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books tagged “german”
books tagged “german”
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The Adventures of Tom Sawyerby Mark Twain, Russell BakerISBN 0679735011 (0-679-73501-1)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Alanna : The First Adventureby Tamora PierceISBN 0679801146 (0-679-80114-6)
Softcover, Random House Children's Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Alanna : The First Adventure'Book summary:Call it fate, call it intuition, or just call it common sense, but somehow young Alanna knows she isn't meant to become some proper lady cloistered in a convent. Instead, she wants to be a great warrior maiden--a female knight. But in the land of Tortall, women aren't allowed to train as warriors. So Alanna finds a way to switch places with her twin, Thom, and take his place as a knight in training at the palace of King Roald. Disguising herself as a boy, Alanna begins her training as a page in the royal court. Soon, she is garnering the admiration of all around her, including the crown prince, with her strong work ethic and her thirst for knowledge. But all the while, she is haunted by the recurring vision of a black stone city that emanates evil... somehow she knows it is her fate to purge that place of its wickedness. But how will she find it? And can she fulfill her destiny while keeping her gender a secret?
With Alanna: The First Adventure, veteran fantasy author Tamora Pierce has created a lively, engaging heroine who will charm middle-school readers with her tomboyish bravado and have them eagerly searching for the next book in the Song of the Lioness series. Like Brian Jacques's tales of Redwall, this popular quartet is an entertaining fantasy series for younger teens. (Ages 10 to 13) --Jennifer Hubert [via]
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The Annotated Shakespeareby William Shakespeare, A. L. RowseISBN 0681322608 (0-681-32260-8)
Hardcover, Longmeadow Press
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An Artist of the Floating Worldby Kazuo IshiguroISBN 0679722661 (0-679-72266-1)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'An Artist of the Floating World'Book summary:In An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro offers readers of the English language an authentic look at postwar Japan, "a floating world" of changing cultural behaviors, shifting societal patterns and troubling questions. Ishiguro, who was born in Nagasaki in 1954 but moved to England in 1960, writes the story of Masuji Ono, a bohemian artist and purveyor of the night life who became a propagandist for Japanese imperialism during the war. But the war is over. Japan lost, Ono's wife and son have been killed, and many young people blame the imperialists for leading the country to disaster. What's left for Ono? Ishiguro's treatment of this story earned a 1986 Whitbread Prize. [via]
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The Assignment : Or on the Observing of the Observer of the Observersby Friedrich Durrenmatt, Joel AgeeISBN 0679722335 (0-679-72233-5)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Aurora's Motive: A True Story of Mother-love, Feminism and Murderby Erich Hackl, Edna McCownISBN 0679724354 (0-679-72435-4)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenmanby Andrzej Szczypiorski, Klara GlowczewskaISBN 0679732144 (0-679-73214-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Blitzkrieg Storyby Charles MessengerISBN 0684148013 (0-684-14801-3)
Hardcover, Scribner
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The Boy Who Followed Ripleyby Patricia HighsmithISBN 067974567X (0-679-74567-X)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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The Brothers Karamazovby Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Larissa Volokhonsky, Richard PevearISBN 0679729259 (0-679-72925-9)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Brothers Karamazov'Book summary:A new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. This acclaimed new English version of Dostoevsky's last novel does justice to all its levels of artistry and intention. [via]
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Candideby Voltaire, Rockwell KentISBN 0679642587 (0-679-64258-7)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Candide'Book summary:Political satire doesn't age well, but occasionally a diatribe contains enough art and universal mirth to survive long after its timeliness has passed. Candide is such a book. Penned by that Renaissance man of the Enlightenment, Voltaire, Candide is steeped in the political and philosophical controversies of the 1750s. But for the general reader, the novel's driving principle is clear enough: the idea (endemic in Voltaire's day) that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and apparent folly, misery and strife are actually harbingers of a greater good we cannot perceive, is hogwash.
Telling the tale of the good-natured but star-crossed Candide (think Mr. Magoo armed with deadly force), as he travels the world struggling to be reunited with his love, Lady Cunegonde, the novel smashes such ill-conceived optimism to splinters. Candide's tutor, Dr. Pangloss, is steadfast in his philosophical good cheer, in the face of more and more fantastic misfortune; Candide's other companions always supply good sense in the nick of time. Still, as he demolishes optimism, Voltaire pays tribute to human resilience, and in doing so gives the book a pleasant indomitability common to farce. Says one character, a princess turned one-buttocked hag by unkind Fate: "I have wanted to kill myself a hundred times, but somehow I am still in love with life. This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our most melancholy propensities; for is there anything more stupid than to be eager to go on carrying a burden which one would gladly throw away, to loathe one's very being and yet to hold it fast, to fondle the snake that devours us until it has eaten our hearts away?"--Michael Gerber [via]
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Candide : Or, Optimismby Peter Constantine, Voltaire, Diane JohnsonISBN 0679643133 (0-679-64313-3)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Candide : Or, Optimism'Book summary:In this splendid new translation of Voltaires satiric masterpiece, all the celebrated wit, irony, and trenchant social commentary of one of the great works of the Enlightenment is restored and refreshed.
Voltaire may have cast a jaundiced eye on eighteenth-century Europea place that was definitely not the best of all possible worlds. But amid its decadent society, despotic rulers, civil and religious wars, and other ills, Voltaire found a mother lode of comic material. And this is why Peter Constantines thoughtful translation is such a pleasure, presenting all the books subtlety and ribald joys precisely as Voltaire had intended.
The globe-trotting misadventures of the youthful Candide; his tutor, Dr. Pangloss; Martin, and the exceptionally trouble-prone object of Candides affections, Cunégonde, as they brave exile, destitution, cannibals, and numerous deprivation, provoke both belly laughs and deep contemplation about the roles of hope and suffering in human life.
The transformation of Candides outlook from panglossian optimism to realism neatly lays out Voltaires philosophythat even in Utopia, life is less about happiness than survivalbut not before providing us with one of literatures great and rare pleasures. [via]More editions of Candide : Or, Optimism:
The Cement Gardenby Ian McEwanISBN 0679750185 (0-679-75018-5)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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Cider House Rulesby John IrvingISBN 0679603352 (0-679-60335-2)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cider House Rules'Book summary: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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Classics of Horror: Dracula/Frankenstein/2 Books in 1by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Bram StokerISBN 0681411635 (0-681-41163-5)
Hardcover, Longmeadow Pr
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The Club Dumasby Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Sonia SotoISBN 0679777547 (0-679-77754-7)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Club Dumas'Book summary:Fallen angels, satanic manuals, and a passion for the works of Raphael Sabatini and Alexandre Dumas among others--this is the stuff of Spanish author Arturo Pérez-Reverte's engrossing novel The Club Dumas. Set in a world of antiquarian booksellers where dealers would gladly betray their own mothers to get their hands on a rare volume, The Club Dumas is a thinking person's thriller: in addition to a riveting plot, the book is full of intriguing details that range from the working habits of Alexandre Dumas to how one might go about forging a 17th-century text. Woven through these meditations is enough murder, sex, and the occult to keep both the hero, Lucas Corso, and the reader hopping.
As in his previous novel, The Flanders Panel, set in the world of art restoration, Mr. Pérez-Reverte has written a literary thriller to tease both the intellect and adrenaline gland. Lucas Corso makes a complex, ultimately sympathetic hero, and there's plenty to delight in the intricate twists and turns the story takes before the mystery of The Club Dumas is finally solved. [via]
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Complete Works of William Shakespeareby William ShakespeareISBN 0681410035 (0-681-41003-5)
Hardcover, Longmeadow Pr
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The Consolations of Philosophyby Alain De BottonISBN 0679779175 (0-679-77917-5)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Consolations of Philosophy'Book summary:"It is common," Alain de Botton writes in The Consolations of Philosophy, "to assume that we are dealing with a highly intelligent book when we cease to understand it. Profound ideas cannot, after all, be explained in the language of children." While his easygoing exploration of philosophers from Socrates to Nietzsche isn't exactly written for the Blue's Clues set, few readers will cease to understand it. Furthermore, it's a joy to read. De Botton's 1997 How Proust Can Change Your Life forged a new kind of lit crit: an exploration of Remembrance of Things Past, delivered in the sweet-gummed envelope of an advice book. He returns to the self-help format here, this time plundering the great thinkers to puzzle out the way we ought to live.
What was stunning about the Proust book was de Botton's brazen annexing of a hallowed novelist to address lite emotional problems. That format is less arresting when applied to the philosophers, since which earnest philosophy major has not, from time to time, tried to apply the alpine heights of thought to his own humble worries? Usually, sophomoric attempts to turn to, say, Kant for advice on love tend to be unmitigated disasters. In de Botton's case, however, he is able to find consolation for a broken heart in Schopenhauer, consolation for inadequacy in Montaigne. Epicurus, usually associated with a love of luxury, is a solace for those of us without much money--and de Botton learns from him that "objects mimic in a material dimension what we require in a psychological one. We need to rearrange our minds but are lured towards new shelves. We buy a cashmere cardigan as a substitute for the counsel of friends."
Lest the reader become burdened by all this philosophizing, the book is peppered with illustrations--the section on Nietzsche of course includes a DC Comics drawing of Superman. And it's further leavened by the author's personal anecdotes and winning confessional tone. Early on, for instance, he admits his own gnawing need for popularity: "A desire to please led me to laugh at modest jokes like a parent on the opening night of a school play." Before he became a medicine man for the soul, de Botton was a first-rate novelist, and it shows in his writing. --Claire Dederer [via]
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Corelli's Mandolinby Louis De Bernieres, Robin DesserISBN 067976397X (0-679-76397-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Corelli's Mandolin'Book summary:Fictional Novel, Literary Fiction [via]
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Count of Monte Cristoby Alexandre DumasISBN 0679601996 (0-679-60199-6)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Count of Monte Cristo'Book summary:A wonderful children's book filled with great illustrations. [via]
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Cyrano De Bergeracby Anthony Burgess, Edmond RostandISBN 0679734139 (0-679-73413-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cyrano De Bergerac'Book summary:Translated by Anthony Burgess. [via]
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Disclosureby Michael CrichtonISBN 0679751432 (0-679-75143-2)
Softcover, Random House Large Print
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Disclosure'Book summary:A brutal struggle in the cutthroat computer industry; a shattering psychological game of cat and mouse; an accusation of sexual harassment that threatens to derail a brilliant career...this is the electrifying core of Michael Crichton's new novel, the first since Rising Sun.
At the center: Tom Sanders, an up-and-coming executive with DigiCom in Seattle, a man whose corporate future is certain. Until: after a closed-door meeting with his new boss -- a woman who was his lover ten years before, a woman who has been promoted to the position he expected to have -- he is accused of sexually harassing her. Now he finds himself trapped between what he knows to be true and what he knows others will assume to be the truth. And, as he uncovers an electronic trail into the company's secrets, he begins to grasp just how cynical and manipulative an abuse of truth has actually occurred...
Tackling one of the most divisive issues of our time, Disclosure compels us to see beyond our traditional responses. It is Michael Crichton at his best.
Michael Crichton's novels include The Terminal Man, Congo, Sphere, Jurassic Park, and Rising Sun. [via]More editions of Disclosure:
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Draculaby Bram StokerISBN 0679602291 (0-679-60229-1)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dracula'Book summary: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]More editions of Dracula:
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Dublinersby James Joyce, Walter Hettche, Hans Walter GablerISBN 0679739904 (0-679-73990-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dubliners'Book summary:"Don't you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I am trying to do?...To give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life of its own."
-- James Joyce, in a letter to his brother
With these fifteen stories James Joyce reinvented the art of fiction, using a scrupulous, deadpan realism to convey truths that were at once blasphemous and sacramental. Whether writing about the death of a fallen priest ("The Sisters"), the petty sexual and fiscal machinations of "Two Gallants," or of the Christmas party at which an uprooted intellectual discovers just how little he really knows about his wife ("The Dead"), Joyce takes narrative places it had never been before.
The text of this edition has been newly edited by Hans Walter Gabler and Walter Hettche and is followed by a new afterword, chronology, and bibliography by John S. Kelly. Also included in a special appendix are the original versions of three stories as well as Joyce's long-suppressed Preface to Dubliners. [via]More editions of Dubliners:
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Emmaby Jane AustenISBN 0679602577 (0-679-60257-7)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Emma'Book summary:Of all Jane Austen's heroines, Emma Woodhouse is the most flawed, the most infuriating, and, in the end, the most endearing. Pride and Prejudice's Lizzie Bennet has more wit and sparkle; Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey more imagination; and Sense and Sensibility's Elinor Dashwood certainly more sense--but Emma is lovable precisely because she is so imperfect. Austen only completed six novels in her lifetime, of which five feature young women whose chances for making a good marriage depend greatly on financial issues, and whose prospects if they fail are rather grim. Emma is the exception: "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her." One may be tempted to wonder what Austen could possibly find to say about so fortunate a character. The answer is, quite a lot.
For Emma, raised to think well of herself, has such a high opinion of her own worth that it blinds her to the opinions of others. The story revolves around a comedy of errors: Emma befriends Harriet Smith, a young woman of unknown parentage, and attempts to remake her in her own image. Ignoring the gaping difference in their respective fortunes and stations in life, Emma convinces herself and her friend that Harriet should look as high as Emma herself might for a husband--and she zeroes in on an ambitious vicar as the perfect match. At the same time, she reads too much into a flirtation with Frank Churchill, the newly arrived son of family friends, and thoughtlessly starts a rumor about poor but beautiful Jane Fairfax, the beloved niece of two genteelly impoverished elderly ladies in the village. As Emma's fantastically misguided schemes threaten to surge out of control, the voice of reason is provided by Mr. Knightly, the Woodhouse's longtime friend and neighbor. Though Austen herself described Emma as "a heroine whom no one but myself will much like," she endowed her creation with enough charm to see her through her most egregious behavior, and the saving grace of being able to learn from her mistakes. By the end of the novel Harriet, Frank, and Jane are all properly accounted for, Emma is wiser (though certainly not sadder), and the reader has had the satisfaction of enjoying Jane Austen at the height of her powers. --Alix Wilber [via]
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The Escape of the Goeben: Prelude to Gallipoliby Redmond McLaughlinISBN 0684137615 (0-684-13761-5)
Hardcover, Scribner
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Europe, Europe: Forays into a Continentby Hans Magnus EnzensbergerISBN 0679731598 (0-679-73159-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Europe, Europe: Forays into a Continent'Book summary:In this highly acclaimed and entertaining book, already "among the touchstones of the new travel writing" (Newsweek), one of West Germany's leading authors takes us on an insider's tour of Europe in the recent past. Focusing on Italy, Poland, Hungary, Sweden, Spain, and Portugal, he describes how Europe has been moving toward a new identity.
Enzensberger makes a witty and knowledgeable traveling companion, delving into surprising corners and bywaysfrom the back alleys of Budapest to the halls of the Italian mintand striking up conversations with everyone from bankers to revolutionaries, astrologers to apparatchiks. In the process, he suggests that Europe's strength lies increasingly in embracing diversity and improvisation, not bigness and regimentation. He enables us to see with fresh eyes one of the most exciting parts of the world today. [via]More editions of Europe, Europe: Forays into a Continent:
Feeding Your Baby: Breast, Bottle and Baby Foodsby Carolyn T. ChubetISBN 0681404531 (0-681-40453-1)
Softcover, Longmeadow Pr
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The Fermataby Nicholson BakerISBN 0679759336 (0-679-75933-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The First Manby Albert Camus, David Hapgood, Sarah BurnesISBN 0679768165 (0-679-76816-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The First Man'Book summary:Camus tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like his own. Camus summons up the sights, sounds and textures of a childhood circumscribed by poverty and a father's death yet redeemed by the austere beauty of Algeria and the boy's attachment to his nearly deaf-mute mother. Published thirty-five years after its discovery amid the wreckage of the car accident that killed Camus, The First Man is the brilliant consummation of the life and work of one of the 20th century's greatest novelists. Translated from the French by David Hapgood.
"The First Man is perhaps the most honest book Camus ever wrote, and the most sensual...Camus is...writing at the depth of his powers...It is a work of genius."--The New Yorker
"Fascinating...The First Man helps put all of Camus's work into a clearer perspective and brings into relief what separates him from the more militant literary personalities of his day...Camus's voice has never been more personal."--New York Times Book Review [via]More editions of The First Man:
Floating in My Mother's Palmby Ursula HegiISBN 0679731156 (0-679-73115-6)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Folded Leafby William MaxwellISBN 0679772561 (0-679-77256-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Frankensteinby Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Walter Cronkite, Charles Michener, Eugenie VinkISBN 0679749543 (0-679-74954-3)
Softcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Frankenstein'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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The German Empire, 1870-1918by Michael SturmerISBN 0679640908 (0-679-64090-8)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Great Expectationsby Charles Dickens, Monica Kulling, Cindy AlvarezISBN 0679874666 (0-679-87466-6)
Softcover, Random House Childrens Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Great Expectations'Book summary:Seven-year-old Pip is an orphan. He lives with his nasty older sister and works as a blacksmiths apprentice. Pip dreams of a better life, but has no idea how to turn his luck around. Then a mysterious stranger decides to make all of Pips dreams come true. Pips lonely life is about to change forever. Will his great expectations be realized? Or will he learn that money and power are worthless without love and friendship? [via]
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A History of Warfareby John KeeganISBN 0679730826 (0-679-73082-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A History of Warfare'Book summary:The acclaimed author of The Face of Battle examines centures of conflict in a variety of diverse societies and cultures. "Keegan is at once the most readable and the most original of living military historians . . . A History of Warfare is perhaps the most remarkable study of warfare that has yet been written."--The New York Times Book Review. [via]
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Hotel Paradiseby Martha GrimesISBN 0679758798 (0-679-75879-8)
Hardcover, Random House Large Print
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Hotel Paradise'Book summary:Internationally acclaimed Martha Grimes once again turns her hand to crafting a story of such rich atmosphere and intricate suspense that she transports the reader to a world unlike any other.
A once-fashionable, now fading resort hotel. A spinster Aunt living in an attic. Dirt roads that lead to dead ends. A house full of secrets and old, dusty furnishings, uninhabited for almost half a century. A twelve-year-old girl with a passion for double-chocolate ice-cream sodas, and decaying lake-fronts, and an obsession with the death by drowning of another young girl, forty years before.
Like all important events in the past, there are repercussions and ramifications in the present. In the world as seen by Martha Grimes, those repercussions simmer and seethe and wind their way through hearts and souls. The ramifications can be subtle. Or exhilarating. Passionate. And they can also be deadly.
Hotel Paradise is a delicate yet excruciating view of the pettiness and cruelty of small town America. It is a look at the difficult decisions a young girl must make on her way to becoming an adult and the choices she must make between right and wrong, between love and truth, between life and death. It is a novel with extraordinary range and depth that ultimately becomes a thrilling morality play.
With its narrative grace, its compelling characters, and its moment-to-moment suspense, Hotel Paradise is Martha Grimes at the top of her form. [via]More editions of Hotel Paradise:
Iliad and the Odysseyby HomerISBN 0681452447 (0-681-45244-7)
Hardcover, Longmeadow Pr
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In the Hand of the Goddessby Tamora PierceISBN 0679801111 (0-679-80111-1)
Softcover, Random House Children's Books
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Independent Peopleby Halldor Laxness, Brad Leithauser, J. A. ThompsonISBN 0679767924 (0-679-76792-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Independent People'Book summary:This magnificent novelwhich secured for its author the 1955 Nobel Prize in Literatureis at least available to contemporary American readers. Although it is set in the early twentieth century, it recalls both Iceland's medieval epics and such classics as Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. And if Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to achieve independence is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic.
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Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude, Bjartur wants nothing more than to raise his flocks unbeholden to any man. But Bjartur's spirited daughter wants to live unbeholden to him. What ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. Vast in scope and deeply rewarding, Independent People is a masterpiece.More editions of Independent People:
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Ivanhoeby Scott, Walter, Sr.ISBN 0679602631 (0-679-60263-1)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ivanhoe'Book summary:Hailed by Victor Hugo as "the real epic of our age," Ivanhoe was an immensely popular bestseller when first published in 1819. The book inspired literary imitations as well as paintings, dramatizations, and even operas. Now Sir Walter Scott's sweeping romance of medieval England has prompted a lavish
new television production.
In the twelfth century, Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe returns home to England from the Third Crusade to claim his inheritance and the love of the lady Rowena. The heroic adventures of this noble Saxon knight involve him in the struggle between Richard the Lion-Hearted and his malignant brother John: a conflict that brings Ivanhoe into alliance with the
mysterious outlaw Robin Hood and his legendary fight for the forces of good.
"Scott's characters, like Shakespeare's and Jane Austen's, have the seed of life in them," observed Virginia Woolf. "The emotions in which Scott excels are not those of human beings pitted against other human beings, but of man pitted against
Nature, of man in relation to fate. His romance is the romance of hunted men hiding in woods at night; of brigs standing out to sea; of waves breaking in the moonlight; of solitary sands and distant horsemen; of violence and suspense." For Henry James, "Scott was a born
storyteller. . . . Since Shakespeare, no writer has created so immense a gallery of portraits." [via]More editions of Ivanhoe:
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Ivanhoeby Walter ScottISBN 0679642234 (0-679-64223-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ivanhoe'Book summary:Hailed by Victor Hugo as 'the real epic of our age,' Ivanhoe was an immensely popular bestseller when first published in 1819. The book inspired literary imitations as well as paintings, dramatizations, and even operas. Now Sir Walter Scott's sweeping romance of medieval England has prompted a lavish new television production.
In the twelfth century, Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe returns home to England from the Third Crusade to claim his inheritance and the love of the lady Rowena. The heroic adventures of this noble Saxon knight involve him in the struggle between Richard the Lion-Hearted and his malignant brother John: a conflict that brings Ivanhoe into alliance with the mysterious outlaw Robin Hood and his legendary fight for the forces of good.
'Scott's characters, like Shakespeare's and Jane Austen's, have the seed of life in them,' observed Virginia Woolf. 'The emotions in which Scott excels are not those of human beings pitted against other human beings, but of man pitted against Nature, of man in relation to fate. His romance is the romance of hunted men hiding in woods at night; of brigs standing out to sea; of waves breaking in the moonlight; of solitary sands and distant horsemen; of violence and suspense.' For Henry James, 'Scott was a born storyteller. . . . Since Shakespeare, no writer has created so immense a gallery of portraits.' [via]More editions of Ivanhoe:
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Jane Eyreby Charlotte BronteISBN 0679783326 (0-679-78332-6)
Softcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Jane Eyre'Book summary:Jane Eyre is a wildly emotional romance with a lonely heroine and a tormented Byronic hero, pathetic orphans, dark secrets, and a madwoman in the attic. When it was
published in 1847, it was a great popular success. The power of the writing, the masterly
handling of the narrative, and the boldly realistic style were much admired. But many found it difficult to believe that Currer Bell, the pseudonymous author, was Charlotte Brontë, a young woman from a bleak Yorkshire parsonage.
Time has served Jane Eyre well. Charlotte Brontë's social commentary still fascinates; the novel is still powerful, full of erotic tension, passion, and irony. It can be read as an astonishing paradigm of feminist writing. At its heart is the assertion that a woman has the right to be independent, and its insistence on that fact and on the equality of the sexes makes it a truly revolutionary work of art. Above all, Jane Eyre is a marvelous love story, as affecting as any in fiction.
Diane Johnson has provided a new Introduction to this Modern Library edition, which is the companion volume to the A&E television presentation. The Modern Library also publishes Charlotte Brontë's three other completed novels: The Professor, Shirley, and Villette.
The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun-dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hard-bound editions of important works of liter-ature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau-gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices. [via] -
The Lathe of Heavenby Ursula K. Le GuinISBN 0684125293 (0-684-12529-3)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Lathe of Heaven'Book summary:Ursula K. Le Guin is one of science fiction's greatest writers. She is also an acclaimed author of powerful and perceptive nonfiction, fantasy, and literary fiction. She has received many honors, including six Nebula and five Hugo Awards, the National Book Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Newbery, the Pilgrim, the Tiptree, and citations by the American Library Association. She has written over a dozen highly regarded novels and story collections. Her SF masterworks are The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Dispossessed (1974), and The Lathe of Heaven (1971).
George Orr has dreams that come true--dreams that change reality. He dreams that the aunt who is sexually harassing him is killed in a car crash, and wakes to find that she died in a wreck six weeks ago, in another part of the country. But a far darker dream drives George into the care of a psychotherapist--a dream researcher who doesn't share George's ambivalence about altering reality.
The Lathe of Heaven is set in the sort of worlds that one would associate with Philip K. Dick, but Ms. Le Guin's treatment of the material, her plot and characterization and concerns, are more akin to the humanistic, ethically engaged, psychologically nuanced fiction of Theodore Sturgeon. The Lathe of Heaven is an insightful and chilling examination of total power, of war and injustice and other age-old problems, of changing the world, of playing God. --Cynthia Ward [via]
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Lioness Rampantby Tamora PierceISBN 0679801138 (0-679-80113-8)
Softcover, Random House Childrens Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lioness Rampant'Book summary:At last, Alanna of Trebond has become the first female knight errant in Tortall. She sets out on an impossible quest to find the Dominion Jewel, a legendary gem that, in the right hands, has limitless power for good. But while she searches for the one thing that can save her war-torn country, her nemesis returns from the dead and begins to wreak havoc. Only Alanna has the power to prevent Tortall's utter destruction...
In this final verse of the Song of the Lioness quartet, Alanna grows from heroine into legend. [via]More editions of Lioness Rampant:
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The Lost Worldby Michael CrichtonISBN 0679765077 (0-679-76507-7)
Softcover, Random House Large Print
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Lost World'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 Bovaryby Gustave Flaubert, Francis SteegmullerISBN 0679736360 (0-679-73636-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Madame Bovary'Book summary:For daring to peer into the heart of an adulteress and enumerate its contents with profound dispassion, the author of Madame Bovary was tried for "offenses against morality and religion." What shocks us today about Flaubert's devastatingly realized tale of a young woman destroyed by the reckless pursuit of her romantic dreams is its pure artistry: the poise of its narrative structure, the opulence of its prose (marvelously captured in the English translation of Francis Steegmuller), and its creation of a world whose minor figures are as vital as its doomed heroine. In reading Madame Bovary, one experiences a work that remains genuinely revolutionary almost a century and a half after its creation. [via]
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Maltese Falconby Dashiell HammettISBN 0679722645 (0-679-72264-5)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Maltese Falcon'Book summary:Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett's archetypally tough San Francisco detective, is more noir than L.A. Confidential and more vulnerable than Raymond Chandler's Marlowe. In The Maltese Falcon, the best known of Hammett's Sam Spade novels (including The Dain Curse and The Glass Key), Spade is tough enough to bluff the toughest thugs and hold off the police, risking his reputation when a beautiful woman begs for his help, while knowing that betrayal may deal him a new hand in the next moment.
Spade's partner is murdered on a stakeout; the cops blame him for the killing; a beautiful redhead with a heartbreaking story appears and disappears; grotesque villains demand a payoff he can't provide; and everyone wants a fabulously valuable gold statuette of a falcon, created as tribute for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV. Who has it? And what will it take to get it back? Spade's solution is as complicated as the motives of the seekers assembled in his hotel room, but the truth can be a cold comfort indeed.
Spade is bigger (and blonder) in the book than in the movie, and his Mephistophelean countenance is by turns seductive and volcanic. Sam knows how to fight, whom to call, how to rifle drawers and secrets without leaving a trace, and just the right way to call a woman "Angel" and convince her that she is. He is the quintessence of intelligent cool, with a wise guy's perfect pitch. If you only know the movie, read the book. If you're riveted by Chinatown or wonder where Robert B. Parker's Spenser gets his comebacks, read the master. --Barbara Schlieper [via]
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Mansfield Parkby Jane AustenISBN 0679601945 (0-679-60194-5)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mansfield Park'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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Marpingen : Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in a Nineteenth-Century German Villageby David BlackbournISBN 0679757783 (0-679-75778-3)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Marpingen : Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in a Nineteenth-Century German Village'Book summary:In a riveting work of historical research, David Blackbourn brings might the period surrounding the days in July 1876 when three young girls claimed to have sighted the Virgin Mary in the fields outside the German town of Marpingen.
As journalists, priests, and sellers of pious memorabilia descended on Marpingen, the sleepy town rapidly metamorphosed into a cause celebre, with supporters and opponents referring to it as "the German Lourdes," and even "the Bethlehem of Germany." "It is an undeniable fact that the whole world is talking about Marpingen," wrote one sympathetic commentator. "Marpingen has become the center of events that have shaken the world," suggested another.
Tens of thousands of pilgrims flocked to the town, prompting numerous claims of miraculous cures -- as well as military intervention, the dispatch of an undercover detective, parliamentary debate, and a dramatic trial.
Pondering what had happened from another perspective was a man on whom the drama placed a heavy burden. "The events are so tremendous," wrote a Marpingen parish priest, "that a true account of them would already fill a book."
Blackbourn, a leading historian of modem Germany, vividly portrays the Catholic world of the Bismarckian era through a detailed exploration of the changing social, economic, and community structures that formed its matrix, and provides a sensitive account of popular religious beliefs. Ranging widely across the fields of social, cultural, and political history, he powerfully evokes the crisis-laden atmosphere of the 1870s, revealing the subtle interplay between politics and religion, the changing nature of the family itself, and the ferment of ideas that fueled the great debate over "modernity." And in a final chapter, he looks ahead to the renewed apparitions of the Virgin in twentieth-century Marpingen against the background of war, Nazism, and the Cold War.A remarkable piece of historical detective work by an important scholar.
From the Hardcover edition. [via]More editions of Marpingen : Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in a Nineteenth-Century German Village:
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Master And Margaritaby Mikhail Bulgakov, Katherine Tiernan O'Connor, Diana Lewis BurginISBN 0679760806 (0-679-76080-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Maus a Survivors Tale: And Here My Troubles Beginby Art SpiegelmanISBN 0679729771 (0-679-72977-1)
Softcover, Pantheon Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Maus a Survivors Tale: And Here My Troubles Begin'Book summary:***WINNER OF THE 1992 PULIZTER PRIZE***Acclaimed as a quiet triumph and a brutally moving work of art, the first volume of Art Spiegelman's Mausintroduced readers to Vladek Spieglman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist trying to come to terms with his father, his father's terrifying story, and History itself. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), succeeds perfectly in shocking us out of any lingering sense of familiarity with the events described, approaching, as it does, the unspeakable through the diminutive.This second volume, subtitled And Here My Troubles Began, moves us from the barracks of Auschwitz to the bungalows of the Catskills. Genuinely tragic and comic by turns, it attains a complexity of theme and a precision of thought new to comics and rare in any medium. Mausties together two powerful stories: Vladek's harrowing take of survival against all odds, delineating the paradox of family life in the death camps, and the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. At every level this is the ultimate survivor's tale-and that too of the children who somehow survive even the survivors. [via]
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Memoirs of a Geishaby Arthur GoldenISBN 0679781587 (0-679-78158-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Memoirs of a Geisha'Book summary:A literary sensation and runaway bestseller, this brilliant debut novel tells with seamless authenticity and exquisite lyricism the true confessions of one of Japan's most celebrated geisha. Speaking to us with the wisdom of age and in a voice at once haunting and startlingly immediate, Nitta Sayuri tells the story of her life as a geisha. It begins in a poor fishing village in 1929, when, as a nine-year-old girl with unusual blue-gray eyes, she is taken from her home and sold into slavery to a renowned geisha house. We witness her transformation as she learns the rigorous arts of the geisha: dance and music; wearing kimono, elaborate makeup, and hair; pouring sake to reveal just a touch of inner wrist; competing with a jealous rival for men's solicitude and the money that goes with it. In Memoirs of a Geisha , we enter a world where appearances are paramount; where a girl's virginity is auctioned to the highest bidder; where women are trained to beguile the most powerful men; and where love is scorned as illusion. It is a unique and triumphant work of fiction-at once romantic, erotic, suspenseful-and completely unforgettable. [via]
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The Murders in the Rue Morgue: The Dupin Talesby Edgar Allan Poe, Matthew PearlISBN 0679643427 (0-679-64342-7)
Softcover, Modern Library
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The Mysterious Islandby Jules Verne, Jordan Stump, Caleb Carr, Jules-Descartes FeratISBN 0679642366 (0-679-64236-6)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Mysterious Island'Book summary:Based on the true story of Alexander Selkirk, a man who survived by himself for almost five years on an uninhabited Pacific island off the coast of Chile, Jules Vernes page-turner The Mysterious Island is a tale of five men and a dog who escape Civil War Richmond in a balloon during a storm and land on a faraway and uncharted island where they must overcome natures harsh elements to create from scratch a civilization for themselves.
Currently available only in an abridged 1970s translation and, in full, only in a dated nineteenth-century translation that is stuffy and limp, turning the muscular, breathless tone of the original into something overwrought and melodramatic, The Mysterious Island is restored here to its original robustness in Jordan Stumps striking new rendition. This major re-presentation also features an Introduction by Caleb Carr, and over eighty illustrations reprinted from the original 1875 French edition. [via]More editions of The Mysterious Island:
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The Odysseyby Homer, Robert FitzgeraldISBN 0679728139 (0-679-72813-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Odyssey'Book summary:Translated by Robert Fitzgerald, this is the most acclaimed translation of THE ODYSSEY of our time. [via]
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Of Love and Other Demonsby Gabriel García MárquezISBN 0679762841 (0-679-76284-1)
Softcover, Random House Large Print
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Of Love and Other Demons'Book summary:On her twelfth birthday, Sierva Maria the only child of a decaying noble family in an eighteenth-century South American seaport is bitten by a rabid dog. Believed to be possessed, she is brought to a convent for observation. And into her cell stumbles Father Cayetano Delaura, who has already dreamed about a girl with hair trailing after her like a bridal train. As he tends to her with holy water and sacramental oils, Delaura feels something shocking begin to occur. He has fallen in love and it is not long until Sierva Maria joins him in his fevered misery. Unsettling and indelible, Of Love and Other Demons is an evocative, majestic tale of the most universal experiences known to woman and man. [via]
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The Old Man and the Seaby Ernest HemingwayISBN 0684102455 (0-684-10245-5)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Old Man and the Sea'Book summary:Here, for a change, is a fish tale that actually does honour to the author. In fact The Old Man and the Sea revived Ernest Hemingway's career, which was foundering under the weight of such post-war stinkers as Across the River and into the Trees. It also led directly to his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1954 (an award Hemingway gladly accepted, despite his earlier observation that "no son of a bitch that ever won the Nobel Prize ever wrote anything worth reading afterwards"). A half century later, it's still easy to see why. This tale of an aged Cuban fisherman going head-to-head (or hand-to-fin) with a magnificent marlin encapsulates Hemingway's favourite motifs of physical and moral challenge. Yet Santiago is too old and infirm to partake of the gun-toting machismo that disfigured much of the author's later work:
"The brown blotches of the benevolent skin cancer the sun brings from its reflection on the tropic sea were on his cheeks. The blotches ran well down the sides of his face and his hands had the deep-creased scars from handling heavy fish on the cords."
Hemingway's style, too, reverts to those superb snapshots of perception that won him his initial fame:Just before it was dark, as they passed a great island of Sargasso weed that heaved and swung in the light sea as though the ocean were making love with something under a yellow blanket, his small line was taken by a dolphin. He saw it first when it jumped in the air, true gold in the last of the sun and bending and flapping wildly in the air.
If a younger Hemingway had written this novella, Santiago most likely would have towed the enormous fish back to port and posed for a triumphal photograph--just as the author delighted in doing, circa 1935. Instead his prize gets devoured by a school of sharks. Returning with little more than a skeleton, he takes to his bed and, in the very last line, cements his identification with his creator:"The old man was dreaming about the lions."
Perhaps there's some allegory of art and experience floating around in there somewhere--but The Old Man and the Sea was, in any case, the last great catch of Hemingway's career. --James Marcus [via]More editions of The Old Man and the Sea:
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The Old Man And the Seaby HemingwayISBN 0684163268 (0-684-16326-8)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Old Man And the Sea'Book summary:Size is approx 4" x 6" x 1/4" [via]
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Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciencesby Michel FoucaultISBN 0679753354 (0-679-75335-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences'Book summary:No description available [via]
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The Origin of Species: Library Editionby Charles Robert DarwinISBN 0679749551 (0-679-74955-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Origin of Species: Library Edition'Book summary:Voyage with Darwin as he gathers the raw material that ushered in the greatest intellectual revolution in 2,000 years upon the publication of this very book! [via]
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The Plagueby Albert Camus, Stuart GilbertISBN 0679720219 (0-679-72021-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Plague'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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The Pond God and Other Storiesby Thea BeckmanISBN 0684143992 (0-684-14399-2)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Pond God and Other Stories'Book summary:A young boy who volunteers to travel through time to the Middle Ages arrives during the Children's Crusade and is caught in its momentum. [via]
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A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Manby James JoyceISBN 0679739890 (0-679-73989-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man'Book summary:Published in 1916 to immediate acclaim, James Joyce's semi-autobiographical tale of his alterego, Stephen Dedalus, is a coming-of-age story like no other. A bold, innovative experiment with both language and structure, the work has exerted a lasting influence on the contemporary novel. [via]
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Possessionby A. S. ByattISBN 0679735909 (0-679-73590-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Possession'Book summary:
Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as "a gifted observer, able to discern the exact details that bring whole worlds into being" and "a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights," A. S. Byatt writes some of the most engaging and skillful novels of our time. Time magazine calls her "a novelist of dazzling inventiveness."
Possession, for which Byatt won England's prestigious Booker Prize, was praised by critics on both sides of the Atlantic when it was first published in 1990. "On academic rivalry and obsession, Byatt is delicious. On the nature of possessionthe lover by the beloved, the biographer by his subjectshe is profound," said The Sunday Times (London). The New Yorker dubbed it "more fun to read than The Name of the Rose . . . Its prankish verve [and] monstrous richness of detail [make for] a one-woman variety show of literary styles and types." The novel traces a pair of young academicsRoland Michell and Maud Baileyas they uncover a clandestine love affair between two long-dead Victorian poets. Interwoven in a mesmerizing pastiche are love letters and fairytales, extracts from biographies and scholarly accounts, creating a sensuous and utterly delightful novel of ideas and passions.
With an Introduction by the author that describes the novel's origins and its twenty-year gestation, this Modern Library edition is a handsome keepsake for fans of Possessionnew and old alike. [via] -
A Prayer for Owen Meanyby John IrvingISBN 0679642595 (0-679-64259-5)
Hardcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Prayer for Owen Meany'Book summary:Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mom with a baseball and believes--accurately--that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom. John Irving's novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movie Simon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel since Flannery O'Connor's work. Irving fans will find much that is familiar: the New England prep-school-town setting, symbolic amputations of man and beast, the Garp-like unknown father of the narrator (Owen's orphaned best friend), the rough comedy. The scene of doltish the doltish headmaster driving a trashed VW down the school's marble staircase is a marvelous set piece. So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in. But it's all, as Highlights magazine used to put it, "fun with a purpose." When Owen plays baby Jesus in the pageants, and glimpses a tombstone with his death date while enacting A Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn't cancel the fact that he was born to be martyred. The book's countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy--from Vietnam to the Contras.
The book's mystic religiosity is steeped in Robertson Davies's Deptford trilogy, and the fatal baseball relates to the fatefully misdirected snowball in the first Deptford novel, Fifth Business. Tiny, symbolic Owen echoes the hero of Irving's teacher Günter Grass's The Tin Drum--the two characters share the same initials. A rollicking entertainment, Owen Meany is also a meditation on literature, history, and God. --Tim Appelo [via]
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Preparing for the Twenty-First Centuryby Paul KennedyISBN 0679747052 (0-679-74705-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Pride and Prejudiceby Jane AustenISBN 0679783261 (0-679-78326-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Pride and Prejudice'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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The Readerby Bernhard Schlink, Carol Brown JanewayISBN 0679781307 (0-679-78130-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Ripley under Groundby Patricia HighsmithISBN 0679742301 (0-679-74230-1)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ripley under Ground'Book summary:In this harrowing illumination of the psychotic mind, the enviable Tom Ripley has a lovely house in the French countryside, a beautiful and very rich wife, and an art collection worthy of a connoisseur. But such a gracious life has not come easily. One inopportune inquiry, one inconvenient friend, and Ripley's world will come tumbling down--unless he takes decisive steps. In a mesmerizing novel that coolly subverts all traditional notions of literary justice, Ripley enthralls us even as we watch him perform acts of pure and unspeakable evil. [via]
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The Secret of Terror Castleby Robert ArthurISBN 0679811761 (0-679-81176-1)
Softcover, Random House Childrens Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Secret of Terror Castle'Book summary:Finding a genuine haunted house for a movie set sounds like fun -- and a great way to generate publicity for the Three Investigators' new detective agency. But when the boys arrive for an overnight visit at Terror Castle -- home of a deceased horror-movie actor -- they soon find out how the place got its name! [via]
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Selectionsby Arthur SchopenhauerISBN 0684128160 (0-684-12816-0)
Hardcover, Scribner
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Shirleyby Charlotte BrontëISBN 0679602755 (0-679-60275-5)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Snowby P. D. Eastman, R. McKeeISBN 067989246X (0-679-89246-X)
Hardcover, Random House Childrens Books
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Snow Falling on Cedarsby David GutersonISBN 067976402X (0-679-76402-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Snow Falling on Cedars'Book summary:Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award American Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award San Piedro Island, north of Puget Sound, is a place so isolated that no one who lives there can afford to make enemies. But in 1954 a local fisherman is found suspiciously drowned, and a Japanese American named Kabuo Miyamoto is charged with his murder. In the course of the ensuing trial, it becomes clear that what is at stake is more than a man's guilt. For on San Pedro, memory grows as thickly as cedar trees and the fields of ripe strawberries--memories of a charmed love affair between a white boy and the Japanese girl who grew up to become Kabuo's wife; memories of land desired, paid for, and lost. Above all, San Piedro is haunted by the memory of what happened to its Japanese residents during World War II, when an entire community was sent into exile while its neighbors watched. Gripping, tragic, and densely atmospheric, Snow Falling on Cedars is a masterpiece of suspense-- one that leaves us shaken and changed. "Haunting.... A whodunit complete with courtroom maneuvering and surprising turns of evidence and at the same time a mystery, something altogether richer and deeper."--Los Angeles Times "Compelling...heartstopping. Finely wrought, flawlessly written."--The New York Times Book Review [via]
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Spring Snowby Yukio MishimaISBN 0679722416 (0-679-72241-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Spring Snow'Book summary:The first novel of Mishima's landmark tetralogy, The Sea of fertility
Spring Snow is set in Tokyo in 1912, when the hermetic world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders -- rich provincial families unburdened by tradition, whose money and vitality make them formidable contenders for social and political power.
Among this rising new elite are the ambitious Matsugae, whose son has been raised in a family of the waning aristocracy, the elegant and attenuated Ayakura. Coming of age, he is caught up in the tensions between old and new -- fiercely loving and hating the exquisite, spirited Ayakura Satoko. He suffers in psychic paralysis until the shock of her engagement to a royal prince shows him the magnitude of his passion, and leads to a love affair that is as doomed as it was inevitable. [via]More editions of Spring Snow:
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Stargirlby Jerry SpinelliISBN 0679886370 (0-679-88637-0)
Hardcover, Random House Childrens Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Stargirl'Book summary:"She was homeschooling gone amok." "She was an alien." "Her parents were circus acrobats." These are only a few of the theories concocted to explain Stargirl Caraway, a new 10th grader at Arizona's Mica Area High School who wears pioneer dresses and kimonos to school, strums a ukulele in the cafeteria, laughs when there are no jokes, and dances when there is no music. The whole school, not exactly a "hotbed of nonconformity," is stunned by her, including our 16-year-old narrator Leo Borlock: "She was elusive. She was today. She was tomorrow. She was the faintest scent of a cactus flower, the flitting shadow of an elf owl."
In time, incredulity gives way to out-and-out adoration as the student body finds itself helpless to resist Stargirl's wide-eyed charm, pure-spirited friendliness, and penchant for celebrating the achievements of others. In the ultimate high school symbol of acceptance, she is even recruited as a cheerleader. Popularity, of course, is a fragile and fleeting state, and bit by bit, Mica sours on their new idol. Why is Stargirl showing up at the funerals of strangers? Worse, why does she cheer for the opposing basketball teams? The growing hostility comes to a head when she is verbally flogged by resentful students on Leo's televised Hot Seat show in an episode that is too terrible to air. While the playful, chin-held-high Stargirl seems impervious to the shunning that ensues, Leo, who is in the throes of first love (and therefore scornfully deemed "Starboy"), is not made of such strong stuff: "I became angry. I resented having to choose. I refused to choose. I imagined my life without her and without them, and I didn't like it either way."
Jerry Spinelli, author of Newbery Medalist Maniac Magee, Newbery Honor Book Wringer, and many other excellent books for teens, elegantly and accurately captures the collective, not-always-pretty emotions of a high school microcosm in which individuality is pitted against conformity. Spinelli's Stargirl is a supernatural teen character--absolutely egoless, altruistic, in touch with life's primitive rhythms, meditative, untouched by popular culture, and supremely self-confident. It is the sensitive Leo whom readers will relate to as he grapples with who she is, who he is, who they are together as Stargirl and Starboy, and indeed, what it means to be a human being on a planet that is rich with wonders. (Ages 10 to 14) --Karin Snelson [via]
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The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hydeby Robert Louis StevensonISBN 0679734767 (0-679-73476-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde'Book summary:The young Robert Louis Stevenson suffered from repeated nightmares of living a double life, in which by day he worked as a respectable doctor and by night he roamed the back alleys of old-town Edinburgh. In three days of furious writing, he produced a story about his dream existence. His wife found it too gruesome, so he promptly burned the manuscript. In another three days, he wrote it again. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published as a "shilling shocker" in 1886, and became an instant classic. In the first six months, 40,000 copies were sold. Queen Victoria read it. Sermons and editorials were written about it. When Stevenson and his family visited America a year later, they were mobbed by reporters at the dock in New York City. Compulsively readable from its opening pages, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is still one of the best tales ever written about the divided self.
This University of Nebraska Press edition is a small, exquisitely produced paperback. The book design, based on the original first edition of 1886, includes wide margins, decorative capitals on the title page and first page of each chapter, and a clean, readable font that is 19th-century in style. Joyce Carol Oates contributes a foreword in which she calls Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a "mythopoetic figure" like Frankenstein, Dracula, and Alice in Wonderland, and compares Stevenson's creation to doubled selves in the works of Plato, Poe, Wilde, and Dickens.
This edition also features 12 full-page wood engravings by renowned illustrator Barry Moser. Moser is a skillful reader and interpreter as well as artist, and his afterword to the book, in which he explains the process by which he chose a self-portrait motif for the suite of engravings, is fascinating. For the image of Edward Hyde, he writes, "I went so far as to have my dentist fit me out with a carefully sculpted prosthetic of evil-looking teeth. But in the final moments I had to abandon the idea as being inappropriate. It was more important to stay in keeping with the text and, like Stevenson, not show Hyde's face." (Also recommended: the edition of Frankenstein illustrated by Barry Moser) --Fiona Webster [via]
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The Talented Mr. Ripleyby Patricia HighsmithISBN 0679742298 (0-679-74229-8)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Talented Mr. Ripley'Book summary:One of the great crime novels of the 20th century, Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley is a blend of the narrative subtlety of Henry James and the self-reflexive irony of Vladimir Nabokov. Like the best modernist fiction, Ripley works on two levels. First, it is the story of a young man, Tom Ripley, whose nihilistic tendencies lead him on a deadly passage across Europe. On another level, the novel is a commentary on fictionmaking and techniques of narrative persuasion. Like Humbert Humbert, Tom Ripley seduces readers into empathizing with him even as his actions defy all moral standards.
The novel begins with a play on James's The Ambassadors. Tom Ripley is chosen by the wealthy Herbert Greenleaf to retrieve Greenleaf's son, Dickie, from his overlong sojourn in Italy. Dickie, it seems, is held captive both by the Mediterranean climate and the attractions of his female companion, but Mr. Greenleaf needs him back in New York to help with the family business. With an allowance and a new purpose, Tom leaves behind his dismal city apartment to begin his career as a return escort. But Tom, too, is captivated by Italy. He is also taken with the life and looks of Dickie Greenleaf. He insinuates himself into Dickie's world and soon finds that his passion for a lifestyle of wealth and sophistication transcends moral compunction. Tom will become Dickie Greenleaf--at all costs.
Unlike many modernist experiments, The Talented Mr. Ripley is eminently readable and is driven by a gripping chase narrative that chronicles each of Tom's calculated maneuvers of self-preservation. Highsmith was in peak form with this novel, and her ability to enter the mind of a sociopath and view the world through his disturbingly amoral eyes is a model that has spawned such latter-day serial killers as Hannibal Lecter. --Patrick O'Kelley [via]
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Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicantsby Wolfgang SchivelbuschISBN 067974438X (0-679-74438-X)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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The Tenant of Wildfell Hallby Anne BrontëISBN 0679602798 (0-679-60279-8)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall'Book summary:Over a short period in the 1840s, the three Brontë sisters working in a remote English
parsonage produced some of the best-loved and most-enduring of all novels: Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Emily's Wuthering Heights, and Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a book that created a scandal when it was published in 1848 under the pseudonym Acton Bell.
Compelling in its imaginative power and bold naturalism, the novel opens in the autumn of 1827, when a mysterious woman who calls herself Helen Graham seeks refuge at the desolate moorland mansion of Wildfell Hall. Brontë's enigmatic heroine becomes the object of gossip and jealousy as neighbors learn she is escaping from an abusive marriage and living under an assumed name. A daring story that exposed the dark brutality of Victorian chauvinism, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was nevertheless attacked by some critics as a celebration of the same excesses it criticized.
"Every reader who has felt the power of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights comes, sooner or later, to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall," observed Brontë scholar Margaret Lane. "Anne Brontë, with all the Brontë taste for violence and drama, and with her experience of the same rude scenes and savage Yorkshire tales that had fed the imaginations of her sisters, did not shrink. She used the material at hand, and shaped it with singular honesty and seri-
ousness....Anne is a true Brontë."
This edition of The Tenant of Wildfell
Hall is the companion volume to the Mobil Masterpiece Theatre WGBH television presentation broadcast on PBS.
The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun-dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hard-bound editions of important works of liter-ature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau-gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.
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The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a dramatic serial on Mobil Masterpiece Theatre, a public television series presented by WGBH-TV, Boston, made possible by a grant from the Mobil Corporation.
"The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was conceived in the same atmosphere as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Wildfell Hall has power and imagination, and is so close to one of the tragedies in the sisters' own lives, that no perceptive reader can be indifferent to it."
--Margaret Lane
"I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it."
--Anne Bronte [via]More editions of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:
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The Three Musketeersby Alexandre Dumas, Deborah G. FelderISBN 0679860177 (0-679-86017-7)
Softcover, Random House Childrens Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Three Musketeers'Book summary:It's "one for all and all for one!" as D'Artagnan and his three pals follow a course of swashbuckling intrigue and adventure in 17th-centry France. [via]
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The Three Musketeers: Being the First of the D'artagnan Romances; and Twenty Years After, a Sequelby Alexandre Dumas, Jacques Le ClercqISBN 0679603328 (0-679-60332-8)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Three Musketeers: Being the First of the D'artagnan Romances; and Twenty Years After, a Sequel'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]More editions of The Three Musketeers: Being the First of the D'artagnan Romances; and Twenty Years After, a Sequel:
Total War: Causes and Courses of the Second World Warby Peter CalvocoressiISBN 0679730990 (0-679-73099-0)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Treasure Islandby Robert Louis Stevenson, Jeff FisherISBN 0681007699 (0-681-00769-9)
Hardcover, Longmeadow Pr
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Treasure Island'Book summary:Climb aboard for the swashbuckling adventure of a lifetime. Treasure Islandhas enthralled (and caused slight seasickness) for decades. The names Long John Silver and Jim Hawkins are destined to remain pieces of folklore for as long as children want to read Robert Louis Stevenson's most famous book. With it's dastardly plot and motley crew of rogues and villains, it seems unlikely that children will ever say no to this timeless classic. --Naomi Gesinger [via]
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The Waste Land and Other Writingsby T. S. Eliot, Mary KarrISBN 0679641017 (0-679-64101-7)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Waste Land and Other Writings'Book summary:First published in 1922, "The Waste Land" is T.S. Eliot's masterpiece, and is not only one of the key works of modernism but also one of the greatest poetic achievements of the twentieth century. A richly allusive pilgrimage of spiritual and psychological torment and redemption, Eliot's poem exerted a revolutionary influence on his contemporaries, summoning forth a rich new poetic language, breaking decisively with Romantic and Victorian poetic traditions. Kenneth Rexroth was not alone in calling Eliot "the representative poet of the time, for the same reason that Shakespeare and Pope were of theirs. He articulated the mind of an epoch in words that seemed its most natural expression."
As influential as his verse, T.S. Eliot's criticism also exerted a transformative effect on twentieth-century letter, and this new edition of The Waste Land and Other Writings includes a selection of Eliot's most important essays.
In her new Introduction, Mary Karr dispels some of the myths of the great poem's inaccessibility and sheds fresh light on the ways in which "The Waste Land" illuminates contemporary experience. [via]More editions of The Waste Land and Other Writings:
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William Shakespeare Complete Worksby William Shakespeare, Eric Rasmusse N, Heloise SenechalISBN 0679642951 (0-679-64295-1)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'William Shakespeare Complete Works'Book summary: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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Works of Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Les Miserablesby Victor HugoISBN 0681410566 (0-681-41056-6)
Hardcover, Longmeadow Pr
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The World According to Garpby John IrvingISBN 0679603069 (0-679-60306-9)
Hardcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The World According to Garp'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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German
Deutschland Ist Andersby Harold H. Von Hofe, Margarete Elisabeth FreitasISBN 0684125994 (0-684-12599-4)
Hardcover, Scribner
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Random House German Dictionary : Vest Pocket Editionby Jennifer HornorISBN 0679771956 (0-679-77195-6)
Hardcover, Random House Information Group
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