books tagged “Non-Fiction” (non-fiction / non fiction)

books tagged “Non-Fiction”

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  • Vidal, Gore: 1876 (Modern Library)
    1876 (Modern Library)
    by Gore Vidal
    ISBN 0679602941 (0-679-60294-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Horne, Alistair: The Age of Napoleon
    The Age of Napoleon
    by Alistair Horne
    ISBN 0679642633 (0-679-64263-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Mitchell, Stephen: Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke
    Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke
    by Stephen Mitchell, Rainer Maria Rilke
    ISBN 0679601619 (0-679-60161-9)
    Hardcover, Modern Library

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  • The American Heart Association Cookbook: Recipes Selected, Compiled, and Tested under the Direction of Ruthe Eshleman and Mary Winston ; Illustrations by Tonia Hampson and Lauren Jarrett
    by Mary Winston, American Heart Association, Ruthe Eshleman
    ISBN 0679509038 (0-679-50903-8)
    Hardcover, D. McKay

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    Book summary:

    Heart Healthy recipes from the American Heart Association. [via]

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  • Axel's Castle : A Story of the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930
    by Edmund Wilson
    ISBN 067960233X (0-679-60233-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    If great writers are hard to find, then it's safe to say great literary critics are as rare as wild white tigers who can juggle plates. Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) was one of America's most important critics, and Axel's Castle was the book that put him on the map. Few people outside graduate school read serious literary criticism, but a look into Wilson's intense thought and clear prose makes you wonder why the genre has been neglected. If you're a lover of the Modernist writers--Wilson looks specifically at Joyce, Proust, Yeats, Valery, Eliot, Stein, and Rimbaud here--then you'll enjoy Axel's Castle. [via]

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  • The Balkans: A Short History
    by Mark Mazower
    ISBN 0679640878 (0-679-64087-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Throughout history, the Balkans have been a crossroads, a zone of endless military, cultural and economic mixing and clashing between Europe and Asia, Christianity and Islam, Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Subject to violent shifts of borders, rulers and belief systems at the hands of the world's great empires--from the Byzantine to the Habsburg and Ottoman--the Balkans are often called Europe's tinderbox and a seething cauldron of ethnic and religious resentments.
            
    Much has been made of the Balkans' deeply rooted enmities. The recent destruction of the former Yugoslavia was widely ascribed to millennial hatreds frozen by the Cold War and unleashed with the fall of communism. In this brilliant account, acclaimed historian Mark Mazower argues that such a view is a dangerously unbalanced fantasy. A landmark reassessment, The Balkans rescues the region's history from the various ideological camps that have held it hostage for their own ends, not least the need to justify nonintervention. The heart of the book deals with events from the emergence of the
    nation-state onward. With searing eloquence, Mazower demonstrates that of all the gifts bequeathed to the region by modernity, the most dubious has been the ideological weapon of romantic nationalism that has been used again and again by the power hungry as an acid to dissolve the bonds of centuries of peaceful coexistence. The Balkans is a magnificent depiction of a vitally important region, its history and its prospects. [via]

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  • Jung, C. G.: The Basic Writings of C.G. Jung
    The Basic Writings of C.G. Jung
    by C. G. Jung, Violet S. De Laszlo
    ISBN 067960071X (0-679-60071-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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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 Best and the Brightest
    by David Halberstam, John McCain
    ISBN 0679640991 (0-679-64099-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    David Halberstams masterpiece, the defining history of the making of the Vietnam tragedy, with a new Foreword by Senator John McCain.

    Using portraits of Americas flawed policy makers and accounts of the forces that drove them, The Best and the Brightest reckons magnificently with the most important abiding question of our countrys recent history: Why did America become mired in Vietnam, and why did we lose? As the definitive single-volume answer to that question, this enthralling book has never been superseded. It is an American classic. [via]

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  • Reid, John: The Best Little Boy in the World : 1998 Edition
    The Best Little Boy in the World : 1998 Edition
    by John Reid, Andrew Tobias
    ISBN 067960314X (0-679-60314-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • A Boy's Own Story
    by Edmund White, Allan Gurganus
    ISBN 0679642544 (0-679-64254-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    For more than two decades, Edmund White has been widely recognized as Americas preeminent gay writer. He has a novelists eye for the telling detail or the remarkable phrase and, like Proust himself, concentrates upon the minutiae of the past so that it might live again, wrote The New York Times Book Review. White possesses the rare combination of a po-etic sense of language and an ironic sense of humor, declared Newsweek. [He] is unquestionably the foremost American gay novelist. Commemorating the twentieth anni-versary of A Boys Own Story, this Modern Library edition presents Whites autobiographical novel together with an Introduction by prizewinning novelist Allan Gurganus and a new Afterword by the author himself.

    A Boys Own Story, with equal parts stunning lyricism and unabashed humor, traces a nameless narrators coming-of-age in the 1950s. Struggling with his homosexuality, the narrator seeks the consolations of a fantastic imagination and fills his head with romantic expectations (I believed without a doubt in a better world, which was adulthood or New York or Paris or love.) His distant, divorced parents exacerbate his hunger for emotional connection, and he endures the unhelpful attentions of a priest and a psychoanalyst. In time, he recognizes the need to be loved by the men in his life and, in the surprising conclusion, escapes his childhood forever with one unforgettable act.

    With A Boys Own Story, American literature is larger by one classic novel, wrote The Washington Post Book World. No reader, straight or gay . . . can fail to experience shock after shock of recognition in these pages, and few, I would bet, will be able to withhold a one-to-one sympathy from the unnamed narrator, even when he is being, by the standards of only yesterday, shocking. [via]

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  • Burr
    by Gore Vidal
    ISBN 0679602852 (0-679-60285-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Charles Schuyler is a personal assistant to Aaron Burr, the former Revolutionary War hero, vice president under Jefferson, and infamous slayer of Alexander Hamilton. He's also been employed by a group of political operatives in New York journalism circles to dig up evidence that Burr is the "natural father," as the expression goes, of up-and-coming presidential candidate Martin van Buren. Schuyler's journal entries are a wondrous prose picture of Jacksonian society, while an imagined autobiographical account from Burr provides a similar depiction of the nation's origins. Like all of Vidal's historical fiction, Burr has little use for America's received iconography, and draws upon contemporary sources to puncture the legendary reputations of Washington and Jefferson. There are also marvelous cameo appearances from figures like Washington Irving and Davy Crockett, of whom Schuyler notes, "He is considered a delightful figure. I can't think why." (There's also a substantial subplot in which Schuyler falls in love with a prostitute named Helen Jewett; readers may be interested to learn that she is, in fact, a real historical figure). --Ron Hogan [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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  • The Canterbury Tales
    by Geoffrey Chaucer
    ISBN 0679601252 (0-679-60125-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    On a spring day in April--sometime in the waning years of the 14th century--29 travelers set out for Canterbury on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Thomas Beckett. Among them is a knight, a monk, a prioress, a plowman, a miller, a merchant, a clerk, and an oft-widowed wife from Bath. Travel is arduous and wearing; to maintain their spirits, this band of pilgrims entertains each other with a series of tall tales that span the spectrum of literary genres. Five hundred years later, people are still reading Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. If you haven't yet made the acquaintance of the Franklin, the Pardoner, or the Squire because you never learned Middle English, take heart: this edition of the Tales has been translated into modern idiom.

    From the heroic romance of "The Knight's Tale" to the low farce embodied in the stories of the Miller, the Reeve, and the Merchant, Chaucer treated such universal subjects as love, sex, and death in poetry that is simultaneously witty, insightful, and poignant. The Canterbury Tales is a grand tour of 14th-century English mores and morals--one that modern-day readers will enjoy. [via]

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  • A Christmas Memory, One Christmas, & the Thanksgiving Visitor
    by Truman Capote
    ISBN 0679602372 (0-679-60237-2)
    Hardcover, Modern Library

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    Book summary:

    A Christmas Memory is the classic memoir of Truman Capote's childhood in rural Alabama. Until he was ten years old, Capote lived with distant relatives. This book is an autobiographical story of those years and his frank and fond memories of one of his cousins, Miss Sook Faulk. The text is illustrated with full color illustrations that add greatly to the story without distracting from Capote's poignant prose. [via]

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  • City of God
    by Augustine, Marcus Dods
    ISBN 0679600876 (0-679-60087-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Augustine's City of God, a monumental work of religious lore, philosophy, and history, was written as a kind of literary tombstone for Roman culture. After the sack of Rome, Augustine wrote this book to anatomize the corruption of Romans' pursuit of earthly pleasures: "grasping for praise, open-handed with their money; honest in the pursuit of wealth, they wanted to hoard glory." Augustine contrasts his condemnation of Rome with an exaltation of Christian culture. The glory that Rome failed to attain will only be realized by citizens of the City of God, the Heavenly Jerusalem foreseen in Revelation. Because City of God was written for men of classical learning--custodians of the culture Augustine sought to condemn--it is thick with Ciceronian circumlocutions, and makes many stark contrasts between "Your Virgil" and "Our Scriptures." Even if Augustine's prose strikes modern ears as a bit bombastic, and if his polarized Christian/pagan world is more binary than the one we live in today, his arguments against utopianism and his defense of the richness of Christian culture remain useful and strong. City of God is, as its final words proclaim itself to be, "a giant of a book." --Michael Joseph Gross [via]

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  • The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
    by Jacob Burckhardt
    ISBN 0679601694 (0-679-60169-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Published in 1860, Burckhardts great work redefined our sense of the European past, wholly reinterpreting what has since been known simply as the Italian Renaissance. With unsurpassed erudition, Burckhardt illuminates a world of artistic and cultural ferment, innovation, and discovery; of revived humanism; of fierce tensions between church and empire; and of the birth of both the modern state and the modern individual. The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy remains the single most important and influential account of this crucial moment in the history of the West.


    From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]

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  • Angelou, Maya: THE COLLECTED AUTOBIOGRAPHIES OF MAYA ANGELOU
    The Collected Autobiographies Of Maya Angelou
    by Maya Angelou
    ISBN 0679643257 (0-679-64325-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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  • Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
    by Edgar Allan Poe
    ISBN 0679600078 (0-679-60007-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most original writers in the history of American letters, a genius who was tragically misunderstood in his lifetime. He was a seminal figure in the development of science fiction and the detective story, and exerted a great influence on Dostoyevsky, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, and Charles Baudelaire, who championed him long before Poe was appreciated in his own country. Baudelaire's enthusiasm brought Poe a wide audience in Europe, and his writing came to have enormous importance for modern French literature. This edition includes his most well-known works--"The Raven," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "Annabel Lee," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"--as well as less-familiar stories, poems, and essays. [via]

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  • The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea
    by John Micklethwait, Adrian Wooldridge
    ISBN 0679642498 (0-679-64249-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    From the acclaimed authors of A Future Perfect comes the untold story of how the company became the worlds most powerful institution.

    Like all groundbreaking books, The Company fills a hole we didnt know existed, revealing that we cannot make sense of the past four hundred years until we place that seemingly humble Victorian innovation, the joint-stock company, in the center of the frame.

    With their trademark authority and wit, Economist editors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge reveal the company to be one of historys great catalysts, for good and for ill, a mighty engine for sucking in, recombining, and pumping out money, goods, people, and culture to every corner of the globe. What other earthly invention has the power to grow to any size, and to live to any age? What else could have given us both the stock market and the British Empire? The company man, the company town, and company time? Disneyfication and McDonaldsization, to say nothing of Coca-colonialism? Through its many mutations, the company has always incited controversy, and governments have always fought to rein it in. Today, though Marx may spin in his grave and anarchists riot in the streets, the company exercises an unparalleled influence on the globe, and understanding what this creature is and where it comes from has never been a more pressing matter. To the rescue come these acclaimed authors, with a short volume of truly vast range and insight. [via]

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  • The Complete Poems of John Keats
    by John Keats
    ISBN 0679601082 (0-679-60108-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Illustrated with 10 unique illustrations.

    Contents


    Introduction
    Keats? Poems
    Epistles
    Sonnets
    Poems Published in 1820
    Fragments
    Poems Written At Teignmouth
    Lamia
    Isabella
    Hyperion
    Canto II
    The Cap and Bells
    [via]

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  • Shelley, Percy Bysshe: The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley
    The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley
    by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
    ISBN 0679601112 (0-679-60111-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Count of Monte Cristo
    by Alexandre Dumas
    ISBN 0679601996 (0-679-60199-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    A wonderful children's book filled with great illustrations. [via]

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  • Crime and Punishment
    by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Constance Black Garnett
    ISBN 0679601007 (0-679-60100-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Translated by Constance Garnett, Introduction by Ernest J. Simmons [via]

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  • The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror
    by Bernard Lewis
    ISBN 0679642811 (0-679-64281-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    After the terrorist attacks of September 11, many Americans yearned to understand why Muslim extremists felt such passionate animosity toward the Western world, particularly the United States. Since that historic attack there have been many books and discussions about this very question, but few of them offer such a readable and relevant response as this excellent offering by renowned historian Bernard Lewis (What Went Wrong?). For modern Westerners, Islam is an especially foreign religion and culture to understand. For instance, Westerners typically dismiss things as unimportant when using the expression "thats history." But for those raised in Muslim households, historyeven ancient historyis just as important (if not more important) as the present. And to better understand the hostilities rooted in this historyone could start with recognizing the long-standing resentment the Islamic community harbors from having its homelands torn apart and re-packaged into random political states by occupying Europeans (Westerners). Or stretch back in time to the brutality of the Crusades. Or go straight to the U.S. political meddling in the region throughout the latter 20th century.

    This is not a pity fest for Muslims. Lewis even-handedly explores the sources of Islamic antagonism toward the West while also explaining how a supposedly peace-worshipping religion could be so distorted by violent extremism. He notes that the American way of lifeespecially that of fulfillment through material gain and sexual freedomis a direct threat to Islamic values (which is why night clubsplaces where men and women publicly touch one anotherare targets of bombings). But it is basic Western democracy that especially threatens Islamic extremists, notes Lewis, because within its own community more and more Muslims are coming to value the freedom that political democracy allows. For anyone wanting an intelligent and accessible primer on the Islamic-Western conflict, this is an excellent place to begin. Gail Hudson [via]

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  • Boorstin, Daniel J.: The Daniel J. Boorstin Reader
    The Daniel J. Boorstin Reader
    by Daniel J. Boorstin
    ISBN 0679601651 (0-679-60165-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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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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  • The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Vol. 2 : The History of the Empire from A.D. 395 to 1185
    by Edward Gibbon, J. B. Bury, Gian Battista Piranesi
    ISBN 067960149X (0-679-60149-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    "Gibbon is a kind of bridge that connects the ancient with the modern ages," noted Thomas Carlyle.  "And how gorgeously does it swing across the gloomy and tumultuous chasm of these barbarous centuries."  Indeed, Gibbon, the supreme historian of the Enlightenment--the illustrious scholar who envisioned history as a branch of literature--seemed almost predestined to write his monumental account of the Roman Empire's terrible self-destruction.  "I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion," wrote the author in the famous epigram that summed up his towering achievement in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
    "Gibbon is not merely a master of the pageant and the story; he is also the critic and the historian of the mind," said Virginia Woolf.  "Without his satire, his irreverence, his mixture of sedateness and slyness, of majesty and mobility, and above all that belief in reason which pervades the whole book and gives it unity, an implicit if unspoken message, the Decline and Fall would be the work of another man....We seem as we read him raised above the tumult and the chaos into a clear and rational air."
    The second volume contains chapters twenty-seven through forty-eight of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. [via]

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  • Buddha: The Dhammapada: Verses on the Way
    The Dhammapada: Verses on the Way
    by Buddha, Glenn Wallis
    ISBN 0679643079 (0-679-64307-9)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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  • Diary Of Samuel Pepys: Selected Passages
    by Samuel Pepys, Richard Le Gallienne, Robert Louis Stevenson
    ISBN 0679642218 (0-679-64221-8)
    Hardcover, Modern Library

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    Book summary:

    The diary which Samuel Pepys kept from January 1660 to May 1669 ...is one of our greatest historical records and... a major work of English literature, writes the renowned historian Paul Johnson. A witness to the coronation of Charles II, the Great Plague of 1665, and the Great Fire of 1666, Pepys chronicled the events of his day. Originally written in a cryptic shorthand, Pepys's diary provides an astonishingly frank and diverting account of political intrigues and naval, church, and cultural affairs, as well as a quotidian journal of daily life in London during the Restoration.

    In 1825, when Pepys's memoirs were first published, Francis Jeffrey of The Edinburgh Review declared, "We can scarcely say that we wish it a page shorter... it is very entertaining thus to be transported into the very heart of a time so long gone by; and to be admitted into the domestic intimacy, as well as the public councils of a man of great activity and circulation in the reign of Charles II." Edited and abridged by literary critic and author Richard Le Gallienne, this edition features an Introduction by Robert Louis Stevenson. [via]

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  • Dracula
    by Bram Stoker
    ISBN 0679602291 (0-679-60229-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Of the many admiring reviews Bram Stoker's Dracula received when it first appeared in 1897, the most astute praise came from the author's mother, who wrote her son: "It is splendid. No book since Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein or indeed any other at all has come near yours in originality, or terror."

    A popular bestseller in Victorian England, Stoker's hypnotic tale of the bloodthirsty Count Dracula, whose nocturnal atrocities are symbolic of an evil ages old yet forever new, endures as the quintessential story of suspense and horror. The unbridled lusts and desires, the diabolical cravings that Stoker dramatized with such mythical force, render Dracula resonant and unsettling a century later. [via]

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  • Dubliners
    by James Joyce
    ISBN 0679600493 (0-679-60049-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Dubliners was completed in 1905, but a series of British and Irish publishers and printers found it offensive and immoral, and it was suppressed.  The book finally came out in London in 1914, just as Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man began to appear in the journal Egoist under the auspices of Ezra Pound.  The first three stories in Dubliners might be incidents from a draft of Portrait of the Artist, and many of the characters who figure in Ulysses have their first appearance here, but this is not a book of interest only because of its relationship to Joyce's life and mature work.  It is one of the greatest story collections in the English language--an unflinching, brilliant, often tragic portrait of early twentieth-century Dublin.  The book, which begins and ends with a death, moves from "stories of my childhood" through tales of public life.  Its larger purpose, Joyce said, was as a moral history of Ireland. [via]

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  • Emma
    by Jane Austen
    ISBN 0679601937 (0-679-60193-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Of all Jane Austen's heroines, Emma Woodhouse is the most flawed, the most infuriating, and, in the end, the most endearing. Pride and Prejudice's Lizzie Bennet has more wit and sparkle; Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey more imagination; and Sense and Sensibility's Elinor Dashwood certainly more sense--but Emma is lovable precisely because she is so imperfect. Austen only completed six novels in her lifetime, of which five feature young women whose chances for making a good marriage depend greatly on financial issues, and whose prospects if they fail are rather grim. Emma is the exception: "Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her." One may be tempted to wonder what Austen could possibly find to say about so fortunate a character. The answer is, quite a lot.

    For Emma, raised to think well of herself, has such a high opinion of her own worth that it blinds her to the opinions of others. The story revolves around a comedy of errors: Emma befriends Harriet Smith, a young woman of unknown parentage, and attempts to remake her in her own image. Ignoring the gaping difference in their respective fortunes and stations in life, Emma convinces herself and her friend that Harriet should look as high as Emma herself might for a husband--and she zeroes in on an ambitious vicar as the perfect match. At the same time, she reads too much into a flirtation with Frank Churchill, the newly arrived son of family friends, and thoughtlessly starts a rumor about poor but beautiful Jane Fairfax, the beloved niece of two genteelly impoverished elderly ladies in the village. As Emma's fantastically misguided schemes threaten to surge out of control, the voice of reason is provided by Mr. Knightly, the Woodhouse's longtime friend and neighbor. Though Austen herself described Emma as "a heroine whom no one but myself will much like," she endowed her creation with enough charm to see her through her most egregious behavior, and the saving grace of being able to learn from her mistakes. By the end of the novel Harriet, Frank, and Jane are all properly accounted for, Emma is wiser (though certainly not sadder), and the reader has had the satisfaction of enjoying Jane Austen at the height of her powers. --Alix Wilber [via]

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  • The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill
    by Edwin A. Burtt
    ISBN 0679601317 (0-679-60131-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    The thirteen essays in this Modern Library edition comprise a complete survey of the golden age of English philosophy.  The anthology begins in the early seventeenth century with Francis Bacon's comprehensive program for the total reorganization of all knowledge; it culminates, some two hundred and fifty years later, with John Stuart Mill.  The thinkers represented here are the creators of the twentieth-century world.  Indebted to them is a long line of economists, sociologists, and political leaders whose work has profoundly influenced the life and thought of our own time.  

    Included are the excerpts from Francis Bacon's The Great Instauration, Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, Jeremy Bentham's An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, and John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.  The complete texts are provided for Locke's second "Treatise of Government", George Berkeley's "Treatise Concerning the Principle's of Human Knowledge", David Hume's "Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" and "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion", John Gay's "Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Virtue or Morality", James Mill's "Government", and John Stuart Mill's "Utilitarianism" and "On Liberty".  With an introduction as well as nine biographical prefaces by Edwin A. Burtt. [via]

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  • Beardsley, Monroe C.: The European Philosophers from Descartes to Nietzsche
    The European Philosophers from Descartes to Nietzsche
    by Monroe C. Beardsley
    ISBN 0679600248 (0-679-60024-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory
    by Edward Larson
    ISBN 0679642889 (0-679-64288-9)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    I often said before starting, that I had no doubt I should frequently repent of the whole undertaking. So wrote Charles Darwin aboard The Beagle, bound for the Galapagos Islands and what would arguably become the greatest and most controversial discovery in scientific history. But the theory of evolution did not spring full-blown from the head of Darwin. Since the dawn of humanity, priests, philosophers, and scientists have debated the origin and development of life on earth, and with modern science, that debate shifted into high gear.

    In this lively, deeply erudite work, Pulitzer Prizewinning science historian Edward J. Larson takes us on a guided tour of Darwins dangerous idea, from its theoretical antecedents in the early nineteenth century to the brilliant breakthroughs of Darwin and Wallace, to Watson and Cricks stunning discovery of the DNA double helix, and to the triumphant neo-Darwinian synthesis and rising sociobiology today.

    Along the way, Larson expertly places the scientific upheaval of evolution in cultural perspective: the social and philosophical earthquake that was the French Revolution; the development, in England, of a laissez-faire capitalism in tune with a Darwinian ethos of survival of the fittest; the emergence of Social Darwinism and the dark science of eugenics against a backdrop of industrial revolution; the American Christian backlash against evolutionism that culminated in the famous Scopes trial; and on to todays world, where religious fundamentalists litigate for the right to teach creation science alongside evolution in U.S. public schools, even as the theory itself continues to evolve in new and surprising directions.

    Throughout, Larson trains his spotlight on the lives and careers of the scientists, explorers, and eccentrics whose collaborations and competitions have driven the theory of evolution forward. Here are portraits of Cuvier, Lamarck, Darwin, Wallace, Haeckel, Galton, Huxley, Mendel, Morgan, Fisher, Dobzhansky, Watson and Crick, W. D. Hamilton, E. O. Wilson, and many others. Celebrated as one of mankinds crowning scientific achievements and reviled as a threat to our deepest values, the theory of evolution has utterly transformed our view of life, religion, origins, and the theory itself, and remains controversial, especially in the United States (where 90% of adults do not subscribe to the full Darwinian vision). Replete with fresh material and new insights, Evolution will educate and inform while taking readers on a fascinating journey of discovery. [via]

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  • Baldwin, James: The Fire Next Time
    The Fire Next Time
    by James Baldwin
    ISBN 0679601511 (0-679-60151-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Frankenstein : Or, the Modern Prometheus
    by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
    ISBN 0679600590 (0-679-60059-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Frankenstein, loved by many decades of readers and praised by such eminent literary critics as Harold Bloom, seems hardly to need a recommendation. If you haven't read it recently, though, you may not remember the sweeping force of the prose, the grotesque, surreal imagery, and the multilayered doppelgänger themes of Mary Shelley's masterpiece. As fantasy writer Jane Yolen writes of this (the reviewer's favorite) edition, "The strong black and whites of the main text [illustrations] are dark and brooding, with unremitting shadows and stark contrasts. But the central conversation with the monster--who owes nothing to the overused movie image & but is rather the novel's charnel-house composite--is where [Barry] Moser's illustrations show their greatest power ... The viewer can all but smell the powerful stench of the monster's breath as its words spill out across the page. Strong book-making for one of the world's strongest and most remarkable books." Includes an illuminating afterword by Joyce Carol Oates. [via]

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  • Sturmer, Michael: The German Empire, 1870-1918
    The German Empire, 1870-1918
    by Michael Sturmer
    ISBN 0679640908 (0-679-64090-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Go Tell It on the Mountain
    by James Baldwin
    ISBN 0679601546 (0-679-60154-6)
    Hardcover, Modern Library

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    First published in 1953 when James Baldwin was nearly 30, Go Tell It on the Mountain is a young man's novel, as tightly coiled as a new spring, yet tempered by a maturing man's confidence and empathy. It's not a long book, and its action spans but a single day--yet the author packs in enough emotion, detail, and intimate revelation to make his story feel like a mid-20th-century epic. Using as a frame the spiritual and moral awakening of 14-year-old John Grimes during a Saturday night service in a Harlem storefront church, Baldwin lays bare the secrets of a tormented black family during the depression. John's parents, praying beside him, both wrestle with the ghosts of their sinful pasts--Gabriel, a preacher of towering hypocrisy, fathered an illegitimate child during his first marriage down South and refused to recognize his doomed bastard son; Elizabeth fell in love with a charming, free-spirited young man, followed him to New York, became pregnant with his son, and lost him before she could reveal her condition.

    Baldwin lays down the terrible symmetries of these two blighted lives as the ironic context for John's dark night of the soul. When day dawns, John believes himself saved, but his creator makes it clear that this salvation arises as much from blindness as revelation: "He was filled with a joy, a joy unspeakable, whose roots, though he would not trace them on this new day of his life, were nourished by the wellspring of a despair not yet discovered."

    Though it was hailed at publication for its groundbreaking use of black idiom, what is most striking about Go Tell It on the Mountain today is its structure and its scope. In peeling back the layers of these damaged lives, Baldwin dramatizes the story of the great black migration from rural South to urban North. "Behind them was the darkness," Baldwin writes of Gabriel and Elizabeth's lost generation, "nothing but the darkness, and all around them destruction, and before them nothing but the fire--a bastard people, far from God, singing and crying in the wilderness!" This is Baldwin's music--a music in which rhapsody is rooted anguish--and there is none finer in American literature. --David Laskin [via]

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  • Guadalcanal Diary
    by Richard Tregaskis, Mark Bowden
    ISBN 0679640231 (0-679-64023-1)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    In the summer and fall of 1942, American Marines landed on the South Pacific island of Guadalcanal and began the slow, bloody work of defeating the Japanese empire. Their landing was significant not only for the outcome of World War II, but also for the conduct of war ever since, for the invasion of Guadalcanal marked the first time that a combined air, sea, and land assault had ever been attempted. It is for that reason that tacticians and military historians study the months-long battle today, and their primary guide to that conflict is Richard Tregaskis's extraordinary Guadalcanal Diary.

    A volunteer combat correspondent, Tregaskis braved much danger to bring the story of the fighting to American readers. But he was not one to celebrate his own exploits, and in the pages of his book, he centers on the brave young men from all over the United States who fought and died in appalling numbers. His attention to detail yields arresting descriptions of attacks and counterattacks, of moments of low morale and of exaltation, of moments of quiet behind the lines and of sheer terror at the very point of engagement. Tregaskis's style is unadorned and matter-of-fact, and his present-tense narrative places the reader in the thick of the battle during those "hopeless weeks."

    The direct literary ancestor of books of military reportage such as Mark Bowden's Black Hawk Down and Michael Herr's Dispatches, Guadalcanal Diary is an exemplary work of journalism, and as vivid a portrait of men under fire as has ever been committed to print. --Gregory McNamee [via]

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  • The Hunchback of Notre Dame
    by Victor Hugo, Catherine Liu, Elizabeth McCracken
    ISBN 0679642579 (0-679-64257-9)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    The story and characters in Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame  have resonated with succeeding generations since its publication in 1831. It has tempted filmmakers, and most recently animators, who have exploited its dramatic content to good effect but have inevitably lost some of the grays that make the original text so compelling.
       From Victor Hugo's flamboyant imagination came Quasimodo, the grotesque bell ringer; La Esmeralda, the sensuous gypsy dancer; and the haunted archdeacon Claude Frollo. Hugo set his epic tale in the Paris of 1482 under Louis XI and meticulously re-created the
    day-to-day life of its highest and lowest inhabitants. Written at a time of perennial political upheaval in France, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame  is the product of an emerging democratic sensibility and prefigures the teeming masterpiece Les Misérables, which Hugo would write thirty years later.
       He made the cathedral the centerpiece of the novel and called it Notre-Dame de Paris. (It received its popular English title at the time of its second translation in 1833.) Hugo wrote that his inspiration came from a carving of the word "fatality" in Greek that he had found in the cathedral. The inscription had been eradicated by the time the book was published, and Hugo feared that Notre-Dame's Gothic splendor might soon be lost to the contemporary fad for tearing down old buildings. Notre-Dame has survived as one of the great monuments of Paris, and Hugo's novel is a fitting celebration of it, a popular classic that is proving to be just as enduring.

    The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foun-dation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hard-bound editions of important works of liter-ature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau-gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.




    Jacket paintings: (front) detail from Notre Dame  by Paul Lecomte, courtesy of David David Gallery/SuperStock; (spine) Victor Hugo, 1833, by Louis Boulanger of Giraudon/Art Resource, N.Y. [via]

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  • Roosevelt, Theodore: Hunting Trips of a Ranchman and the Wilderness Hunter : Sketches of Sport on the Northern Cattle Plains; and the Wilderness Hunter: an Account of the Big Game of the United States and Its Chase with Horse, Hound, and Rifle
    Hunting Trips of a Ranchman and the Wilderness Hunter : Sketches of Sport on the Northern Cattle Plains; and the Wilderness Hunter: an Account of the Big Game of the United States and Its Chase with Horse, Hound, and Rifle
    by Theodore Roosevelt, Stephen E. Ambrose
    ISBN 0679602348 (0-679-60234-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Ideas and Opinions
    by Albert Einstein, Alan Lightman
    ISBN 0679601058 (0-679-60105-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    A new edition of the most definitive collection of Albert Einstein's popular writings, gathered under the supervision of Einstein himself. The selections range from his earliest days as a theoretical physicist to his death in 1955; from such subjects as relativity, nuclear war or peace, and religion and science, to human rights, economics, and government. [via]

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  • Introduction to Aristotle
    by Richard P. McKeon, Aristotle
    ISBN 0679600272 (0-679-60027-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Includes the complete Posterior Analytics, De Anima, Nichomachean, Ethics, and Poetics with selections from Physics, Metaphysics, and Politics [via]

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  • Buruma, Ian: Inventing Japan : 1853-1964
    Inventing Japan : 1853-1964
    by Ian Buruma
    ISBN 0679640851 (0-679-64085-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Mitchell, Joseph: Joe Gould's Secret
    Joe Gould's Secret
    by Joseph Mitchell
    ISBN 0679601848 (0-679-60184-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Joseph Ferdinand Gould--better known as Joe Gould--was a member of one of the oldest families in Massachusetts and a graduate of Harvard, and his parents took it for granted that he would go on to medical school and become a surgeon and a distinguished civic leader, as many of his ancestors, including his father and grandfather, had. Instead, in 1916, in his middle twenties, he abruptly broke with his background and went to New York City and spent the next forty years living from hand to mouth in Greenwich Village as a kind of half outcast, half bohemian. He panhandled in Village hangouts, wore cast-off clothes, slept in flophouses or doorways, and often went hungry for days at a time. He said that he lived this way so that he could wander around the city at will, listening to people and writing down some of the astonishing things he heard them say. He had become obsessed with the idea that talk is history and that even offhand remarks may have eerie and prophetic historical import. He wrote in dime-store composition books, filling hundreds of them, and said that these books, when eventually joined together, would become an enormous book (a dozen times longer than the Bible, he estimated) that would be called An Oral History of Our Time. (Historians at Columbia University have given Gould credit for originating the term "oral history.")
            
    In 1942, Joseph Mitchell, impressed by Gould's concept, wrote a profile of him for The New Yorker. Twenty-two years later, some time after Gould's death, he wrote another profile of him, and the two have been combined in Joe Gould's Secret. "When I found out Gould's secret," Mitchell said, "I was appalled, but I soon regained my respect for him, and through the years my respect has grown, though I must confess that he is still an enigma to me. Nowadays, in fact, when his name comes into my mind, it is followed instantly by another name--the name of Bartleby the Scrivener--and then I invariably recall Bartleby's haunting, horrifyingly lonely remark 'I would prefer not to.' " [via]

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  • Leaves of Grass
    by Walt Whitman
    ISBN 0679600760 (0-679-60076-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Abraham Lincoln read it with approval, but Emily Dickinson described its bold language and themes as "disgraceful." Ralph Waldo Emerson found it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet produced." Published at the author's expense on July 4, 1855, Leaves of Grass inaugurated a new voice and style into American letters and gave expression to an optimistic, bombastic vision that took the nation as its subject. Unlike many other editions of Leaves of Grass, which reproduce various short, early versions, this Modern Library Paperback Classics "Death-bed" edition presents everything Whitman wrote in its final form, and includes newly commissioned notes.


    From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]

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  • Letters to a Young Poet
    by Stephen Mitchell, Rainer Maria Rilke
    ISBN 0679642323 (0-679-64232-3)
    Hardcover, Modern Library

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    Book summary:

    Rilkes Letters to a Young Poet are arguably the most famous and beloved letters of the twentieth century. Written when the poet was himself still a young man, with most of his greatest work before him, they were addressed to a student who had sent Rilke some of his own writing, asking for advice on becoming a writer. The two never met, but over a period of several years Rilke wrote him these ten letters, which have been cherished by hundreds of thousands of readers for what Stephen Mitchell calls in his Foreword the "vibrant and deeply felt experience of life" that informs them. Eloquent and personal, Rilkes meditations on the creative process, the nature of love, the wisdom of children, and the importance of solitude offer a wealth of spiritual and practical guidance for anyone. At the same time, this collection, in Stephen Mitchells definitive translation, reveals the thoughts and feelings of one of the greatest poets and most distinctive sensibilities of the twentieth century. [via]

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  • Lincoln, Abraham: The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln
    The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln
    by Abraham Lincoln, Allan Nevins, Philip Van Doren Stern
    ISBN 0679603298 (0-679-60329-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Life on the Mississippi
    by Mark Twain
    ISBN 0679600957 (0-679-60095-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Fashioned from the same experiences that would inspire the masterpiece Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twains most brilliant and most personal nonfiction work. It is at once an affectionate evocation of the vital river life in the steamboat era and a melancholy reminiscence of its passing after the Civil War, a priceless collection of humorous anecdotes and folktales, and a unique glimpse into Twains life before he began to write.

    Written in a prose style that has been hailed as among the greatest in English literature, Life on the Mississippi established Twain as not only the most popular humorist of his time but also Americas most profound chronicler of the human comedy.


    From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]

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  • Lincoln
    by Gore Vidal
    ISBN 0679600485 (0-679-60048-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Lincoln is a masterwork of historical fiction, in which Gore Vidal combines a comprehensive knowledge of Civil War America with 20th-century literary technique, probing the minds and motives of the men surrounding Abraham Lincoln, including personal secretary John Hay and scheming cabinet members William Seward and Salmon P. Chase, as well as his wife, Mary Todd. It is a book monumental in scope that never loses sight of the intimate and personal in its depiction of the power struggles that accompanied Lincoln's efforts to preserve the Union at all costs--efforts in which the eradication of slavery was far from the president's main objective. As usual, there's plenty of room for Vidal's wickedly humorous deflation of American icons, including a comic interlude in a Washington bordello in which Lincoln's former law partner informs Hay that Lincoln had contracted syphilis as a young man and had, just before marrying Mary Todd, suffered what can only be described as a nervous breakdown. (Protestors should note that Vidal is only passing along what that former partner had written in his own biography of Lincoln.) Don't be intimidated by the size of Lincoln; if you like historical fiction, you should read this book at the first opportunity. --Ron Hogan [via]

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  • Ellison, Ralph: Living with Music : Ralph Ellison's Jazz Writings
    Living with Music : Ralph Ellison's Jazz Writings
    by Ralph Ellison, Robert G. O'Meally, Wynton Marsalis
    ISBN 0679640347 (0-679-64034-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Twain, Mark: Mark Twain's Library of Humor
    Mark Twain's Library of Humor
    by Mark Twain, Roy Blount, E.W. Kemble, Steve Martin
    ISBN 0679640363 (0-679-64036-3)
    Softcover, Modern Library

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  • Moby Dick Or, the Whale
    by Herman Melville, Rockwell Kent
    ISBN 0679600108 (0-679-60010-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Avec Moby Dick, Melville a donné naissance à un livre-culte et inscrit dans la mémoire des hommes un nouveau mythe : celui de la baleine blanche. Fort de son expérience de marin, qui a nourri ses romans précédents et lui a assuré le succès, l'écrivain américain, alors en pleine maturité, raconte la folle quête du capitaine Achab et sa dernière rencontre avec le grand cachalot. Véritable encyclopédie de la mer, nouvelle Bible aux accents prophétiques, parabole chargée de thèmes universels, Moby Dick n'en reste pas moins construit avec une savante maîtrise, maintenant un suspense lent, qui s'accélère peu à peu jusqu'à l'apocalypse finale. L'écriture de Melville, infiniment libre et audacieuse, tour à tour balancée, puis hachée au rythme des houles, des vents et des passions humaines, est d'une richesse exceptionnelle. Il faut remonter à Shakespeare pour trouver l'exemple d'une langue aussi inventive, d'une poésie aussi grandiose. --Scarbo [via]

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  • Moby-Dick
    by Herman Melville
    ISBN 0679602909 (0-679-60290-9)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Avec Moby Dick, Melville a donné naissance à un livre-culte et inscrit dans la mémoire des hommes un nouveau mythe : celui de la baleine blanche. Fort de son expérience de marin, qui a nourri ses romans précédents et lui a assuré le succès, l'écrivain américain, alors en pleine maturité, raconte la folle quête du capitaine Achab et sa dernière rencontre avec le grand cachalot. Véritable encyclopédie de la mer, nouvelle Bible aux accents prophétiques, parabole chargée de thèmes universels, Moby Dick n'en reste pas moins construit avec une savante maîtrise, maintenant un suspense lent, qui s'accélère peu à peu jusqu'à l'apocalypse finale. L'écriture de Melville, infiniment libre et audacieuse, tour à tour balancée, puis hachée au rythme des houles, des vents et des passions humaines, est d'une richesse exceptionnelle. Il faut remonter à Shakespeare pour trouver l'exemple d'une langue aussi inventive, d'une poésie aussi grandiose. --Scarbo [via]

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  • Most of the Most of S. J. Perelman
    by S. J. Perelman, Steve Martin
    ISBN 0679640371 (0-679-64037-1)
    Softcover, Modern Library

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    Book summary:

    This book includes many of the greatest hits from 1930 to 1958--available only in this edition--by the devastatingly witty Perelman, the leading figure of The New Yorker magazine's golden age of humor and one of the most popular American humorists ever. In these hilarious pieces, the charmingly cranky Perelman turns his scathing attention to books, movies, New York socialites, the newspaper business, country life, travel, Hollywood, the publishing industry, and, last but not least, himself. His self-portrait: "Under a forehead roughly comparable to . . . Piltdown Man are visible a pair of tiny pig eyes, lit up alternately by greed and concupiscence. . . . Before they made S. J. Perelman, they broke the mold." Sophisticated and supremely mischievous, Perelman is an acrobat of language who turns a phrase and then, before the reader has time to finish admiring his agility, turns it again. [via]

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  • The Nature of Economies
    by Jane Jacobs
    ISBN 0679603409 (0-679-60340-9)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Nearly forty years after The Death and Life of Great American Cities forever changed the field of urban studies, Jane Jacobs--one of the few contemporary thinkers whose works will remain in print for generations--brings us a modern classic on economies and ecology. Original and eloquent, this new book looks at the connection between the economy and nature, arguing that the principles of development, common to both systems, are the proper subject of economic study.
            
    The Nature of Economies is written in the form of a Platonic dialogue, a conversation over coffee among five contemporary New Yorkers. The question they discuss is: Does economic life obey the same rules as those governing the systems in nature? For example, can the way fields and forests maximize their intakes and uses of sunlight teach us something about how economies expand wealth and jobs and can do this in environmentally beneficial ways? The underlying question is both simple and profound, and the answers that emerge will shape the way people think about how economies really work.
            
    The New York Times described Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities as "first of all a work of literature." The accessibility of her prose--The New Criterion called it "majestic"--stands as Jacobs's hallmark. She is the rarest of analytic thinkers, both an economic visionary and an artist. Examining complex systems with the wit, style, and clear eye of the masterly essayist, in The Nature of Economies Jacobs once again accomplishes the near impossible: She fundamentally challenges some of the established principles of economics while writing in a style that enthralls the general reader. [via]

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  • Welty, Eudora: On Writing
    On Writing
    by Eudora Welty, Richard Bausch
    ISBN 0679642706 (0-679-64270-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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  • Peoples and Empires : A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, from Greece to the Present
    by Anthony Pagden
    ISBN 0679640967 (0-679-64096-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Peoples and Empires is the story of the great European empires  the Roman, the Spanish, the French, the British  and their colonies, and the back-and-forth between us and them, culture and nature, civilization and barbarism, the center and the periphery. It relates the history of how conquerors justified conquest, and how colonists and colonized changed each other. Its about how we came to think about world divisions the way we do. Written by the man who has been called the worlds foremost historian of human migration, Peoples and Empires will become a seminal work. [via]

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  • Persuasion
    by Jane Austen
    ISBN 0679601910 (0-679-60191-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

    Of all Jane Austens great and delightful novels, Persuasion is widely regarded as the most moving. It is the story of a second chance.

    Anne Elliot, daughter of the snobbish, spendthrift Sir Walter Elliot, is a woman of quiet charm and deep feelings. When she was nineteen, she fell in love withand was engaged toa naval officer, the fearless and headstrong Captain Wentworth. But the young man had no fortune, and Anne allowed herself to be persuaded, against her profoundest instinct, to give him up.Now, at twenty-seven, and believing that she has lost her bloom, Anne is startled to learn that Captain Wentworth has returned to the neighborhood, a rich man and still unwed. Her never-diminished love is muffled by her pride. He seems cold and unforgiving. Even worse, he appears to be infatuated by the flighty and pretty Louisa Musgrove.

    What happens as Anne and Wentworth are thrown together in the social world of Bathand as an eager new suitor appears for Anneis touchingly and wittily told in a masterpiece that is also one of the most entrancing novels in the English language. [via]

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  • Plutarch: Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans
    by A. H. Clough, John Dryden
    ISBN 0679600086 (0-679-60008-6)
    Hardcover, Modern Library

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    Book summary:

    Plutarch's Lives, written at the beginning of the second century A.D., is a brilliant social history of the ancient world by one of the greatest biographers and moralists of all time. In what is by far his most famous and influential work, Plutarch reveals the character and personality of his subjects and how they led ultimately to tragedy or victory. Richly anecdotal and full of detail, Volume I contains profiles and comparisons of Romulus and Theseus, Numa and Lycurgus, Fabius and Pericles, and many more powerful figures of ancient Greece and Rome.

    The present translation, originally published in 1683 in conjunction with a life of Plutarch by John Dryden, was revised in 1864 by the poet and scholar Arthur Hugh Clough, whose notes and preface are also included in this edition.


    From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]

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  • Plutarch's Lives Vol. 2 : The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
    by Arthur Hugh Clough, John Dryden, Plutarch
    ISBN 0679600094 (0-679-60009-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Plutarch's Lives, written at the beginning of the second century A.D., is a brilliant social history of the ancient world by one of the greatest biographers and moralists of all time. In what is by far his most famous and influential work, Plutarch reveals the character and personality of his subjects and how they led ultimately to tragedy or victory. Richly anecdotal and full of detail, Volume I contains profiles and comparisons of Romulus and Theseus, Numa and Lycurgus, Fabius and Pericles, and many more powerful figures of ancient Greece and Rome.

    The present translation, originally published in 1683 in conjunction with a life of Plutarch by John Dryden, was revised in 1864 by the poet and scholar Arthur Hugh Clough, whose notes and preface are also included in this edition.


    From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]

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  • Possession
    by A. S. Byatt
    ISBN 0679640304 (0-679-64030-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as "a gifted observer, able to discern the exact details that bring whole worlds into being" and "a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights," A. S. Byatt writes some of the most engaging and skillful novels of our time. Time magazine calls her "a novelist of dazzling inventiveness."
            
    Possession, for which Byatt won England's prestigious Booker Prize, was praised by critics on both sides of the Atlantic when it was first published in 1990. "On academic rivalry and obsession, Byatt is delicious. On the nature of possessionthe lover by the beloved, the biographer by his subjectshe is profound," said The Sunday Times (London). The New Yorker dubbed it "more fun to read than The Name of the Rose . . . Its prankish verve [and] monstrous richness of detail [make for] a one-woman variety show of literary styles and types." The novel traces a pair of young academicsRoland Michell and Maud Baileyas they uncover a clandestine love affair between two long-dead Victorian poets. Interwoven in a mesmerizing pastiche are love letters and fairytales, extracts from biographies and scholarly accounts, creating a sensuous and utterly delightful novel of ideas and passions.
            
    With an Introduction by the author that describes the novel's origins and its twenty-year gestation, this Modern Library edition is a handsome keepsake for fans of Possessionnew and old alike. [via]

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  • Pritchett, V. S.: The Pritchett Century : A Selection of the Best by V. S. Pritchett
    The Pritchett Century : A Selection of the Best by V. S. Pritchett
    by V. S. Pritchett
    ISBN 0679602445 (0-679-60244-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate : Two Novels
    by Nancy Mitford
    ISBN 0679600906 (0-679-60090-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Few aristocratic English families of the 20th century have enjoyed quite the delicious notoriety that the Mitford sisters courted in the years bracketed by two world wars. For a start, two of the girls, Unity and Diana, were Fascists (the former was a friend of Hitler and Goebbels, and the latter married Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists). Two others took the writing route: Jessica ran away from home and became a famous muckraking journalist, and Nancy composed maliciously witty--and transparently autobiographical--novels as well as several biographies. The Pursuit of Love (1945), her greatest fictional success, and its companion, Love in a Cold Climate (1949), keep closely to the spirit (and details) of their youthful amusements and more grown-up adventures.

    Seen through the adoring eyes of Fanny Logan, the self-effacing cousin who records their shenanigans with a wicked sincerity, the Radletts of Alconleigh shine with Gloucestershire glamour: apoplectic Uncle Matthew; Lord Alconleigh (modeled to a fine nuance after Mitford's father, Lord Redesdale, who like Uncle Matthew used to hunt his children with bloodhounds); his kind, rather vague wife, Aunt Sadie; as well as Fanny's favorite cousin Linda and the other six Radlett children. The Radlett daughters and Fanny wait impatiently for life to become interesting. Because of their station, however, nothing but marriage is expected of them, so they hurl themselves at love like crusaders, with varied and always fascinating results. At one point Fanny recounts:

    A few minutes only after Linda had left me to go back to London, Christian and the comrades, I had another caller. This time it was Lord Merlin...."This is a bad business," he said, abruptly, and without preamble, though I had not seen him for several years. "I'm just back from Rome, and what do I find--Linda and Christian Talbot. It's an extraordinary thing that I can't ever leave England without Linda getting herself mixed up with some thoroughly undesirable character. This is a disaster--how far has it gone? Can nothing be done?"
    The Pursuit of Love follows the romantic fortunes of Linda Radlett, while Love in a Cold Climate ventures further afield with the story of Polly Hampton's shocking love affair and its unexpectedly funny aftermath. Fanny's inexhaustible narration is a pleasant buffer for Mitford's deft teasing, which dances along just this side of mockery. The author of U and Non-U, a famous tongue-in-cheek treatise on the shibboleths of upper-class mores, Mitford often leaves the reader wondering just where she stands in the class wars, and much of her humor arises in the fine distinctions of aristocratic manners and speech. Still, there's an inimitable tart sweetness to these stories of true love and its pallid imitators, making them perfect snapshots of a vanished world. --Barrie Trinkle [via]

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  • Rimbaud, Arthur: Rimbaud Complete
    Rimbaud Complete
    by Arthur Rimbaud, Wyatt Mason
    ISBN 0679642307 (0-679-64230-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Charyn, Jerome: Savage Shorthand: The Life And Death Of Isaac Babel
    Savage Shorthand: The Life And Death Of Isaac Babel
    by Jerome Charyn
    ISBN 0679643060 (0-679-64306-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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  • Bulloch, James D.: The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe: Or How the Confederate Cruisers Were Equipped
    The Secret Service of the Confederate States in Europe: Or How the Confederate Cruisers Were Equipped
    by James D. Bulloch, Philip Van Doren Stern
    ISBN 0679640223 (0-679-64022-3)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Modern Library Staff: The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson
    The Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson
    by Modern Library Staff, Emily Dickinson
    ISBN 0679602011 (0-679-60201-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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  • Siddhartha
    by Hermann Hesse, Susan Bernofsky, Tom Robbins
    ISBN 0679643362 (0-679-64336-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Hermann Hesses classic novel Siddhartha has delighted, inspired, and influenced generations of readers, writers, and thinkers. Though set in a place and time far removed from the Germany of 1922, the year of the books debut, the novel is infused with the sensibilities of Hesses time, synthesizing disparate philosophiesEastern religions, Jungian archetypes, Western individualisminto a unique vision of life as expressed through one mans search for meaning.

    It is the story of the quest of Siddhartha, a wealthy Indian Brahmin who casts off a life of privilege and comfort to seek spiritual fulfillment and wisdom. On his journey, Siddhartha encounters wandering ascetics, Buddhist monks, and successful merchants, as well as a courtesan named Kamala and a simple ferryman who has attained enlightenment. Traveling among these people and experiencing lifes vital passageslove, work, friendship, and fatherhoodSiddhartha discovers that true knowledge is guided from within.

    Susan Bernofskys magnificent new translation brings out Hesses inspired lyricism and his elegant, melodious cadences, illuminating the novels universal themes and timeless wisdom about the human condition.

    This original Modern Library edition includes a lively new Introduction by Tom Robbins and a glossary of Indian terms. [via]

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  • The Souls of Black Folk
    by W. E. B. Du Bois
    ISBN 0679601872 (0-679-60187-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963) is the greatest of African American intellectuals--a sociologist, historian, novelist, and activist whose astounding career spanned the nation's history from Reconstruction to the civil rights movement. Born in Massachusetts and educated at Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin, Du Bois penned his epochal masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk, in 1903. It remains his most studied and popular work; its insights into Negro life at the turn of the 20th century still ring true.

    With a dash of the Victorian and Enlightenment influences that peppered his impassioned yet formal prose, the book's largely autobiographical chapters take the reader through the momentous and moody maze of Afro-American life after the Emancipation Proclamation: from poverty, the neoslavery of the sharecropper, illiteracy, miseducation, and lynching, to the heights of humanity reached by the spiritual "sorrow songs" that birthed gospel and the blues. The most memorable passages are contained in "On Booker T. Washington and Others," where Du Bois criticizes his famous contemporary's rejection of higher education and accommodationist stance toward white racism: "Mr. Washington's programme practically accepts the alleged inferiority of the Negro races," he writes, further complaining that Washington's thinking "withdraws many of the high demands of Negroes as men and American citizens." The capstone of The Souls of Black Folk, though, is Du Bois' haunting, eloquent description of the concept of the black psyche's "double consciousness," which he described as "a peculiar sensation.... One ever feels this twoness--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." Thanks to W.E.B. Du Bois' commitment and foresight--and the intellectual excellence expressed in this timeless literary gem--black Americans can today look in the mirror and rejoice in their beautiful black, brown, and beige reflections. --Eugene Holley Jr. [via]

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  • The Sound and the Fury
    by William Faulkner
    ISBN 0679600175 (0-679-60017-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    The ostensible subject of The Sound and the Fury is the dissolution of the Compsons, one of those august old Mississippi families that fell on hard times and wild eccentricity after the Civil War. But in fact what William Faulkner is really after in his legendary novel is the kaleidoscope of consciousness--the overwrought mind caught in the act of thought. His rich, dark, scandal-ridden story of squandered fortune, incest (in thought if not in deed), madness, congenital brain damage, theft, illegitimacy, and stoic endurance is told in the interior voices of three Compson brothers: first Benjy, the "idiot" man-child who blurs together three decades of inchoate sensations as he stalks the fringes of the family's former pasture; next Quentin, torturing himself brilliantly, obsessively over Caddy's lost virginity and his own failure to recover the family's honor as he wanders around the seedy fringes of Boston; and finally Jason, heartless, shrewd, sneaking, nursing a perpetual sense of injury and outrage against his outrageous family.

    If Benjy's section is the most daringly experimental, Jason's is the most harrowing. "Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say," he begins, lacing into Caddy's illegitimate daughter, and then proceeds to hurl mud at blacks, Jews, his sacred Compson ancestors, his glamorous, promiscuous sister, his doomed brother Quentin, his ailing mother, and the long-suffering black servant Dilsey who holds the family together by sheer force of character.

    Notoriously "difficult," The Sound and the Fury is actually one of Faulkner's more accessible works once you get past the abrupt, unannounced time shifts--and certainly the most powerful emotionally. Everything is here: the complex equilibrium of pre-civil rights race relations; the conflict between Yankee capitalism and Southern agrarian values; a meditation on time, consciousness, and Western philosophy. And all of it is rendered in prose so gorgeous it can take your breath away. Here, for instance, Quentin recalls an autumnal encounter back home with the old black possum hunter Uncle Louis:

    And we'd sit in the dry leaves that whispered a little with the slow respiration of our waiting and with the slow breathing of the earth and the windless October, the rank smell of the lantern fouling the brittle air, listening to the dogs and to the echo of Louis' voice dying away. He never raised it, yet on a still night we have heard it from our front porch. When he called the dogs in he sounded just like the horn he carried slung on his shoulder and never used, but clearer, mellower, as though his voice were a part of darkness and silence, coiling out of it, coiling into it again. WhoOoooo. WhoOoooo. WhoOooooooooooooooo.
    What Faulkner has created is a modernist epic in which characters assume the stature of gods and the primal family events resonate like myths. It is The Sound and the Fury that secures his place in what Edmund Wilson called "the full-dressed post-Flaubert group of Conrad, Joyce, and Proust." --David Laskin [via]

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  • The Story of My Life : The Restored Edition
    by Helen Keller, James Berger
    ISBN 0679642870 (0-679-64287-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    THE 100th YEAR ANNIVERSARY EDITION

    The Story of My Life, a remarkable account of overcoming the debilitating challenges of being both deaf and blind, has become an international classic, making Helen Keller one of the most well-known, inspirational figures in history. Originally published in 1903, Kellers fascinating memoir narrates the events of her life up to her third year at Radcliffe College.

    Helen Kellers story of struggle and achievement is one of unquenchable hope. From tales of her difficult early days, to details of her relationship with her beloved teacher Anne Sullivan, to her impressions of academic life, Kellers honest, straightforward writing lends insight into an amazing mind. Like the original, this centenary edition of The Story of My Life includes letters Keller wrote to friends throughout her childhood and adolescence that chronicle her intellectual and sensory progression, as well as assistant John Macys commentary on her interpretations of her surroundings.

    In addition to reprinting Kellers long-lost original work, this edition contains excerpts from her little-known, deeply personal memoir The World We Live In, which give readers a detailed look into an otherwise unimaginable existence, as well as an excerpt from Out of the Dark, a political commentary Keller wrote during her years as a socialist.

    Deftly edited and prefaced by scholar James Berger, this comprehensive anniversary edition celebrates a century of readers enthrallment with one of the most powerful figures in history. [via]

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  • This Side of Paradise
    by F. Scott Fitzgerald
    ISBN 0679602062 (0-679-60206-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Fitzgerald's first novel, reprinted in the handsome Everyman's Library series of literary classic, uses numerous formal experiments to tell the story of Amory Blaine, as he grows up during the crazy years following the First World War. It also contains a new introduction by Craig Raine that describes critical and popular reception of the book when it came out in 1920. [via]

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  • The Thurber Carnival
    by James Thurber
    ISBN 0679600892 (0-679-60089-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    After the chuckles and amidst the chortles, the first-time reader of The Thurber Carnival is bound to utter a discreetly voiced "Huh?" Like Cracker Jacks, there are surprises inside James Thurber's delicious 1945 smorgasbord of essays, stories, and sketches. This festival is, surprises and all, a collection of earlier collections (mostly), including, among others, gems from My World--and Welcome to It, Let Your Mind Alone!, and The Middle Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze. Needless to say, there are also numerous cartoons that, by themselves, are worth the price of admission. While redoubling Thurber's deserved reputation as a laugh-out-loud humorist and teller-of-gentle-tales, it reintroduces him as a thinker-of-thoughts. To wit: his 1933 "Preface to a Life," in which he observes himself while discussing "writers of light pieces running from a thousand to two thousand words":

    To call such persons "humorists," a loose-fitting and ugly word, is to miss the nature of their dilemma and the dilemma of their nature. The little wheels of their invention are set in motion by the damp hand of melancholy.
    Enjoy the surprises, certainly, but revel in the candy-coated popcorn and peanuts. As in "More Alarms at Night," in which a teenaged Thurber intrudes upon his sleeping father, a skittish man named Charles, because he can't recall the name Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Coincidentally, his father has just been frightened half to death by Thurber's brother, who had earlier stalked into his room saying coldly, "Buck, your time has come."
    "Listen," I said. "Name some towns in New Jersey quick!" It must have been around three in the morning. Father got up, keeping the bed between him and me, and started to pull his trousers on. "Don't bother about dressing," I said. "Just name some towns in New Jersey." While he hastily pulled on his clothes--I remember he left his socks off and put his shoes on his bare feet--father began to name, in a shaky voice, various New Jersey cities. I can still see him reaching for his coat without taking his eyes off me. "Newark," he said, "Jersey City, Atlantic City, Elizabeth, Paterson, Passaic, Trenton, Jersey City, Trenton, Paterson--" "It has two names," I snapped. "Elizabeth and Paterson," he said.
    Of course, things turn out fine, as well they should. And why not? The best of Thurber, which The Thurber Carnival arguably is, is sublime; surprising insight and wry observations tossed lightly and served constantly with effortless good humor and an obvious love for all things gently eccentric. --Michael Hudson [via]

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  • Tom Jones
    by Henry Fielding
    ISBN 0679601260 (0-679-60126-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    One of the great comic novels in the English language, Tom Jones was an instant success when it was published in 1749: Ten thousand copies were sold in its first year. A foundling, Tom is discovered one evening by the benevolent Squire Allworthy and his sister Bridget and brought up as a son in their household until it is time for him to set out in search of both his fortune and his true identity.

    Amorous, high-spirited, and filled with what Fielding called "the glorious lust of doing good" but with a tendency toward dissolution, Tom Jones is one of the first characters in fiction to display legitimate sides of human virtue and vice. "Upon my word, I think Tom Jones is one of the most perfect plots ever planned," said Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

    Now, Tom Jones has been brought to television in a magnificent new co-production from A&E Network and BBC television. Max Beesley stars as Tom, with Samantha Morton (who appeared in A&E's Emma and Jane Eyre) as Sophia. The cast also includes Benjamin Whitrow, Brian Blessed, Frances De La Tour, and John Sessions. Tom Jones is directed by Metin Huseyin, produced by Suzan Harrison, with a screenplay by Simon Burke.

    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 hard-bound 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 inau-gurating 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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  • Ulysses
    by James Joyce
    ISBN 0679600116 (0-679-60011-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and unreadable. In a famous 1933 court decision, Judge John M. Woolsey declared it an emetic book--although he found it sufficiently unobscene to allow its importation into the United States--and Virginia Woolf was moved to decry James Joyce's "cloacal obsession." None of these adjectives, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in a close-focus sort of way) suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book. Even the verbal vaudeville of the final chapters can be navigated with relative ease, as long as you're willing to be buffeted, tickled, challenged, and (occasionally) vexed by Joyce's sheer command of the English language.

    Among other things, a novel is simply a long story, and the first question about any story is: What happens?. In the case of Ulysses, the answer might be Everything. William Blake, one of literature's sublime myopics, saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of indelible Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets, argue, and (in Bloom's case) masturbate. And thanks to the book's stream-of-consciousness technique--which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river--we're privy to their thoughts, emotions, and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordian folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism.

    Both characters add their glorious intonations to the music of Joyce's prose. Dedalus's accent--that of a freelance aesthetician, who dabbles here and there in what we might call Early Yeats Lite--will be familiar to readers of Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man. But Bloom's wistful sensualism (and naive curiosity) is something else entirely. Seen through his eyes, a rundown corner of a Dublin graveyard is a figure for hope and hopelessness, mortality and dogged survival: "Mr Bloom walked unheeded along his grove by saddened angels, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes, old Ireland's hearts and hands. More sensible to spend the money on some charity for the living. Pray for the repose of the soul of. Does anybody really?" --James Marcus [via]

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  • Varieties of Religious Experience
    by William James
    ISBN 0679640118 (0-679-64011-8)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    "I am neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in the history of religions, nor an anthropologist. Psychology is the only branch of learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist the religious propensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution. It would seem, therefore, as a psychologist, the natural thing for me would be to invite you to a descriptive survey of those religious propensities."

    When William James went to the University of Edinburgh in 1901 to deliver a series of lectures on "natural religion," he defined religion as "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." Considering religion, then, not as it is defined by--or takes place in--the churches, but as it is felt in everyday life, he undertook a project that, upon completion, stands not only as one of the most important texts on psychology ever written, not only as a vitally serious contemplation of spirituality, but for many critics one of the best works of nonfiction written in the 20th century. Reading The Varieties of Religious Experience, it is easy to see why. Applying his analytic clarity to religious accounts from a variety of sources, James elaborates a pluralistic framework in which "the divine can mean no single quality, it must mean a group of qualities, by being champions of which in alternation, different men may all find worthy missions." It's an intellectual call for serious religious tolerance--indeed, respect--the vitality of which has not diminished through the subsequent decades. [via]

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  • Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau
    by Henry David Thoreau, Brooks Atkinson
    ISBN 0679600043 (0-679-60004-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    With their call for "simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!, for self-honesty, and for harmony with nature, the writings of Henry David Thoreau are perhaps the most influential philosophical works in all American literature.

    The selections in this volume represent Thoreau at his best. Included in their entirety are Walden, his indisputable masterpiece, and his two great arguments for nonconformity, Civil Disobedience and Life Without Principle. A lifetime of brilliant observation of nature--and of himself--is recorded in selections from A Week On The Concord And Merrimack Rivers, Cape Cod, The Maine Woods and The Journal. [via]

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  • War and Peace
    by Leo Tolstoy, Constance Black Garnett
    ISBN 0679600841 (0-679-60084-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    (Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)

    Three-Volume Boxed Set [via]

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  • Lloyd, Alan: The War in the Trenches
    The War in the Trenches
    by Alan Lloyd
    ISBN 0679507167 (0-679-50716-7)
    Hardcover, D. McKay Co

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  • Seranne, Ann: The Western Junior League Cookbook
    The Western Junior League Cookbook
    by Ann Seranne
    ISBN 0679514546 (0-679-51454-6)
    Hardcover, McKay

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  • William Shakespeare Complete Works
    by William Shakespeare, Eric Rasmusse N, Heloise Senechal
    ISBN 0679642951 (0-679-64295-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    FROM THE WORLD FAMOUS ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY, THE FIRST AUTHORITATIVE, MODERNIZED, AND CORRECTED EDITION OF SHAKESPEARE'S FIRST FOLIO IN THREE CENTURIES.Skillfully assembled by Shakespeare's fellow actors in 1623, the First Folio was the original Complete Works. It is arguably the most important literary work in the English language. But starting with Nicholas Rowe in 1709 and continuing to the present day, Shakespeare editors have mixed Folio and Quarto texts, gradually corrupting the original Complete Works with errors and conflated textual variations.Now Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, two of today's most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, have edited the First Folio as a complete book, resulting in a definitive Complete Works for the twenty-first century.Combining innovative scholarship with brilliant commentary and textual analysis that emphasizes performance history and values, this landmark edition will be indispensable to students, theater professionals, and general readers alike.For more information on this Modern Library edition, visit www.therscshakespeare.com [via]

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  • The Wisdom of Confucius
    by Confucius, Lin Yutang
    ISBN 0679601236 (0-679-60123-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    This book is a reproduction of a volume found in the collection of the University of Michigan Library. It is produced from digital images created through the Library's large-scale digitization efforts. The digital images for this book were cleaned and prepared for printing through automatic processes. Despite the cleaning process, occasional flaws may still be present that were part of the original work itself, or introduced during digitization, including missing pages. [via]

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  • The Writer's Chapbook
    by George Plimpton
    ISBN 0679603158 (0-679-60315-8)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    The first issue of The Paris Review in 1953 included an interview on the craft of writing with E. M. Forster, perhaps the greatest living author of the time. Subsequent issues carried interviews with, among others, François Mauriac, Graham Greene, Irwin Shaw, William Styron, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner; in the intervening years, many of the world's most significant writers (Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, John Updike, and John Dos Passos) sat down with The Paris Review. Many of the interviews have been collected in a series of volumes entitled Writers at Work. From these interviews, The Paris Review's editor, George Plimpton, has selected the best and most illuminating insights that the writers have provided and arranged them by subject rather than by author. The book is divided into four parts: "The Writer: A Profile" (including the sections "On Reading," "On Work Habits," On the Audi-
    ence," etc.); Part II is "Technical Matters" ("On Style," "On Plot," etc.); Part III is "Different Forms" ("On Biography," "On Journalism"); and Part IV is "The Writer's Life," covering topics like conferences, courses, and teaching, along with a section in which writers provided portraits of other writers.
            The Writer's Chapbook is a fund of observations by writers on writing. These range from marvel-
    ous one-liners (Eugene O'Neill on critics: "I love every bone in their heads"; T. S. Eliot on editors: "I suppose some editors are failed writers--but so are most writers") to expositions on plot, character, and the technical process of putting pen to paper and doing it for a living. "I don't even have a plot," says Norman Mailer; Paul Bowles describes writing in bed; Toni Morrison talks about inventing characters; and Edward Albee and Tom Wolfe explain where they discovered the titles for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Bonfire of the Vanities.
            This book is a treasure. But beware: What is true for the Writers at Work series holds for The Writer's Chapbook even more--a reader who picks it up, intending just to dip into it, might not emerge for days. [via]

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