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› Find signed collectible books: 'An Accidental Family'
Set in the 1870s, a time of social disorder in Russia, An Accidental Family is the story of Arkady Dolgoruky, an awkward, illegitimate twenty-year-old on a desperate search for his family. This new translation of Dostoevsky's last completed novel fully captures the raciness and youthful vigor of the original text, and expresses "the innermost spiritual world of someone on the eve of manhood at that tumultuous time." [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'
Called "the veriest trash" by a member of the Concord, Massachusetts Library Board that banned the novel when it was first published, Huckleberry Finn has come to be viewed, as H.L. Mencken put it, as "one of the great masterpieces of the world." Ernest Hemingway wrote that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn....There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." A daringly ironic attack on racism American-style, Twain's story of what he once called a "sound heart" triumphing over a "deformed conscience" is poignant, powerful, and fresh. It is no wonder that this extraordinary book continues to captivate readers around the world. This handsome Oxford World's Classic edition uses the reliable 1885 text and includes in-depth, up-to-date editorial apparatus. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Aesop's Fables'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Ambassadors'
The second of James's three late masterpieces, was, in its author's opinion, "the best, all round, of my productions".
Lambert Strether, a mild middle-aged American of no particular achievements, is dispatched to Paris from the manufacturing empire of Woollett, Massachusetts. The mission conferred on him by his august patron, Mrs. Newsome, is to discover what, or who, is keeping her son Chad in the notorious city of pleasure, and to bring him home. But Strether finds Chad transformed by the influence of a remarkable woman; and as the Parisian spring advances, he himself succumbs to the allure of the 'vast bright Babylon' and to the mysterious charm of Madame de Vionnet. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Bleak House'
Bleak House is a satirical look at the Byzantine legal system in London as it consumes the minds and talents of the greedy and nearly destroys the lives of innocents--a contemporary tale indeed. Dickens's tale takes us from the foggy dank streets of London and the maze of the Inns of Court to the peaceful countryside of England. Likewise, the characters run from murderous villains to virtuous girls, from a devoted lover to a "fallen woman," all of whom are affected by a legal suit in which there will, of course, be no winner. The first-person narrative related by the orphan Esther is particularly sweet. The articulate reading by the acclaimed British actor Paul Scofield, whose distinctive broad English accent lends just the right degree of sonority and humor to the text, brings out the color in this classic social commentary disguised as a Victorian drama. However, to abridge Dickens is, well, a Dickensian task, the results of which make for a story in which the author's convoluted plot lines and twists of fate play out in what seems to be a fast-forward format. Listeners must pay close attention in order to keep up with the multiple narratives and cast of curious characters, including the memorable Inspector Bucket and Mr. Guppy. Fortunately, the publisher provides a partial list of characters on the inside jacket. (Running time: 3 hours; 2 cassettes) [via]

› Find signed collectible books: 'The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Other Stories'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Candide and Other Stories'
Candide, the wittiest and best-loved book of a genius who is still unequaled in his ability to spin art out of philosophy, became a huge bestseller in Europe after it was published in 1759. Voltaire, skeptical of the systems of philosophy that were floated about to explain the workings of the world, used this satirical story about the optimist Candide and his friend Dr. Pangloss to interrogate and discredit the philosophies and approach more closely the truth about human life, suffering, and happiness in the real world. Now, the short novel Candide is considered one of the most important texts of the enlightenment. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Decameron'
The Decameron (c.1351) is an entertaining series of one hundred stories written in the wake of the Black Death. The stories are told in a country villa outside the city of Florence by ten young noble men and women who are seeking to escape the ravages of the plague. Boccaccio's skill as a dramatist is masterfully displayed in these vivid portraits of people from all stations in life, with plots that revel in a bewildering variety of human reactions. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Dic Oxford Advanced Learner's of Current English'
This book is intended for students of English as a foreign language. Phonetics Editor:: Ashby, Michael; [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Don Quixote'
He lived in a small village in a dusty corner of Spain, a bony man of about fifty. He had little to do, and so he read. The flickering candle flame filled the corners of his room with ghostly shadows of giants and of dragons--for the only books he read were about the knights of old who roamed the countryside seeking adventures.
The horizon stretched out an invitation. He knew that he too must be a knight, must travel on a quest, must seek adventures. So he found a suit of rusty armor, made himself a visor of cardboard and tin, and he called himself Don Quixote de la Mancha.
In this spirited, lively retelling of the famous Cervantes classic, Michael Harrison's clear and lively style is beautifully complemented by Victor Ambrus's evocative paintings of the landscape of sixteenth-century Spain. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Don Quixote De LA Mancha'
Don Quixote, originally published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, stands as Cervantes' belated but colossal literary success. A work which has achieved mythic status, it is considered to have pioneered the modern novel. Don Quixote, a poor gentleman from La Mancha, Spain, entranced by the code of chivalry, seeks romantic honor through absurd and fantastic adventures. His fevered imagination turns everyday objects into heroic opponents and stepping stones to greater glory; each exploit serves as a comic, yet disturbing commentary on the psychological struggle between reality and illusion, fact and fiction. This celebrated translation by Charles Jarvis offers a new introduction and notes which provide essential background information. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Don Quixote De LA Mancha'
Don Quixote, originally published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, stands as Cervantes' belated but colossal literary success. A work which has achieved mythic status, it is considered to have pioneered the modern novel. Don Quixote, a poor gentleman from La Mancha, Spain, entranced by the code of chivalry, seeks romantic honor through absurd and fantastic adventures. His fevered imagination turns everyday objects into heroic opponents and stepping stones to greater glory; each exploit serves as a comic, yet disturbing commentary on the psychological struggle between reality and illusion, fact and fiction. This celebrated translation by Charles Jarvis offers a new introduction and notes which provide essential background information. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde'
You are walking through the streets of London. It is getting dark and you want to get home quickly. You enter a narrow side-street. Everything is quiet, but as you pass the door of a large, windowless building, you hear a key turning in the lock. A man comes out and looks at you. You have never seen him before, but you realize immediately that he hates you. You are shocked to discover, also, that you hate him. Who is this man that everybody hates? And why is he coming out of the laboratory of the very respectable Dr Jekyll? [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Education of Henry Adams'
Many great artists have had at least intermittent doubts about their own abilities. But The Education of Henry Adams is surely one of the few masterpieces to issue directly from a raging inferiority complex. The author, to be sure, had bigger shoes to fill than most of us. Both his grandfather and great-grandfather were U.S. presidents. His father, a relative underachiever, scraped by as a member of Congress and ambassador to the Court of St. James. But young Henry, born in Boston in 1838, was destined for a walk-on role in his nation's history--and seemed alarmingly aware of the fact from the time he was an adolescent.
It gets worse. For the author could neither match his exalted ancestors nor dismiss them as dusty relics--he was an Adams, after all, formed from the same 18th-century clay. "The atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial," we are told,
revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped, from his greatest grandmother's birth, in the odor of political crime. Resistance to something was the law of New England nature; the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of resistance; for numberless generations his predecessors had viewed the world chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with evil forces to be abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; the duty was unchanged.Here, as always, Adams tells his story in a third-person voice that can seem almost extraplanetary in its detachment. Yet there's also an undercurrent of melancholy and amusement--and wonder at the specific details of what was already a lost world.
Continuing his uphill conquest of the learning curve, Adams attended Harvard, which didn't do much for him. ("The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.") Then, after a beer-and-sausage-scented spell as a graduate student in Berlin, he followed his father to Washington, D.C., in 1860. There he might have remained--bogged down in "the same rude colony ... camped in the same forest, with the same unfinished Greek temples for workrooms, and sloughs for roads"--had not the Civil War sent Adams père et fils to London. Henry sat on the sidelines throughout the conflict, serving as his father's private secretary and anxiously negotiating the minefields of English society. He then returned home and commenced a long career as a journalist, historian, novelist, and peripheral participant in the political process--a kind of mouthpiece for what remained of the New England conscience.
He was not, by any measure but his own, a failure. And the proof of the pudding is The Education of Henry Adams itself, which remains among the oddest and most enlightening books in American literature. It contains thousands of memorable one-liners about politics, morality, culture, and transatlantic relations: "The American mind exasperated the European as a buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest." There are astonishing glimpses of the high and mighty: "He saw a long, awkward figure; a plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part evidently worried by white kid gloves; features that expressed neither self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism..." (That would be Abraham Lincoln; the "melancholy function" his Inaugural Ball.) But most of all, Adams's book is a brilliant account of how his own sensibility came to be. A literary landmark from the moment it first appeared, the Autobiography confers upon its author precisely that prize he felt had always eluded him: success. --James Marcus [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Emma'
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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› Find signed collectible books: 'Emma'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fathers and Sons'
A specially commissioned new translation of Turgenev's novel, which, with its controversial portrayal of Buzarov, the "nihilist" or "new man", aroused shock throughout Russian society when it was first published in 1862. The translator gained access to Turgenev's working manuscript. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Frankenstein'
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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› Find signed collectible books: 'Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus'
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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› Find signed collectible books: 'Great Expectations'
With a new introduction and notes, this edition of Great Expectations offers new insights into one of Dickens's most fascinating and disturbing novels. Charting the progess of Pip from childhood to adulthood, Dickens shows the dangers of being driven by a desire for wealth and social status. As Pip moves from the Kent marshes to busy, commercial London, encountering many extraordinary characters--from Magwitch, the escaped convict, to Miss Havisham, a woman locked up with her past--he is confronted with the challenge of establishing a sense of his own identity and values contrary to the plans others have for him. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Great Expectations'
"I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip." So begins James Riordan's lively retelling of Great Expectations, Charles Dickens's classic novel about a boy taken from poor beginnings, educated as a gentleman, and his ultimate discovery of the identity of his mysterious benefactor. This compelling and easy-to-read version of Great Expectations is vividly brought to life with the illustrations of Victor G. Ambrus, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in England and the artist for numerous other classics in this popular series, including Moby Dick, Gulliver's Travels, The Wizard of Oz, and many others. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Grimms' Fairy Tales'
Grimms' Fairy Tales is a charming new edition of one of the best-known collections of children's stories of all times. Peter Carter brings a novelist's flair for narrative pace and vivid imagery to these familiar tales while remaining faithful to the spirit and tone of the original orally transmitted stories. The authentic rhythm of spoken English is captured in Carter's clear and resonant style.
All the favorite characters are here--Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel, Red Riding Hood--along with others less well-known in gripping tales such as The Singing Bone and The Carrion Crows. Haunting and powerful, sad and humorous, these stories remain as fresh and fascinating as the first day they were told. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gulliver's Travels'
George Orwell considered Gulliver's Travels among the six most indispensable books in world literature. Recognized as a masterpiece since it first appeared in 1726, Swift's tale of a seaman's adventures is a brilliant, biting piece of satirical writing--aimed originally at Swift's contemporaries, but strikingly relevant to modern life and the unchanging defects of human nature. This edition is based on the 1735 edition, incorporating Swift's revisions to the earlier text. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Gulliver's Travels'
In Gulliver's Travels, the narrator represents himself as a reliable reporter of the fantastic adventures he has just experienced. But how far can we rely on a narrator who has been impersonated by someone else? The work purports to be a travel book, and describes the shipwrecked Gulliver's encounters with the inhabitants of four extraordinary places: Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and the country of the Houyhnhnms. An extraordinarily skillful blend of fantasy and realism makes Gulliver's Travels by turns hilarious, frightening, and profound. Swift's alter ego plays tricks on us, and our gullibility uncovers one of the world's most disturbing satires of the human condition.
The fullest, most up-to-date paperback of Gulliver's Travels currently available, this new edition contains an astute analysis of the nature of Swift's satire. It includes the changing frontispiece portraits of Gulliver that appeared in successive early editions and whose subtle changes contribute to the reader's uncertainty about the veracity of the author. A new introduction by Claude Rawson draws on the latest scholarship and considers Swift's role-playing and the relationship of the author to Gulliver. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gulliver's Travels'
Embark on a journey with one of the greatest world travelers of all time. Ride with him across the South Seas to the miniature island of Liliput, where people grow no taller than six inches high. Round the Cape of Good Hope to the land of Brobdingnag, home of giants tall as church steeples, and sail on to the exotic lands of Laputa, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrip, and more. Share Gulliver's incredible adventures, from his singlehanded defeat of an entire naval fleet (albeit one whose ships are toy boat-sized), to his harrowing abduction by a giant eagle, to his unfortunate dunking in a reservoir-sized pot of cream by a jealous dwarf!
These are the stories of Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift's classic tale of fantastic adventures in far-off lands, brilliantly retold by James Riordan in rich, vivid prose that captures all the whimsy and satire of the original in the modern language of today's children. The illustrations by noted artist Victor Ambrus are rich and colorful, delicate in detail, strong in composition, and permeated with humor. And the insightful--often scathing--social commentary that Swift wove into his original tale remains intact, providing fascinating reading for adults as well as children. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Karamazov Brothers'
Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, The Karamazov Brothers (1880) is both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophical debate. The dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is murdered; his sons--the atheist intellectual Ivan, the hot-blooded Dmitry, and the saintly novice Alyosha--are all involved at some level. Brilliantly bound up with this psychological drama is Dostoevsky's intense and disturbing exploration of many deeply felt ideas about the existence of God, freedom of will, the collective nature of guilt, and the disastrous consequences of rationalism. Filled with eloquent voices, this new translation fully realizes the power and dramatic virtuosity of Dostoevsky's most brilliant work. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby'
Our hero confronts a large and varied cast, including Wackford Squeers, the fantastic ogre of a schoolmaster, and Vincent Crummles, the grandiloquent ham actor, on his comic and satirical adventures up and down the country. Punishing wickedness, befriending the helpless, strutting the stage, and falling in love, Nicholas shares some of his creator's energy and earnestness as he faces the pressing issues of early Victorian society. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Little Women'
This classic story of the March family women and their lives in New England during the Civil War has remained enduringly popular since its publication in 1868. Poor, argumentative, loving, and optimistic, the March sisters struggle to supplement their family's meager income and realize their own dreams. This highly autobiographical novel shows us women who are strong-minded and independent in their determination to control their own destiny. The introduction to this edition provides a fascinating history of the Alcotts, and a biographical history of Louisa Alcott's own struggles as a writer. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Mansfield Park'
The Mansfield Park of the title, a magnificent, idyllic estate which is home to the wealthy Bertram family, stands as a bastion of English tradition and stability. The novel's heroine, Fanny Price, is a "poor relation" living with the Bertrams, acutely conscious of her inferior status and yet daring to love their son Edmund--but from afar. However, with five marriageable young people on the premises, the peace at Mansfield cannot last. Courtships, entertainments and intrigues throw the place into turmoil, and Fanny finds herself unwillingly competing with a dazzlingly witty and lovely rival. As critic Margaret Drabble has pointed out, the house becomes "full of the energies of discord--sibling rivalry, greed, ambition, illicit sexual passion, and vanity," and the novel becomes ever more engrossing as it builds to Mansfield's final scandal and, finally, a satisfying conclusion. Unique in its moral design and brilliant interplay of the forces of tradition and change, Mansfield Park was the first novel of Jane Austen's maturity, and the first in which the author turned her unerring eye on the concerns of English society at a time of great upheaval. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Nicholas Nickleby: Library Edition'
This edition of the celebrated novel by Dickens comes with extensive notes and an appendix reproducing the Nickleby "Proclamation" - a pre-publication advertisement for the novel signed by "Boz". [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Northanger Abbey'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Northanger Abbey and Persuasion'
This is part of a complete set of Jane Austen's novels collating the editions published during the author's lifetime and previously unpublished manuscripts. The books are illustrated with 19th century plates and incorporate revisions by experts in the light of subsequent research. The set consists of "Pride and Prejudice", "Sense and Sensibility", "Mansfield Park", "Northanger Abbey" and "Persuasion", "Emma" and "Minor Works". [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, the Watsons, Sanditon: Lady Susan ; The Watsons ; Sanditon'
This volume contains an epistolary novel, Lady Susan, and two unfinished works, The Watsons and Sanditon, along with the well-known Northanger Abbey. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, the Watsons, Sanditon: Lady Susan ; The Watsons ; Sanditon'
Northanger Abbey is the earliest of Jane Austen's great comedies of female enlightenment and combines literary burlesque - making fun of the excesses of the Gothic novel - with larger moral, philosophical, and social issues: the folly of letting literature get in the way of life, the inexcusability of not thinking for oneself, and the painful difficulties (especially for women) involved in growing up. Lady Susan and The Watsons are early compositions that reflect many of the qualities of Northanger Abbey. The first is an epistolary novel centring on the intrigues of the villainous Lady Susan; the second is an unfinished example of Jane Austen's most characteristic form - a story where the heroine is outstanding for her sense and goodness, virtues notably lacking in the other characters, who are here part of an altogether bleaker vision. Sanditon, too, is tragically incomplete, and it signals the achievement of a new depth and breadth of comic insight on the part of its author. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Origin of Species: Library Edition'
In The Origin of Species (1859) Darwin challenged many of the most deeply-held beliefs of the Western world. Arguing for a material, not divine, origin of species, he showed that new species are achieved by "natural selection." The Origin communicates the enthusiasm of original thinking in an open, descriptive style, and Darwin's emphasis on the value of diversity speaks more strongly now than ever. As well as a stimulating introduction and detailed notes, this edition offers a register of the many writers referred to by Darwin in the text. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Origin of Species: Library Edition'
In The Origin of Species (1859) Darwin challenged many of the most deeply-held beliefs of the Western world. Arguing for a material, not divine, origin of species, he showed that new species are achieved by "natural selection." The Origin communicates the enthusiasm of original thinking in an open, descriptive style, and Darwin's emphasis on the value of diversity speaks more strongly now than ever. As well as a stimulating introduction and detailed notes, this edition offers a register of the many writers referred to by Darwin in the text. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary'
This thoroughly revised and updated new edition of the standard dictionary for advanced learners of English contains thousands of new words, increased coverage of phrasal verbs, idioms and American English, greater focus on pronunciation and stress, as well as appendices on irregular verbs, punctuation and weights and measures. The edition also provides notes to clarify points of semantic or grammatical difficulty, and an introduction in simple English for the student plus a higher-level foreword for the teacher or lecturer. The work will be of benefit to advanced students of English, for students reading and studying contemporary textbooks, literature, newspapers and periodicals, for non-native teachers of advanced-level English and for non-native lecturers in English studies. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Oxford Illustrated Dickens'
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen'
"I should like to see Emma in love, and in some doubt of return; it would do her good," remarks one of Jane Austen's characters in Emma.
Quick-witted, beautiful, headstrong and rich, Emma Woodhouse is inordinately fond of match-making select inhabitants of the village of Highbury, yet aloof and oblivious as to the question of whom she herself might marry. This paradox multiplies the intrigues and sparkling ironies of Jane Austen's masterpiece, her comedy of a sentimental education through which Emma discovers a capacity for love and marriage. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Persuasion'
Anne Elliot, heroine of Austen's last novel, did something we can all relate to: Long ago, she let the love of her life get away. In this case, she had allowed herself to be persuaded by a trusted family friend that the young man she loved wasn't an adequate match, social stationwise, and that Anne could do better. The novel opens some seven years after Anne sent her beau packing, and she's still alone. But then the guy she never stopped loving comes back from the sea. As always, Austen's storytelling is so confident, you can't help but allow yourself to be taken on the enjoyable journey. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Persuasion'
'All the privilege I claim for my own sex...is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.'. Anne Elliot's heartfelt words strike the keynote of Jane Austen's last completed novel. It features a heroine older and wiser than her predecessors in earlier books, and its tone is more intimate and sober as Jane Austen unfolds a simple love-story. She described her heroine in a letter as 'almost too good for me': Anne Elliot's goodness is not of the cloying kind, but an unsentimental quality that, combined with stoicism and integrity, enables her to find happiness in love after seven years when it seemed she had for ever put an end to such a prospect. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Pilgrim's Progress'
One of the best-selling books of all time, The Pilgrim's Progress holds a unique place in the history of English literature. Bunyan captures the speech of ordinary people as accurately as he depicts their behavior and appearance and as firmly as he realizes their inner emotional and spiritual life. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Politics'
The Politics is one of the most influential texts in the history of political thought, and it raises issues which still confront anyone who wants to think seriously about the ways in which human societies are organized and governed. By examining the way societies are run--from households to city states--Aristotle establishes how successful constitutions can best be initiated and upheld.
For this edition, Sir Ernest Barker's fine translation, which has been widely used for nearly half a century, has been extensively revised to meet the needs of the modern reader. The accessible introduction and clear notes examine the historical and philosophical background of the work and discuss its significance for modern political thought. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Portrait of a Lady'
When Isabel Archer, a young American with looks, wit, and imagination, arrives in Europe, she sees the world as "a place of brightness," full of possibility. Rejecting suitors who offer her wealth and devotion, she follows her own path and finds it leads to a dark and constricted future. The Portrait of a Lady is the masterpiece of James's middle period, and Isabel is his most engaging central character. This edition provides a new introduction and notes, and includes Henry James's own Preface. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man'
James Joyce's Portrait of an Artist is one of the most significant literary works of the twentieth century, and one of the most innovative. Its originality shocked contemporary readers on its publication in 1916 who found its treating of the minutiae of daily life as indecorous, and its central character unappealing. Was it art or was it filth?
The novel charts the intellectual, moral, and sexual development of Stephen Dedalus, from his childhood listening to his father's stories through his schooldays and adolescence to the brink of adulthood and independence, and his awakening as an artist. Growing up in a Catholic family in Dublin in the final years of the nineteenth century, Stephen's consciousness is forged by Irish history and politics, by Catholicism and culture, language and art. Stephen's story mirrors that of Joyce himself, and the novel is both startlingly realistic and brilliantly crafted, not to mention that it is one of the founding texts of Modernism and the precursor of the acclaimed Ulysses.
For this edition Jeri Johnson, an eminent Joyce scholar, has written an introduction and notes which together provide a comprehensive and illuminating appreciation of Joyce's artistry. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Pride & Prejudice'
"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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› Find signed collectible books: 'Pride and Prejudice'
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."
So begins Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen's perfect comedy of manners--one of the most popular novels of all time--that features splendidly civilized sparring between the proud Mr. Darcy and the prejudiced Elizabeth Bennet as they play out their spirited courtship in a series of eighteenth-century drawing-room intrigues. "Pride and Prejudice seems as vital today as ever, " writes Anna Quindlen in her introduction to this Modern Library edition. "It is a pure joy to read." Eudora Welty agrees: "The gaiety is unextinguished, the irony has kept its bite, the reasoning is still sweet, the sparkle undiminished. [It is] irresistible and as nearly flawless as any fiction could be."
This volume is the companion to the BBC television series, a lavish production aired on the Arts and Entertainment Network.
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 ModernLibrary continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Weir of Hermiston'
This volume includes Stevenson's famous spine-chilling thriller Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as well as Weir of Hermiston, a brilliant autobiographical portrayal of a father-son relationship. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tom Jones'
Tom Jones isn't a bad guy, but boys just want to have fun. Nearly two and a half centuries after its publication, the adventures of the rambunctious and randy Tom Jones still makes for great reading. I'm not in the habit of using words like bawdy or rollicking, but if you look them up in the dictionary, you should see a picture of this book. [via]
› Find signed collectible books: 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea'
The classic tale of Captain Nemo and the submarine the Nautilus, this is the quintessential translation by the internationally renowned Verne scholar, William Butcher. This edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea reports the very first study of Verne's manuscript and is packed with detail on artistic and scientific references. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'
A monumental work of American literature, Uncle Tom's Cabin charts the progress to freedom of fugitives who escape the chains of slavery, and of a martyr who transcends all earthly ties. This edition firmly locates the novel within the context of African-American writing, the issues of race, and the role of women. Its appendices include the most important contemporary African-American literary responses to the glorification of Uncle Tom's Christian resignation, as well as excerpts from popular slave narratives, quoted by Stowe in her justification of the dramatization of slavery, Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. [via]
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Women in Love'
In Women in Love (1920), Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen who first appeared in Lawrence's earlier novel, The Rainbow, take center stage as Lawrence explores their growth and development in their relationships with two powerful men, Rupert Birkin and his friend Gerald Crich. A novel of regeneration and dark, destructive human passion, Women in Love reflects the impact on Lawrence of the First World War in the potential both for annihilation and salvation of the self. A full introduction and detailed notes offer an illuminating discourse on one of Lawrence's most extraordinary, innovative, and unsettling works. [via]
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