books tagged “great books”

books tagged “great books”

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  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
    by Mark Twain
    ISBN 080490006X (0-8049-0006-X)
    Softcover, Airmont Pub Co

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    Book summary:

    Few books capture both the simplicity and complexities of American life quite like these enduring "boyhood" classics by Mark Twain.

    The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
    Take a lighthearted, nostalgic trip to a simpler time, seen through the eyes of a special boy named Tom Sawyer. It is a summertime world of hooky and adventure, pranks and punishment, villains and young love. [via]

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  • The Aeneid
    by Virgil, James H. Mantinband
    ISBN 0804469520 (0-8044-6952-0)
    Softcover, Continuum Intl Pub Group

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  • Aesop's Fables
    by Michael Hague, Aesop
    ISBN 0805063153 (0-8050-6315-3)
    Softcover, Henry Holt & Co

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    Book summary:

    "Please, O King," cried the Mouse, "spare me this time and I shall never forget your kindness. Someday I may be able to repay you." The Lion was so amused by this idea that he let the poor creature go.

    In sixth-century Greece, it is said, there lived a slave named Aesop who was renowned for his brilliant storytelling. The collection of sly, witty fables that bears his name continues to delight readers of all ages. Michael Hague has selected his favorite fables and illustrated them with beautiful paintings in the style that has made his work so popular.
    [via]

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  • American Tabloid : A Novel
    by James Ellroy
    ISBN 0804114498 (0-8041-1449-8)
    Softcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    CHOSEN BY TIME MAGAZINE AS ONE OF
    THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
    "ONE HELLISHLY EXCITING RIDE."
    --Detroit Free Press
    The '50s are finished. Zealous young senator Robert Kennedy has a red-hot jones to nail Jimmy Hoffa. JFK has his eyes on the Oval Office. J. Edgar Hoover is swooping down on the Red Menace. Howard Hughes is dodging subpoenas and digging up Kennedy dirt. And Castro is mopping up the bloody aftermath of his new communist nation.
    "HARD-BITTEN. . . INGENIOUS. . . ELLROY SEGUES INTO POLITICAL INTRIGUE WITHOUT MISSING A BEAT."
    --The New York Times
    In the thick of it: FBI men Kemper Boyd and Ward Littell. They work every side of the street, jerking the chains of made men, street scum, and celebrities alike, while Pete Bondurant, ex-rogue cop, freelance enforcer, troubleshooter, and troublemaker, has the conscience to louse it all up.
    "VASTLY ENTERTAINING."
    --Los Angeles Times
    Mob bosses, politicos, snitches, psychos, fall guys, and femmes fatale. They're mixing up a molotov cocktail guaranteed to end the country's innocence with a bang. Dig that crazy beat: it's America's heart racing out of control. . . .
    "A SUPREMELY CONTROLLED WORK OF ART."
    --The New York Times Book Review [via]

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  • Weis, Margaret: The Annotated Chronicles
    The Annotated Chronicles
    by Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman
    ISBN 0786918705 (0-7869-1870-5)
    Softcover, Wizards of the Coast

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  • The Annotated Chronicles
    by Michael Williams, Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman, Jean F. Blashfield
    ISBN 0786915269 (0-7869-1526-9)
    Hardcover, Wizards of the Coast

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    Book summary:

    The novels that introduced the Dragonlance line, collected in an annotated paperback.

    This annotated version of Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Dragons of Winter Night, and Dragons of Spring Dawning contains extensive notes by New York Times bestselling authors Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, as well as commentary from the original members of the Dragonlance conceptual team. These collected titles launched what has become a flagship line of Wizards of the Coast book publishing.
    [via]

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  • As You Like It
    by William Shakespeare
    ISBN 0808508768 (0-8085-0876-8)
    Hardcover, Bt Bound

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  • Bloom, Harold: Beowulf
    Beowulf
    by Harold Bloom
    ISBN 0791040828 (0-7910-4082-8)
    Softcover, Facts on File

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  • Lane, Edward William: Best Selections from the Arabian Nights Entertainments
    Best Selections from the Arabian Nights Entertainments
    by Edward William Lane, Edward Stanley Poole, William Harvey
    ISBN 0805502440 (0-8055-0244-0)
    Hardcover, Hart Pub Co

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  • Blindness
    by Jose Saramago, Giovanni Pontiero
    ISBN 0786218347 (0-7862-1834-7)
    Hardcover, Thorndike Pr

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    Book summary:

    In an unnamed city in an unnamed country, a man sitting in his car waiting for a traffic light to change is suddenly struck blind. But instead of being plunged into darkness, this man sees everything white, as if he "were caught in a mist or had fallen into a milky sea." A Good Samaritan offers to drive him home (and later steals his car); his wife takes him by taxi to a nearby eye clinic where they are ushered past other patients into the doctor's office. Within a day the man's wife, the taxi driver, the doctor and his patients, and the car thief have all succumbed to blindness. As the epidemic spreads, the government panics and begins quarantining victims in an abandoned mental asylum--guarded by soldiers with orders to shoot anyone who tries to escape. So begins Portuguese author José Saramago's gripping story of humanity under siege, written with a dearth of paragraphs, limited punctuation, and embedded dialogue minus either quotation marks or attribution. At first this may seem challenging, but the style actually contributes to the narrative's building tension, and to the reader's involvement.

    In this community of blind people there is still one set of functioning eyes: the doctor's wife has affected blindness in order to accompany her husband to the asylum. As the number of victims grows and the asylum becomes overcrowded, systems begin to break down: toilets back up, food deliveries become sporadic; there is no medical treatment for the sick and no proper way to bury the dead. Inevitably, social conventions begin to crumble as well, with one group of blind inmates taking control of the dwindling food supply and using it to exploit the others. Through it all, the doctor's wife does her best to protect her little band of blind charges, eventually leading them out of the hospital and back into the horribly changed landscape of the city.

    Blindness is in many ways a horrific novel, detailing as it does the total breakdown in society that follows upon this most unnatural disaster. Saramago takes his characters to the very edge of humanity and then pushes them over the precipice. His people learn to live in inexpressible filth, they commit acts of both unspeakable violence and amazing generosity that would have been unimaginable to them before the tragedy. The very structure of society itself alters to suit the circumstances as once-civilized, urban dwellers become ragged nomads traveling by touch from building to building in search of food. The devil is in the details, and Saramago has imagined for us in all its devastation a hell where those who went blind in the streets can never find their homes again, where people are reduced to eating chickens raw and packs of dogs roam the excrement-covered sidewalks scavenging from corpses.

    And yet in the midst of all this horror Saramago has written passages of unsurpassed beauty. Upon being told she is beautiful by three of her charges, women who have never seen her, "the doctor's wife is reduced to tears because of a personal pronoun, an adverb, a verb, an adjective, mere grammatical categories, mere labels, just like the two women, the others, indefinite pronouns, they too are crying, they embrace the woman of the whole sentence, three graces beneath the falling rain." In this one woman Saramago has created an enduring, fully developed character who serves both as the eyes and ears of the reader and as the conscience of the race. And in Blindness he has written a profound, ultimately transcendent meditation on what it means to be human. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • Catch-22
    by Joseph Heller
    ISBN 0808514024 (0-8085-1402-4)
    Hardcover, Bt Bound

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    Book summary:

    There was a time when reading Joseph Heller's classic satire on the murderous insanity of war was nothing less than a rite of passage. Echoes of Yossarian, the wise-ass bombardier who was too smart to die but not smart enough to find a way out of his predicament, could be heard throughout the counterculture. As a result, it's impossible not to consider Catch-22 to be something of a period piece. But 40 years on, the novel's undiminished strength is its looking-glass logic. Again and again, Heller's characters demonstrate that what is commonly held to be good, is bad; what is sensible, is nonsense.

    Yossarian says, "You're talking about winning the war, and I am talking about winning the war and keeping alive."
    "Exactly," Clevinger snapped smugly. "And which do you think is more important?"
    "To whom?" Yossarian shot back. "It doesn't make a damn bit of difference who wins the war to someone who's dead."
    "I can't think of another attitude that could be depended upon to give greater comfort to the enemy."
    "The enemy," retorted Yossarian with weighted precision, "is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he's on."
    Mirabile dictu, the book holds up post-Reagan, post-Gulf War. It's a good thing, too. As long as there's a military, that engine of lethal authority, Catch-22 will shine as a handbook for smart-alecky pacifists. It's an utterly serious and sad, but damn funny book. [via]

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  • Bloom, Harold: Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre
    Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre
    by Harold Bloom
    ISBN 0791040925 (0-7910-4092-5)
    Softcover, Facts on File

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  • Weis, Margaret: Chronicles Trilogy
    Chronicles Trilogy
    by Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman
    ISBN 0786926813 (0-7869-2681-3)
    Softcover, Wizards of the Coast

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  • A Clockwork Orange
    by Anthony Burgess
    ISBN 0786246448 (0-7862-4644-8)
    Hardcover, Thorndike Pr

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    Book summary:

    "Penguin Decades" bring you the novels that helped shape modern Britain. When they were published, some were bestsellers, some were considered scandalous, and others were simply misunderstood. All represent their time and helped define their generation, while today each is considered a landmark work of storytelling. Anthony Burgess' "A Clockwork Orange" was published in 1962 and has been controversial ever since. It tells the story of fifteen-year-old Alex - whose chief preoccupations are Beethoven's Ninth and ultra-violence - as he and his droogs rampage though a dystopian future seeking thrills, until they come under the control of the state's sinister apparatus. [via]

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  • Weis, Margaret: Dragonlance Chronicles: Dragons, of Autumn Twilight / Dragons of Winter Night / Dragons of Spring Dawning
    Dragonlance Chronicles: Dragons, of Autumn Twilight / Dragons of Winter Night / Dragons of Spring Dawning
    by Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman
    ISBN 0786942983 (0-7869-4298-3)
    Hardcover, Wizards of the Coast

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  • Austen, Jane: Emma
    Emma
    by Jane Austen
    ISBN 0804901023 (0-8049-0102-3)
    Softcover, Airmont Pub Co

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    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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  • Bloom, Harold: Emma Bovary
    Emma Bovary
    by Harold Bloom
    ISBN 0791009351 (0-7910-0935-1)
    Hardcover, Facts on File

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  • Fountainhead
    by Ayn Rand
    ISBN 0808519387 (0-8085-1938-7)
    Hardcover, Bt Bound

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    Book summary:

    The Fountainhead has become an enduring piece of literature, more popular now than when published in 1943. On the surface, it is a story of one man, Howard Roark, and his struggles as an architect in the face of a successful rival, Peter Keating, and a newspaper columnist, Ellsworth Toohey. But the book addresses a number of universal themes: the strength of the individual, the tug between good and evil, the threat of fascism. The confrontation of those themes, along with the amazing stroke of Rand's writing, combine to give this book its enduring influence. [via]

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  • A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes and the Eternal Passion for Books
    by Nicholas A. Basbanes
    ISBN 0805061762 (0-8050-6176-2)
    Softcover, Henry Holt & Co

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    Book summary:

    What a delightful book about books and people who love books! As a second generation bibliophile, a possible bibliomane who had several people move out of my house a year ago because they erroneously believed that my books were taking over the household, and a devout employee of "Earth's Biggest Bookstore," I can vouch that Basbanes accurately describes the glorious role of book collectors as archivists of human knowledge, and -- in continual counterpoint -- sometimes pathologically obsessed book junkies. [via]

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  • Plato: Gorgias
    Gorgias
    by Plato, James H. Nichols
    ISBN 0801485274 (0-8014-8527-4)
    Softcover, Cornell Univ Pr

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  • The Grapes of Wrath
    by John Steinbeck
    ISBN 0791093050 (0-7910-9305-0)
    Hardcover, Facts on File

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    Book summary:

    When The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939, America, still recovering from the Great Depression, came face to face with itself in a startling, lyrical way. John Steinbeck gathered the country's recent shames and devastations--the Hoovervilles, the desperate, dirty children, the dissolution of kin, the oppressive labor conditions--in the Joad family. Then he set them down on a westward-running road, local dialect and all, for the world to acknowledge. For this marvel of observation and perception, he won the Pulitzer in 1940.

    The prize must have come, at least in part, because alongside the poverty and dispossession, Steinbeck chronicled the Joads' refusal, even inability, to let go of their faltering but unmistakable hold on human dignity. Witnessing their degeneration from Oklahoma farmers to a diminished band of migrant workers is nothing short of crushing. The Joads lose family members to death and cowardice as they go, and are challenged by everything from weather to the authorities to the California locals themselves. As Tom Joad puts it: "They're a-workin' away at our spirits. They're a tryin' to make us cringe an' crawl like a whipped bitch. They tryin' to break us. Why, Jesus Christ, Ma, they comes a time when the on'y way a fella can keep his decency is by takin' a sock at a cop. They're workin' on our decency."

    The point, though, is that decency remains intact, if somewhat battle-scarred, and this, as much as the depression and the plight of the "Okies," is a part of American history. When the California of their dreams proves to be less than edenic, Ma tells Tom: "You got to have patience. Why, Tom--us people will go on livin' when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people--we go on." It's almost as if she's talking about the very novel she inhabits, for Steinbeck's characters, more than most literary creations, do go on. They continue, now as much as ever, to illuminate and humanize an era for generations of readers who, thankfully, have no experiential point of reference for understanding the depression. The book's final, haunting image of Rose of Sharon--Rosasharn, as they call her--the eldest Joad daughter, forcing the milk intended for her stillborn baby onto a starving stranger, is a lesson on the grandest scale. "'You got to,'" she says, simply. And so do we all. --Melanie Rehak [via]

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  • Harper Lee's to Kill a Mockingbird
    by Harper Lee
    ISBN 0808510258 (0-8085-1025-8)
    Hardcover, Bt Bound

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    Book summary:

    FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. A guide to reading ""To Kill A Mockingbird"" with a critical and appreciative mind. Includes background on the author's life and times, sample tests, term paper suggestions, and a reading list. [via]

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  • Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin
    by Harold Bloom
    ISBN 0791036723 (0-7910-3672-3)
    Hardcover, Facts on File

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  • The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
    by Carson McCullers
    ISBN 0783887736 (0-7838-8773-6)
    Hardcover, G K Hall & Co

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    Book summary:

    When she was only twenty-three, Carson  McCullers's first novel created a literary sensation. She  was very special, one of America's superlative  writers who conjures up a vision of existence as  terrible as it is real, who takes us on shattering  voyages into the depths of the spiritual isolation  that underlies the human condition. This novel is  the work of a supreme artist, Carson McCullers's  enduring masterpiece. The heroine is the strange  young girl, Mick Kelly. The setting is a small  Southern town, the cosmos universal and eternal.  The characters are the damned, the voiceless, the  rejected. Some fight their loneliness with  violence and depravity, Some with sex or drink, and some  -- like Mick -- with a quiet, intensely personal  search for beauty. [via]

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  • Conrad, Joseph: The Heart of Darkness
    The Heart of Darkness
    by Joseph Conrad
    ISBN 0804901120 (0-8049-0112-0)
    Softcover, Airmont Pub Co

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  • The Hobbit
    by J.R.R. Tolkien
    ISBN 0808520806 (0-8085-2080-6)
    Hardcover, Bt Bound

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    Poor Bilbo Baggins! An unassuming and rather plump hobbit (as most of these small, furry- footed people tend to be ), Baggins finds himself unwittingly drawn into adventure by a wizard named Gandalf and 13 dwarves bound for the Lonely Mountain, where a dragon named Smaug hordes a stolen treasure. Before he knows what is happening, Baggins finds himself on the road to danger. Wizards, dwarves and dragons may seem the stuff of children's fairy tales, but The Hobbit is in a class of its own--light-hearted enough for younger readers, yet with a dark edge guaranteed to intrigue an older audience. In the best tradition of the archetypal hero's quest, Bilbo Baggins sets out on his fateful journey a callow, untested soul and returns--tempered by hardship, danger and loss--a better man--er, hobbit.

    This book is the predecessor to Tolkien's masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, and though that trilogy can be thoroughly enjoyed without first reading The Hobbit, much that happens in the later novels is foreshadowed here. A word of caution, however: as Bilbo discovers early on, travel and adventure are addictive things; embark on this journey to the Lonely Mountain with Tolkien's reluctant hero, and you might not be able to stop there. And the road taken to the distant mountains of Mordor in the ensuing trilogy is an even more perilous one. [via]

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  • The Hobbit or There and Back Again
    by J. R. R. Tolkien
    ISBN 0786251778 (0-7862-5177-8)
    Hardcover, Thorndike Pr

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    Book summary:

    Poor Bilbo Baggins! An unassuming and rather plump hobbit (as most of these small, furry- footed people tend to be ), Baggins finds himself unwittingly drawn into adventure by a wizard named Gandalf and 13 dwarves bound for the Lonely Mountain, where a dragon named Smaug hordes a stolen treasure. Before he knows what is happening, Baggins finds himself on the road to danger. Wizards, dwarves and dragons may seem the stuff of children's fairy tales, but The Hobbit is in a class of its own--light-hearted enough for younger readers, yet with a dark edge guaranteed to intrigue an older audience. In the best tradition of the archetypal hero's quest, Bilbo Baggins sets out on his fateful journey a callow, untested soul and returns--tempered by hardship, danger and loss--a better man--er, hobbit.

    This book is the predecessor to Tolkien's masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, and though that trilogy can be thoroughly enjoyed without first reading The Hobbit, much that happens in the later novels is foreshadowed here. A word of caution, however: as Bilbo discovers early on, travel and adventure are addictive things; embark on this journey to the Lonely Mountain with Tolkien's reluctant hero, and you might not be able to stop there. And the road taken to the distant mountains of Mordor in the ensuing trilogy is an even more perilous one. [via]

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  • Holes
    by Louis Sachar
    ISBN 0786261900 (0-7862-6190-0)
    Softcover, Thorndike Pr

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    Book summary:

    "If you take a bad boy and make him dig a hole every day in the hot sun, it will turn him into a good boy." Such is the reigning philosophy at Camp Green Lake, a juvenile detention facility where there is no lake, and there are no happy campers. In place of what used to be "the largest lake in Texas" is now a dry, flat, sunburned wasteland, pocked with countless identical holes dug by boys improving their character. Stanley Yelnats, of palindromic name and ill-fated pedigree, has landed at Camp Green Lake because it seemed a better option than jail. No matter that his conviction was all a case of mistaken identity, the Yelnats family has become accustomed to a long history of bad luck, thanks to their "no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing-great-great-grandfather!" Despite his innocence, Stanley is quickly enmeshed in the Camp Green Lake routine: rising before dawn to dig a hole five feet deep and five feet in diameter; learning how to get along with the Lord of the Flies-styled pack of boys in Group D; and fearing the warden, who paints her fingernails with rattlesnake venom. But when Stanley realizes that the boys may not just be digging to build character--that in fact the warden is seeking something specific--the plot gets as thick as the irony.

    It's a strange story, but strangely compelling and lovely too. Louis Sachar uses poker-faced understatement to create a bizarre but believable landscape--a place where Major Major Major Major of Catch-22 would feel right at home. But while there is humor and absurdity here, there is also a deep understanding of friendship and a searing compassion for society's underdogs. As Stanley unknowingly begins to fulfill his destiny--the dual plots coming together to reveal that fate has big plans in store--we can't help but cheer for the good guys, and all the Yelnats everywhere. (Ages 10 and older) --Brangien Davis [via]

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  • Jane Eyre
    by Charlotte Bronte, Anna Claybourne, Bob Harvey
    ISBN 0794506585 (0-7945-0658-5)
    Softcover, Edc Pub

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    Book summary:

    Charlotte Brontë's first novel, published in 1847, was a bestseller in its day and remains popular today. Jane is a plain, impoverished orphan who becomes governess to the ward of Mr. Rochester, the Byronic and enigmatic employer with whom she falls in love. This quintessential coming-of-age story is a stirring and satisfying tale that still has resonance for young women who are struggling to find the balance between romantic love and personal freedom. [via]

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  • John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath
    by Harold Bloom
    ISBN 0791082393 (0-7910-8239-3)
    Hardcover, Facts on File

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    Book summary:

    Harold Bloom writes, "The Grapes of Wrath is a flawed but permanent American book." John Steinbeck's novel, still popular a half-century after its original publication, is the focus of this edition of Bloom's Notes. Along with a collection of some of the best criticism available on his work, this text includes a brief biography of the author, structural and thematic analysis, an index of themes and ideas, and more. This series is edited by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University; Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English, New York University Graduate School. These texts are the ideal aid for all students of literature, presenting concise, easy-to-understand biographical, critical, and bibliographical information on a specific literary work. Also provided are multiple sources for book reports and term papers with a wealth of information on literary works, authors, and major characters. [via]

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  • Leaves of Grass
    by Walt Whitman
    ISBN 0804900914 (0-8049-0091-4)
    Softcover, Airmont Pub Co

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    Book summary:

    Leaves of Grass (1855) is a poetry collection by the American poet Walt Whitman. Among the poems in the collection are "Song of Myself," "I Sing the Body Electric," and in later editions, Whitman's elegy to the assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd." Whitman spent his entire life writing Leaves of Grass, revising it in several editions until his death.

    Leaves of Grass has its genesis in an essay called The Poet by Ralph Waldo Emerson, published in 1845, which expressed the need for the United States to have its own new and unique poet to write about the new country's virtues and vices. Whitman, reading the essay, consciously set out to answer Emerson's call as he began work on the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman, however, downplayed Emerson's influence, stating, "I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil".



    On May 15, 1855, Whitman registered the title Leaves of Grass with the clerk of the United States District Court, Southern District of New Jersey, and received its copyright. The first edition was published in Brooklyn at the Fulton Street printing shop of two Scottish immigrants, James and Andrew Rome, whom Whitman had known since the 1840s, on July 4, 1855. Whitman paid for and did much of the typesetting for the first edition himself. The book did not include the author's name, instead offering an engraving by Samuel Hollyer depicting the poet in work clothes and a jaunty hat, arms at his side. Early advertisements for the first edition appealed to "lovers of literary curiosities" as an oddity. Sales on the book were few but Whitman was not discouraged.

    The first edition was very small, collecting only twelve unnamed poems in 95 pages. Whitman once said he intended the book to be small enough to be carried in a pocket. "That would tend to induce people to take me along with them and read me in the open air: I am nearly always successful with the reader in the open air. "About 800 were printed, though only 200 were bound in its trademark green cloth cover. The only American library known to have purchased a copy of the first edition was in Philadelphia. The poems of the first edition, which were given titles in later issues, were "Song of Myself," "A Song For Occupations," "To Think of Time," "The Sleepers," "I Sing the Body Electric," "Faces," "Song of the Answerer," "Europe: The 72d and 73d Years of These States," "A Boston Ballad," "There Was a Child Went Forth," "Who Learns My Lesson Complete?", and "Great Are the Myths."

    The title Leaves of Grass was a pun. "Grass" was a term given by publishers to works of minor value and "leaves" is another name for the pages on which they were printed.

    Whitman sent a copy of the first edition of Leaves of Grass to Emerson, the man who had inspired its creation. In a letter to Whitman, Emerson said "I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom America has yet contributed." He went on, "I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy." [via]

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  • Little Prince
    by Antoine De Saint-Exupery, Katherine Woods
    ISBN 0783815484 (0-7838-1548-4)
    Hardcover, G K Hall & Co

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    You could be excused for thinking that this book is one containing a simple story for young children about a Little Prince. How wrong you would be! This is far from the truth: it is much more. It is a complex story containing lots of ambiguities about a child with golden hair. These are all eruditely discussed before the actual story begins, in a section entitled "How It All Began". "Is The Little Prince a story written for children or is it a meditation intended for adults?"

    The Art of Living is discussed, along with a system of values, and the train of thought behind them is the unifying element. You are invited to "look at the book, and allow yourself to travel from one image to the next... " It was written and published more than 50 years ago in the USA, and the author was a Frenchman who illustrated the book himself; it was later translated by Kathryn Woods. The Little Prince is still very popular and has now been translated into many languages. Shortly after it was first written, the author died--disappearing together with his plane somewhere over the Mediterranean. This Gift edition contains all the original illustrations, plus some more original drawings that came to light later and have been published here for the first time.--Susan Naylor

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  • Bloom, Harold: Lolita
    Lolita
    by Harold Bloom
    ISBN 0791009610 (0-7910-0961-0)
    Hardcover, Facts on File

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  • Lolita
    by Vladimir Nabokov
    ISBN 0783880804 (0-7838-8080-4)
    Hardcover, G K Hall & Co

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    Book summary:

    Despite its lascivious reputation, the pleasures of Lolita are as much intellectual as erogenous. It is a love story with the power to raise both chuckles and eyebrows. Humbert Humbert is a European intellectual adrift in America, haunted by memories of a lost adolescent love. When he meets his ideal nymphet in the shape of 12-year-old Dolores Haze, he constructs an elaborate plot to seduce her, but first he must get rid of her mother. In spite of his diabolical wit, reality proves to be more slippery than Humbert's feverish fantasies, and Lolita refuses to conform to his image of the perfect lover.

    Playfully perverse in form as well as content, riddled with puns and literary allusions, Nabokov's 1955 novel is a hymn to the Russian-born author's delight in his adopted language. Indeed, readers who want to probe all of its allusive nooks and crannies will need to consult the annotated edition. Lolita is undoubtedly, brazenly erotic, but the eroticism springs less from the "frail honey-hued shoulders ... the silky supple bare back" of little Lo than it does from the wantonly gorgeous prose that Humbert uses to recount his forbidden passion:

    She was musical and apple-sweet ... Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice ... and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty--between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.
    Much has been made of Lolita as metaphor, perhaps because the love affair at its heart is so troubling. Humbert represents the formal, educated Old World of Europe, while Lolita is America: ripening, beautiful, but not too bright and a little vulgar. Nabokov delights in exploring the intercourse between these cultures, and the passages where Humbert describes the suburbs and strip malls and motels of postwar America are filled with both attraction and repulsion, "those restaurants where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended upon the cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads." Yet however tempting the novel's symbolism may be, its chief delight--and power--lies in the character of Humbert Humbert. He, at least as he tells it, is no seedy skulker, no twisted destroyer of innocence. Instead, Nabokov's celebrated mouthpiece is erudite and witty, even at his most depraved. Humbert can't help it--linguistic jouissance is as important to him as the satisfaction of his arrested libido. --Simon Leake [via]

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  • The Lord of the Rings
    by J. R. R. Tolkien
    ISBN 0791056651 (0-7910-5665-1)
    Hardcover, Facts on File

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    Book summary:

    The struggle between good and evil in Middle Earth.

    The title, J.R.R. Tolkiens The Lord of the Rings, part of Chelsea House Publishers Modern Critical Interpretations series, presents the most important 20th-century criticism on J.R.R. Tolkiens The Lord of the Rings through extracts of critical essays by well-known literary critics. This collection of criticism also features a short biography on J.R.R. Tolkien, a chronology of the authors life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University. [via]

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  • Flaubert, Gustave: Madame Bovary
    Madame Bovary
    by Gustave Flaubert
    ISBN 0804900892 (0-8049-0089-2)
    Softcover, Airmont Pub Co

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  • Mansfield Park
    by Jane Austen
    ISBN 0804901317 (0-8049-0131-7)
    Softcover, Airmont Pub Co

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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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  • The Metamorphoses of Ovid
    by David R. Slavitt, Ovid
    ISBN 0801847982 (0-8018-4798-2)
    Softcover, Johns Hopkins Univ Pr

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    Book summary:

    First published in 8 A.D. when he was 52, Ovid's epic poem contains profoundly entertaining tales of Adonis, Midas, Apollo, Icarus, and many others. (Poetry) [via]

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  • Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee
    by Charles J. Shields
    ISBN 0805083197 (0-8050-8319-7)
    Softcover, Owl Books

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    "A fine, well-rounded portrait of Harper Lee. Mockingbird is good reading."Star-Tribune (Minneapolis)

    To Kill a Mockingbirdthe twentieth century's most widely read American novelhas sold thirty million copies and still sells a million yearly. Yet despite her book's perennial popularity, its creator, Harper Lee, has become a somewhat mysterious figure. Now, after years of research, Charles J. Shields brings to life the warmhearted, high-spirited, and occasionally hardheaded woman who gave us two of American literature's most unforgettable charactersAtticus Finch and his daughter, Scout.

    At the center of Shields's evocative, lively book is the story of Lee's struggle to create her famous novel, but her colorful life contains many highlightsher girlhood as a tomboy in overalls in tiny Monroeville, Alabama; the murder trial that made her beloved father's reputation and inspired her great work; her journey to Kansas as Truman Capote's ally and research assistant to help report the story of In Cold Blood. Mockingbirdunique, highly entertaining, filled with humor and heartis a wide-ranging, idiosyncratic portrait of a writer, her dream, and the place and people whom she made immortal.

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  • The Odyssey
    by Homer, Richard P. Martin, Edward McCrorie
    ISBN 0801882672 (0-8018-8267-2)
    Softcover, Johns Hopkins Univ Pr

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    Book summary:

    "Tell us, Goddess, daughter of Zeus, start in your own place: when all the rest at Troy had fled from that steep doom and gone back home, away from war and the salt sea, only this man longed for his wife and a way home." Homer's Odyssey , at once an exciting epic of strife and subterfuge and a deeply felt tale of love and devotion, stands at the very beginning of the Western literary tradition. From ancient Greece to the present day its influence on later literature has been unsurpassed, and for centuries translators have approached the meter, tone, and pace of Homer's poetry with a variety of strategies. Chapman and Pope paid keen attention to color, drama, and vivacity of style, rendering the Greek verse loosely and inventively. In the twentieth century, translators such as Lattimore kept rigorously close to the sense of each word in the original; others, including Fitzgerald and Fagles, have departed further from the language of the original, employing their own inventive modern style. Poet and translator Edward McCrorie now opens new territory in this striking rendition, which captures the spare, powerful tone of Homer's epic while engaging contemporary readers with its brisk pace, idiomatic language, and lively characterization. McCrorie closely reproduces the Greek metrical patterns and employs a diction and syntax that reflects the plain, at times stark, quality of Homer's lines, rather than later English poetic styles. Avoiding both the stiffness of word-for-word literalism and the exaggeration and distortion of free adaptation, this translation dramatically evokes the ancient sound and sense of the poem. McCrorie's is truly an Odyssey for the twenty-first century. To accompany this innovative translation, noted classical scholar Richard Martin has written an accessible and wide-ranging introduction explaining the historical and literary context of the Odyssey , its theological and cultural underpinnings, Homer's poetic strategies and narrative techniq [via]

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  • The Odyssey
    by Richard P. Martin, Homer
    ISBN 0801868548 (0-8018-6854-8)
    Hardcover, Johns Hopkins Univ Pr

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    Book summary:

    "Tell us, Goddess, daughter of Zeus, start in your own place:

    when all the rest at Troy had fled from that steep doom

    and gone back home, away from war and the salt sea,

    only this man longed for his wife and a way home."

    Homer's Odyssey, at once an exciting epic of strife and subterfuge and a deeply felt tale of love and devotion, stands at the very beginning of the Western literary tradition. From ancient Greece to the present day its influence on later literature has been unsurpassed, and for centuries translators have approached the meter, tone, and pace of Homer's poetry with a variety of strategies. Chapman and Pope paid keen attention to color, drama, and vivacity of style, rendering the Greek verse loosely and inventively. In the twentieth century, translators such as Lattimore kept rigorously close to the sense of each word in the original; others, including Fitzgerald and Fagles, have departed further from the language of the original, employing their own inventive modern style.

    Poet and translator Edward McCrorie now opens new territory in this striking rendition, which captures the spare, powerful tone of Homer's epic while engaging contemporary readers with its brisk pace, idiomatic language, and lively characterization. McCrorie closely reproduces the Greek metrical patterns and employs a diction and syntax that reflects the plain, at times stark, quality of Homer's lines, rather than later English poetic styles. Avoiding both the stiffness of word-for-word literalism and the exaggeration and distortion of free adaptation, this translation dramatically evokes the ancient sound and sense of the poem. McCrorie's is truly an Odyssey for the twenty-first century.

    To accompany this innovative translation, noted classical scholar Richard Martin has written an accessible and wide-ranging introduction explaining the historical and literary context of the Odyssey, its theological and cultural underpinnings, Homer's poetic strategies and narrative techniques, and his cast of characters. In addition, Martin provides detailed notesfar more extensive than those in other editionsaddressing key themes and concepts; the histories of persons, gods, events, and myths; literary motifs and devices; and plot development. Also included is a pronunciation glossary and character index.

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  • The Odyssey of Homer
    by Homer
    ISBN 0804900574 (0-8049-0057-4)
    Softcover, Airmont Pub Co

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    Book summary:

    This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. This text refers to the Bibliobazaar edition. [via]

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  • The Origin of Species: Library Edition
    by Charles Robert Darwin
    ISBN 0785819118 (0-7858-1911-8)
    Hardcover, Castle Books Inc

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    Book summary:

    It's hard to talk about The Origin of Species without making statements that seem overwrought and fulsome. But it's true: this is indeed one of the most important and influential books ever written, and it is one of the very few groundbreaking works of science that is truly readable.

    To a certain extent it suffers from the Hamlet problem--it's full of clichés! Or what are now clichés, but which Darwin was the first to pen. Natural selection, variation, the struggle for existence, survival of the fittest: it's all in here.

    Darwin's friend and "bulldog" T.H. Huxley said upon reading the Origin, "How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that." Alfred Russel Wallace had thought of the same theory of evolution Darwin did, but it was Darwin who gathered the mass of supporting evidence--on domestic animals and plants, on variability, on sexual selection, on dispersal--that swept most scientists before it. It's hardly necessary to mention that the book is still controversial: Darwin's remark in his conclusion that "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history" is surely the pinnacle of British understatement. --Mary Ellen Curtin [via]

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  • Othello
    by William Shakespeare
    ISBN 0774037806 (0-7740-3780-6)
    Softcover, Coles Pub Group Ltd

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    Othello The Shakespeare Parallel Text Series...William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1564, and his birth is traditionally celebrated on April 23. The facts of his life, known from surviving documents, are sparse. He was one of eight children born to John Shakespeare, a merchant of some standing in his community. William probably went to the King's New School in Stratford, but he had no university education. In November 1582, at the age of eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior, who was pregnant with their first child, Susanna. She was born on May 26, 1583. Twins, a boy, Hamnet ( who would die at age eleven), and a girl, Judith, were born in 1585. By 1592 Shakespeare had gone to London working as an actor and already known as a playwright. A rival dramatist, Robert Greene, referred to him as "an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers." Shakespeare became a principal shareholder and playwright of the successful acting troupe, the Lord Chamberlain's Men (later under James I, called the King's Men). In 1599 the Lord Chamberlain's Men built and occupied the Globe Theater in Southwark near the Thames River. Here many of Shakespeare's plays were performed by the most famous actors of his time, including Richard Burbage, Will Kempe, and Robert Armin. In addition to his 37 plays, Shakespeare had a hand in others, including Sir Thomas More and The Two Noble Kinsmen, and he wrote poems, including Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. His 154 sonnets were published, probably without his authorization, in 1609. [via]

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  • Ovid's Metamorphoses
    by Ovid, William S. Anderson
    ISBN 0806114568 (0-8061-1456-8)
    Softcover, Univ of Oklahoma Pr

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    Book summary:

    One of the most influential and popular works in all literature, Ovids Metamorphoses is a weaving-together of classical myths, extending in time from the creation of the world to the death of Julius Caesar. This volume provides the Latin text of the first five books of the poem and the most detailed commentary available in English for these books.

    In his introduction to the volume, editor William S. Anderson provides essential background information, discussing Ovids life, the reception of the Metamorphoses during Ovids day and after, and the poems central issues. The Latin text of the five books is Andersons own edition, based on years of study of the surviving manuscripts. In the extensive notes that follow the text, Anderson offers both useful summaries of the stories and detailed line-by-line comments.

    Unlike other epic poems, which concern wars and heroism, the Metamorphoses centers on ordinary human beings, women as well as men, who live in a world of continuous change. The first five books, which include such well-known stories as Apollo and Daphane, Diana and Actaeon, and Narcissus and Echo, deal especially with the relationship between human beings and the gods. Arrogant and lustful, but all-powerful, the gods of Ovids universe selfishly pursue their own pleasures, frequently at the expense of their human targets. Yet these gods escape unscathed, while the humans, unjustly, are punished. Helpless to defend themselves, they are changed into animal or nonhuman forms.

    A resource for students and scholars of Latin, this volume enhances understanding and enjoyment of Ovids changeable poem about our changeable existence.

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  • Ovid's Metamorphoses
    by Arthur Golding
    ISBN 0801870607 (0-8018-7060-7)
    Softcover, Johns Hopkins Univ Pr

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    Book summary:

    This landmark translation of Ovid was acclaimed by Ezra Pound as "the most beautiful book in the language (my opinion and I suspect it was Shakespeare's)". Ovid's deliciously witty and poignant epic starts with the creation of the world and brings together a series of ingeniously linked myths and legends in which men and women are transformedoften by loveinto flowers, trees, stones, and stars. Golding's robustly vernacular version was the first major English translation and decisively influenced Shakespeare, Spenser, and the character of English Renaissance writing.

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  • Ovid: Ovid's Metamorphoses: Books 1-5
    Ovid's Metamorphoses: Books 1-5
    by Ovid, William S. Anderson
    ISBN 0806128453 (0-8061-2845-3)
    Hardcover, Univ of Oklahoma Pr

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  • Ovid: Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures
    Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures
    by Ovid, George Sandys
    ISBN 0803207182 (0-8032-0718-2)
    Hardcover, University of Nebraska Press

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  • Wilde, Oscar: The Picture of Dorian Gray
    The Picture of Dorian Gray
    by Oscar Wilde
    ISBN 0804900396 (0-8049-0039-6)
    Softcover, Airmont Pub Co

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  • Cooper, Lane: Plato on the Trial and Death of Socrates: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo
    Plato on the Trial and Death of Socrates: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo
    by Lane Cooper
    ISBN 0801490499 (0-8014-9049-9)
    Softcover, Cornell Univ Pr

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  • Plato's Republic
    by Plato
    ISBN 0804901724 (0-8049-0172-4)
    Softcover, Airmont Pub Co

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    Book summary:

    The most important of the Socratic dialogues, the Republic is concerned with the construction of an ideal commonwealth and thus wins its place as the earliest of utopias. [via]

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  • Irving, John: A Prayer for Owen Meany
    A Prayer for Owen Meany
    by John Irving
    ISBN 0792481976 (0-7924-8197-6)
    Hardcover, World Pubns

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  • Plato: Protagoras
    Protagoras
    by Plato, Robert C. Bartlett
    ISBN 0801488656 (0-8014-8865-6)
    Softcover, Cornell Univ Pr

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  • A Raisin in the Sun
    by Lorraine Hansberry
    ISBN 0808508717 (0-8085-0871-7)
    Hardcover, Random House

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    Book summary:

    FOR USE IN SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES ONLY. An African-American family is united in love and pride as they struggle to overcome poverty and harsh living conditions in this award-winning 1959 play. [via]

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  • Reflections on the Revolution in France
    by Edmund Burke, J. C. D. Clark
    ISBN 0804742057 (0-8047-4205-7)
    Softcover, Stanford Univ Pr

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    Book summary:

    The French Revolution is a defining moment in world history, and usually it has been first approached by English-speaking readers through the picture painted of it by Edmund Burke. Reflections on the Revolution in France is a classic work in a range of fields from history through political science to literature, and securely holds its place among the canon of "great books." Yet its meaning is still contested and often misunderstood, equally by those who wish to admire or to denigrate Burke for his present-day relevance. This edition aims to locate Burke once again in his contemporary political and intellectual setting. Alone among recent versions, it reprints the text of the first edition of the Reflections, and shows how Burke amended it as his knowledge of the Revolution deepened. It is certain to become the standard edition for scholars and students alike.

    The editor's Introduction is much more extensive than that of any previous edition. It situates the Reflections in Burke's life and the development of his ideas, the history of English political thought, the debate about the French Revolution, and the debate the book itself inspired. But the Introduction is more than a compendium of information; it is a thoughtful, coherent interpretation of Burke and his book. The editor's notes are also fuller than those of any previous edition, glossing many literary and biblical allusions missed by previous editors. He also supplies an extended note on the text, a biographical guide, and a bibliography, helpfully presented in discursive form.

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  • Robinson Crusoe
    by Daniel Defoe
    ISBN 0804900221 (0-8049-0022-1)
    Softcover, Airmont Pub Co

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    Book summary:

    Recreations of two of the world's most unforgettable and enthralling adventure stories: one about storm and shipwreck, pirates and mutiny, the other a tale of a fantastical underwater world of mythical monsters and a mysterious sea captain. The action-packed storylines retain all the impact of the authors' own words; photos and narrative illustrations help readers to absorb the full flavor of the original novels. Fact-filled boxes examine the books' themes, characters, and each author's life and times. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea includes a map of the journey and explores marine life and oceanography in Jules Verne's time. A specially researched map of Crusoe's exotic island gives facts on its flora and fauna. [via]

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  • Rose in Bloom
    by Louisa May Alcott
    ISBN 0786272945 (0-7862-7294-5)
    Hardcover, Thorndike Pr

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    Book summary:

    In this sequel to Eight Cousins, Rose Campbell returns to the "Aunt Hill" after two years of traveling around the world. Suddenly, she is surrounded by male admirers, all expecting her to marry them. But before she marries anyone, Rose is determined to establish herself as an independent young woman. Besides, she suspects that some of her friends like her more for her money than for herself. [via]

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  • Rumor Of Dragons
    by Margaret Weis, Tracy Hickman
    ISBN 078693087X (0-7869-3087-X)
    Softcover, Random House Childrens Books

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    Book summary:

    An all-new young reader adaptation of the very first Dragonlance novel.

    For the first time ever, the Dragonlance novel that started the entire series, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, has been made available in a format that is perfect for young readers. The novel has been divided into two volumes, A Rumor of Dragons and Night of the Dragons, that are sized to fit the young reader market. These titles contain brand new cover art and interior art and are the first in a series of young reader titles that will be adapted from the remaining novels in the Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy.
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  • Austen, Jane: Sense And Sensibility
    Sense And Sensibility
    by Jane Austen
    ISBN 0804900582 (0-8049-0058-2)
    Softcover, Airmont Pub Co

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  • Haggard, H. Rider: She
    She
    by H. Rider Haggard
    ISBN 0804901465 (0-8049-0146-5)
    Softcover, Airmont Pub Co

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  • Bloom, Harold: Sophocles' Oedipus Trilogy: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, & Antigone
    Sophocles' Oedipus Trilogy: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, & Antigone
    by Harold Bloom
    ISBN 0791040992 (0-7910-4099-2)
    Softcover, Facts on File

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  • A Tale of Two Cities
    by Charles Dickens, Lucinda Dickens Hawksley, Bob Harvey
    ISBN 079450390X (0-7945-0390-X)
    Softcover, Usborne Pub Ltd

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    Book summary:

    Charles Dickens's a Tale of Two Cities (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations) [via]

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  • Their Eyes Were Watching God
    by Zora Neale Hurston
    ISBN 078381884X (0-7838-1884-X)
    Hardcover, Thorndike Pr

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    Book summary:

    At the height of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston was the preeminent black woman writer in the United States. She was a sometime-collaborator with Langston Hughes and a fierce rival of Richard Wright. Her stories appeared in major magazines, she consulted on Hollywood screenplays, and she penned four novels, an autobiography, countless essays, and two books on black mythology. Yet by the late 1950s, Hurston was living in obscurity, working as a maid in a Florida hotel. She died in 1960 in a Welfare home, was buried in an unmarked grave, and quickly faded from literary consciousness until 1975 when Alice Walker almost single-handedly revived interest in her work.

    Of Hurston's fiction, Their Eyes Were Watching God is arguably the best-known and perhaps the most controversial. The novel follows the fortunes of Janie Crawford, a woman living in the black town of Eaton, Florida. Hurston sets up her characters and her locale in the first chapter, which, along with the last, acts as a framing device for the story of Janie's life. Unlike Wright and Ralph Ellison, Hurston does not write explicitly about black people in the context of a white world--a fact that earned her scathing criticism from the social realists--but she doesn't ignore the impact of black-white relations either:

    It was the time for sitting on porches beside the road. It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.
    One person the citizens of Eaton are inclined to judge is Janie Crawford, who has married three men and been tried for the murder of one of them. Janie feels no compulsion to justify herself to the town, but she does explain herself to her friend, Phoeby, with the implicit understanding that Phoeby can "tell 'em what Ah say if you wants to. Dat's just de same as me 'cause mah tongue is in mah friend's mouf."

    Hurston's use of dialect enraged other African American writers such as Wright, who accused her of pandering to white readers by giving them the black stereotypes they expected. Decades later, however, outrage has been replaced by admiration for her depictions of black life, and especially the lives of black women. In Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston breathes humanity into both her men and women, and allows them to speak in their own voices. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • To Kill a Mockingbird
    by Harper Lee
    ISBN 0791093085 (0-7910-9308-5)
    Hardcover, Facts on File

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    Book summary:

    Harold Bloom's introduction questions whether Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is a novel that will endure or has had popularity merely as a time. Along with a collection of some of the best criticism available on his work, this text includes a brief biography of the author, structural and thematic analysis, an index of themes and ideas, and more. This series is edited by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University; Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English, New York University Graduate School. These texts are the ideal aid for all students of literature, presenting concise, easy-to-understand biographical, critical, and bibliographical information on a specific literary work. Also provided are multiple sources for book reports and term papers with a wealth of information on literary works, authors, and major characters. [via]

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  • Shakespeare, William: The Tragedy of Othello
    The Tragedy of Othello
    by William Shakespeare
    ISBN 0804910138 (0-8049-1013-8)
    Softcover, Airmont Pub Co

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  • The Trial
    by Franz Kafka, Breon Mitchell
    ISBN 0805209999 (0-8052-0999-9)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must report to court on a regular basis--an event that proves maddening, as nothing is ever resolved. As he grows more uncertain of his fate, his personal life--including work at a bank and his relations with his landlady and a young woman who lives next door--becomes increasingly unpredictable. As K. tries to gain control, he succeeds only in accelerating his own excruciating downward spiral. [via]

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  • Tropic of Cancer
    by Henry Miller
    ISBN 0802131786 (0-8021-3178-6)
    Softcover, Grove Pr

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    Book summary:

    No punches are pulled in Henry Miller's most famous work. Still pretty rough going for even our jaded sensibilities, but Tropic of Cancer is an unforgettable novel of self-confession. Maybe the most honest book ever written, this autobiographical fiction about Miller's life as an expatriate American in Paris was deemed obscene and banned from publication in this country for years. When you read this, you see immediately how much modern writers owe Miller. [via]

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  • Tropic of Cancer/Tropic of Capricorn
    by Henry Miller
    ISBN 0802138438 (0-8021-3843-8)
    Softcover, Grove Pr

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    Book summary:

    Forty years have passed since Grove Press first published Henry Miller's landmark masterpiece -- an act that would forever change the face of American literature. Initially banned in America as obscene, Tropic of Cancer was first published in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards permitted its publication. Tropic of Cancer is now considered, as Norman Mailer said, "one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century." Also banned in America for almost thirty years, Tropic of Capricorn is now considered a cornerstone of modern literature. Together, Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn are a lasting testament to one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century and his contribution not only to literature but to the cause of free speech. [via]

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  • Tropic of Capricorn
    by Henry Miller
    ISBN 0802151825 (0-8021-5182-5)
    Softcover, Grove Pr

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    Book summary:

    Great classic work, by Arthir Miller [via]

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  • Uncle Tom's Cabin
    by Harriet Beecher Stowe
    ISBN 0804901430 (0-8049-0143-0)
    Softcover, Airmont Pub Co

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    Book summary:

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

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  • William Shakespeare
    ISBN 0791076555 (0-7910-7655-5)
    Hardcover, Facts on File

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    Book summary:

    In creating workds such as Hamlet and Macbeth, Shakespeare became the quintessential dramatist of the Western canon. This comprehensive volume places critical focus on Shakespeare's major comedies, histories, romances, and tragedies.

    This title, William Shakespeare, part of Chelsea House Publishers Modern Critical Views series, examines the major works of William Shakespeare through full-length critical essays by expert literary critics. In addition, this title features a short biography on William Shakespeare, a chronology of the authors life, and an introductory essay written by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University. [via]

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  • William Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet/Macbeth/Hamlet/Othello/The Taming of the Shrew/A Midsummer Night's Dream/The Merchant of Venice
    by William Shakespeare, Marina Kastan
    ISBN 0806943440 (0-8069-4344-0)
    Hardcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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    Book summary:

    He was the greatest poet and playwright who ever lived, the dramatist who penned lines that we quote without even realizing their origin. Shakespeare's glorious works have even inspired animated films--like Disney's The Lion King. Introduce children to the Bard with this wonderful, fully annotated collection of sonnets and soliloquies, enhanced with beautiful, highly realistic color paintings that bring each excerpt to vivid life. Here are Shakespeare's most famous speeches: "To be or not to be" from Hamlet, with the melancholy Dane pictured in front of the castle, his face pensive and gazing into the distance; Portia's gentle plea for mercy in The Merchant of Venice; Macbeth's witches' cackling "Double, double, toil and trouble"; and Marc Antony's sarcastic address to "Friends, Romans, Countrymen," in Julius Caesar. A golden-robed Henry V, kneeling and bowed from the weight of the world, ponders how rulers must bear the burden of their subjects' needs. Mercutio, seen here in a bright red background as fiery and explosive as his personality, gently teases his lovesick friend Romeo. From the tender sonnets (Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?) to the humorous songs sung by his jesters in comedies such as Twelfth Night, every page contains pure verbal and visual magic.

    "...the most delicate challenge in introducing poetry to children [is]...making all the necessary allowances for accessibility without completely throwing felicity and mystery to the winds. In this respect...it is particularly heartening to come upon...The Poetry for Young People Series [which] should be commended for recognizing that secure stepping stones hold infinitely more hope than forced marches."--Washington Post Book World.


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  • A Wrinkle in Time: Library Edition
    by Madeleine L'Engle
    ISBN 0786273356 (0-7862-7335-6)
    Softcover, Thorndike Pr

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    Book summary:

    Everyone in town thinks Meg is volatile and dull-witted and that her younger brother Charles Wallace is dumb. People are also saying that their father has run off and left their brilliant scientist mother. Spurred on by these rumors, Meg and Charles Wallace, along with their new friend Calvin, embark on a perilous quest through space to find their father. In doing so they must travel behind the shadow of an evil power that is darkening the cosmos, one planet at a time.

    Young people who have trouble finding their place in the world will connect with the "misfit" characters in this provocative story. This is no superhero tale, nor is it science fiction, although it shares elements of both. The travelers must rely on their individual and collective strengths, delving deep into their characters to find answers.

    A classic since 1962, Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time is sophisticated in concept yet warm in tone, with mystery and love coursing through its pages. Meg's shattering yet ultimately freeing discovery that her father is not omnipotent provides a satisfying coming-of-age element. Readers will feel a sense of power as they travel with these three children, challenging concepts of time, space, and the power of good over evil. (Ages 9 to 12) [via]

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