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books tagged “Literary fiction” (Literary Fiction / literary fiction)
books tagged “Literary fiction”
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The Adventures of Tom Sawyerby Mark Twain, Russell BakerISBN 0679735011 (0-679-73501-1)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, Or, The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Nightby Bennett Alfred Cerf, Richard Francis BurtonISBN 0679602356 (0-679-60235-6)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, Or, The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night'Book summary:Full of mischief and valor, ribaldry and romance, The Arabian Nights is a work that has enthralled readers for centuries. The text presented here is that of the 1932 Modern Library edition for which Bennett A. Cerf chose the "most famous and representative" of the stories from the multivolume translation of Richard F. Burton.
The origins of The Arabian Nights are obscure. About a thousand years ago a vast number of stories in Arabic from various countries began to be brought together; only much later was the collection called The Arabian Nights or the Thousand and One Nights. All the stories are told by Shahrazad (Scheherazade), who entertains her husband, King Shahryar, whose custom it was to execute his wives after a single night. Shahrazad begins a story each night but withholds the ending until the following night, thus postponing her execution.
This selection includes many of the stories that are universally known though seldom read in this authentic form:
"Alaeddin; or, the Wonderful Lamp," "Sindbad the Seaman and Sindbad the Landsman," and "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves." These, and the tales that accompany them, make delightful reading, demonstrating, as the Modern Library noted in 1932, that Shahrazad's spell remains unbroken. [via]More editions of The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, Or, The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night:
The Art of Living and Other Storiesby John GardnerISBN 0679723501 (0-679-72350-1)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Autobiography of Alice B. Toklasby Gertrude SteinISBN 067972463X (0-679-72463-X)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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Bad Behaviorby Mary GaitskillISBN 0679723277 (0-679-72327-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Barabbasby Par Lagerkvist, Alan BlairISBN 067972544X (0-679-72544-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Barabbas'Book summary:Barabbas is the acquitted; the man whose life was exchanged for that of Jesus of Nazareth, crucified upon the hill of Golgotha. Barabbas is a man condemned to have no god. "Christos Iesus" is carved on the disk suspended from his neck, but he cannot affirm his faith. He cannot pray. He can only say, "I want to believe."
Translated from the Swedish by Alan Blair [via]More editions of Barabbas:
The Beggar Maidby Alice MunroISBN 0679732713 (0-679-73271-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Birdyby William WhartonISBN 0679734120 (0-679-73412-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Birdy'Book summary:Hailed upon its publication as "a classic for readers not yet born" (Philadelphia Inquirer), Birdy is an inventive, hypnotic novel about friendship and family, dreaming and surviving, love and war, madness and beauty, and, above all, "birdness." It tells the story of Al, a bold, hot-tempered boy whose goals in life are to life weights and pick up girls, and his strange friend Birdy, the skinny, tongue-tied perhaps genius who only wants to raise canaries and to fly. While fighting in World War II, they find their dreams become all too realand their lives are changed forever.
In Birdy, William Wharton crafts an unforgettable tale that suggests another notion of sanity in a world that is manifestly insane. [via]More editions of Birdy:
The Bostoniansby Henry James, Alison Lurie, Library of America StaffISBN 0679733817 (0-679-73381-7)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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By the Lakeby John McGahernISBN 0679744029 (0-679-74402-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Call of the Wildby Jack London, E. L. Doctorow, Donald Pizer, Library of America StaffISBN 0679725350 (0-679-72535-0)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Cancer Wardby Nicholas Bethell, David Burg, Aleksandr SolzhenitsynISBN 0679601635 (0-679-60163-5)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cancer Ward'Book summary:Like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn the hero, Oldg Kostoglotov, spent many years in labour camps and was eventually transferred to a cancer ward. This study of how people confront terminal illness is also a dissection of the "cancerous" Soviet police state. [via]
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The Cinnamon Peelerby Michael OndaatjeISBN 0679742727 (0-679-74272-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Confessions of Nat Turnerby William StyronISBN 0679736638 (0-679-73663-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Confessions of Nat Turner'Book summary:In the late summer of 1831, in a remote section of southeastern Virginia, there took place the only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery...
The revolt was led by a remarkable Negro preacher named Nat Turner, an educated slave who felt himself divinely ordained to annihilate all the white people in the region.
The Confessions of Nat Turner is narrated by Nat himself as he lingers in jail through the cold autumnal days before his execution. The compelling story ranges over the whole of Nat's Life, reaching its inevitable and shattering climax that bloody day in August.
The Confessions of Nat Turner is not only a masterpiece of storytelling; is also reveals in unforgettable human terms the agonizing essence of Negro slavery. Through the mind of a slave, Willie Styron has re-created a catastrophic event, and dramatized the intermingled miseries, frustrations--and hopes--which caused this extraordinary black man to rise up out of the early mists of our history and strike down those who held his people in bondage. [via] -
David Copperfieldby Charles DickensISBN 0679603204 (0-679-60320-4)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'David Copperfield'Book summary:
" Like so many fond parents I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child," wrote Charles Dickens. "And his name is David Copperfield."
Of all of Dickens's novels, David Copperfield most closely reflects the events of his own life. The story of an abandoned waif who discovers life and love in an indifferent world, this classic tale of childhood is populated with a cast of eccentrics, innocents, and villains who number among the author's greatest creations.
"David Copperfield is filled with characters of the most astonishing variety, vividness, and originality," noted Somerset Maugham. "They are not realistic and yet they abound with life. There never were such people as the Micawbers, Pegotty and Barkis, Traddles, Betsey Trotwood and Mr. Dick, Uriah Heep and his mother. They are fantastic inventions of Dickens's exultant imagination, but they have so much vigor, they are so consistent, they are presented with so much conviction, that you believe in them. They are extravagant, but not unreal, and when you have once to know them you can never quite forget them." T. S. Eliot agreed: "Dickens excelled in character; in the creation of characters of greater intensity than human beings." And Virginia Woolf concluded: "In David Copperfield, though char-
acters swarm and life flows into every creek and cranny, some common feelings--youth, gaiety, hope--envelops the tumult, brings the scattered parts together, and invests the most perfect of all the Dickens novels with an atmosphere of beauty."
The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun-
dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices. [via]More editions of David Copperfield:
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Dead Soulsby Nikolai Gogol, Bernard G. GuerneyISBN 0679602658 (0-679-60265-8)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dead Souls'Book summary:A socially adept newcomer fluidly inserts himself into an unnamed Russian town, conquering first the drinkers, then the dignitaries. All find him amiable, estimable, agreeable. But what exactly is Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov up to?--something that will soon throw the town "into utter perplexity."
After more than a week of entertainment and "passing the time, as they say, very pleasantly," he gets down to business--heading off to call on some landowners. More pleasantries ensue before Chichikov reveals his bizarre plan. He'd like to buy the souls of peasants who have died since the last census. The first landowner looks carefully to see if he's mad, but spots no outward signs. In fact, the scheme is innovative but by no means bonkers. Even though Chichikov will be taxed on the supposed serfs, he will be able to count them as his property and gain the reputation of a gentleman owner. His first victim is happy to give up his souls for free--less tax burden for him. The second, however, knows Chichikov must be up to something, and the third has his servants rough him up. Nonetheless, he prospers.
Dead Souls is a feverish anatomy of Russian society (the book was first published in 1842) and human wiles. Its author tosses off thousands of sublime epigrams--including, "However stupid a fool's words may be, they are sometimes enough to confound an intelligent man," and is equally adept at yearning satire: "Where is he," Gogol interrupts the action, "who, in the native tongue of our Russian soul, could speak to us this all-powerful word: forward? who, knowing all the forces and qualities, and all the depths of our nature, could, by one magic gesture, point the Russian man towards a lofty life?" Flannery O'Connor, another writer of dark genius, declared Gogol "necessary along with the light." Though he was hardly the first to envision property as theft, his blend of comic, fantastic moralism is sui generis.--Kerry Fried [via]
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Death Comes for the Archbishopby Willa CatherISBN 0679728899 (0-679-72889-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Death Comes for the Archbishop'Book summary:Willa Cather's best known novel; a narrative that recounts a life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert. [via]
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Dictionary of the Khazarsby Milorad Pavic, Christina Pribicevic-ZoricISBN 0679724613 (0-679-72461-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dictionary of the Khazars'Book summary:A national bestseller, Dictionary of the Khazars was cited by The New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of the year. Written in two versions, male and female (both available in Vintage International), which are identical save for seventeen crucial lines, Dictionary is the imaginary book of knowledge of the Khazars, a people who flourished somewhere beyond Transylvania between the seventh and ninth centuries. Eschewing conventional narrative and plot, this lexicon novel combines the dictionaries of the world's three major religions with entries that leap between past and future, featuring three unruly wise men, a book printed in poison ink, suicide by mirrors, a chimerical princess, a sect of priests who can infiltrate one's dreams, romances between the living and the dead, and much more. [via]
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Einstein's Monstersby Martin AmisISBN 0679729968 (0-679-72996-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Einstein's Monsters'Book summary:A collection of stories about a frightening world inhabited by people dehumanized by the daily threat of nuclear war and postwar survivors deformed by its results. [via]
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Ellen Fosterby Kaye GibbonsISBN 067972866X (0-679-72866-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ellen Foster'Book summary:Oprah Book Club® Selection, October 1997: Kaye Gibbons is a writer who brings a short story sensibility to her novels. Rather than take advantage of the novel's longer form to paint her visions in broad, sweeping strokes, Gibbons prefers to concentrate on just one corner of the canvas and only a few colors to produce her small masterpieces. In Gibbons's case, her canvas is the American South and her colors are all the shades of gray.
In Ellen Foster, the title character is an 11-year-old orphan who refers to herself as "old Ellen," an appellation that is disturbingly apt. Ellen is an old woman in a child's body; her frail, unhappy mother dies, her abusive father alternately neglects her and makes advances on her, and she is shuttled from one uncaring relative's home to another before she finally takes matters into her own hands and finds herself a place to belong. There is something almost Dickensian about Ellen's tribulations; like Oliver Twist, David Copperfield or a host of other literary child heroes, Ellen is at the mercy of predatory adults, with only her own wit and courage--and the occasional kindness of others--to help her through. That she does, in fact, survive her childhood and even rise above it is the book's bittersweet victory. [via]
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Et Tu, Babeby Mark LeynerISBN 0679745068 (0-679-74506-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Exile and the Kingdomby Albert Camus, Justin O'BrienISBN 067973385X (0-679-73385-X)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dreamby Hunter S. Thompson, Ralph SteadmanISBN 0679724192 (0-679-72419-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream'Book summary:Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is the ne plus ultra of Hunter S. Thompson and the whole gonzo clan he spawned. Written in the lurid afterglow of the 1960s, Fear and Loathing is a loosely connected series of mad dashes across the desert, trashed hotel rooms, and goofs on the brutish, naïve, or merely unhip, perpetrated by Thompson and his mammoth Samoan attorney. The pair start out high on a medicine cabinet's worth of elixirs, powders, and pills, and stay that way for 200 pages. They careen through an unsettling landscape of paranoia and alienation, but that doesn't mean the book isn't a riot. Here's a small taste: "By this time, the drink was beginning to cut the acid and my hallucinations were down to a tolerable level. The room service waiter had a vaguely reptilian cast to his features, but I was no longer seeing huge pterodactyls lumbering around the corridors in pools of fresh blood."
Though somewhat dated (it appeared serially in Rolling Stone throughout November 1971), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a book of real vitality and Rabelaisian wit. A document of the counterculture after it was well past ripe and deep into rot, the book is a wild ride, a paranoid ramble that is thoroughly exhilarating and worth the trip. No pun intended. [via]
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Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories, Tie-In Editionby Hunter S. ThompsonISBN 0679602984 (0-679-60298-4)
Hardcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories, Tie-In Edition'Book summary:Dr. Thompson made the list of inspirational scribes when I polled in a recent writing workshop, and why not? Back in a spiffy Modern Library edition, replete with additional essays, I find in this iconographic work that HST both invoked--and provoked--an era that was not so much the '60s proper, but rather the mean, shadow-filled death of that time, which is still playing out. Thank God Thompson was there to explode the myth of "objective" journalism and help pave the way for the pens and voices that followed. [via]
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The Fifth Childby Doris May LessingISBN 0679721827 (0-679-72182-7)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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The Fire Next Timeby James BaldwinISBN 067974472X (0-679-74472-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Fire Next Time'Book summary:It's shocking how little has changed between the races in this country since 1963, when James Baldwin published this coolly impassioned plea to "end the racial nightmare." The Fire Next Time--even the title is beautiful, resonant, and incendiary. "Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?" Baldwin demands, flicking aside the central race issue of his day and calling instead for full and shared acceptance of the fact that America is and always has been a multiracial society. Without this acceptance, he argues, the nation dooms itself to "sterility and decay" and to eventual destruction at the hands of the oppressed: "The Negroes of this country may never be able to rise to power, but they are very well placed indeed to precipitate chaos and ring down the curtain on the American dream."
Baldwin's seething insights and directives, so disturbing to the white liberals and black moderates of his day, have become the starting point for discussions of American race relations: that debasement and oppression of one people by another is "a recipe for murder"; that "color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality"; that whites can only truly liberate themselves when they liberate blacks, indeed when they "become black" symbolically and spiritually; that blacks and whites "deeply need each other here" in order for America to realize its identity as a nation.
Yet despite its edgy tone and the strong undercurrent of violence, The Fire Next Time is ultimately a hopeful and healing essay. Baldwin ranges far in these hundred pages--from a memoir of his abortive teenage religious awakening in Harlem (an interesting commentary on his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain) to a disturbing encounter with Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad. But what binds it all together is the eloquence, intimacy, and controlled urgency of the voice. Baldwin clearly paid in sweat and shame for every word in this text. What's incredible is that he managed to keep his cool. --David Laskin [via]
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Flaubert's Parrotby Julian BarnesISBN 0679731369 (0-679-73136-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Flaubert's Parrot'Book summary:Just what sort of book is Flaubert's Parrot, anyway? A literary biography of 19th-century French novelist, radical, and intellectual impresario Gustave Flaubert? A meditation on the uses and misuses of language? A novel of obsession, denial, irritation, and underhanded connivery? A thriller complete with disguises, sleuthing, mysterious meetings, and unknowing targets? An extended essay on the nature of fiction itself?
On the surface, at first, Julian Barnes's book is the tale of an elderly English doctor's search for some intriguing details of Flaubert's life. Geoffrey Braithwaite seems to be involved in an attempt to establish whether a particularly fine, lovely, and ancient stuffed parrot is in fact one originally "borrowed by G. Flaubert from the Museum of Rouen and placed on his worktable during the writing of Un coeur simple, where it is called Loulou, the parrot of Felicité, the principal character of the tale."
What begins as a droll and intriguing excursion into the minutiae of Flaubert's life and intellect, along with an attempt to solve the small puzzle of the parrot--or rather parrots, for there are two competing for the title of Gustave's avian confrere--soon devolves into something obscure and worrisome, the exploration of an arcane Braithwaite obsession that is perhaps even pathological. The first hint we have that all is not as it seems comes almost halfway into the book, when after a humorously cantankerous account of the inadequacies of literary critics, Braithwaite closes a chapter by saying, "Now do you understand why I hate critics? I could try and describe to you the expression in my eyes at this moment; but they are far too discoloured with rage." And from that point, things just get more and more curious, until they end in the most unexpected bang.
One passage perhaps best describes the overall effect of this extraordinary story: "You can define a net in one of two ways, depending on your point of view. Normally, you would say that it is a meshed instrument designed to catch fish. But you could, with no great injury to logic, reverse the image and define the net as a jocular lexicographer once did: he called it a collection of holes tied together with string." Julian Barnes demonstrates that it is possible to catch quite an interesting fish no matter how you define the net. --Andrew Himes [via]
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Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafeby Fannie FlaggISBN 0679744959 (0-679-74495-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe'Book summary:The remarkable novel of two Southern friendships--the basis of the hit film--available for the first time in large print. [via]
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Friend of My Youthby Alice MunroISBN 0679729577 (0-679-72957-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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G.by John BergerISBN 0679736549 (0-679-73654-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Giovanni's Roomby James BaldwinISBN 0679642196 (0-679-64219-6)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Giovanni's Room'Book summary:Baldwin's haunting and controversial second novel is his most sustained treatment of sexuality, and a classic of gay literature. In a 1950s Paris swarming with expatriates and characterized by dangerous liaisons and hidden violence, an American finds himself unable to repress his impulses, despite his determination to live the conventional life he envisions for himself After meeting and proposing to a young woman, he falls into a lengthy affair with an Italian bartender and is confounded and tortured by his sexual identity as he oscillates between the two.
Examining the mystery of love and passion in an intensely imagined narrative, Baldwin creates a moving and complex story of death and desire that is revelatory in its insight.
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Go down, Mosesby William FaulknerISBN 0679732179 (0-679-73217-9)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Go Down, Moses'Book summary:"I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance." -William Faulkner, on receiving the Nobel Prize Go Down, Moses is composed of seven interrelated stories, all of them set in Faulkner's mythic Yoknapatawpha County. From a variety of perspectives, Faulkner examines the complex, changing relationships between blacks and whites, between man and nature, weaving a cohesive novel rich in implication and insight. [via]
The History of Luminous Motionby Scott BradfieldISBN 0679729437 (0-679-72943-7)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chaptersby Julian BarnesISBN 0679731377 (0-679-73137-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters'Book summary:This is, in short, a complete, unsettling, and frequently exhilarating vision of the world, starting with the voyage of Noah's ark and ending with a sneak preview of heaven! [via]
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The House on Mango Streetby Sandra CisnerosISBN 0679734775 (0-679-73477-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The House on Mango Street'Book summary:Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught everywhere from inner-city grade schools to universities across the country, and translated all over the world, The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero. Told in a series of vignettes - sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous - it is the story of a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become. Few other books in our time have touched so many readers. [via]
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The Hunchback of Notre Dameby Victor Hugo, Catherine Liu, Elizabeth McCrackenISBN 0679642579 (0-679-64257-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame'Book summary:The story and characters in Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame have resonated with succeeding generations since its publication in 1831. It has tempted filmmakers, and most recently animators, who have exploited its dramatic content to good effect but have inevitably lost some of the grays that make the original text so compelling.
From Victor Hugo's flamboyant imagination came Quasimodo, the grotesque bell ringer; La Esmeralda, the sensuous gypsy dancer; and the haunted archdeacon Claude Frollo. Hugo set his epic tale in the Paris of 1482 under Louis XI and meticulously re-created the
day-to-day life of its highest and lowest inhabitants. Written at a time of perennial political upheaval in France, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame is the product of an emerging democratic sensibility and prefigures the teeming masterpiece Les Misérables, which Hugo would write thirty years later.
He made the cathedral the centerpiece of the novel and called it Notre-Dame de Paris. (It received its popular English title at the time of its second translation in 1833.) Hugo wrote that his inspiration came from a carving of the word "fatality" in Greek that he had found in the cathedral. The inscription had been eradicated by the time the book was published, and Hugo feared that Notre-Dame's Gothic splendor might soon be lost to the contemporary fad for tearing down old buildings. Notre-Dame has survived as one of the great monuments of Paris, and Hugo's novel is a fitting celebration of it, a popular classic that is proving to be just as enduring.
The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun-dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hard-bound editions of important works of liter-ature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau-gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.
Jacket paintings: (front) detail from Notre Dame by Paul Lecomte, courtesy of David David Gallery/SuperStock; (spine) Victor Hugo, 1833, by Louis Boulanger of Giraudon/Art Resource, N.Y. [via] -
The Immoralistby Richard Howard, Andre GideISBN 0679741917 (0-679-74191-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Immoralist'Book summary:With today's headlines and talk shows, it takes a lot to shock a reader--certainly more than was required in 1902, when André Gide's The Immoralist was first published. What was seen then as a story of dereliction translates today into a tale of introspection and fierce self-discovery. While traveling to Tunis with his new bride, the Parisian scholar Michel is overcome by tuberculosis. As he slowly convalesces, he revels in the physical pleasures of living and resolves to forgo his studies of the past in order to experience the present--to let "the layers of acquired knowledge peel away from the mind like a cosmetic and reveal, in patches, the naked flesh beneath, the authentic being hidden there."
But this is not the Michel his colleagues knew, nor the man Marceline married, and he must hide his new values under the patina of what he now reviles. Bored by Parisian society, he moves to a family farm in Normandy. He is happy there, especially in the company of young Charles, but he must soon return to the city and academe. Michel remains restless until he gives his first lecture and runs into Ménalque, who has long outraged society, and recognizes in him a reflection of his torment. Finally, Michel heads south, deeper into the desert, until, as he confides to his friends, he is lost in the sea of sand, under a clear, directionless sky.
What Gide's story lacks in sensationalism is fulfilled by his descriptive prose, which evokes the exotic nature of Michel's inner and outer journey: "I did not understand the forbearance of this African earth, submerged for days at a time and now awakening from winter, drunk with water, bursting with new juices; it laughed in this springtime frenzy whose echo, whose image I perceived within myself." --Joannie Kervran Stangeland [via]
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Independence Dayby Richard FordISBN 0679735186 (0-679-73518-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Independence Day'Book summary:The Pulitzer-Prize Winning novel for 1996.In this visionary sequel to The Sportswriter, Richard Ford deepens his portrait of one of the most unforgettable characters in American fiction, and in so doing gives us an indelible portrait of America.Frank Bascombe, in the aftermath of his divorce and the ruin of his career, has entered an "Existence Period," selling real estate in Haddam, New Jersey, and mastering the high-wire act of normalcy. But over one Fourth of July weekend, Frank is called into sudden, bewildering engagement with life.Independence Day is a moving, peerlessly funny odyssey through America and through the layered consciousness of one of its most compelling literary incarnations, conducted by a novelist of astonishing empathy and perception. [via]
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Invisible Manby Ralph EllisonISBN 0679732764 (0-679-73276-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Invisible Man'Book summary:A classic from the moment it first appeared in 1952, The Invisible Man chronicles the travels of its narrator, a young, nameless black man, as he moves through the hellish levels of American intolerance and cultural blindness. Searching for a context in which to know himself, he exists in a very peculiar state. "I am an invisible man," he says in his prologue, "When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me." But this is hard-won self-knowledge, earned over the course of many years.
As the book gets started, the narrator is expelled from his Southern Negro college for inadvertently showing a white trustee the reality of black life in the south, including an incestuous farmer and a rural whorehouse. The college director chastises him: "Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie! What kind of an education are you getting around here?" Mystified, the narrator moves north to New York City, where the truth, at least as he perceives it, is dealt another blow when he learns that his former headmaster's recommendation letters are, in fact, letters of condemnation.
What ensues is a search for what truth actually is, which proves to be supremely elusive. The narrator becomes a spokesman for a mixed-race band of social activists called "The Brotherhood" and believes he is fighting for equality. Once again, he realises he's been duped into believing what hethought was the truth, when in fact it is only another variation. Of the Brothers, he eventually discerns: "They were blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their voices. And because they were blind they would destroy themselves.... Here I thought they accepted me because they felt that colour made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn't see either colour or men".
Invisible Man is certainly a book about race in America, andsadly enough, few of the problems it chronicles have disappeared even now. But Ellison's first novel transcends such a narrow definition. It's also a book about the human race stumbling down the path to identity, challenged and successful to varying degrees. None of us can ever be sure of the truth beyond ourselves, and possibly not even there. The world isa tricky place, and no one knows this better than the invisible man, who leaves us with these chilling, provocative words: "And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" --Melanie Rehak, Amazon.com [via]
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Killer Angelsby Michael ShaaraISBN 0679643249 (0-679-64324-9)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Killer Angels'Book summary:This novel reveals more about the Battle of Gettysburg than any piece of learned nonfiction on the same subject. Michael Shaara's account of the three most important days of the Civil War features deft characterizations of all of the main actors, including Lee, Longstreet, Pickett, Buford, and Hancock. The most inspiring figure in the book, however, is Col. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, whose 20th Maine regiment of volunteers held the Union's left flank on the second day of the battle. This unit's bravery at Little Round Top helped turned the tide of the war against the rebels. There are also plenty of maps, which convey a complete sense of what happened July 1-3, 1863. Reading about the past is rarely so much fun as on these pages. [via]
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The Last Gentlemanby Walker PercyISBN 0679602720 (0-679-60272-0)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Last Gentleman'Book summary:"The Last Gentleman is lovely and brilliant...a highly whimsical kind of picaresque tale that puts one in mind of both Faulkner and Camus," wrote Joyce Carol Oates when Walker Percy's novel was first published in 1966.
Williston Bibb Barrett, the last gentleman of the story, is a displaced Southerner who has dropped out of Princeton owing to a nervous condition that his psychoanalyst associates with an inability to fit into groups. While living in New York City, our wayfarer-hero falls in love with a young woman he spies through a telescope...and sets out on a cross-country odyssey in search of home, identity, and the meaning of contemporary life.
"The Last Gentleman is a fantastically intuitive report on how America feels to the touch," said Wilfrid Sheed. "Page-for-page and line-for-line this is certainly one of the best-written books in recent memory. As a Southern writer, Percy inherits the remains of a sonorous musical language. But beyond that, his unique point of view forms beautiful sentences like a diamond cutting glass." Alfred Kazin agreed: "Percy is a natural writer, downright, subtle, mischievous . . . a philosopher among novelists."
With a new Introduction by Robert Coles.
The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with afford-
able hardbound editions of impor-
tant works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-
fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring
as its emblem the running torch-
bearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau-
gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices. [via]More editions of The Last Gentleman:
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The Leopardby Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa, Archibald ColquhounISBN 0679731210 (0-679-73121-0)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Leopard'Book summary:In Sicily in 1860, as Italian unification grows inevitable, the smallest of gestures seems dense with meaning and melancholy, sensual agitation and disquiet: "Some huge irrational disaster is in the making." All around him, the prince, Don Fabrizio, witnesses the ruin of the class and inheritance that already disgust him. His favorite nephew, Tancredi, proffers the paradox, "If we want things to stay as they are, they will have to change," but Don Fabrizio would rather take refuge in skepticism or astronomy, "the sublime routine of the skies."
Giuseppe di Lampedusa, also an astronomer and a Sicilian prince, was 58 when he started to write The Leopard, though he had had it in his mind for 25 years. E. M. Forster called his work "one of the great lonely books." What renders it so beautiful and so discomfiting is its creator's grasp of human frailty and, equally, of Sicily's arid terrain--"comfortless and irrational, with no lines that the mind could grasp, conceived apparently in a delirious moment of creation; a sea suddenly petrified at the instant when a change of wind had flung waves into frenzy." The author died at the age of 60, soon after finishing The Leopard, though he did live long enough to see it rejected as unpublishable. [via]
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Life on the Mississippiby Mark Twain, Jonathan Raban, Library of America StaffISBN 067972527X (0-679-72527-X)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Life on the Mississippi'Book summary:Fashioned from the same experiences that would inspire the masterpiece Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twains most brilliant and most personal nonfiction work. It is at once an affectionate evocation of the vital river life in the steamboat era and a melancholy reminiscence of its passing after the Civil War, a priceless collection of humorous anecdotes and folktales, and a unique glimpse into Twains life before he began to write.
Written in a prose style that has been hailed as among the greatest in English literature, Life on the Mississippi established Twain as not only the most popular humorist of his time but also Americas most profound chronicler of the human comedy.
From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]-
Lincolnby Gore VidalISBN 0679602844 (0-679-60284-4)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Lincoln'Book summary:Lincoln is a masterwork of historical fiction, in which Gore Vidal combines a comprehensive knowledge of Civil War America with 20th-century literary technique, probing the minds and motives of the men surrounding Abraham Lincoln, including personal secretary John Hay and scheming cabinet members William Seward and Salmon P. Chase, as well as his wife, Mary Todd. It is a book monumental in scope that never loses sight of the intimate and personal in its depiction of the power struggles that accompanied Lincoln's efforts to preserve the Union at all costs--efforts in which the eradication of slavery was far from the president's main objective. As usual, there's plenty of room for Vidal's wickedly humorous deflation of American icons, including a comic interlude in a Washington bordello in which Lincoln's former law partner informs Hay that Lincoln had contracted syphilis as a young man and had, just before marrying Mary Todd, suffered what can only be described as a nervous breakdown. (Protestors should note that Vidal is only passing along what that former partner had written in his own biography of Lincoln.) Don't be intimidated by the size of Lincoln; if you like historical fiction, you should read this book at the first opportunity. --Ron Hogan [via]
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London Fieldsby Martin AmisISBN 0679730346 (0-679-73034-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'London Fields'Book summary:London Fields is Amis's murder story for the end of the millennium. The murderee is Nicola Six, a "black hole" of sex and self-loathing intent on orchestrating her own extinction. The murderer may be Keith Talent, a violent lowlife whose only passions are pornography and darts. Or is the killer the rich, honorable, and dimly romantic Guy Clinch? [via]
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Magic Mountainby Thomas MannISBN 067973645X (0-679-73645-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Mama Dayby Gloria NaylorISBN 0679721819 (0-679-72181-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mama Day'Book summary:1988 Mama day [via]
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Meditationsby Marcus Aurelius, Gregory HaysISBN 0679642609 (0-679-64260-9)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Meditations'Book summary:One measure, perhaps, of a book's worth, is its intergenerational pliancy: do new readers acquire it and interpret it afresh down through the ages? The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, translated and introduced by Gregory Hays, by that standard, is very worthwhile, indeed. Hays suggests that its most recent incarnation--as a self-help book--is not only valid, but may be close to the author's intent. The book, which Hays calls, fondly, a "haphazard set of notes," is indicative of the role of philosophy among the ancients in that it is "expected to provide a 'design for living.'" And it does, both aphoristically ("Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what's left and live it properly.") and rhetorically ("What is it in ourselves that we should prize?"). Whether these, and other entries ("Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life.") sound life-changing or like entries in a teenager's diary is up to the individual reader, as it should be. Hays's introduction, which sketches the life of Marcus Aurelius (emperor of Rome A.D. 161-180) as well as the basic tenets of stoicism, is accessible and jaunty. --H. O'Billovich [via]
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Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locustby Nathanael WestISBN 067960278X (0-679-60278-X)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locust'Book summary:"Somehow or other I seem to have slipped in between all the 'schools,' " observed Nathanael West the year before his untimely death in 1940. "My books meet no needs except my own, their circulation is practically private and I'm lucky to be published." Yet today, West is widely recognized as a prophetic writer whose dark and comic vision of
a society obsessed with mass-
produced fantasies foretold much
of what was to come in American life.
Miss Lonelyhearts (1933), which West envisioned as "a novel in the form of a comic strip," tells of an advice-to-the-lovelorn columnist who becomes tragically embroiled in the desperate lives of his readers. The Day of the Locust (1939) is West's great dystopian Hollywood novel based on his experiences at the seedy fringes of the movie industry.
"The work of Nathanael West, savagely, comically, tragically original, has come into its own," said novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg. "A new public [has] discovered in the writings of West a brilliant reflection of its own sense of chaos and helplessness in a world running more to madness than to reason." [via]More editions of Miss Lonelyhearts & the Day of the Locust:
Moll Flandersby Daniel DefoeISBN 0679601333 (0-679-60133-3)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Moll Flanders'Book summary:The recent adaptation of Moll Flanders for Masterpiece Theater is a book-lover's dream: the dialogue and scene arrangement are close enough to allow the viewer to follow along in the book. The liberties taken with the tale are few (some years of childhood between the gypsies and the wealthy family are elided; Moll is Moll throughout the tale, rather than Mrs. Betty; Robert becomes Rowland, etc.) and the sets avoid the careless anachronism of the movie version released earlier this year.
The breasts, raised skirts, tumbling hair and heavy breathing on the small screen might catch you by surprise if you don't read the book carefully (as might Moll's abandonment of her children on more than one occasion). Unlike his near-contemporary John Cleland (_Fanny Hill_), Defoe was trying to keep out of jail, and so didn't dwell on the details of "correspondence" between Moll and her varied lovers. But on the page and on the screen, Moll comes across quite clearly as a woman who might bend, but refuses to break, and who is intent on having as good a life as she can get.
E. M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel considers Moll and her creator's art in some detail. While he finds much to criticize in Defoe's ability to plot (where did those last two children go, anyway?), he is as besotted with Moll as I am. Immoral? Sure -- but immortal, and never, ever dull. We hope at least a few of the viewers of the recent adaptation take a couple hours to discover the original, inimitable Moll Flanders. [via]
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Moons of Jupiterby Alice MunroISBN 0679732705 (0-679-73270-5)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Moons of Jupiter'Book summary:In these piercingly lovely and endlessly surprising stories by one of the most acclaimed current practitioners of the art of fiction, many things happen: there are betrayals and reconciliations, love affairs consummated and mourned. But the true events in The Moons Of Jupiter are the ways in which the characters are transformed over time, coming to view their past selves with an anger, regret, and infinite compassion that communicate themselves to us with electrifying force. [via]
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No Exit and Three Other Playsby Jean Paul SartreISBN 0679725164 (0-679-72516-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'No Exit and Three Other Plays'Book summary:4 plays about an existential portrayal of Hell, the reworking of the Electra-Orestes story, the conflict of a young intellectual torn between theory and conflict and an arresting attack on American racism. [via]
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The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Briggeby Stephen Mitchell, Rainer Maria RilkeISBN 0679732454 (0-679-73245-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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October Lightby John GardnerISBN 0679721339 (0-679-72133-9)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Optimist's Daughterby Eudora WeltyISBN 067972883X (0-679-72883-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Outer Darkby Cormac McCarthyISBN 0679728732 (0-679-72873-2)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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Picturing Willby Ann BeattieISBN 0679731946 (0-679-73194-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Playerby Michael TolkinISBN 0679722548 (0-679-72254-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Plumed Serpentby D. H. LawrenceISBN 0679734937 (0-679-73493-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Pninby Vladimir NabokovISBN 0679723412 (0-679-72341-2)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Pnin'Book summary:Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is a tireless lover who writes to his treacherous Liza: "A genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do." Pnin is the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, yet he stages a faculty party to end all faculty parties forever. [via]
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The Professorby Charlotte BrontëISBN 0679602739 (0-679-60273-9)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Professor'Book summary:The Professor was the first novel that Charlotte Brontë completed. Rejected by the publisher who took on the work of her sisters in 1846--Anne's Agnes Grey and Emily's Wuthering Heights--it remained unpublished until 1857, two years after Charlotte Brontë's death. Like Villette (1853), The Professor is based on her experiences as a language student in Brussels in 1842. Told from the point of view of William Crimsworth, the only male narrator that she used, the work formulated a new aesthetic that questioned many of the presuppositions of Victorian society. Brontë's hero escapes from a humiliating clerkship in a Yorkshire mill to find work as a teacher in Belgium, where he falls in love with an impoverished student-teacher, who is perhaps the author's most realistic feminist heroine. The Professor endures today as both a harbinger of Brontë's later novels and a compelling read in its own right.
"The middle and latter portion of The Professor is as good as I can write," proclaimed Brontë. "It contains more pith, more substance, more reality, in my judgment, than much of Jane Eyre."
The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun-dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hard-bound editions of important works of liter-ature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau-gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices. [via]More editions of The Professor:
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The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate : Two Novelsby Nancy MitfordISBN 0679600906 (0-679-60090-6)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate : Two Novels'Book summary:Few aristocratic English families of the 20th century have enjoyed quite the delicious notoriety that the Mitford sisters courted in the years bracketed by two world wars. For a start, two of the girls, Unity and Diana, were Fascists (the former was a friend of Hitler and Goebbels, and the latter married Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists). Two others took the writing route: Jessica ran away from home and became a famous muckraking journalist, and Nancy composed maliciously witty--and transparently autobiographical--novels as well as several biographies. The Pursuit of Love (1945), her greatest fictional success, and its companion, Love in a Cold Climate (1949), keep closely to the spirit (and details) of their youthful amusements and more grown-up adventures.
Seen through the adoring eyes of Fanny Logan, the self-effacing cousin who records their shenanigans with a wicked sincerity, the Radletts of Alconleigh shine with Gloucestershire glamour: apoplectic Uncle Matthew; Lord Alconleigh (modeled to a fine nuance after Mitford's father, Lord Redesdale, who like Uncle Matthew used to hunt his children with bloodhounds); his kind, rather vague wife, Aunt Sadie; as well as Fanny's favorite cousin Linda and the other six Radlett children. The Radlett daughters and Fanny wait impatiently for life to become interesting. Because of their station, however, nothing but marriage is expected of them, so they hurl themselves at love like crusaders, with varied and always fascinating results. At one point Fanny recounts:
A few minutes only after Linda had left me to go back to London, Christian and the comrades, I had another caller. This time it was Lord Merlin...."This is a bad business," he said, abruptly, and without preamble, though I had not seen him for several years. "I'm just back from Rome, and what do I find--Linda and Christian Talbot. It's an extraordinary thing that I can't ever leave England without Linda getting herself mixed up with some thoroughly undesirable character. This is a disaster--how far has it gone? Can nothing be done?"
The Pursuit of Love follows the romantic fortunes of Linda Radlett, while Love in a Cold Climate ventures further afield with the story of Polly Hampton's shocking love affair and its unexpectedly funny aftermath. Fanny's inexhaustible narration is a pleasant buffer for Mitford's deft teasing, which dances along just this side of mockery. The author of U and Non-U, a famous tongue-in-cheek treatise on the shibboleths of upper-class mores, Mitford often leaves the reader wondering just where she stands in the class wars, and much of her humor arises in the fine distinctions of aristocratic manners and speech. Still, there's an inimitable tart sweetness to these stories of true love and its pallid imitators, making them perfect snapshots of a vanished world. --Barrie Trinkle [via]More editions of The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate : Two Novels:
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The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revoltby Albert CamusISBN 0679733841 (0-679-73384-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt'Book summary:By one of the most profoundly influential thinkers of our century, The Rebel is a classic essay on revolution. For Albert Camus, the urge to revolt is one of the "essential dimensions" of human nature, manifested in man's timeless Promethean struggle against the conditions of his existence, as well as the popular uprisings against established orders throughout history. And yet, with an eye toward the French Revolution and its regicides and deicides, he shows how inevitably the course of revolution leads to tyranny. As old regimes throughout the world collapse, The Rebel resonates as an ardent, eloquent, and supremely rational voice of conscience for our tumultuous times.
Translated from the French by Anthony Bower. [via]More editions of The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt:
Room Temperatureby Nicholson BakerISBN 0679734406 (0-679-73440-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Sailor's Holiday : The Wild Life of Sailor and Lulaby Barry GiffordISBN 0679734902 (0-679-73490-2)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Selected Talesby Edgar Allan PoeISBN 0679725245 (0-679-72524-5)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Selected Tales'Book summary:Read throughout the world, admired by Dostoevsky and translated by Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe has become a legendary figure, representing the artist as obsessed outcast and romantic failure. His nightmarish visions, shaped by cool artistic calculation, reveal some of the dark possibilities of human experience. But his enormous popularity and his continuing influence on literature depend less on legend or vision than on his stylistic accomplishments as a writer. The tales in this volume include Poe's best-known and most representative works as well as his masterly "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym."
For the first time, the authoritative editions of works by major American novelists, poets, scholars, and essayists collected in the hardcover volumes of The Library of America are being published singly in a series of handsome paperback books. A distinguished writer has contributed an introduction for each volume, which also includes a chronology of the author's life and career, an essay on the text, and notes. [via]More editions of Selected Tales:
Shameby Salman RushdieISBN 0679722041 (0-679-72204-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Shawlby Cynthia OzickISBN 0679729267 (0-679-72926-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Shawl'Book summary:A devastating vision of the Holocaust and the unfillable emptiness it left in the lives of those who passed through it. [via]
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Shirleyby Charlotte BrontëISBN 0679602755 (0-679-60275-5)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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Sister Carrieby Theodore DreiserISBN 067960250X (0-679-60250-X)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Sister Carrie'Book summary:Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser's revolutionary first novel, was published in 1900--sort of. The story of Carrie Meeber, an 18-year-old country girl who moves to Chicago and becomes a kept woman, was strong stuff at the turn of the century, and what Dreiser's wary publisher released was a highly expurgated version. Times change, and we now have a restored "author's cut" of Sister Carrie that shows how truly ahead of his time Dreiser was. First and foremost, he has written an astute, nonmoralizing account of a woman and her limited options in late-19th-century America. That's impressive in and of itself, but Dreiser doesn't stop there. Digging deeply into the psychological underpinnings of his characters, he gives us people who are often strangers to themselves, drifting numbly until fate pushes them on a path they can later neither defend nor even remember choosing.
Dreiser's story unfolds in the measured cadences of an earlier era. This sometimes works brilliantly as we follow the choices, small and large, that lead some characters to doom and others to glory. On the other hand, the middle chapters--of which there are many--do drag somewhat, even when one appreciates Dreiser's intentions. If you can make it through the sagging midsection, however, you'll be rewarded by Sister Carrie's last 150 pages, which depict the harrowing downward spiral of one of the book's central characters. Here Dreiser portrays with brutal power how the wrong decision--or lack of decision--can lay waste to a life. --Rebecca Gleason [via]
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Spiderby Patrick McGrathISBN 0679736301 (0-679-73630-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Stories of Vladimir Nabokovby Vladimir Vladimirovich NabokovISBN 0679729976 (0-679-72997-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov'Book summary:These stories, written between the early 1920s to the mid-1950s, reveal the fascinating progress of Nabokov's early development as they remind us that we are in the presence of a magnificent original, a genuine master. Edited by his son and translator, Dmitri Nabokov, this volume is a literary event. [via]
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The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor: Who Drifted on a Life Raft for Ten Days Without Food or Water, Was Proclaimed a National Hero, Kissed by Beauty Queens, Made rich Through Publicity, aby Gabriel Garcia MarquezISBN 067972205X (0-679-72205-X)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor: Who Drifted on a Life Raft for Ten Days Without Food or Water, Was Proclaimed a National Hero, Kissed by Beauty Queens, Made rich Through Publicity, a'Book summary:Translated by Randolf Hogan. In 1955, Garcia Marquez was working for El Espectador, a newspaper in Bogota, when in February of that year eight crew members of the Caldas, a Colombian destroyer, were washed overboard and disappeared. Ten days later one of them turned up, barely alive, on a deserted beach in northern Colombia. This book, which originally appeared as a series of newspaper articles, is Garcia Marquez's account of that sailor's ordeal. [via]
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The Sweet-Shop Ownerby Graham SwiftISBN 0679739807 (0-679-73980-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Talking It overby Julian BarnesISBN 0679736875 (0-679-73687-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Tao Te Chingby Lao-Tzu, Jane English, Gia-Fu FengISBN 0679724346 (0-679-72434-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Tao Te Ching'Book summary:For nearly two generations, Gia-fu Feng and Jane English's translation of the Tao Te Ching has been the standard for those seeking access to the wisdom of Taoist thought. Now Jane English and her long-time editor, Toinette Lippe, have revised and refreshed the translation so that it more faithfully reflects the Classical Chinese in which it was first written, taking into account changes in our own language and eliminating any lingering infelicities. They have retained the simple clarity of the original rendering of a sometimes seemingly obtuse spiritual text, a clarity that has made this version a classic in itself, selling over a million copies.
Written most probably in the sixth century B.C. by Lao Tsu, this esoteric but infintely practical book has been translated into English more frequently than any other work except the Bible. Gia-fu Feng and Jane English's superb translationthe most accessible and authoritative modern English translationoffers the essence of each word and makes Lao Tsu's teaching immediate and alive. This edition includes an introduction and notes by the well-known writer and scholar of philosophy and comparative religion, Jacob Needleman.
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The Tenant of Wildfell Hallby Anne BrontëISBN 0679602798 (0-679-60279-8)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall'Book summary:Over a short period in the 1840s, the three Brontë sisters working in a remote English
parsonage produced some of the best-loved and most-enduring of all novels: Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Emily's Wuthering Heights, and Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a book that created a scandal when it was published in 1848 under the pseudonym Acton Bell.
Compelling in its imaginative power and bold naturalism, the novel opens in the autumn of 1827, when a mysterious woman who calls herself Helen Graham seeks refuge at the desolate moorland mansion of Wildfell Hall. Brontë's enigmatic heroine becomes the object of gossip and jealousy as neighbors learn she is escaping from an abusive marriage and living under an assumed name. A daring story that exposed the dark brutality of Victorian chauvinism, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was nevertheless attacked by some critics as a celebration of the same excesses it criticized.
"Every reader who has felt the power of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights comes, sooner or later, to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall," observed Brontë scholar Margaret Lane. "Anne Brontë, with all the Brontë taste for violence and drama, and with her experience of the same rude scenes and savage Yorkshire tales that had fed the imaginations of her sisters, did not shrink. She used the material at hand, and shaped it with singular honesty and seri-
ousness....Anne is a true Brontë."
This edition of The Tenant of Wildfell
Hall is the companion volume to the Mobil Masterpiece Theatre WGBH television presentation broadcast on PBS.
The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun-dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hard-bound editions of important works of liter-ature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau-gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.
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The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a dramatic serial on Mobil Masterpiece Theatre, a public television series presented by WGBH-TV, Boston, made possible by a grant from the Mobil Corporation.
"The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was conceived in the same atmosphere as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Wildfell Hall has power and imagination, and is so close to one of the tragedies in the sisters' own lives, that no perceptive reader can be indifferent to it."
--Margaret Lane
"I wished to tell the truth, for truth always conveys its own moral to those who are able to receive it."
--Anne Bronte [via]More editions of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:
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This Side of Paradiseby F. Scott FitzgeraldISBN 0679602062 (0-679-60206-2)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'This Side of Paradise'Book summary:Fitzgerald's first novel, reprinted in the handsome Everyman's Library series of literary classic, uses numerous formal experiments to tell the story of Amory Blaine, as he grows up during the crazy years following the First World War. It also contains a new introduction by Craig Raine that describes critical and popular reception of the book when it came out in 1920. [via]
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Transparent Thingsby Vladimir Vladimirovich NabokovISBN 0679725415 (0-679-72541-5)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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The Virgin and the Gypsyby D. H. LawrenceISBN 0679740775 (0-679-74077-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Virgin and the Gypsy'More editions of The Virgin and the Gypsy:
A Virtuous Womanby Kaye GibbonsISBN 0679728449 (0-679-72844-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Wapshot Chronicleby John CheeverISBN 0679738991 (0-679-73899-1)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Wapshot Chronicle'More editions of The Wapshot Chronicle:
Washington Squareby Henry James, Elizabeth Hardwick, Library of American Art StaffISBN 0679732292 (0-679-73229-2)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Washington Square'Book summary:"Washington Square is perhaps the only novel in which a man has successfully invaded the feminine field and produced work comparable to Jane Austen's," said Graham Greene.
Inspired by a story Henry James heard at a dinner party, Washington Square tells how the rakish but idle Morris Townsend tries to win the heart of heiress Catherine Sloper against the objections of her father. Precise and understated, the book endures as a matchless social study of New York in the mid-nineteenth century.
The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with afford-
able hardbound editions of impor-
tant works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-
fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring
as its emblem the running torch-
bearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau-
gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices. [via]-
William Shakespeare Complete Worksby William Shakespeare, Eric Rasmusse N, Heloise SenechalISBN 0679642951 (0-679-64295-1)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'William Shakespeare Complete Works'Book summary:FROM THE WORLD FAMOUS ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY, THE FIRST AUTHORITATIVE, MODERNIZED, AND CORRECTED EDITION OF SHAKESPEARE'S FIRST FOLIO IN THREE CENTURIES.Skillfully assembled by Shakespeare's fellow actors in 1623, the First Folio was the original Complete Works. It is arguably the most important literary work in the English language. But starting with Nicholas Rowe in 1709 and continuing to the present day, Shakespeare editors have mixed Folio and Quarto texts, gradually corrupting the original Complete Works with errors and conflated textual variations.Now Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, two of today's most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, have edited the First Folio as a complete book, resulting in a definitive Complete Works for the twenty-first century.Combining innovative scholarship with brilliant commentary and textual analysis that emphasizes performance history and values, this landmark edition will be indispensable to students, theater professionals, and general readers alike.For more information on this Modern Library edition, visit www.therscshakespeare.com [via]
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Winesburg, Ohioby Sherwood AndersonISBN 0679601465 (0-679-60146-5)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Winesburg, Ohio'Book summary:Library Journal praised this edition of Sherwood Anderson's famed short stories as "the finest edition of this seminal work available." Reconstructed to be as close to the original text as possible, Winesburg, Ohio depicts the strange, secret lives of the inhabitants of a small town. In "Hands," Wing Biddlebaum tries to hide the tale of his banishment from a Pennsylvania town, a tale represented by his hands. In "Adventure," lonely Alice Hindman impulsively walks naked into the night rain. Threaded through the stories is the viewpoint of George Willard, the young newspaper reporter who, like his creator, stands witness to the dark and despairing dealings of a community of isolated people. [via]
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The Wings of the Doveby Henry JamesISBN 0679600671 (0-679-60067-1)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Wings of the Dove'More editions of The Wings of the Dove:
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Winter's Talesby Isak DinesenISBN 0679743340 (0-679-74334-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Winter's Tales'Book summary:In Isak Dinesen's universe, the magical enchantment of the fairy tale and the moral resonance of myth coexist with an unflinching grasp of the most obscure human strengths and weaknesses. A despairing author abandons his wife, but in the course of a long night's wandering, he learns love's true value and returns to her, only to find her a different woman than the one he left. A landowner, seeking to prove a principle, inadvertently exposes the ferocity of mother love. A wealthy young traveler melts the hauteur of a lovely woman by masquerading as her aged and loyal servant.
Shimmering and haunting, Dinesen's Winter's Tales transport us, through their author's deft guidance of our desire to imagine, to the mysterious place where all stories are born. [via]More editions of Winter's Tales:
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The World According to Garpby John IrvingISBN 0679603069 (0-679-60306-9)
Hardcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The World According to Garp'Book summary:"Garp was a natural storyteller," says the narrator of John Irving's incandescent novel, referring to the book's hero, the novelist Garp, who has much in common with Irving himself. "He could make things up one right after the other, and they seemed to fit."
Irving packs wild characters and weird events into his classic--officially recognized as such in a Modern Library edition with a new introduction by the author--while amazingly maintaining the rough feel of realism in every scene and the pulse of life in every heart. Many novelists of his time might have populated a novel with a novelist protagonist whose life and books comment on each other and the novel we're reading. Transsexual football players, ball turret gunners lobotomized in battle, multiple adultery, unicycling bears, mad feminists who amputate their tongues in sympathy with the celebrated victim of a horrifying rape--Irving made them all people. Even the bear is a fitting character.
In a crucial episode, Garp's wife's seduction of a young man coincidentally occurs at the moment when Garp is delighting their young sons with a reckless car trick (one of the few scenes beautifully, eerily, heartbreakingly captured in the film version as well). Many authors would have been content with the harsh comedy of the scene, but Irving respects its integrity, and he builds the rest of the book on the consequences of the event. How does he get away with his killer cocktail of slapstick and horror? Because it's simply what we all face daily, rearranged into soul-satisfying art. "Life is an X-rated soap opera," according to Garp, and who can contradict him?
Rereading Garp 20 years later, one is struck by how elegantly Irving structures his bizarre and complex story. Take the two most celebrated bits in the book, the Under Toad and Garp's story "The Pension Grillparzer," which shimmers like an exquisite Kafkaesque insect in the amber of the novel. When Garp warns his son about the "undertow" at the beach, the boy imagines a monster out of Beowulf who lurks beneath the waves to suck you under: the "Under Toad." It's funny at first, but we soon find that the Under Toad is a metaphor with teeth--he connects with a prophetic dream of death in "The Pension Grillparzer," set in Vienna. Garp's son's last words are, "It's like a dream!" And as Irving--who studied at the University of Vienna--can certainly tell you, the German word for "death" sounds precisely like the English word "toad."
All that death, and yet Garp is mainly exuberant. This story is, as Garp's stuttering writing teacher puts it, "rich with lu-lu-lunacy and sorrow." It enriches literature, and our lives. --Tim Appelo [via]
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