later, thanks to Freud, became easily recognizable as the Oedipus complex. Never was a son more indentured to his mother's love and full of hatred for his father than Paul Morel, D.H. Lawrence's young protagonist. Never, that is, except perhaps Lawrence himself. In his 1913 novel he grappled with the discordant loves that haunted him all his life--for his spiritual childhood sweetheart, here called Miriam, and for his mother, whom he transformed into Mrs. Morel. It is, by Lawrence's own account, a book aimed at depicting this woman's grasp: "as her sons grow up she selects them as lovers--first the eldest, then the second. These sons are urged into life by their reciprocal love of their mother--urged on and on. But when they come to manhood, they can't love, because their mother is the strongest power in their lives."

    Of course, Mrs. Morel takes neither of her two elder sons (the first of whom dies early, which further intensifies her grip on Paul) as a literal lover, but nonetheless her psychological snare is immense. She loathes Paul's Miriam from the start, understanding that the girl's deep love of her son will oust her: "She's not like an ordinary woman, who can leave me my share in him. She wants to absorb him." Meanwhile, Paul plays his part with equal fervor, incapable of committing himself in either direction: "Why did his mother sit at home and suffer?... And why did he hate Miriam, and feel so cruel towards her, at the thought of his mother. If Miriam caused his mother suffering, then he hated her--and he easily hated her." Soon thereafter he even confesses to his mother: "I really don't love her. I talk to her, but I want to come home to you."

    The result of all this is that Paul throws Miriam over for a married suffragette, Clara Dawes, who fulfills the sexual component of his ascent to manhood but leaves him, as ever, without a complete relationship to challenge his love for his mother. As Paul voyages from the working-class mining world to the spheres of commerce and art (he has fair success as a painter), he accepts that his own achievements must be equally his mother's. "There was so much to come out of him. Life for her was rich with promise. She was to see herself fulfilled... All his work was hers."

    The cycles of Paul's relationships with these three women are terrifying at times, and Lawrence does nothing to dim their intensity. Nor does he shirk in his vivid, sensuous descriptions of the landscape that offers up its blossoms and beasts and "shimmeriness" to Paul's sensitive spirit. Sons and Lovers lays fully bare the souls of men and earth. Few books tell such whole, complicated truths about the permutations of love as resolutely without resolution. It's nothing short of searing to be brushed by humanity in this manner. --Melanie Rehak [via]

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  • Ninh, Bao: The Sorrow of War
    The Sorrow of War
    by Bao Ninh, Phan Thanh Hao
    ISBN 0679439617 (0-679-43961-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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  • Ford, Richard: The Sportswriter
    The Sportswriter
    by Richard Ford
    ISBN 0679454519 (0-679-45451-9)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • Story of My Life: A Novel
    by Jay McInerney
    ISBN 0679722572 (0-679-72257-2)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    In his breathlessly paced new novel Jay McInerney revisits the nocturnal New York of Bright Lights, Big City. Alison Poole, twenty going on 40,000, is a budding actress already fatally well versed in hopping the clubs, shopping Chanel falling in and out of, lust, and abusing other people's credit cards. As Alison races toward emotional breakdown, McInerney gives us a hilarious yet oddly touching portrait of a postmodern Holly Golightly coming to terms with a world in which everything is permitted and nothing really matters. [via]

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  • Straight Man
    by Richard Russo
    ISBN 0679432469 (0-679-43246-9)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    First Jane Smiley came out of the comedy closet with Moo, a campus satire par excellence, and now Richard Russo has gotten in on the groves-of-academe game. Straight Man is hilarious sport, with a serious side. William Henry Devereaux Jr., is almost 50 and stuck forever as chair of English at West Central Pennsylvania University. It is April and fear of layoffs--even among the tenured--has reached mock-epic proportions; Hank has yet to receive his department budget and finds himself increasingly offering comments such as "Always understate necrophilia" to his writing students. Then there are his possible prostate problems and the prospect of his father's arrival. Devereaux Sr., "then and now, an academic opportunist," has always been a high-profile professor and a low-profile parent.

    Though Hank tries to apply William of Occam's rational approach (choose simplicity) to each increasingly absurd situation, and even has a dog named after the philosopher, he does seem to cause most of his own enormous difficulties. Not least when he grabs a goose and threatens to off a duck (sic) a day until he gets his budget. The fact that he is also wearing a fake nose and glasses and doing so in front of a TV camera complicates matters even further. Hank tries to explain to one class that comedy and tragedy don't go together, but finds the argument "runs contrary to their experience. Indeed it may run contrary to my own." It runs decidedly against Richard Russo's approach in Straight Man, and the result is a hilarious and touching novel. [via]

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  • Swann's Way
    by Marcel Proust, C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin
    ISBN 067972009X (0-679-72009-X)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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    Book summary:

    The transmutation of sensation into sentiment, the ebb tide of memory, waves of emotion such as desire, jealousy, and artistic euphoria--this is the material of this enormous and yet singularly light and translucid work.

    --VLADIMIR NABOKOV


    In the overture to Swann's Way, the themes of the whole of In Search of Lost Time are introduced, and the narrator's childhood in Paris and Combray is recalled, most  memorably in the evocation of the famous maternal good-night kiss. The  recollection of the narrator's love for Swann's daughter Gilberte leads to an account  of Swann's passion for Odette and the rise of the nouveaux riches Verdurins.

    The final volume of a new, definitive text of A la recherche du temps perdu was published by the Bibliotheque de la Pleiade in 1989. For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin's acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff's translation to take into account the new French editions. [via]

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  • Hollinghurst, Alan: The Swimming-Pool Library
    The Swimming-Pool Library
    by Alan Hollinghurst
    ISBN 0679722564 (0-679-72256-4)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Wyss, J.D.: The Swiss Family Robinson
    The Swiss Family Robinson
    by J.D. Wyss, Louis John Rhead
    ISBN 0679436405 (0-679-43640-5)
    Hardcover, Everymans Library

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  • A Tale of Two Cities
    by Charles Dickens
    ISBN 0679602089 (0-679-60208-9)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    A Tale of Two Cities is Charles Dickens's great historical novel, set against the violent upheaval of the French Revolution. The most famous and perhaps the most popular of his works, it compresses an event of immense complexity to the scale of a family history, with a cast of characters that includes a bloodthirsty ogress and an antihero as believably flawed as any in modern fiction. Though the least typical of the author's novels, A Tale of Two Cities still underscores many of his enduring themes--imprisonment, injustice, and social anarchy, resurrection and the renunciation that fosters renewal.

    Over the years the Modern Library has become a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable, beautifully produced, hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. Perfect for students, the Modern Library comprises over 170 titles by such oft-studied authors as Plato, Chaucer, Bronte, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Joyce, Keats, Shakespeare and Chekhov.

    And coming soon, more Modern Library titles on the Random House Web Site. [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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    Book summary:

    "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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  • The Thurber Carnival
    by James Thurber
    ISBN 0679600892 (0-679-60089-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    After the chuckles and amidst the chortles, the first-time reader of The Thurber Carnival is bound to utter a discreetly voiced "Huh?" Like Cracker Jacks, there are surprises inside James Thurber's delicious 1945 smorgasbord of essays, stories, and sketches. This festival is, surprises and all, a collection of earlier collections (mostly), including, among others, gems from My World--and Welcome to It, Let Your Mind Alone!, and The Middle Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze. Needless to say, there are also numerous cartoons that, by themselves, are worth the price of admission. While redoubling Thurber's deserved reputation as a laugh-out-loud humorist and teller-of-gentle-tales, it reintroduces him as a thinker-of-thoughts. To wit: his 1933 "Preface to a Life," in which he observes himself while discussing "writers of light pieces running from a thousand to two thousand words":

    To call such persons "humorists," a loose-fitting and ugly word, is to miss the nature of their dilemma and the dilemma of their nature. The little wheels of their invention are set in motion by the damp hand of melancholy.
    Enjoy the surprises, certainly, but revel in the candy-coated popcorn and peanuts. As in "More Alarms at Night," in which a teenaged Thurber intrudes upon his sleeping father, a skittish man named Charles, because he can't recall the name Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Coincidentally, his father has just been frightened half to death by Thurber's brother, who had earlier stalked into his room saying coldly, "Buck, your time has come."
    "Listen," I said. "Name some towns in New Jersey quick!" It must have been around three in the morning. Father got up, keeping the bed between him and me, and started to pull his trousers on. "Don't bother about dressing," I said. "Just name some towns in New Jersey." While he hastily pulled on his clothes--I remember he left his socks off and put his shoes on his bare feet--father began to name, in a shaky voice, various New Jersey cities. I can still see him reaching for his coat without taking his eyes off me. "Newark," he said, "Jersey City, Atlantic City, Elizabeth, Paterson, Passaic, Trenton, Jersey City, Trenton, Paterson--" "It has two names," I snapped. "Elizabeth and Paterson," he said.
    Of course, things turn out fine, as well they should. And why not? The best of Thurber, which The Thurber Carnival arguably is, is sublime; surprising insight and wry observations tossed lightly and served constantly with effortless good humor and an obvious love for all things gently eccentric. --Michael Hudson [via]

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  • Vanishing Act
    by Thomas Perry
    ISBN 0679435360 (0-679-43536-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    JANE WHITEFIELD is . . .



    . . . in the one-woman business of helping the desperate disappear. Thanks to her membership in the Wolf Clan of the Seneca tribe, she can fool any pursuer, cover any trail, and then provide her clients with new identities, complete with authentic paperwork. Jane knows all the tricks, ancient and modern; in fact, she has invented several of them herself. But when Jane opens a door out of the world for an attractive fugitive named John Felker, she walks into a trap that will take all her heritage and cunning to escape. . . .



    "A unique heroine, an ultracompetent woman attuned to the ancient ways of her ancestors and to the harsh realities of the modern, bureaucratic world."

    --San Francisco Chronicle



    "A compelling, multifaceted protagonist. Whitefield is as tough as Sam Spade, as tender as Jo in Little Women and as resourceful as Robinson Crusoe's Friday."

    --Philadelphia Inquirer



    "Strong-willed . . . [A] most singular creation."

    --The New York Times Book Review



    "Entertainingly resourceful."

    --The New York Times



    "One sharp and tough cookie."

    --Detroit News


    From the Paperback edition. [via]

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  • Violin
    by Anne Rice
    ISBN 0679433023 (0-679-43302-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    In the grand manner of Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice's new novel moves across time and the continents, from nineteenth-century Vienna to a St. Charles Greek Revival mansion in present-day New Orleans to the dazzling capitals of the modern-day world, telling a story of two charismatic figures bound to each other by a passionate commitment to music as a means of rapture, seduction, and liberation.At the novel's center: a uniquely fascinating woman, Triana--who once dreamed of becoming a great musician--and the demonic fiddler Stefan, tormented ghost of a Russian aristocrat, who begins to prey upon her, using his magic violin first to enchant, then to dominate and draw her into a state of madness through the music she loves. But Triana understands the power of the music perhaps even more than does Stefan--and she sets out to resist Stefan and to fight not only for her sanity but for her life. The struggle draws them both into a terrifying supernatural realm where they find themselves surrounded by memories, by horrors, and by overwhelming truths. Battling desperately, they are at last propelled towards the novel's astonishing and unforgettable climax.Violin is crowded with the history, the drama, the invention, and the romantic intensity that have become synonymous with Anne Rice at her incomparable best. [via]

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  • Where I'm Calling from
    by Raymond Carver
    ISBN 0679722319 (0-679-72231-9)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    The last story collection published during Carver's life (he died in 1988) contains most of his greatest hits from his earlier books, as well as seven stories that hadn't been collected up to that point. The breadth of the collection makes these 37 stories an extremely complete map of Carver territory, of a particular area of America and of the specific texture of the people Carver writes about -- their difficult attempts at survival in a world where happiness does not arrive wrapped up in neat packages but comes in far more peculiar parcels, if it comes at all. [via]

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  • William Shakespeare Complete Works
    by William Shakespeare, Eric Rasmusse N, Heloise Senechal
    ISBN 0679642951 (0-679-64295-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    FROM THE WORLD FAMOUS ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY, THE FIRST AUTHORITATIVE, MODERNIZED, AND CORRECTED EDITION OF SHAKESPEARE'S FIRST FOLIO IN THREE CENTURIES.Skillfully assembled by Shakespeare's fellow actors in 1623, the First Folio was the original Complete Works. It is arguably the most important literary work in the English language. But starting with Nicholas Rowe in 1709 and continuing to the present day, Shakespeare editors have mixed Folio and Quarto texts, gradually corrupting the original Complete Works with errors and conflated textual variations.Now Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, two of today's most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, have edited the First Folio as a complete book, resulting in a definitive Complete Works for the twenty-first century.Combining innovative scholarship with brilliant commentary and textual analysis that emphasizes performance history and values, this landmark edition will be indispensable to students, theater professionals, and general readers alike.For more information on this Modern Library edition, visit www.therscshakespeare.com [via]

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  • The Winshaw Legacy: Or, What a Carve Up!
    by Jonathan Coe
    ISBN 0679433856 (0-679-43385-6)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    'I could recommend The Winshaw Legacy as I a superb political novel, or as a fiendishly clever meta-novel, or as a unique modern historical novel, or as a riveting family saga, but I'm afraid that would drive everyone, yawning in terror, straight out of the bookstore. So let's just say it has naked pictures of Natasha Richardson...Can't say that? Well, let's say it's a nasty farce with lots of bathroom humor and violence which reminds me at least as much of Fawlty Towers as it does of Midnight's Children.'

    -- Jay McInerney

    A postmodern detective story, a scathing send-up of the rapacious eighties, a macabre Gothic -- all rolled up in a bravura tragicomic entertainment.

    The Winshaw family, as their official biographer is warned by old Mortimer Winshaw himself, is the meanest, greediest, cruellest bunch of backstabbing penny-pinching bastards who ever crawled across the face of the earth.' Bankers, industrialists, politicians, arms dealers and media barons -- they rule Britannia, more or less. They also have a guilty secret in the shape of a mad aunt stashed away in a remote asylum, convinced of familial treachery during World War II and determined to effect the ruin of her entire clan.

    In the summer of 1990, while Saddam Hussein is provoking yet another war, the Winshaws' biographer (a severely depressed young novelist) is piecing together the truth of their sordid legacy, and discovers that it converges bizarrely with the plot of a film he's been obsessed by since childhood. Moreover, it seems that all of this, dynasty and cinema alike, has some mysterious connection with his own troubled history. Of course whether he -- or anybody else -- will be alive when this compound riddle is solved remains to be seen.

    Savagely funny, hugely inventive and passionately political. The Winshaw Legacy assumes Dickensian proportions as it excoriates the modern age of greed -- and heralds the American debut of an extraordinary writer. As The Economist concluded: Talented comic novelists are rare [but] that exclusive club -- Thomas Love Peacock, Evelyn Waugh and P. G. Wodehouse are among its members -- has admitted a newcomer, an Englishman called Jonathan Coe.'

    'A remarkable achievement; intelligent, funny, and important.' -- The Times Literary Supplement

    'An extravagant literary blockbuster...A grand and intelligent novel, so full of accomplishment and pleasure.' -- New Statesman & Society'

    Really, something to get excited about...his big, hilarious, intricate, furious, moving treat of a novel.' -- The Guardian [via]

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  • The Woman Warrior
    by Maxine Hong Kingston
    ISBN 0679721886 (0-679-72188-6)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    The Woman Warrior is a pungent, bitter, but beautifully written memoir of growing up Chinese American in Stockton, California. Maxine Hong Kingston (China Men) distills the dire lessons of her mother's mesmerizing "talk-story" tales of a China where girls are worthless, tradition is exalted and only a strong, wily woman can scratch her way upward. The author's America is a landscape of confounding white "ghosts"--the policeman ghost, the social worker ghost--with equally rigid, but very different rules. Like the woman warrior of the title, Kingston carries the crimes against her family carved into her back by her parents in testimony to and defiance of the pain. [via]

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  • The World According to Garp
    by John Irving
    ISBN 0679603069 (0-679-60306-9)
    Hardcover, Modern Library

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    Book summary:

    "Garp was a natural storyteller," says the narrator of John Irving's incandescent novel, referring to the book's hero, the novelist Garp, who has much in common with Irving himself. "He could make things up one right after the other, and they seemed to fit."

    Irving packs wild characters and weird events into his classic--officially recognized as such in a Modern Library edition with a new introduction by the author--while amazingly maintaining the rough feel of realism in every scene and the pulse of life in every heart. Many novelists of his time might have populated a novel with a novelist protagonist whose life and books comment on each other and the novel we're reading. Transsexual football players, ball turret gunners lobotomized in battle, multiple adultery, unicycling bears, mad feminists who amputate their tongues in sympathy with the celebrated victim of a horrifying rape--Irving made them all people. Even the bear is a fitting character.

    In a crucial episode, Garp's wife's seduction of a young man coincidentally occurs at the moment when Garp is delighting their young sons with a reckless car trick (one of the few scenes beautifully, eerily, heartbreakingly captured in the film version as well). Many authors would have been content with the harsh comedy of the scene, but Irving respects its integrity, and he builds the rest of the book on the consequences of the event. How does he get away with his killer cocktail of slapstick and horror? Because it's simply what we all face daily, rearranged into soul-satisfying art. "Life is an X-rated soap opera," according to Garp, and who can contradict him?

    Rereading Garp 20 years later, one is struck by how elegantly Irving structures his bizarre and complex story. Take the two most celebrated bits in the book, the Under Toad and Garp's story "The Pension Grillparzer," which shimmers like an exquisite Kafkaesque insect in the amber of the novel. When Garp warns his son about the "undertow" at the beach, the boy imagines a monster out of Beowulf who lurks beneath the waves to suck you under: the "Under Toad." It's funny at first, but we soon find that the Under Toad is a metaphor with teeth--he connects with a prophetic dream of death in "The Pension Grillparzer," set in Vienna. Garp's son's last words are, "It's like a dream!" And as Irving--who studied at the University of Vienna--can certainly tell you, the German word for "death" sounds precisely like the English word "toad."

    All that death, and yet Garp is mainly exuberant. This story is, as Garp's stuttering writing teacher puts it, "rich with lu-lu-lunacy and sorrow." It enriches literature, and our lives. --Tim Appelo [via]

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