books tagged “literary”

books tagged “literary”

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  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
    by Mark Twain
    ISBN 0766607208 (0-7666-0720-8)
    Hardcover, Modern Pub

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    Book summary:

    A seminal work of American Literature that still commands deep praise and still elicits controversy, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is essential to the understanding of the American soul. The recent discovery of the first half of Twain's manuscript, long thought lost, made front-page news. And this unprecedented edition, which contains for the first time omitted episodes and other variations present in the first half of the handwritten manuscript, as well as facsimile reproductions of thirty manuscript pages, is indispensable to a full understanding of the novel. The changes, deletions, and additions made in the first half of the manuscript indicate that Mark Twain frequently checked his impulse to write an even darker, more confrontational book than the one he finally published. [via]

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  • Beowulf
    by Gareth Hinds
    ISBN 0763630233 (0-7636-3023-3)
    Softcover, Candlewick Pr

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    This exhilarating graphic-novel edition of an ancient classic honors the spirit of the original as it attracts modern readers.

    The epic tale of the great warrior Beowulf has thrilled readers through the ages  and now it is reinvented for a new generation with Gareth Hindss masterful illustrations. Grendels black blood runs thick as Beowulf defeats the monster and his hideous mother, while somber hues overcast the heros final, fatal battle against a raging dragon. Speeches filled with courage and sadness, lightning-paced contests of muscle and will, and funeral boats burning on the fjords are all rendered in glorious and gruesome detail. Told for more than a thousand years, Beowulfs heroic saga finds a true home in this graphic-novel edition. [via]

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

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  • Beowulf
    by Magnus Magnusson, Julian Glover, Sheila MacKie
    ISBN 0750911042 (0-7509-1104-2)
    Softcover, Sutton Pub Ltd

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    The poem 'Beowulf' is one of the glories of European Literature. It was composed in Anglo-Saxon verse early in the eighth century and has come down to just one surviving manuscript. This is the text that Julian Glover has taken for this book. [via]

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  • Bluebeards Eggs
    by Atwood
    ISBN 0771008082 (0-7710-0808-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    collectible first edition book [via]

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  • Cat's Eye
    by Margaret Atwood
    ISBN 0770423345 (0-7704-2334-5)
    Softcover, McClelland & Stewart Ltd

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    Cat's Eye is one of Margaret Atwood's most intriguing novels, a ruminative, symbol-laced, and deceptively loose book that encompasses many of the concerns of her earlier works, compounding them with a new awareness of aging and the curious vagaries of memory. Its premise is simple enough: Elaine Risley, a successful painter living on the West Coast, returns to Toronto, the scene of her childhood and artistic development, for a retrospective of her work at an independent feminist gallery. As Risley arrives in Toronto, she begins to examine her past in that city, from her early girlhood through to the final days of her first marriage. Risley's memories dominate the book; her exhibition is a light but important counterpoint to all that has gone before it.

    In a sense, Cat's Eye is a feminist deconstruction of the artist's coming-of-age novel, but Risley's feminism is skeptical and detached. Her painful girlhood friendships haunt her through her middle age, and she has far more sympathy for men than she does for the women who have supported her career. As a result, Cat's Eye transcends orthodox feminism and rigorously examines troubling questions of gender, sexuality, and art from a wryly nonpartisan perspective. Fans of Atwood's more recent novels will love Cat's Eye, but it is a book that deserves the attention of her numerous detractors; perhaps it will encourage them to give her a second look. --Jack Illingworth [via]

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  • A Christmas Carol
    by Charles Dickens
    ISBN 0762408316 (0-7624-0831-6)
    Hardcover, Running Pr Book Pub

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    In the history of English literature, Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, which has been continuously in print since it was first published in the winter of 1843, stands out as the quintessential Christmas story. What makes this charming edition of Dickens's immortal tale so special is the collection of 80 vivid illustrations by Everett Shinn (1876-1953). Shinn, a well-known artist in his time, was a popular illustrator of newspapers and magazines whose work displayed a remarkable affinity for the stories of Charles Dickens, evoking the bustling street life of the mid-1800s. Printed on heavy, cream-colored paper stock, the edges of the pages have been left rough, simulating the way in which the story might have appeared in Dickens's own time. Though countless editions of this classic have been published over the years, this one stands out as particularly beautiful, nostalgic, and evocative of the spirit of Christmas. [via]

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  • Dickens, Charles: A Christmas Carol /tiny Tim
    A Christmas Carol /tiny Tim
    by Charles Dickens, Mark Summers
    ISBN 0760750297 (0-7607-5029-7)
    Hardcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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  • Close Range
    by Annie Proulx
    ISBN 0783886772 (0-7838-8677-2)
    Hardcover, Thorndike Pr

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    A breathtaking collection of unabridged stories from the Pulitzer Prize-Winning author of The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes

    Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in this collection of stories about loneliness, quick violence, and the wrong kinds of love.

    Close Range features stories of desperation, hard times, and unlikely elation, set in a landscape both brutal and magnificent. Enlivened by folk tales, flights of fancy, and details of ranch and rural work, they juxtapose Wyoming's traditional character and attitudes -- confrontation of tough problems, prejudice, persistence in the face of difficulty -- with the more benign values of the new west.

    Stories in Close Range have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's and GQ. They have been selected for the O. Henry Stories 1998 and The Best American Short Stories of the Century and have won the National Magazine Award for Fiction. This is work by an author writing at the peak of her craft. [via]

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  • Poe, Edgar Allan: The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Tales
    The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Tales
    by Edgar Allan Poe
    ISBN 0781287561 (0-7812-8756-1)
    Hardcover, Reprint Services Corp

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  • Dead Souls
    by Clifford Odets, Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol
    ISBN 0766195732 (0-7661-9573-2)
    Softcover, Kessinger Pub Co

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    1923. Odets writes in his introduction that the brutal censorship imposed upon the great Russian Empire of Gogol's time by its feudal lords and masters is comparable in our time to only that imposed upon the peoples of certain Fascist states. Enlightenment was not then a word to utter lightly on a muddy street corner. But Gogol set out to enlighten the Russian people, and his method was curiously simple. Of his central character Tchitchikov, in Dead Souls he states, Him I have taken as a type to show forth the vices and failings, rather than the merits and virtues, of the commonplace Russian individual; and the characters which revolve around him have also been selected for the purpose of demonstrating our national weaknesses and shortcomings. [via]

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  • Death Comes for the Archbishop
    by Willa Cather, John J. Murphy, Charles W. Mignon
    ISBN 0803214294 (0-8032-1429-4)
    Hardcover, Univ of Nebraska Pr

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    Death Comes for the Archbishop sprang from Willa Cathers love for the land and cultures of the American Southwest. Published in 1927 to both praise and perplexity, it has since claimed for itself a major place in twentieth-century literature.
     
    When Cather first visited the American Southwest in 1912, she found a new world to imagine and soon came to feel that "the story of the Catholic Church in [the Southwest] was the most interesting of all its stories." The narrative follows Bishop Jean Latour and Father Joseph Vaillant, friends since their childhood in France, as they organize the new Roman Catholic diocese of Santa Fe subsequent to the Mexican War. While seeking to revive the church and build a cathedral in the desert, the clerics, like their historical prototypes, Bishop Jean Lamy and Father Joseph Machebeuf, face religious corruption, natural adversity, and the loneliness of living in a strange and unforgiving land.
     
    The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition presents groundbreaking research, establishing a new text that reflects Cathers long and deep involvement with her story. The historical essay traces the artistic and spiritual development that led to its writing. The broad-ranging explanatory notes illuminate the elements of French, Mexican, Hispanic, and Native American cultures that meet in the course of the narrative; they also explain the part played by the land and its peopletheir history, religion, art, and languages. The textual essay and apparatus reveal Cathers creative process and enable the reader to follow the complex history of the text.
    [via]

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  • Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde
    by Robert Louis Stevenson, Ron Tiner, John Grant
    ISBN 0794502385 (0-7945-0238-5)
    Softcover, Edc Pub

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    Book summary:

    The young Robert Louis Stevenson suffered from repeated nightmares of living a double life, in which by day he worked as a respectable doctor and by night he roamed the back alleys of old-town Edinburgh. In three days of furious writing, he produced a story about his dream existence. His wife found it too gruesome, so he promptly burned the manuscript. In another three days, he wrote it again. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published as a "shilling shocker" in 1886, and became an instant classic. In the first six months, 40,000 copies were sold. Queen Victoria read it. Sermons and editorials were written about it. When Stevenson and his family visited America a year later, they were mobbed by reporters at the dock in New York City. Compulsively readable from its opening pages, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is still one of the best tales ever written about the divided self.

    This University of Nebraska Press edition is a small, exquisitely produced paperback. The book design, based on the original first edition of 1886, includes wide margins, decorative capitals on the title page and first page of each chapter, and a clean, readable font that is 19th-century in style. Joyce Carol Oates contributes a foreword in which she calls Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a "mythopoetic figure" like Frankenstein, Dracula, and Alice in Wonderland, and compares Stevenson's creation to doubled selves in the works of Plato, Poe, Wilde, and Dickens.

    This edition also features 12 full-page wood engravings by renowned illustrator Barry Moser. Moser is a skillful reader and interpreter as well as artist, and his afterword to the book, in which he explains the process by which he chose a self-portrait motif for the suite of engravings, is fascinating. For the image of Edward Hyde, he writes, "I went so far as to have my dentist fit me out with a carefully sculpted prosthetic of evil-looking teeth. But in the final moments I had to abandon the idea as being inappropriate. It was more important to stay in keeping with the text and, like Stevenson, not show Hyde's face." (Also recommended: the edition of Frankenstein illustrated by Barry Moser) --Fiona Webster [via]

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  • Edgar Allan Poe
    ISBN 0785814531 (0-7858-1453-1)
    Hardcover, Book Sales

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    Book summary:

    The life of American writer Edgar Allan Poe was characterized by a dramatic series of successes and failures, breakdowns and recoveries, personal gains and hopes dashed through, despite which he created some of the finest literature the world has ever known. Over time his works have influenced such major creative forces as the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Andre Gide, filmmaker D.W. Griffith and modern literary legend Allen Ginsberg.

    Best known for his poems and short fiction, Poe perfected the psychological thriller, invented the detective story, and rarely missed transporting the reader to his own supernatural realm. He has also been hailed posthumously as one of the finest literary critics of the nineteenth century.

    In Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales and Poems fans may indulge in all of Poe's most imaginative short-stories, including The Fall of the House of Usher, The Murders in Rue Morgue, The Tell-Tale Heart, Ligeia and Ms. In a Bottle. His complete early and miscellaneous poetic masterpieces are here also, including The Raven, Ulalume, Annabel Lee, Tamerlane, as well as select reviews and narratives.
    [via]

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  • Edgar Allen Poe
    by Edgar Allen Poe
    ISBN 0785813500 (0-7858-1350-0)
    Softcover, Book Sales

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    This collection of 73 short stories and 48 poems includes such masterpieces as The Fall of the House of Usher, The Purloined Letter, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and Murders in the Rue Morgue. [via]

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  • The Emperor's Children
    by Claire Messud
    ISBN 0786292660 (0-7862-9266-0)
    Hardcover, Thorndike Pr

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    Danielle, a junior television producer, is on the hunt for the documentary idea that will make her reputation; Marina, the beautiful daughter of a famous and wealthy liberal journalist and intellectual, is desperate to prove her worth - while unsure exactly of how this is to be achieved; Julius, a freelance writer of devastating book reviews, is determined to live a fabulous Manhattan lifestyle on a budget of nothing at all. "The Emperor's Children" follows these three friends - and their overlapping social and family circles - through their day-to-day lives, their perceived struggles and successes and their constant search for meaning and authenticity. Sweeping in scope, minutely perceptive about the nuances of Manhattan life, with richly drawn characters and vivid prose, "The Emperor's Children" is a finely textured portrait of a particular place at a particular moment - and a haunting illustration how the events of a single day can change everything, for ever. It reveals Claire Messud as a novelist in bloom, writing at the height of her powers. [via]

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  • End of the Affair
    by Graham Greene
    ISBN 0783895283 (0-7838-9528-3)
    Hardcover, Thorndike Pr

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    Set in London during and just after World War II, Graham Greene's The End of the Affair is a pathos-laden examination of a three-way collision between love of self, love of another, and love of God. The affair in question involves Maurice Bendrix, a solipsistic novelist, and a dutifully married woman, Sarah Miles. The lovers meet at a party thrown by Sarah's dreary civil-servant husband, and proceed to liberate each other from boredom and routine unhappiness. Reflecting on the ebullient beginnings of their romance, Bendrix recalls: "There was never any question in those days of who wanted whom--we were together in desire." Indeed, the affair goes on unchecked for several years until, during an afternoon tryst, Bendrix goes downstairs to look for intruders in his basement and a bomb falls on the building. Sarah rushes down to find him lying under a fallen door, and immediately makes a deal with God, whom she has never particularly cared for. "I love him and I'll do anything if you'll make him alive.... I'll give him up forever, only let him be alive with a chance.... People can love each other without seeing each other, can't they, they love You all their lives without seeing You."

    Bendrix, as evidenced by his ability to tell the story, is not dead, merely unconscious, and so Sarah must keep her promise. She breaks off the relationship without giving a reason, leaving Bendrix mystified and angry. The only explanation he can think of is that she's left him for another man. It isn't until years later, when he hires a private detective to ascertain the truth, that he learns of her impassioned vow. Sarah herself comes to understand her move through a strange rationalization. Writing to God in her journal, she says:

    You willed our separation, but he [Bendrix] willed it too. He worked for it with his anger and his jealousy, and he worked for it with his love. For he gave me so much love, and I gave him so much love that soon there wasn't anything left, when we'd finished, but You.
    It's as though the pull toward faith were inevitable, if incomprehensible--perhaps as punishment for her sin of adultery. In her final years, Sarah's faith only deepens, even as she remains haunted by the bombing and the power of her own attraction to God. Set against the backdrop of a war-ravaged city, The End of the Affair is equally haunting as it lays forth the question of what constitutes love in troubling, unequivocal terms. --Melanie Rehak [via]

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  • Fine Balance
    by Rohinton Mistry
    ISBN 0771034806 (0-7710-3480-6)
    Softcover, McClelland & Stewart Ltd

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    Book summary:

    A fiction work by Rohinto Mistry and published by McClelland & Stewart Ltd in Canada in 1995. In paperback format, it has 822 pages. [via]

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  • Lethem, Jonathan: The Fortress of Solitude
    The Fortress of Solitude
    by Jonathan Lethem
    ISBN 0786259965 (0-7862-5996-5)
    Hardcover, Thorndike Pr

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  • The Fourth Bear: A Nursery Crime
    by Jasper Fforde
    ISBN 0786290013 (0-7862-9001-3)
    Hardcover, Thorndike Pr

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    Book summary:

    Jack Spratt and Mary Mary return in their second adventure from the inimitable Jasper Fforde

    Five years ago, Viking introduced Jasper Fforde and his upsidedown, inside-out literary crime masterpieces. And as they move from Thursday Next to Jack Spratts Nursery Crimes, his audience is insatiable and growing. Now, with The Fourth Bear, Jack Spratt and Mary Mary take on their most dangerous case so far as a murderous cookie stalks the streets of Reading.

    The Gingerbreadmanpsychopath, sadist, genius, and killeris on the loose. But it isnt Jack Spratts case. He and Mary Mary have been demoted to Missing Persons following Jacks poor judgment involving the poisoning of Mr. Bun the baker. Missing Persons looks like a boring assignment until a chance encounter leads them into the hunt for missing journalist Henrietta "Goldy" Hatchett, star reporter for The Daily Mole. Last to see her alive? The Three Bears, comfortably living out a life of rural solitude in Andersens wood.

    But all is not what it seems. How could the bears porridge be at such disparate temperatures when they were poured at the same time? Why did Mr. and Mrs. Bear sleep in separate beds? Was there a fourth bear? And if there was, who was he, and why did he try to disguise Goldys death as a freak accident?

    Jack answers all these questions and a few others besides, rescues Mary Mary from almost certain death, and finally meets the Fourth Bear and the Gingerbreadman face-to-face. [via]

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  • Frances Hodgson Burnett's the Secret Garden
    by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Jason Cockcroft, Gillian Cross
    ISBN 0753454793 (0-7534-5479-3)
    Hardcover, Kingfisher Books

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    Book summary:

    Children's Books [via]

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  • Fugitive Pieces
    by Anne Michaels
    ISBN 0771058837 (0-7710-5883-7)
    Softcover, McClelland & Stewart Ltd

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    Anne Michaels, an accomplished poet, has already published two collections of poetry in her native Canada. She turns her hand to fiction in an impressive debut novel, Fugitive Pieces. This is the story of Jakob Beer, a Polish Jew, translator, and poet who, as a child, witnessed his family's slaughter at the hands of the Nazis. Beer himself was found and smuggled out of Poland by Athos Roussos, a Greek archaeologist who carried him back to Greece and kept him there in precarious safety. After the war they emigrated together to Canada. Jakob's story is told through diaries discovered by Ben, a young man whose parents are Holocaust survivors and who is a vessel for their memories just as Jakob is the bearer of his own.

    Fugitive Pieces is a book about memory and forgetting. How is it possible to love the living when our hearts are still with the dead? What is the difference between what historical fact tells us and what we remember? More than that, the novel is a meditation on the power of language to free our souls and allow us to find our own destinies. [via]

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  • Jacobson, Mark: Gojiro
    Gojiro
    by Mark Jacobson
    ISBN 0802135390 (0-8021-3539-0)
    Softcover, Grove Pr

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  • Rushdie, Salman: The Ground Beneath Her Feet
    The Ground Beneath Her Feet
    by Salman Rushdie
    ISBN 0783887124 (0-7838-8712-4)
    Softcover, Thorndike Pr

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  • Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories
    by Alice Munro
    ISBN 0771065256 (0-7710-6525-6)
    Hardcover, McClelland & Stewart

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    Book summary:

    Readers know what they are going to get when they pick up an unfamiliar Alice Munro collection, and yet almost every page carries a bounty of unexpected action, feeling, language, and detail. Her stories are always unique, blazing an invigorating originality out of her seemingly commonplace subjects. Each collection develops her oeuvre in increments, subtly expanding her range.

    Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage is, of course, no exception. It is a fairly conservative collection of nine stories, none of which move far beyond Munro's favored settings: the tiny towns and burgeoning cities of southern Ontario and British Columbia. There are glimpses of youth here--in the title story, an epistolary prank by two teenage girls leads to a one-sided cross country elopement and, seemingly, a happy marriage, and in "Nettles," disrupted childhood affection fleetingly returns through a chance meeting--but most of these pieces are stories of aging women and men, confronting the twin travails of death and late love. As is always the case with Munro, their plots are too elegantly elaborate to summarize, and their unsentimental power is a given; baroque praise would be futile. Read these stories--it is the only way to really understand the miracles that Munro so regularly performs. --Jack Illingworth [via]

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  • Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Selected Poems
    Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Selected Poems
    by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lisa Lipkin, Johanna Brownell
    ISBN 0785812857 (0-7858-1285-7)
    Hardcover, Book Sales

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  • The House of the Seven Gables
    by Nathaniel Hawthorne
    ISBN 0786280425 (0-7862-8042-5)
    Hardcover, Thorndike Pr

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    In a sleepy little New England village stands a dark, weather-beaten, many-gabled house. This brooding mansion is haunted by a centuries-old curse that casts the shadow of ancestral sin upon the last four members of the distinctive old Pyncheon family. Mysterious deaths threaten the living, while musty documents nestle behind hidden panels carrying the secret of the family's salvation - or its downfall. [via]

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  • Bloom, Harold: How to Read and Why
    How to Read and Why
    by Harold Bloom
    ISBN 0756777364 (0-7567-7736-4)
    Softcover, Diane Pub Co

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  • I know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Blooms Guides)
    by Harold Bloom
    ISBN 0791077683 (0-7910-7768-3)
    Softcover, Facts on File

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  • Interpreter of Maladies: Library Edition
    by Jhumpa Lahiri
    ISBN 0786264349 (0-7862-6434-9)
    Hardcover, Thorndike Pr

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    Book summary:

    Mr. Kapasi, the protagonist of Jhumpa Lahiri's title story, would certainly have his work cut out for him if he were forced to interpret the maladies of all the characters in this eloquent debut collection. Take, for example, Shoba and Shukumar, the young couple in "A Temporary Matter" whose marriage is crumbling in the wake of a stillborn child. Or Miranda in "Sexy," who is involved in a hopeless affair with a married man. But Mr. Kapasi has problems enough of his own; in addition to his regular job working as an interpreter for a doctor who does not speak his patients' language, he also drives tourists to local sites of interest. His fare on this particular day is Mr. and Mrs. Das--first-generation Americans of Indian descent--and their children. During the course of the afternoon, Mr. Kapasi becomes enamored of Mrs. Das and then becomes her unwilling confidant when she reads too much into his profession. "I told you because of your talents," she informs him after divulging a startling secret.

    I'm tired of feeling so terrible all the time. Eight years, Mr. Kapasi, I've been in pain eight years. I was hoping you could help me feel better; say the right thing. Suggest some kind of remedy.
    Of course, Mr. Kapasi has no cure for what ails Mrs. Das--or himself. Lahiri's subtle, bittersweet ending is characteristic of the collection as a whole. Some of these nine tales are set in India, others in the United States, and most concern characters of Indian heritage. Yet the situations Lahiri's people face, from unhappy marriages to civil war, transcend ethnicity. As the narrator of the last story, "The Third and Final Continent," comments: "There are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept." In that single line Jhumpa Lahiri sums up a universal experience, one that applies to all who have grown up, left home, fallen in or out of love, and, above all, experienced what it means to be a foreigner, even within one's own family. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • Kipling, Rudyard: The Jungle Book
    The Jungle Book
    by Rudyard Kipling, Nicola Bayley
    ISBN 0763623172 (0-7636-2317-2)
    Hardcover, Candlewick Pr

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  • The Last Samurai
    by Helen Dewitt
    ISBN 0786887001 (0-7868-8700-1)
    Softcover, Miramax

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  • The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
    by Laurence Sterne, Judith Hawley
    ISBN 0760763054 (0-7607-6305-4)
    Softcover, Barnes & Noble Books

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    Book summary:

    Paperback published in 2005 by Barnes & Noble Books. Originally published in1759, this is the first trade paperback printing. Introduction by Judith Hawley Laurence Sterne explores the difficulties of creativity - both sexual and literary. In doing so, he pushes the conventions of the early novel to extreme limits. [via]

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  • Lonesome Traveler
    by Jack Kerouac
    ISBN 0802130747 (0-8021-3074-7)
    Softcover, Grove Pr

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    Book summary:

    In his first frankly autobiographical work, Jack Kerouac tells the exhilarating story fo the years when he was writing th books that captivated and infuriated the public, restless years of wandering during which he worked as a railway brakeman in California, a steward on a tramp steamer, and a fire lookout on the crest of Desolation Peak in the Cascde Mountains.
    [via]

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  • Doyle, Arthur Conan: Lost World
    Lost World
    by Arthur Conan Doyle
    ISBN 0760755833 (0-7607-5583-3)
    Softcover, Barnes & Noble Books

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  • Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
    by Harold Bloom
    ISBN 0791036669 (0-7910-3666-9)
    Hardcover, Facts on File

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    Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings accomplishes a controlled poignance in representing a portrait of the young artist as a black woman. Her novel is the focus of this edition of Bloom's Notes. Along with a collection of some of the best criticism available on his work, this text includes a brief biography of the author, structural and thematic analysis, an index of themes and ideas, and more. This series is edited by Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities, Yale University; Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Professor of English, New York University Graduate School. These texts are the ideal aid for all students of literature, presenting concise, easy-to-understand biographical, critical, and bibliographical information on a specific literary work. Also provided are multiple sources for book reports and term papers with a wealth of information on literary works, authors, and major characters. [via]

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  • Medieval Structure: The Gothic Vault
    by James H. Acland
    ISBN 0802018866 (0-8020-1886-6)
    Hardcover, Univ of Toronto Pr

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  • Moorcock, Michael: Mother London
    Mother London
    by Michael Moorcock
    ISBN 0792448391 (0-7924-4839-1)
    Hardcover, Bdd Promotional Book Co

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  • Brecht, Bertolt: Mother Courage and Her Children
    Mother Courage and Her Children
    by Bertolt Brecht
    ISBN 0802130828 (0-8021-3082-8)
    Softcover, Grove Pr

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  • My Antonia
    by Willa Cather, James L. Woodress, Kari Ronning, Charles Mignon
    ISBN 0803263724 (0-8032-6372-4)
    Softcover, Univ of Nebraska Pr

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    Book summary:

    It seems almost sacrilege to infringe upon a book as soulful and rich as Willa Cather's My Ántonia by offering comment. First published in 1918, and set in Nebraska in the late 19th century, this tale of the spirited daughter of a Bohemian immigrant family planning to farm on the untamed land ("not a country at all but the material out of which countries are made") comes to us through the romantic eyes of Jim Burden. He is, at the time of their meeting, newly orphaned and arriving at his grandparents' neighboring farm on the same night her family strikes out to make good in their new country. Jim chooses the opening words of his recollections deliberately: "I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to be an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America," and it seems almost certain that readers of Cather's masterpiece will just as easily pinpoint the first time they heard of Ántonia and her world. It seems equally certain that they, too, will remember that moment as one of great light in an otherwise unremarkable trip through the world.

    Ántonia, who, even as a grown woman somewhat downtrodden by circumstance and hard work, "had not lost the fire of life," lies at the center of almost every human condition that Cather's novel effortlessly untangles. She represents immigrant struggles with a foreign land and tongue, the restraints on women of the time (with which Cather was very much concerned), the more general desires for love, family, and companionship, and the great capacity for forbearance that marked the earliest settlers on the frontier.

    As if all this humanity weren't enough, Cather paints her descriptions of the vastness of nature--the high, red grass, the road that "ran about like a wild thing," the endless wind on the plains--with strokes so vivid as to make us feel in our bones that we've just come in from a walk on that very terrain ourselves. As the story progresses, Jim goes off to the University in Lincoln to study Latin (later moving on to Harvard and eventually staying put on the East Coast in another neat encompassing of a stage in America's development) and learns Virgil's phrase "Optima dies ... prima fugit" that Cather uses as the novel's epigraph. "The best days are the first to flee"--this could be said equally of childhood and the earliest hours of this country in which the open land, much like My Ántonia, was nothing short of a rhapsody in prairie sky blue. --Melanie Rehak [via]

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  • Breton, A.: Nadja
    Nadja
    by A. Breton
    ISBN 0802150268 (0-8021-5026-8)
    Softcover, Grove Pr

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  • Northanger Abbey
    by Jane Austen
    ISBN 0755331443 (0-7553-3144-3)
    Softcover, Trafalgar Square

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    Book summary:

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

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

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  • Of Mice and Men
    by John Steinbeck
    ISBN 0783813589 (0-7838-1358-9)
    Hardcover, Thorndike Pr

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    Nobel Prize winning author John Steinbeck, one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century, offers a powerful but tragic tale in "Of Mice and Men". 'Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don't belong no place'. George and his large, simple-minded friend Lennie are drifters, following wherever work leads them. Arriving in California's Salinas Valley, they get work on a ranch. If they can just stay out of trouble, George promises Lennie, then one day they might be able to get some land of their own and settle down some place. But kind-hearted, childlike Lennie is a victim of his own strength. Seen by others as a threat, he finds it impossible to control his emotions. And one day not even George will be able to save him from trouble. "Of Mice and Men" is a tragic and moving story of friendship, loneliness and the dispossessed. "A thriller, a gripping tale that you will not set down until it is finished. Steinbeck has touched the quick". ("New York Times"). Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck is remembered as one of the greatest and best-loved American writers of the twentieth century. His complete works are published by Penguin and include "Cannery Row", "The Pearl", "The Winter of Our Discontent" and "The Grapes of Wrath". [via]

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  • Oliver Twist
    by Charles Dickens, Ian P. Andrew, Tony Robinson
    ISBN 0756618355 (0-7566-1835-5)
    Softcover, Dk Pub

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    Stories to go!

    Children love to listen to stories. Now their favorite Dorling Kindersley children's books are available in convenient book-and-tape packages that are perfect for the car or anywhere. With more than 60 minutes of audio on each tape, these packages will be favorites of children and parents alike. Here, the classic tale of Oliver Twist comes to life via audio, complete with dramatic dialogue, special effects, and music. [via]

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  • Oliver Twist
    by Penko Gelev, John Malam
    ISBN 0764134906 (0-7641-3490-6)
    Softcover, Barrons Juveniles

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    Book summary:

    Oliver, an orphan in 19th-century London, falls into a den of thieves, but is finally rescued by Mr. Brownlow, a wealthy benefactor. In each of Barron's Graphic Classics, an English literary classic is transformed into a dramatic graphic novel with superb, atmospheric color illustrations and a finely-paced narrative. The tale--chosen from among important novels in the literary canon-- will keep young readers fascinated from first page to last. Graphic Classics make fine introductions for young readers to the riches of English literature. Books are available in both paperback and hardcover editions. In addition to the stories, each title features a brief biography and time line of its author, a list of his important works, a glossary, and an index. As such, these books are suitable for classroom use on junior and senior high school levels. [via]

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  • Our Lady of the Flowers
    by Jean Paul Sartre, Jean Genet
    ISBN 0802130135 (0-8021-3013-5)
    Softcover, Grove Pr

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    'Our Lady of the Flowers', which is often considered to be Genet's masterpiece, was written entirely in the solitude of a prison cell. the exceptional value of the work lies in its ambiguity.
    [via]

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  • Peter Pan
    by J. M. Barrie, Charles Vess
    ISBN 0765347199 (0-7653-4719-9)
    Softcover, Tor Books

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    Book summary:

    "All children, except one, grow up." Thus begins a great classic of children's literature that we all remember as magical. What we tend to forget, because the tale of Peter Pan and Neverland has been so relentlessly boiled down, hashed up, and coated in saccharine, is that J.M. Barrie's original version is also witty, sophisticated, and delightfully odd. The Darling children, Wendy, John, and Michael, live a very proper middle-class life in Edwardian London, but they also happen to have a Newfoundland for a nurse. The text is full of such throwaway gems as "Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter Pan when she was tidying up her children's minds," and is peppered with deliberately obscure vocabulary including "embonpoint," "quietus," and "pluperfect." Lest we forget, it was written in 1904, a relatively innocent age in which a plot about abducted children must have seemed more safely fanciful. Also, perhaps, it was an age that expected more of its children's books, for Peter Pan has a suppleness, lightness, and intelligence that are "literary" in the best sense. In a typical exchange with the dastardly Captain Hook, Peter Pan describes himself as "youth... joy... a little bird that has broken out of the egg," and the author interjects: "This, of course, was nonsense; but it was proof to the unhappy Hook that Peter did not know in the least who or what he was, which is the very pinnacle of good form." A book for adult readers-aloud to revel in--and it just might teach young listeners to fly. (Ages 5 and older) --Richard Farr [via]

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  • Peter Pan
    by Dk, Chris Molan, Michael Johnstone, Dawn French
    ISBN 0756612756 (0-7566-1275-6)
    Softcover, Dk Pub

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    Book summary:

    Reading level: Ages 7 and up Paperback: 48 pages Publisher: DK CHILDREN (April 4, 2005) Language: English ISBN-10: 0756612756 ISBN-13: 978-0756612757 Product Dimensions: 13.5 x 9.3 x 1 inches Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews) Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #154,335 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) [via]

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  • The Promise
    by Chaim Potok
    ISBN 0783802560 (0-7838-0256-0)
    Hardcover, G K Hall & Co

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  • Twain, Mark: Pudd'Nhead Wilson
    Pudd'Nhead Wilson
    by Mark Twain
    ISBN 0783891474 (0-7838-9147-4)
    Hardcover, Thorndike Pr

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  • Greene, Graham: The Quiet American
    The Quiet American
    by Graham Greene
    ISBN 0792714199 (0-7927-1419-9)
    Softcover, Chivers North Amer

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  • Updike, John: Rabbit, Run
    Rabbit, Run
    by John Updike
    ISBN 0783818238 (0-7838-1823-8)
    Hardcover, G K Hall & Co

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  • The Rebel Angels
    by Robertson Davies
    ISBN 0771595565 (0-7715-9556-5)
    Hardcover, Macmillan of Canada

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    Book summary:

    The Rebel Angels is the inaugural volume of the Cornish Trilogy, Robertson Davies's final completed series. These are Davies's oddest books, and they've sparked more controversy than any of his other works, simply because they are the most sensitive to a reader's tastes--depending on one's sensibilities, they will either prove to be delightful or dreadfully dull.

    Like A Mixture of Frailties, the first of Davies's major novels, The Rebel Angels revolves around the execution of a difficult will. In this case, the estate is of one Francis Cornish, a fantastically rich patron and collector of Canadian art and a noted antiquarian bibliophile. A lost Rabelais manuscript is rumoured to be among his possessions, and his executors include the deliciously revolting Renaissance scholar Urquhart McVarish; Professor Clement Hollier, a classically middle-aged inhabitant of the ivory tower; and the Reverend Simon Darcourt, Davies's obligatory humanist clergyman. A heroine is provided in the form of Maria Theotoky, a beautiful Ph.D. student of Professor Hollier's. A rich, funny, and slightly ribald campus novel results, one that revels in the fustian of the now-vanished pre-postmodern university.

    The Cornish Trilogy is by far the most arcane of Davies's major works. The later volumes, What's Bred in the Bone and The Lyre of Orpheus, extend out of the corporeal world, bringing angels, daimons, and souls in limbo into the fray. Davies's love for obscure learning is at its peak here. While he is often faulted for this, it is really the best part of the fun, provided the reader is willing to follow him into the storehouses of forgotten thought and accept that there is still much of contemporary relevance in the disused fancies of the past. --Jack Illingworth [via]

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  • Richard Wright's Native Son
    by Harold Bloom
    ISBN 0791041395 (0-7910-4139-5)
    Softcover, Facts on File

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  • Sense And Sensibility
    by Jane Austen
    ISBN 0755331451 (0-7553-3145-1)
    Softcover, Headline Book Pub Ltd

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    Book summary:

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

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

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  • Smilla's Sense of Snow
    by Peter Hoeg
    ISBN 0770426182 (0-7704-2618-2)
    Softcover, Doubleday Canada, Limited

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    Book summary:

    In this international bestseller, Peter Høeg successfully combines the pleasures of literary fiction with those of the thriller. Smilla Jaspersen, half Danish, half Greenlander, attempts to understand the death of a small boy who falls from the roof of her apartment building. Her childhood in Greenland gives her an appreciation for the complex structures of snow, and when she notices that the boy's footprints show he ran to his death, she decides to find out who was chasing him. As she attempts to solve the mystery, she uncovers a series of conspiracies and cover-ups and quickly realizes that she can trust nobody. Her investigation takes her from the streets of Copenhagen to an icebound island off the coast of Greenland. What she finds there has implications far beyond the death of a single child. The unusual setting, gripping plot, and compelling central character add up to one of the most fascinating and literate thrillers of recent years. [via]

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  • Burroughs, William S.: The Soft Machine: Nova Express ; The Wild Boys Three Novels
    The Soft Machine: Nova Express ; The Wild Boys Three Novels
    by William S. Burroughs
    ISBN 0802143342 (0-8021-4334-2)
    Softcover

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  • The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
    by Robert Louis Stevenson, Michael Lawrence, Ian Andrew
    ISBN 0789420694 (0-7894-2069-4)
    Hardcover, Dk Pub

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    Book summary:

    The young Robert Louis Stevenson suffered from repeated nightmares of living a double life, in which by day he worked as a respectable doctor and by night he roamed the back alleys of old-town Edinburgh. In three days of furious writing, he produced a story about his dream existence. His wife found it too gruesome, so he promptly burned the manuscript. In another three days, he wrote it again. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published as a "shilling shocker" in 1886, and became an instant classic. In the first six months, 40,000 copies were sold. Queen Victoria read it. Sermons and editorials were written about it. When Stevenson and his family visited America a year later, they were mobbed by reporters at the dock in New York City. Compulsively readable from its opening pages, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is still one of the best tales ever written about the divided self.

    This University of Nebraska Press edition is a small, exquisitely produced paperback. The book design, based on the original first edition of 1886, includes wide margins, decorative capitals on the title page and first page of each chapter, and a clean, readable font that is 19th-century in style. Joyce Carol Oates contributes a foreword in which she calls Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a "mythopoetic figure" like Frankenstein, Dracula, and Alice in Wonderland, and compares Stevenson's creation to doubled selves in the works of Plato, Poe, Wilde, and Dickens.

    This edition also features 12 full-page wood engravings by renowned illustrator Barry Moser. Moser is a skillful reader and interpreter as well as artist, and his afterword to the book, in which he explains the process by which he chose a self-portrait motif for the suite of engravings, is fascinating. For the image of Edward Hyde, he writes, "I went so far as to have my dentist fit me out with a carefully sculpted prosthetic of evil-looking teeth. But in the final moments I had to abandon the idea as being inappropriate. It was more important to stay in keeping with the text and, like Stevenson, not show Hyde's face." (Also recommended: the edition of Frankenstein illustrated by Barry Moser) --Fiona Webster [via]

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  • Kirk, Russell: The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict
    The Sword of Imagination: Memoirs of a Half-Century of Literary Conflict
    by Russell Kirk
    ISBN 0802839541 (0-8028-3954-1)
    Softcover, Isi Books

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    Book summary:

    Now available for the first time in a paperback edition, The Swordof Imagination represents the captsone on the career of one ofAmericas most influential conservative thinkers, Russell Kirk.This highly praised memoir, written dispassionately in thethird person, vividly portaits Kirks intellectual life. Characterizedby verve, insight, and wit, the book ranges fully over the last halfof the twentieth century, pausing on such themes as Kirks mentorsand opponents, the days political figures, and those aspects of themodern world that he loved or despised. Throughout, readers find and are challenged by the conservative values, the permanentthings, for which Kirk became Americas ardent champion. [via]

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

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    Book summary:

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

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

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

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

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  • Burroughs, William: Three Novels: The Soft Machine, Nova Express, the Wild Boys
    Three Novels: The Soft Machine, Nova Express, the Wild Boys
    by William Burroughs
    ISBN 0802130844 (0-8021-3084-4)
    Softcover, Grove Pr

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  • Troyat, Henri: Tolstoy
    Tolstoy
    by Henri Troyat, Nancy Amphoux
    ISBN 0802137687 (0-8021-3768-7)
    Softcover, Grove Pr

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  • The Toughest Indian in the World
    by Sherman Alexie
    ISBN 0802138004 (0-8021-3800-4)
    Softcover, Grove Pr

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    Book summary:

    Call Sherman Alexie any number of things--novelist, poet, filmmaker, thorn in the side of white liberalism--just don't call him "universal." Aside from his well-documented distaste for the word, its fuzziness misses the point. The Toughest Indian in the World, Alexie's second collection, succeeds as brilliantly as it does because of its particularity. These aren't stories about the Indian Condition; they're stories about Indians--urban and reservation, street fighters and yuppies, husbands and wives. "She understood that white people were eccentric and complicated and she only wanted to be understood as eccentric and complicated as well," thinks the Coeur d'Alene narrator of "Assimilation," who's married (unhappily) to a white man. And yet the issue of race has taken up permanent residence inside her house: the marriage survives, but it's love that's the most thorough assimilation of all.

    Like The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, much of The Toughest Indian in the World combines deft psychological realism with the kind of narrative logic more commonly found in dreams. In "South by Southwest," a white drifter finds love on a "nonviolent killing spree" with an overweight Indian he calls Salmon Boy; in "Dear John Wayne," the cowboy actor falls in love with a young Spokane woman and proves himself a charmingly feminist hero. ("Oh, sons, you're just engaging in some harmless gender play," he tells his boys when he finds them trying on lipstick.) But for every bear hibernating on top of the Catholic church, there's also a GAP-wearing, Toyota-driving urban Indian on a quest for his roots. In both realist and surrealist modes, Alexie writes incantatory prose--as well as the kind of dialogue that makes even secondary characters leap into sudden focus: "'What?' asked Wonder Horse, as simple a question as could possibly be tendered, though he made it sound as if he'd asked Where's the tumor?"

    Alexie is sometimes guilty of painting his white characters with too broad a brush. (Is any anthropologist truly as obtuse as the one in "Dear John Wayne"? Could any reader really want Mary Lynn, the narrator of "Assimilation," to stay with her boorish white husband?) Yet his kind of firebrand politics still has the power to shock. A harrowing fable about whites kidnapping Indians for the medical properties of their blood, "The Sin Eaters" could be dismissed as paranoid if it weren't so hauntingly written:

    On that morning, the sun rose and bloomed like blood in a glass syringe. The entire Spokane Indian Reservation and all of its people and places were clean and scrubbed. The Spokane River rose up from its bed like a man who had been healed and joyously wept all the way down to its confluence with the Columbia River. There was water everywhere: a thousand streams interrupted by makeshift waterfalls; small ponds hidden beneath a mask of thick fronds and anonymous blossoms; blankets of dew draped over the shoulders of isolated knolls. An entire civilization of insects lived in the mud puddle formed by one truck tire and a recent rain storm. The blades of grass, the narrow pine needles, and the stalks of roadside wheat were as sharp and bright as surgical tools.
    It's a hard story to read, and that's only right. The Toughest Indian in the World offers so many pleasures, who could deny it the power to disturb us as well? Funny, dreamlike, heartbreaking, angry--these are stories that could have been written by no one but Sherman Alexie. --Mary Park [via]

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

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    Book summary:

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

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

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    Book summary:

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

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  • The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000
    by Martin Amis
    ISBN 0786866748 (0-7868-6674-8)
    Hardcover, Hyperion Books

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    Book summary:

    In Martin Amis's War Against Cliché, a selection of critical essays and reviews published between 1971 and 2000, he establishes himself as one of the fiercest critics and commentators on the literature and culture of the late 20th century. (He has already established himself as one of the most controversial and original novelists writing in English with novels such as Money and Time's Arrow.) In his foreword to the book Amis ruefully admits that his earlier reviews reveal a rather humorless attitude towards the "Literature and Society" debate of the time. Yet this only adds to the fascination of the collection, as Amis gradually finds his critical voice in the 1980s, confirming his passionate belief that "all writing is a campaign against cliché."

    In the subsequent sections of the book, this war leads to some wonderfully cutting and amusing responses to whatever crosses his path, from books on chess and nuclear proliferation to Cervantes' Don Quixote and the novels of his hero Vladimir Nabokov. Praise for his literary heroes is often fulsome: J.G. Ballard's High-Rise "is an intense and vivid bestiary, which lingers in the mind and chronically disquiets it." But his literary wrath is also devastating in its incisiveness: Thomas Harris's Hannibal is dismissed as "a novel of such profound and virtuoso vulgarity," while John Fowles is attacked because "he sweetens the pill: but the pill was saccharine all along." Often frank in its reappraisals (Amis concedes to being too hard on Ballard's Crash when reviewing the film many years later), some of the best writing is reserved for his journalism on sex manuals, chess, and his beloved football. The War Against Cliché will provoke strong reactions, but that only seems to confirm, rather than deny, the value of Amis's writing. --Jerry Brotton, Amazon.co.uk [via]

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  • Davies, Robertson: What's Bred in the Bone
    What's Bred in the Bone
    by Robertson Davies
    ISBN 0771596847 (0-7715-9684-7)
    Hardcover, Macmillan of Canada

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  • White Apples
    by Jonathan Carroll
    ISBN 0765304015 (0-7653-0401-5)
    Softcover, St Martins Pr

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    Book summary:

    Vincent Ettrich is in a tight spot. He has died and been brought back to life to help save his unborn son from evil and chaotic forces who want to prevent this son from becoming the savior of the universe. Sound bizarre? Welcome to the surreal and metaphysically massive novel White Apples by Jonathan Carroll.

    Following up the equally strange but widely acclaimed The Wooden Sea, Carroll paints on an even wider canvas with White Apples. In Carroll's world, humans are key threads in a giant tapestry that is being woven as life is lived. But there are dark forces at work who don't want the weaving to continue as is and Ettrich, his beloved Isabelle, and their sentient fetus find themselves standing in the way. Their struggles to merely understand what is happening to them and to stand tall in the very face of darkness makes for a humorous, touching, and thrilling tale with, as is expected, a big bang of an ending. But the most marvelous aspect of the novel is not its far-reaching, mind-blowing metaphysics. It's the wonderfully tragic love story of Vincent and Isabelle that keeps this flight of fancy grounded and beautifully human. --Jeremy Pugh [via]

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  • The Wooden Sea
    by Jonathan Carroll
    ISBN 0765300133 (0-7653-0013-3)
    Softcover, St Martins Pr

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    Frannie McCabe was an obnoxious juvenile delinquent in his teens, but has settled down into comfortable middle age in the small town of Crane's View as its chief of police; like other Jonathan Carroll protagonists, the hero of The Wooden Sea is about to find himself caught up in uncanny goings-on. First a dog walks into his office and drops dead--more importantly, it will not stay buried. Then a quarreling couple simply disappears, and then Frannie finds himself haunted by his younger, more abrasive self, and by visions of the last day of his life, as an old man about to be knocked down by a motorbike in Vienna.

    What all this means and what lessons Frannie is supposed to take from it all are where the questions lie; anyone who has read an earlier Carroll novel will know the sorts of thing that are liable to happen, the sorts of thing that they are likely to mean--but any reader of an earlier Carroll novel will almost certainly be buying any of his books they can get hold of, anyway. This is an inventive and moving fantasy by a writer who more or less defined dark fantasy as a critical term. --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk [via]

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  • Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague
    by Geraldine Brooks
    ISBN 0783896824 (0-7838-9682-4)
    Hardcover, Thorndike Pr

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    Book summary:

    Geraldine Brooks's Year of Wonders describes the 17th-century plague that is carried from London to a small Derbyshire village by an itinerant tailor. As villagers begin, one by one, to die, the rest face a choice: do they flee their village in hope of outrunning the plague or do they stay? The lord of the manor and his family pack up and leave. The rector, Michael Mompellion, argues forcefully that the villagers should stay put, isolate themselves from neighboring towns and villages, and prevent the contagion from spreading. His oratory wins the day and the village turns in on itself. Cocooned from the outside world and ravaged by the disease, its inhabitants struggle to retain their humanity in the face of the disaster. The narrator, the young widow Anna Frith, is one of the few who succeeds. With Mompellion and his wife, Elinor, she tends to the dying and battles to prevent her fellow villagers from descending into drink, violence, and superstition. All is complicated by the intense, inexpressible feelings she develops for both the rector and his wife. Year of Wonders sometimes seems anachronistic as historical fiction; Anna and Mompellion occasionally appear to be modern sensibilities unaccountably transferred to 17th-century Derbyshire. However, there is no mistaking the power of Brooks's imagination or the skill with which she constructs her story of ordinary people struggling to cope with extraordinary circumstances. --Nick Rennison, Amazon.co.uk [via]

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