books tagged “modern literature”

books tagged “modern literature”

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  • Alice Walker
    by Alice Walker
    ISBN 0671922548 (0-671-92254-8)
    Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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  • Stein, Gertrude: Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
    Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
    by Gertrude Stein
    ISBN 0679600817 (0-679-60081-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud: Psychopathology of Everyday Life/the Interpretation of Dreams/Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex/Wit and
    by Sigmund Freud, A.A. Brill
    ISBN 067960166X (0-679-60166-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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  • The Beautiful and Damned
    by F. Scott Fitzgerald
    ISBN 0671001256 (0-671-00125-6)
    Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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    Book summary:

    Awaiting the inheritance of his grandfather's fortune, Harvard-educated athlete Anthony Patch and his wife Gloria witness the impact of alcohol and avarice on their reckless marriage. Reprint. [via]

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  • Between Meals : An Appetite for Paris
    by A. J. Liebling, James Salter
    ISBN 0679601422 (0-679-60142-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    A man of Rabelaisian appetite, with the exquisite palate of the true gastronome and the literary flair to match, A.J. Liebling (1904-1963) was a formidable eater and a remarkable man, and his nostalgic recitation of his years and meals in Paris is a pleasure to read, dream on, and drool about.

    Liebling treasured a good appetite as a prerequisite for writing about food, as his accounts of substantial meals (two portions of cassoulet, one steak topped with beef marrow, and a dozen or so oysters, for example) attest. For the poised, precise, literary, and humorous flavor of his writing, you need only crack open the book--any page will do. Liebling recounts how to dine superbly without being lead astray by too much money, and he digresses magnificently on the evils of abstemiousness ("No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures; no ascetic can be considered reliably sane"). In this age of diets and pragmatic health care, it's refreshing to read such an inspired and inspiring ode to pleasure. As a means of savoring a love affair with Paris, sparking an interest in a trip to France, restructuring your priorities for the trip you've already planned, or gearing up on the flight over for the gastronomic debauches to come, Liebling is unsurpassed. --Stephanie Gold [via]

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  • Bluest Eye
    by Toni Morrison
    ISBN 0671742922 (0-671-74292-2)
    Softcover, Pocket Books

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    Book summary:

    Oprah Book Club® Selection, April 2000: Originally published in 1970, The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel. In an afterword written more than two decades later, the author expressed her dissatisfaction with the book's language and structure: "It required a sophistication unavailable to me." Perhaps we can chalk up this verdict to modesty, or to the Nobel laureate's impossibly high standards of quality control. In any case, her debut is nothing if not sophisticated, in terms of both narrative ingenuity and rhetorical sweep. It also shows the young author drawing a bead on the subjects that would dominate much of her career: racial hatred, historical memory, and the dazzling or degrading power of language itself.

    Set in Lorain, Ohio, in 1941, The Bluest Eye is something of an ensemble piece. The point of view is passed like a baton from one character to the next, with Morrison's own voice functioning as a kind of gold standard throughout. The focus, though, is on an 11-year-old black girl named Pecola Breedlove, whose entire family has been given a cosmetic cross to bear:

    You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question.... And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.
    There are far uglier things in the world than, well, ugliness, and poor Pecola is subjected to most of them. She's spat upon, ridiculed, and ultimately raped and impregnated by her own father. No wonder she yearns to be the very opposite of what she is--yearns, in other words, to be a white child, possessed of the blondest hair and the bluest eye.

    This vein of self-hatred is exactly what keeps Morrison's novel from devolving into a cut-and-dried scenario of victimization. She may in fact pin too much of the blame on the beauty myth: "Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another--physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion." Yet the destructive power of these ideas is essentially colorblind, which gives The Bluest Eye the sort of universal reach that Morrison's imitators can only dream of. And that, combined with the novel's modulated pathos and musical, fine-grained language, makes for not merely a sophisticated debut but a permanent one. --James Marcus [via]

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  • The Book of the Dun Cow
    by Walter Wangerin
    ISBN 0671832174 (0-671-83217-4)
    Softcover, Pocket Books

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    Winner of the American Book Award, Walter Wangerin's allegorial fantasy concerns a time when the sun turned around the earth and animals could speak, when Chauntecleer the Rooster ruled over a more or less peaceful kingdom. What the animals did not know was that they were the Keeper of Wyrm, monster of Evil long imprisoned beneath the earth. And Wyrm, sub terra, was breaking free.

    [via]

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  • Breakfast at Tiffany's
    by Truman Capote
    ISBN 067960085X (0-679-60085-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Contains:

    Breakfast at Tiffany's
    House of Flowers
    A Diamond Guitar
    A Christmas Memory [via]

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  • Cancer Ward
    by Nicholas Bethell, David Burg, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
    ISBN 0679601635 (0-679-60163-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    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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  • Cider House Rules
    by John Irving
    ISBN 0679603352 (0-679-60335-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    First published in 1985, The Cider House Rules is John Irving's sixth novel. Set in rural Maine in the first half of this century, it tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch--saint and obstetrician, founder and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Cloud's, ether addict and abortionist. It is also the story of Dr. Larch's favorite orphan, Homer Wells, who is never adopted. [via]

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  • Collected Fictions
    by Jorge Luis Borges, Andrew Hurley
    ISBN 0670849707 (0-670-84970-7)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

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    Book summary:

    Although Jorge Luis Borges published his first book in 1923--doling out his own money for a limited edition of Fervor de Buenos Aires--he remained in Argentinian obscurity for almost three decades. In 1951, however, Ficciones appeared in French, followed soon after by an English translation. This collection, which included the cream of the author's short fictions, made it clear that Borges was a world-class (if highly unclassifiable) artist--a brilliant, lyrical miniaturist, who could pose the great questions of existence on the head of pin. And by 1961, when he shared the French Prix Formentor with Samuel Beckett, he seemed suddenly to tower over a half-dozen literary cultures, the very exemplar of modernism with a human face.

    By the time of his death in 1986, Borges had been granted old master status by almost everybody (except, alas, the gentlemen of the Swedish Academy). Yet his work remained dispersed among a half-dozen different collections, some of them increasingly hard to find. Andrew Hurley has done readers a great service, then, by collecting all the stories in a single, meticulously translated volume. It's a pleasure to be reminded that Borges's style--poetic, dreamlike, and compounded of innumerable small surprises--was already in place by 1935, when he published A Universal History of Iniquity: "The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it." (Incidentally, the thrifty author later recycled the second of these aphorisms in his classic bit of bookish metaphysics, "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Teris.") The glories of his middle period, of course, have hardly aged a day. "The Garden of the Forking Paths" remains the best deconstruction of the detective story ever written, even in the post-Auster era, and "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" puts the so-called death of the author in pointed, hilarious perspective.

    But Hurley's omnibus also brings home exactly how consistent Borges remained in his concerns. As late as 1975, in "Avelino Arredondo," he was still asking (and occasionally even answering) the same riddles about time and its human repository, memory: "For the man in prison, or the blind man, time flows downstream as though down a slight decline. As he reached the midpoint of his reclusion, Arredondo more than once achieved that virtually timeless time. In the first patio there was a wellhead, and at the bottom, a cistern where a toad lived; it never occurred to Arredondo that it was the toad's time, bordering on eternity, that he sought." Throughout, Hurley's translation is crisp and assured (although this reader will always have a soft spot for "Funes, the Memorious" rather than "Funes, His Memory.") And thanks to his efforts, Borgesians will find no better--and no more pleasurable--rebuttal of the author's description of himself as "a shy sort of man who could not bring himself to write short stories." --James Marcus [via]

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  • The Color Purple
    by Alice Walker
    ISBN 0671019074 (0-671-01907-4)
    Softcover, Pocket Books

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    Book summary:

    Winner of the National Book Award as well as the Pulitzer Prize, "The Color Purple" established Alice Walker as a major voice in modern fiction. Her unforgettable portrait of Celie and her friends, family, and lovers is rich with passion, pain, inspiration, and an indomitable love of life. Beautifully imagined and deeply compassionate, "The Color Purple" is a classic of American literature. [via]

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  • The Cunning Man
    by Robertson Davies
    ISBN 0670859117 (0-670-85911-7)
    Hardcover, Penguin USA

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    Book summary:

    "Canada's leading man of letters and literary virtuoso" (Chicago Tribune) crowns an astonishing literary career with a new novel in the spirit of hi s bestselling What's Bred in the Bone. A mysterious death prologues a rich and meaty saga, narrated by Dr. Jonathan Hullah, which looks back over a long life punctuated by the dazzling intellectual highjinks and compassionate philosophies of Hullah and his circle. [via]

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  • Mann, Thomas: Death in Venice and Other Stories
    Death in Venice and Other Stories
    by Thomas Mann, Daniel Johnson
    ISBN 0679406662 (0-679-40666-2)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • Neugroschel, Joachim: Death in Venice and Other Tales
    Death in Venice and Other Tales
    by Joachim Neugroschel, Thomas Mann
    ISBN 0670874248 (0-670-87424-8)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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  • Mann, Thomas: Death in Venice : And Seven Other Stories
    Death in Venice : And Seven Other Stories
    by Thomas Mann, Helen T. Lowe-Porter
    ISBN 067960040X (0-679-60040-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Lentricchia, Frank: Edge of Night
    Edge of Night
    by Frank Lentricchia
    ISBN 0679430725 (0-679-43072-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • El Doctor Zhivago / The Doctor Zhivago
    by Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, Max Hayward, Manya Harari
    ISBN 0679407596 (0-679-40759-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

    In the grand tradition of the epic novel, Boris Pasternaks masterpiece brings to life the drama and immensity of the Russian Revolution through the story of the gifted physician-poet, Zhivago; the revolutionary, Strelnikov; and Lara, the passionate woman they both love. Caught up in the great events of politics and war that eventually destroy him and millions of others, Zhivago clings to the private world of family life and love, embodied especially in the magical Lara.

    First published in Italy in 1957, Doctor Zhivago was not allowed to appear in the Soviet Union until 1987, twenty-seven years after the authors death.

    Translated by Manya Harari and Max Hayward [via]

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  • The Elephant Vanishes: Stories
    by Haruki Murakami
    ISBN 0679420576 (0-679-42057-6)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    With the same deadpan mania and genius for dislocation that he brought to his internationally acclaimed novels A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Haruki Murakami makes this collection of stories a determined assault on the normal. A man sees his favorite elephant vanish into thin air; a newlywed couple suffers attacks of hunger that drive them to hold up a McDonald's in the middle of the night; and a young woman discovers that she has become irresistible to a little green monster who burrows up through her backyard.

    By turns haunting and hilarious, The Elephant Vanishes is further proof of Murakami's ability to cross the border between separate realities -- and to come back bearing treasure.


    From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]

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  • Greene, Graham: End of the Affair
    End of the Affair
    by Graham Greene
    ISBN 0671445359 (0-671-44535-9)
    Softcover, Pocket Books

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  • Far from the Madding Crowd
    by Thomas Hardy
    ISBN 0679405763 (0-679-40576-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Set in his fictional Wessex countryside in southwest England, Far from the Madding Crowd was Thomas Hardy's breakthrough work. Though it was first published anonymously in 1874, the quick and tremendous success of Far from the Madding Crowd persuaded Hardy to give up his first profession, architecture, to concentrate on writing fiction. The story of the ill-fated passions of the beautiful Bathsheba Everdene and her three suitors offers a spectacle of country life brimming with an energy and charm not customarily associated with Hardy. ("When Farmer Oak smiled," the novel begins, "the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears. . . .")
    ----The text is based on the authoritative Wessex Edition of 1912, revised and corrected by Hardy himself.
    ----This edition is the companion volume to the Mobil Masterpiece Theatre WGBH television presentation broadcast on PBS. It stars Paloma Baeza as Bathsheba Everdene, Nathaniel Parker as Gabriel Oak, Nigel Terry as Mr. Boldwood, and Jonathan Firth as Frank Troy. Adapted by Philomena
    McDonagh, Far from the Madding Crowd is directed by Nick Renton.
    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 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]

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  • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Other American Stories, Tie-In Edition
    by Hunter S. Thompson
    ISBN 0679602984 (0-679-60298-4)
    Hardcover, Modern Library

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    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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  • Ficciones
    by Jorge Luis Borges, John Sturrock
    ISBN 0679422994 (0-679-42299-4)
    Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Reading Jorge Luis Borges is an experience akin to having the top of one's head removed for repairs. First comes the unfamiliar breeze tickling your cerebral cortex; then disorientation, even mild discomfort; and finally, the sense that the world has been irrevocably altered--and in this case, rendered infinitely more complex. First published in 1945, his Ficciones compressed several centuries' worth of philosophy and poetry into 17 tiny, unclassifiable pieces of prose. He offered up diabolical tigers, imaginary encyclopedias, ontological detective stories, and scholarly commentaries on nonexistent books, and in the process exploded all previous notions of genre. Would any of David Foster Wallace's famous footnotes be possible without Borges? Or, for that matter, the syntactical games of Perec, the metafictional pastiche of Calvino? For good or for ill, the blind Argentinian paved the way for a generation's worth of postmodern monkey business--and fiction will never be simply "fiction" again.

    Its enormous influence on writers aside, Ficciones has also--perhaps more importantly--changed the way that we read. Borges's Pierre Menard, for instance, undertakes the most audacious project imaginable: to create not a contemporary version of Cervantes's most famous work but the Quixote itself, word for word. This second text is "verbally identical" to the original, yet, because of its new associations, "infinitely richer"; every time we read, he suggests, we are in effect creating an entirely new text, simply by viewing it through the distorting lens of history. "A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships," Borges once wrote in an essay about George Bernard Shaw. "All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare," he tells us in "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." In this spirit, Borges is not above impersonating, even quoting, himself.

    It is hard, exactly, to say what all of this means, at least in any of the usual ways. Borges wrote not with an ideological agenda, but with a kind of radical philosophical playfulness. Labyrinths, libraries, lotteries, doubles, dreams, mirrors, heresiarchs: these are the tokens with which he plays his ontological games. In the end, ideas themselves are less important to him than their aesthetic and imaginative possibilities. Like the idealist philosophers of Tlön, Borges does not "seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding"; for him as for them, "metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature." --Mary Park [via]

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  • Frost, Robert: Frost
    Frost
    by Robert Frost, John Hollander
    ISBN 0679455140 (0-679-45514-0)
    Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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  • God of Small Things
    by Arundhati Roy
    ISBN 0679309411 (0-679-30941-1)
    Softcover, Random House of Canada Ltd

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    "They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. " The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, a skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins is stranded on the highway amid a Marxist workers' demonstration. Inside the car sit two-egg twins Rahel and Esthappen, and so begins their tale. . . . Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family--their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologist's moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts). When their English cousin, Sophie Mol, and her mother, Margaret Kochamma, arrive on a Christmas visit, Esthappen and Rahel learn that Things Can Change in a Day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever, beside their river "graygreen."  With fish in it. With the sky and trees in it. And at night, the broken yellow moon in it. The brilliantly plotted story uncoils with an agonizing sense of foreboding and inevitability. Yet nothing prepares you for what lies at the heart of it. The God of Small Things takes on the Big Themes--Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite Joy. Here is a writer who dares to break the rules. To dislocate received rhythms and create the language she requires, a language that is at once classical and unprecedented. Arundhati Roy has given us a book that is anchored to anguish, but fueled by wit and magic. [via]

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  • The Hippopotamus
    by Stephen Fry
    ISBN 0679438793 (0-679-43879-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Ted Wallace is an old, sour, womanising, cantankerous, whisky-sodden beast of a failed poet and drama critic, but he has his faults too.

    Fired from his newspaper, months behind on his alimony payments and disgusted with a world that undervalues him, Ted seeks a few months repose and free drink at Swafford Hall, the country mansion of his old friend Lord Logan.

    But strange things have been going on at Swafford.  Miracles, Healings, Phenomena beyond the comprehension of a mud-caked hippopotamus like Ted... [via]

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  • The Hotel New Hampshire
    by John Irving
    ISBN 0671687948 (0-671-68794-8)
    Softcover, Pocket Books

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    The first of my fathers illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels. So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they dream on in a funny, sad, outrageous, and moving novel by the remarkable author of A Prayer for Owen Meany and Last Night in Twisted River.

    [via]

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  • Levi, Primo: If Not Now, When?
    If Not Now, When?
    by Primo Levi
    ISBN 0671493361 (0-671-49336-1)
    Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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  • If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
    by William Weaver, Italo Calvino
    ISBN 0679420258 (0-679-42025-8)
    Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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    Book summary:

    If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a marvel of ingenuity, an experimental text that looks longingly back to the great age of narration--"when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded." Italo Calvino's novel is in one sense a comedy in which the two protagonists, the Reader and the Other Reader, ultimately end up married, having almost finished If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. In another, it is a tragedy, a reflection on the difficulties of writing and the solitary nature of reading. The Reader buys a fashionable new book, which opens with an exhortation: "Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." Alas, after 30 or so pages, he discovers that his copy is corrupted, and consists of nothing but the first section, over and over. Returning to the bookshop, he discovers the volume, which he thought was by Calvino, is actually by the Polish writer Bazakbal. Given the choice between the two, he goes for the Pole, as does the Other Reader, Ludmilla. But this copy turns out to be by yet another writer, as does the next, and the next.

    The real Calvino intersperses 10 different pastiches--stories of menace, spies, mystery, premonition--with explorations of how and why we read, make meanings, and get our bearings or fail to. Meanwhile the Reader and Ludmilla try to reach, and read, each other. If on a Winter's Night is dazzling, vertiginous, and deeply romantic. "What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space." [via]

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  • In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences
    by Truman Capote
    ISBN 067960023X (0-679-60023-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    "Until one morning in mid-November of 1959, few Americans--in fact, few Kansans--had ever heard of Holcomb. Like the waters of the river, like the motorists on the highway, and like the yellow trains streaking down the Santa Fe tracks, drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there." If all Truman Capote did was invent a new genre--journalism written with the language and structure of literature--this "nonfiction novel" about the brutal slaying of the Clutter family by two would-be robbers would be remembered as a trail-blazing experiment that has influenced countless writers. But Capote achieved more than that. He wrote a true masterpiece of creative nonfiction. The images of this tale continue to resonate in our minds: 16-year-old Nancy Clutter teaching a friend how to bake a cherry pie, Dick Hickock's black '49 Chevrolet sedan, Perry Smith's Gibson guitar and his dreams of gold in a tropical paradise--the blood on the walls and the final "thud-snap" of the rope-broken necks. [via]

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  • In Search of Lost Time
    by Marcel Proust
    ISBN 0679600280 (0-679-60028-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    The Guermantes Way, in this the third volume of In Search of Lost Time, refers to the path that leads to the Duc and Duchess de Guermantess château near Combray. It also represents the narrators passage into the rarefied social kaleidoscope of the Guermantess Paris salon, an important intellectual playground for Parisian society, where he becomes a party to the wit and manners of the Guermantess drawing room. Here he encounters nobles, officers, socialites, and assorted consorts, including Robert de Saint Loup and his prostitute mistress Rachel, the Baron de Charlus, and the Prince de Borodino.

    For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartins acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieffs translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of Á la recherché du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989). [via]

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  • Golding, William: The Inheritors
    The Inheritors
    by William Golding
    ISBN 0671437496 (0-671-43749-6)
    Softcover, Pocket Books

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  • The Interpretation of Dreams
    by Sigmund Freud, A.A. Brill
    ISBN 067960121X (0-679-60121-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Whether we love or hate Sigmund Freud, we all have to admit that he revolutionized the way we think about ourselves. Much of this revolution can be traced to The Interpretation of Dreams, the turn-of-the-century tour de force that outlined his theory of unconscious forces in the context of dream analysis. Introducing the id, the superego, and their problem child, the ego, Freud advanced scientific understanding of the mind immeasurably by exposing motivations normally invisible to our consciousness. While there's no question that his own biases and neuroses influenced his observations, the details are less important than the paradigm shift as a whole. After Freud, our interior lives became richer and vastly more mysterious.

    These mysteries clearly bothered him--he went to great (often absurd) lengths to explain dream imagery in terms of childhood sexual trauma, a component of his theory jettisoned mid-century, though now popular among recovered-memory therapists. His dispassionate analyses of his own dreams are excellent studies for cognitive scientists wishing to learn how to sacrifice their vanities for the cause of learning. Freud said of the work contained in The Interpretation of Dreams, "Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime." One would have to feel quite fortunate to shake the world even once. --Rob Lightner [via]

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  • Invisible Man
    by Ralph Ellison
    ISBN 0679601392 (0-679-60139-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    We rely, in this world, on the visual aspects of humanity as a means of learning who we are. This, Ralph Ellison argues convincingly, is a dangerous habit. A classic from the moment it first appeared in 1952, 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 realizes he's been duped into believing what he thought 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 color made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn't see either color or men."

    Invisible Man is certainly a book about race in America, and sadly 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 is a 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 [via]

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  • Salinger, J. D.: J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey
    J.D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey
    by J. D. Salinger
    ISBN 0671008668 (0-671-00866-8)
    Softcover, Monarch Notes

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  • Life of Pi
    by Yann Martel
    ISBN 0676978991 (0-676-97899-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Serious novels about young boys being drawn closer to God while trapped on lifeboats with dangerous wild animals ought to be impossible. Life of Pi, Yann Martel's second novel, proves they're not. Its plot stretches the limits of credibility into new and exciting shapes, and the fact that Martel has made his materials into an enchanting story is almost unbelievable. Martel's Pi is Piscine Molitor Patel, a boy from Pondicherry, one of the few Indian towns to be colonized by France. Pi is an intelligent, unusual child: he has a scientific turn of mind but is also a practising Hindu, Moslem, and Christian. Pi's family runs a large zoo, but they decide to sell their animals to zoos in the United States and emigrate to Canada. Crossing the Pacific (with their animals), they're shipwrecked halfway between China and Midway. Pi survives, only to find himself sharing a lifeboat with an injured zebra, a spotted hyena, an orangutan, and Richard Parker--an immense Bengal tiger.

    Most of these animals are doomed, but Pi and Richard Parker cling to life, establishing a tacit order on the lifeboat. Martel handles this part of the story perfectly: one would expect Life of Pi to become cute, or perhaps preachy, but it is neither. Life on the boat proceeds in strict accordance with the rules of ecology and territorialism, and the interdependence of the passengers is both believable and absorbing. Life of Pi is a superb novel, both for its story and for its rich examinations of religion, isolation, and love. If this is an indication of what is to come, we can expect great things from Yann Martel. --Jack Illingworth [via]

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  • Theroux, Paul: The London Embassy
    The London Embassy
    by Paul Theroux
    ISBN 0671498053 (0-671-49805-3)
    Softcover, Pocket Books

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  • The Magus
    by John Fowles
    ISBN 0679602836 (0-679-60283-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    The Magus was originally published in 1965 and reissued in a revised version twelve years later. The story of Nicholas Urfe and his friendship with a demonic millionaire which leads to an elaborate series of staged hallucinations, riddles, and psychological traps, The Magus endures as the most enigmatic and magical novel in the Fowles canon, a work rich in symbols, conundrums, and labyrinthine twists of events. This Modern Library edition includes a new introduction by the author. [via]

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  • Master And Margarita
    by Michael Glenny, Mikhail Bulgakov
    ISBN 0679410465 (0-679-41046-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Surely no stranger work exists in the annals of protest literature than The Master and Margarita. Written during the Soviet crackdown of the 1930s, when Mikhail Bulgakov's works were effectively banned, it wraps its anti-Stalinist message in a complex allegory of good and evil. Or would that be the other way around? The book's chief character is Satan, who appears in the guise of a foreigner and self-proclaimed black magician named Woland. Accompanied by a talking black tomcat and a "translator" wearing a jockey's cap and cracked pince-nez, Woland wreaks havoc throughout literary Moscow. First he predicts that the head of noted editor Berlioz will be cut off; when it is, he appropriates Berlioz's apartment. (A puzzled relative receives the following telegram: "Have just been run over by streetcar at Patriarch's Ponds funeral Friday three afternoon come Berlioz.") Woland and his minions transport one bureaucrat to Yalta, make another one disappear entirely except for his suit, and frighten several others so badly that they end up in a psychiatric hospital. In fact, it seems half of Moscow shows up in the bin, demanding to be placed in a locked cell for protection.

    Meanwhile, a few doors down in the hospital lives the true object of Woland's visit: the author of an unpublished novel about Pontius Pilate. This Master--as he calls himself--has been driven mad by rejection, broken not only by editors' harsh criticism of his novel but, Bulgakov suggests, by political persecution as well. Yet Pilate's story becomes a kind of parallel narrative, appearing in different forms throughout Bulgakov's novel: as a manuscript read by the Master's indefatigable love, Margarita, as a scene dreamed by the poet--and fellow lunatic--Ivan Homeless, and even as a story told by Woland himself. Since we see this narrative from so many different points of view, who is truly its author? Given that the Master's novel and this one end the same way, are they in fact the same book? These are only a few of the many questions Bulgakov provokes, in a novel that reads like a set of infinitely nested Russian dolls: inside one narrative there is another, and then another, and yet another. His devil is not only entertaining, he is necessary: "What would your good be doing if there were no evil, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it?"

    Unsurprisingly--in view of its frequent, scarcely disguised references to interrogation and terror--Bulgakov's masterwork was not published until 1967, almost three decades after his death. Yet one wonders if the world was really ready for this book in the late 1930s, if, indeed, we are ready for it now. Shocking, touching, and scathingly funny, it is a novel like no other. Woland may reattach heads or produce 10-ruble notes from the air, but Bulgakov proves the true magician here. The Master and Margarita is a different book each time it is opened. --Mary Park [via]

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  • Kemal, Yashar: Memed My Hawk
    Memed My Hawk
    by Yashar Kemal
    ISBN 0671825542 (0-671-82554-2)
    Softcover, Pocket Books

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  • The Merry Heart : Reflections on Reading, Writing, and the World of Books
    by Robertson Davies
    ISBN 0670873667 (0-670-87366-7)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

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    Book summary:

    Robertson Davies always wanted to call a book of his "The Merry Heart." Now the wish is fulfilled, and fittingly by a selection of his writings, vintage Davies, full of the shrewd relish for life that was his hallmark. Although we shall not see another Davies novel, we can all rejoice that there is another new book that is pure distilled Davies. His utterly distinctive voice resounds here from every line. As close to an autobiography as we can ever expect, this collection of reminiscences, speeches, book reviews, parodies, and essays tells us much about the writer and the man. The introductions to each of the twenty-four chapters add further biographical details, followed by tantalizing fragments from Davies' own unpublished diary. But the strength of the book lies in its stimulating contents. Every chapter is an education for the reader, as it provides the pleasure of browsing through Davies' richly stocked mind. Whether he is discussing art fakery, his schooldays, the differences between Canadians and Americans, Thackeray, Ibsen, "The Little Red Hen," or "Ulysses," this collection gathers his reflections on books, on writing, on reading, on his own writing, on other authors and much else, into a fascinating whole. [via]

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  • Momentous Events, Vivid Memories
    by David B. Pillemer
    ISBN 0674004183 (0-674-00418-3)
    Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr

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    Book summary:

    The bombing of Pearl Harbor, the assassination of President Kennedy, the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger: every generation has unforgettable events, the shared memory of which can create fleeting intimacy among strangers. These public memories, combined with poignant personal moments--the first day of college, a baseball game with one's father, praise from a mentor--are the critical shaping events of individual lives.

    Although experimental memory studies have long been part of empirical psychology, and psychotherapy has focused on repressed or traumatizing memories, relatively little attention has been paid to the inspiring, touching, amusing, or revealing moments that highlight most lives. What makes something unforgettable? How do we learn to share the significance of memories?

    David Pillemer's research, brought together in this gracefully written book, extends the current study of narrative and specific memory. Drawing on a variety of evidence and methods--cognitive and developmental psychology, cross-cultural study, psychotherapy case studies, autobiographies and diaries--Pillemer elaborates on five themes: the function of memory; how children learn to construct and share personal memories; memory as a complex interactive system of image, emotion, and narrative; individual and group differences in memory function and performance; and how unique events linger in memory and influence lives. A provocative last chapter, full of striking examples, considers potential variations in memory across gender, culture, and personality. Momentous Events, Vivid Memories is itself a compelling and memorable book.

    [via]

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  • Cooperman, Stanley: Monarch Great Gatsby
    Monarch Great Gatsby
    by Stanley Cooperman
    ISBN 0671006673 (0-671-00667-3)
    Hardcover, Pearson Education, Limited

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  • Steinbeck, John: Monarch Notes on Of Mice and Men
    Monarch Notes on Of Mice and Men
    by John Steinbeck
    ISBN 0671006932 (0-671-00693-2)
    Hardcover, Pearson Education, Limited

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  • Davies, Robertson: Murther & Walking Spirits
    Murther & Walking Spirits
    by Robertson Davies
    ISBN 0670841897 (0-670-84189-7)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group USA

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  • Nightwood
    by Djuna Barnes, Dorothy Allison
    ISBN 067964024X (0-679-64024-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Nightwood is not only a classic of lesbian literature, but was also acknowledged by no less than T. S. Eliot as one of the great novels of the 20th century. Eliot admired Djuna Barnes' rich, evocative language. Lesbian readers will admire the exquisite craftsmanship and Barnes' penetrating insights into obsessive passion. Barnes told a friend that Nightwood was written with her own blood "while it was still running." That flowing wound was the breakup of an eight-year relationship with the lesbian love of her life. [via]

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  • Oleanna
    by David Mamet
    ISBN 0679424113 (0-679-42411-3)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Mamet's ground-breaking and controversial play on the male-female power struggle, annotated with an introduction, notes and commentary. "An ear for reproducing everyday language has long been David Mamet's hallmark and he has now employed it to skewer the dogmatic, puritannical streak which has become commonplace on and off the campus. With Oleanna he continues an exploration of male-female conflicts begun with Sexual Perversity in Chicago in 1974. Oleanna cogently demonstrates that when free thought and dialogue are imperilled, nobody wins." (Michael Wise, Independent) In Oleanna "John and Carol go to it with hand-to hand combat that amounts to a primal struggle for power. As usual with Mamet, the vehicle for that combat is crackling, highly distilled dialogue unencumbered by literary frills or phony theatrical ones." (Frank Rich, International Herald Tribune) [via]

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  • On the Origin of Species a Facsimile of the First
    by C. Darwin
    ISBN 0674637526 (0-674-63752-6)
    Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr

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    Book summary:

    It is now fully recognized that the publication of Charles Darwins Origin of Species in 1859 brought about a revolution in mans attitude toward life and his own place in the universe. This work is rightly regarded as one of the most important books ever published, and a knowledge of it should be part of the intellectual equipment of every educated person. The book remains surprisingly modern in its assertions and is also remarkably accessible to the layman, much more so than recent treatises necessarily encumbered with technical language and professional jargon.

    This first edition had a freshness and uncompromising directness that were considerably weakened in later editions, and yet nearly all available reprints of the work are based on the greatly modified sixth edition of 1872. In the only other modern reprinting of the first edition, the pagination was changed, so that it is impossible to give page references to significant passages in the original. Clearly this facsimile reprint of the momentous first edition fills a need for scholars and general readers alike.

    [via]

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  • One Hundred Years of Solitude
    by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gregory Rabassa
    ISBN 0679444653 (0-679-44465-3)
    Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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    "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."

    It is typical of Gabriel García Márquez that it will be many pages before his narrative circles back to the ice, and many chapters before the hero of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Buendía, stands before the firing squad. In between, he recounts such wonders as an entire town struck with insomnia, a woman who ascends to heaven while hanging laundry, and a suicide that defies the laws of physics:

    A trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendía house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano José, and went through the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Úrsula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread.
    "Holy Mother of God!" Úrsula shouted.

    The story follows 100 years in the life of Macondo, a village founded by José Arcadio Buendía and occupied by descendants all sporting variations on their progenitor's name: his sons, José Arcadio and Aureliano, and grandsons, Aureliano José, Aureliano Segundo, and José Arcadio Segundo. Then there are the women--the two Úrsulas, a handful of Remedios, Fernanda, and Pilar--who struggle to remain grounded even as their menfolk build castles in the air. If it is possible for a novel to be highly comic and deeply tragic at the same time, then One Hundred Years of Solitude does the trick. Civil war rages throughout, hearts break, dreams shatter, and lives are lost, yet the effect is literary pentimento, with sorrow's outlines bleeding through the vibrant colors of García Márquez's magical realism. Consider, for example, the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar, whom José Arcadio Buendía has killed in a fight. So lonely is the man's shade that it haunts Buendía's house, searching anxiously for water with which to clean its wound. Buendía's wife, Úrsula, is so moved that "the next time she saw the dead man uncovering the pots on the stove she understood what he was looking for, and from then on she placed water jugs all about the house."

    With One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez introduced Latin American literature to a world-wide readership. Translated into more than two dozen languages, his brilliant novel of love and loss in Macondo stands at the apex of 20th-century literature. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • The Origin of Species: Library Edition
    by Charles Robert Darwin
    ISBN 0679600701 (0-679-60070-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Introduction by Edward J. Larson
     
    ÿPerhaps the most readable and accessible of the great works of scientific inquiry, The Origin of Species sold out its first printing on the very day it was published in 1859. Theologians quickly labeled Charles Darwin the most dangerous man in England and, as the Saturday Review noted, the uproar over the book quickly passed beyond the bounds of the study and lecture-room into the drawing-room and the public street. Based largely on Darwins experience as a naturalist while on a five-year voyage aboard H. M. S. Beagle, The Origin of Species set forth a theory of evolution and natural selection that challenged contemporary beliefs about divine providence and the immutability of species. This Modern Library edition includes a Foreword by the Pulitzer Prizewinning science historian Edward J. Larson, an introductory historical sketch, and a glossary Darwin later added to the original text.


    From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]

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  • Pale Fire
    by Vladimir Nabokov
    ISBN 0679410775 (0-679-41077-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Like Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire is a masterpiece that imprisons us inside the mazelike head of a mad émigré. Yet Pale Fire is more outrageously hilarious, and its narrative convolutions make the earlier book seem as straightforward as a fairy tale. Here's the plot--listen carefully! John Shade is a homebody poet in New Wye, U.S.A. He writes a 999-line poem about his life, and what may lie beyond death. This novel (and seldom has the word seemed so woefully inadequate) consists of both that poem and an extensive commentary on it by the poet's crazy neighbor, Charles Kinbote.

    According to this deranged annotator, he had urged Shade to write about his own homeland--the northern kingdom of Zembla. It soon becomes clear that this fabulous locale may well be a figment of Kinbote's colorfully cracked, prismatic imagination. Meanwhile, he manages to twist the poem into an account of Zembla's King Charles--whom he believes himself to be--and the monarch's eventual assassination by the revolutionary Jakob Gradus.

    In the course of this dizzying narrative, shots are indeed fired. But it's Shade who takes the hit, enabling Kinbote to steal the dead poet's manuscript and set about annotating it. Is that perfectly clear? By now it should be obvious that Pale Fire is not only a whodunit but a who-wrote-it. There isn't, of course, a single solution. But Nabokov's best biographer, Brian Boyd, has come up with an ingenious suggestion: he argues that Shade is actually guiding Kinbote's mad hand from beyond the grave, nudging him into completing what he'd intended to be a 1,000-line poem. Read this magical, melancholic mystery and see if you agree. --Tim Appelo [via]

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  • The Periodic Table
    by Primo Levi, Raymond Rosenthal, Neal Ascherson
    ISBN 0679444637 (0-679-44463-7)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Writer Primo Levi (1919-1987), an Italian Jew, did not come to the wide attention of the English-reading audience until the last years of his life. A survivor of the Holocaust and imprisonment in Auschwitz, Levi is considered to be one of the century's most compelling voices, and The Periodic Table is his most famous book. Springboarding from his training as a chemist, Levi uses the elements as metaphors to create a cycle of linked, somewhat autobiographical tales, including stories of the Piedmontese Jewish community he came from, and of his response to the Holocaust. [via]

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  • Plain Truth
    by Jodi Picoult
    ISBN 0671776134 (0-671-77613-4)
    Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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    Jodi Picoult has touched readers deeply with her acclaimed novels, such as "Keeping Faith" and "The Pact." Gifted with "a remarkable ability to make us share her characters' feelings" "(People)," Picoult now explores the complex choices of the heart for a young Amish woman -- the compelling journey of discovery for an urban lawyer who befriends and protects her.

    The small town of Paradise, Pennsylvania, is a jewel in Lancaster County -- known for its picture-postcard landscapes and bucolic lifestyle. But that peace is shattered by the discovery of a dead infant in the barn of an Amish farmer. A police investigation quickly leads to two startling disclosures: the newborn's mother is an unmarried Amish woman, eighteen-year-old Katie Fisher. And the infant did not die of natural causes. Although Katie denies the medical proof that she gave birth to the child, circumstantial evidence leads to her arrest for the murder of her baby.

    One hundred miles away, Philadelphia defense attorney Ellie Hathaway has achieved an enviable, high-profile career. But her latest court "victory" has set the sands shifting beneath her. Single at thirty-nine and unsatisfied with her relationship, Ellie doesn't look back when she turns down her chance to make partner and takes off for an open-ended stay at her great-aunt's home in Paradise.

    Fate brings her to Katie Fisher. Suddenly, Ellie sees the chance to defend a client who truly needs her, not just one who can afford her. But taking on this case challenges Ellie in more ways than one. She finds herself not only in a clash of wills with a client who does not want to be defended but also in a clash of cultures with a people whose channels ofjustice are markedly different from her own.

    Immersing herself in Katie Fisher's life -- and in a world founded on faith, humility, duty, and honesty -- Ellie begins to understand the pressures and sacrifices of those who to live "plain." As she peels away the layers of fact and fantasy, Ellie calls on an old friend for guidance. Now, just as this man from Ellie's past reenters her life, she must uncover the truth about a complex case, a tragic loss, the bonds of love -- and her own deepest fears and desires.

    Moving seamlessly from psychological drama to courtroom suspense, "Plain Truth" is a triumph of contemporary storytelling. Jodi Picoult presents a fascinating portrait of Amish life rarely witnessed by those outside the faith -- and discovers a place where circumstances are not always what they seem, where love meets falsehood, and where relationships grow strong enough to span two worlds. [via]

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  • Power, Maggie: Porphyria's Lover
    Porphyria's Lover
    by Maggie Power
    ISBN 0671719416 (0-671-71941-6)
    Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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  • Portnoy's Complaint
    by Philip Roth
    ISBN 0671736159 (0-671-73615-9)
    Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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    Portnoy's Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933- )] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: 'Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient's "morality," however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.' (Spielvogel, O. "The Puzzled Penis," Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV, p. 909.) It is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship.

    With a new Afterword by the author for the 25th Anniversary edition.


    From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]

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  • A Prayer for Owen Meany
    by John Irving
    ISBN 0679642595 (0-679-64259-5)
    Hardcover, Modern Library

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    Book summary:

    Owen Meany is a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who accidentally kills his best friend's mom with a baseball and believes--accurately--that he is an instrument of God, to be redeemed by martyrdom. John Irving's novel, which inspired the 1998 Jim Carrey movie Simon Birch, is his most popular book in Britain, and perhaps the oddest Christian mystic novel since Flannery O'Connor's work. Irving fans will find much that is familiar: the New England prep-school-town setting, symbolic amputations of man and beast, the Garp-like unknown father of the narrator (Owen's orphaned best friend), the rough comedy. The scene of doltish the doltish headmaster driving a trashed VW down the school's marble staircase is a marvelous set piece. So are the Christmas pageants Owen stars in. But it's all, as Highlights magazine used to put it, "fun with a purpose." When Owen plays baby Jesus in the pageants, and glimpses a tombstone with his death date while enacting A Christmas Carol, the slapstick doesn't cancel the fact that he was born to be martyred. The book's countless subplots add up to a moral argument, specifically an indictment of American foreign policy--from Vietnam to the Contras.

    The book's mystic religiosity is steeped in Robertson Davies's Deptford trilogy, and the fatal baseball relates to the fatefully misdirected snowball in the first Deptford novel, Fifth Business. Tiny, symbolic Owen echoes the hero of Irving's teacher Günter Grass's The Tin Drum--the two characters share the same initials. A rollicking entertainment, Owen Meany is also a meditation on literature, history, and God. --Tim Appelo [via]

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  • Private Parts
    by Howard Stern
    ISBN 0671009443 (0-671-00944-3)
    Softcover, Pocket Books

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    Book summary:

    The #1 bestseller and fastest selling autobiography of all time, "Private Parts, " will be released on March 14 as a major motion picture from Paramount Pictures and Rysher Entertainment. This is the event Stern's millions of fans have been waiting for. Yes, The King of All Media is back, letting it all hang out in his outrageous new movie. And here is the book that tracks the odyssey. In "Private Parts" Stern spills his life story, from his dysfunctional beginnings to his unlikely, turbulent rise to super stardom. In the process, he shares his views on everything from foreign policy to fatherhood and Madonna to masturbation, with lots of lesbians in between. No matter whose side you're on -- Cher's "I hate him. He's just a creep, " or Stallone's "I love him. I really love him" -- Stern's brutally frank "Don't ask, I'll tell" tome spares no group or institution.

    Studded throughout with Howard's favorite photos, pickings from the Hate-Mailbag and illustrations, this is the original, in-your-face manifesto complete with movie art that will once again have fans storming the bookstores...and everyone else running for cover. [via]

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  • Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution
    by Saul Friedlander
    ISBN 0674707664 (0-674-70766-4)
    Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr

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    Book summary:

    Can the Holocaust be compellingly described or represented? Or is there some core aspect of the extermination of the Jews of Europe which resists our powers of depiction, of theory, of narrative? In this volume, twenty scholars probe the moral, epistemological, and aesthetic limits of an account or portrayal of the Nazi horror.

    These essays expose to scrutiny questions that have a pressing claim on our attention, our conscience, and our cultural memory. First presented at a conference organized by Saul Friedlander, they are now made available for the wide consideration and discussion they merit.

    Christopher Browning, Hayden White, Carlo Ginzburg, Martin Jay, Dominick LaCapra, and others focus first on the general question: can the record of his historical event be established objectively through documents and witnesses, or is every historical interpretation informed by the perspective of its narrator? The suggestion that all historical accounts are determined by a preestablished narrative choice raises the ethical and intellectual issues of various forms of relativization. In more specific terms, what are the possibilities of historicizing National Socialism without minimizing the historical place of the Holocaust.

    Also at issue are the problems related to an artistic representation, particularly the dilemmas posed by aestheticization. John Felstiners, Yael S. Feldman, Sidra Ezahi, Eric Santner, and Anton Kaes grapple with these questions and confront the inadequacy of words in the face of the Holocaust. Others address the problem of fitting Nazi policies and atrocities into the history of Western thought and science. The book concludes with Geoffrey Hartmans's evocative meditation on memory.

    [via]

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  • Updike, John: Rabbit Angstrom
    Rabbit Angstrom
    by John Updike
    ISBN 0679444599 (0-679-44459-9)
    Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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  • Ellison, P.: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
    Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
    by P. Ellison
    ISBN 067100901X (0-671-00901-X)
    Softcover, Monarch Notes

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  • The Red Badge of Courage
    by Stephen Crane, Shelby Foote
    ISBN 0679602968 (0-679-60296-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    ENDURING LITERATURE ILLUMINATED

    BY PRACTICAL SCHOLARSHIP

    The story of a young soldier's quest for manhood during the American Civil War.

    EACH ENRICHED CLASSIC EDITION INCLUDES:

    " A concise introduction that gives readers important background information

    " A chronology of the author's life and work

    " A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical context

    " An outline of key themes and plot points to help readers form their own interpretations

    " Detailed explanatory notes

    " Critical analysis, including contemporary and modern perspectives on the work

    " Discussion questions to promote lively classroom and book group interaction

    " A list of recommended related books and films to broaden the reader's experience

    Enriched Classics offer readers affordable editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and insightful commentary. The scholarship provided in Enriched Classics enables readers to appreciate, understand, and enjoy the world's finest books to their full potential.

    SERIES EDITED BY CYNTHIA BRANTLEY JOHNSON

    [via]

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  • Hardy, Thomas: The Return of the Native
    The Return of Native
    by Thomas Hardy
    ISBN 0679417303 (0-679-41730-3)
    Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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    Book summary:

    This fine novel sets in opposition two of Thomas Hardys most unforgettable creations: his heroine, the sensuous, free-spirited Eustacia Vye, and the solemn, majestic stretch of upland in Dorsetshire he called Egdon Heath. The famous opening reveals the haunting power of that dark, forbidding moor where proud Eustacia fervently awaits a clandestine meeting with her lover, Damon Wildeve. But Eustacias dreams of escape are not to be realizedneither Wildeve nor the returning native Clym Yeobright can bring her salvation.

    Injured by forces beyond their control, Hardys characters struggle vainly in the net of destiny. In the end, only the face of the lonely heath remains untouched by fate in this masterpiece of tragic passion, a tale that perfectly epitomizes the authors own unique and melancholy genius.


    From the Paperback edition. [via]

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  • Robert Frost's Poems
    by Robert Frost, Louis Untermeyer
    ISBN 0671496174 (0-671-49617-4)
    Softcover, Pocket Books

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    Here in one volume are selected poems of Robert Frost, accompanied by an introduction and commentary by Louis Untermeyer. They make up an anthology that will bring you numberless hours of pleasure and joy. [via]

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  • Secret Life of Bees
    by Sue Monk Kidd
    ISBN 0670894605 (0-670-89460-5)
    Hardcover, Penguin USA

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    In Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, 14-year-old Lily Owen, neglected by her father and isolated on their Georgia peach farm, spends hours imagining a blissful infancy when she was loved and nurtured by her mother, Deborah, whom she barely remembers. These consoling fantasies are her heart's answer to the family story that as a child, in unclear circumstances, Lily accidentally shot and killed her mother. All Lily has left of Deborah is a strange image of a Black Madonna, with the words "Tiburon, South Carolina" scrawled on the back. The search for a mother, and the need to mother oneself, are crucial elements in this well-written coming-of-age story set in the early 1960s against a background of racial violence and unrest. When Lily's beloved nanny, Rosaleen, manages to insult a group of angry white men on her way to register to vote and has to skip town, Lily takes the opportunity to go with her, fleeing to the only place she can think of--Tiburon, South Carolina--determined to find out more about her dead mother. Although the plot threads are too neatly trimmed, The Secret Life of Bees is a carefully crafted novel with an inspired depiction of character. The legend of the Black Madonna and the brave, kind, peculiar women who perpetuate Lily's story dominate the second half of the book, placing Kidd's debut novel squarely in the honored tradition of the Southern Gothic. --Regina Marler [via]

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  • Selected Non-Fictions
    by Jorge Luis Borges, Eliot Weinberger, Esther Allen, Suzane Jill Levine, Andrew Hurley
    ISBN 0670849472 (0-670-84947-2)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

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    Book summary:

    Jorge Luis Borges was our century's greatest miniaturist, perpetually cramming entire universes onto the head of a pin. Yet his splendid economy, along the wafer-thin proportions of such classic volumes as Ficciones and Labyrinths, has given readers the impression that Borges was miserly with his prose. In fact, he was something of a verbal spendthrift. His collected stories alone run to nearly 1,000 pages. And his nonfiction output was even more staggering: the young Borges cranked out hundreds of essays, book notes, cultural polemics, and movie reviews, and even after he lost his sight in 1955, he continued to dictate short pieces by the dozens. Eliot Weinberger has assembled just a fraction of this outpouring in Selected Non-Fictions, and the result is a 559-page Borgesian blowout, in which the Argentinean fabulist takes on being and nothingness, James Joyce and Lana Turner, and (surprisingly) racial hatred and the rise of Nazism. So much for our image of the mandarin bookworm! The very engagé author of this book seems more like a subequatorial Camus, with a dash of Siskel and Ebert on the side.

    Selected Non-Fictions demonstrates just how quickly Borges began wrestling with such brainteasers as identity, time, and infinity. Indeed, the very first piece in the collection, "The Nothingness of Personality" (1922), already finds him fiddling with the self: "I, as I write this, am only a certainty that seeks out the words that are most apt to compel your attention. That proposition and a few muscular sensations, and the sight of the limpid branches that the trees place outside my window, constitute my current I." There are many such meditations here, including "A History of Eternity" (in which Borges maps out his own, disarmingly empty version of the eternal, "without a God or even a co-proprietor, and entirely devoid of archetypes"). But it's more fun--and more revelatory--to see the author venturing beyond his metaphysical stomping grounds. Borges on King Kong is a hoot, and a cornball masterpiece such as The Petrified Forest elicits this terrific nugget: "Death works in this film like hypnosis or alcohol: it brings the recesses of the soul into the light of day." His capsule biographies are a delight, his critiques of Nazi propaganda are memorably stringent, and nobody should miss him on the tango. True, the sheer variety and mind-boggling erudition of Selected Non-Fictions can be a little forbidding. But, taken as a whole, the collection surely meets the specifications that Borges laid out in a 1927 essay on literary pleasure: "If only some eternal book existed, primed for our enjoyment and whims, no less inventive in the populous morning as in the secluded night, oriented toward all hours of the world." Oh, but it does. --James Marcus [via]

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  • Reaske, Christopher R.: Separate Peace
    Separate Peace
    by Christopher R. Reaske
    ISBN 0671008897 (0-671-00889-7)
    Hardcover, Pearson Education, Limited

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  • The Shipping News
    by Annie Proulx
    ISBN 0671510053 (0-671-51005-3)
    Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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    Book summary:

    When Quoyle's two-timing wife meets her just desserts, he retreats with his two daughters to his ancestral home on the starkly beautiful Newfoundland coast, where a rich cast of local characters and family members all play a part in Quoyle's struggle to reclaim his life. As Quoyle confronts his private demons -- and the unpredictable forces of nature and society -- he begins to see the possibility of love without pain or misery. A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family, The Shipping News shows why Annie Proulx is recognized as one of the most gifted and original writers in America today. [via]

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  • Snow Falling on Cedars
    by David Guterson
    ISBN 0676576109 (0-676-57610-9)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Fighting the distrust and prejudice of his neighbors on a remote island in Puget Sound, a Japanese-American man who spent time in an internment camp during World War II, finds himself on trial for murder. The histories of the accused and the victim, both fishermen and residents of the small town of San Piedro, unfold as newspaperman Ishmael Chambers embarks on a quest for the truth. Lonely and war-scarred, Chambers strives for justice and inner strength, while coming to terms with his ill-fated love for Hatsue Miyamoto, the wife of the accused. Evocative and beautifully written, Snow Falling on Cedars won the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award. [via]

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  • Brautigan, Richard: Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel
    Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel
    by Richard Brautigan
    ISBN 0671223313 (0-671-22331-3)
    Hardcover, Simon & Schuster

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  • Morrison, Toni: Song Of Solomon
    Song Of Solomon
    by Toni Morrison
    ISBN 0679445048 (0-679-44504-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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  • Crane, Stephen: Stephen Cranes the Red Badge of Courage
    Stephen Cranes the Red Badge of Courage
    by Stephen Crane
    ISBN 0671006606 (0-671-00660-6)
    Softcover, Monarch Notes

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  • Wideman, John Edgar: The Stories of John Edgar Wideman
    The Stories of John Edgar Wideman
    by John Edgar Wideman
    ISBN 0679407197 (0-679-40719-7)
    Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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  • The Stranger
    by Albert Camus, Matthew Ward
    ISBN 0679420266 (0-679-42026-6)
    Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc

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    Book summary:

    (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

    Albert Camuss spare, laconic masterpiece about a Frenchman who murders an Arab in Algeria is famous for having diagnosed, with a clarity almost scientific, that condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life.

    Possessing both the force of a parable and the excitement of a perfectly executed thriller, The Stranger is the work of one of the most engaged and intellectually alert writers of the past century.

    Translated by Matthew Ward [via]

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  • Thomas Hardy's the Return of the Native
    by Thomas Hardy
    ISBN 0671006185 (0-671-00618-5)
    Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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  • The Voyage Out
    by Virginia Woolf, Michael Cunningham
    ISBN 0679640282 (0-679-64028-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    The Modern Library is proud to include Virginia Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out--together with a new Introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Cunningham. Published to acclaim in England in 1915 and in America five years later, The Voyage Out marks Woolf's beginning as one of the twentieth century's most brilliant and prolific writers.

    Less formally experimental than her later novels, The Voyage Out none-theless clearly lays bare the poetic style and innovative technique--with its multiple figures of consciousness, its detailed portraits of characters' inner lives, and its constant shifting between the quotidian and the profound--that are the signature of Woolf's fiction.

    Rachel Vinrace, Woolf's first heroine, is a motherless young woman who, at twenty-four, embarks on a sea voyage with a party of other English folk to South America. Guileless, and with only a smattering of education, Rachel is taken under the wing of her aunt Helen, who desires to teach Rachel "how to live."Arriving in Santa Marina, a village on the South American coast, Rachel and Helen are introduced to a group of English expatriates. Among them is the young, sensitive Terence Hewet, an aspiring writer, with whom Rachel falls in love. But theirs is ultimately a tale of doomed love, set against a chorus of other stories and other points of view, as the narrative shifts focus between its central and peripheral characters. E. M. Forster praised The Voyage Out as "a book which attains unity as surely as Wuthering Heights, though by a different path."

    This edition includes a new Introduction by Michael Cunningham, bestselling author of The Hours. Cunningham at once unfolds an engaging short essay of Woolf's early life and career, an insightful exploration of the themes to which Woolf returns again and again in her fiction, and a spirited defense of the relevance and lasting importance of her art. Katherine Anne Porter wrote of Woolf: "The world of arts was her native territory; she ranged freely under her own sky, speaking her mother tongue fearlessly." [via]

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  • Warriors Don't Cry
    by Melba Pattillo Beals
    ISBN 0671866397 (0-671-86639-7)
    Softcover, Washington Square Pr

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    Book summary:

    You've gotta learn to defend yourself. Never let your enemy know what you are feeling.

    -- The soldier assigned to protect Melba

    Please, God, let me learn how to stop being a warrior. Sometimes I just need to be a girl.

    -- Melba's diary, on her sixteenth birthday

    In 1957 Melba Pattillo turned sixteen. That was also the year she became a warrior on the front lines of a civil rights firestorm. Following the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling, Brown v. Board Education, she was one of nine teenagers chosen to integrate Little Rock's Central High School. This is her remarkable story.

    You will listen to the cruel taunts of her schoolmates and their parents. You will run with her from the threat of a lynch mob's rope. You will share her terror as she dodges lighted sticks of dynamite, and her pain as she washes away the acid sprayed into her eyes. But most of all you will share Melba's dignity and courage as she refuses to back down. [via]

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  • The Waste Land and Other Writings
    by T. S. Eliot, Mary Karr
    ISBN 0679641017 (0-679-64101-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    First published in 1922, "The Waste Land" is T.S. Eliot's masterpiece, and is not only one of the key works of modernism but also one of the greatest poetic achievements of the twentieth century. A richly allusive pilgrimage of spiritual and psychological torment and redemption, Eliot's poem exerted a revolutionary influence on his contemporaries, summoning forth a rich new poetic language, breaking decisively with Romantic and Victorian poetic traditions. Kenneth Rexroth was not alone in calling Eliot "the representative poet of the time, for the same reason that Shakespeare and Pope were of theirs. He articulated the mind of an epoch in words that seemed its most natural expression."

    As influential as his verse, T.S. Eliot's criticism also exerted a transformative effect on twentieth-century letter, and this new edition of The Waste Land and Other Writings includes a selection of Eliot's most important essays.

    In her new Introduction, Mary Karr dispels some of the myths of the great poem's inaccessibility and sheds fresh light on the ways in which "The Waste Land" illuminates contemporary experience. [via]

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  • White Fang
    by Jack London, Philippe Munch
    ISBN 0670884804 (0-670-88480-4)
    Softcover, Penguin Group USA

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    Book summary:

    Another outstanding title in the acclaimed series described as "a CD-ROM between covers."

    White Fang was written as the companion book to Jack London's classic 1903 runaway bestseller The Call of the Wild. Seen through the eyes of White Fang--who is half dog, half wolf--the story follows the creature as he is forced to endure a series of harsh environments that turn him from his youthful innocence to mad-dog cruelty. That is, until a young man comes along and offers kindness and friendship. But friendship is something that White Fang doesn't understand...yet. White Fang is more than great storytelling. It is a careful study of the effects of our environments in forming who we are. With fascinating details of the Klondike gold rush and North American Indian life, it is also a remarkable snapshot of its time. With striking illustrations and extended captions unique to the Whole Story series, this striking edition provides background information modern readers could otherwise access only through a broad range of supplemental research. This distinctive approach places White Fang--first published in 1906--within the context of its era, bringing it vividly to life. [via]

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  • The Whole Story : White Fang
    by Jack London
    ISBN 0670884790 (0-670-88479-0)
    Hardcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

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    Book summary:

    Another outstanding title in the acclaimed series described as "a CD-ROM between covers."

    White Fang was written as the companion book to Jack London's classic 1903 runaway bestseller The Call of the Wild. Seen through the eyes of White Fang--who is half dog, half wolf--the story follows the creature as he is forced to endure a series of harsh environments that turn him from his youthful innocence to mad-dog cruelty. That is, until a young man comes along and offers kindness and friendship. But friendship is something that White Fang doesn't understand...yet. White Fang is more than great storytelling. It is a careful study of the effects of our environments in forming who we are. With fascinating details of the Klondike gold rush and North American Indian life, it is also a remarkable snapshot of its time. With striking illustrations and extended captions unique to the Whole Story series, this striking edition provides background information modern readers could otherwise access only through a broad range of supplemental research. This distinctive approach places White Fang--first published in 1906--within the context of its era, bringing it vividly to life. [via]

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  • Winesburg, Ohio
    by Sherwood Anderson
    ISBN 0679601465 (0-679-60146-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    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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  • Within a Budding Grove
    by Marcel Proust, C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin
    ISBN 067960006X (0-679-60006-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    First published in 1919, Within a Budding Grove was awarded the Prix Goncourt, bringing the author immediate fame. In this second volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator turns from the childhood reminiscences of Swanns Way to memories of his adolescence. Having gradually become indifferent to Swanns daughter Gilberte, the narrator visits the seaside resort of Balbec with his grandmother and meets a new object of attentionAlbertine, a girl with brilliant, laughing eyes and plump, matt cheeks.

    For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartins acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieffs translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of Á la recherché du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989). [via]

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  • The World According to Garp
    by John Irving
    ISBN 0679603069 (0-679-60306-9)
    Hardcover, Modern Library

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    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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