Novels: books tagged “novels” (36/349) @ BookFinder.com

ISBN 9780192806628 (0-19-280662-9, 0192806629)

by Edith Wharton, Stephen Orgel

ISBN 0192806629 (0-19-280662-9)
Softcover, Oxford Univ Pr

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Book summary:

Newland Archer saw little to envy in the marriages of his friends, yet he prided himself that in May Welland he had found the companion of his needs--tender and impressionable, with equal purity of mind and manners. The engagement was announced discreetly, but all of New York society was soon privy to this most perfect match, a union of families and circumstances cemented by affection. Enter Countess Olenska, a woman of quick wit sharpened by experience, not afraid to flout convention and determined to find freedom in divorce. Against his judgment, Newland is drawn to the socially ostracized Ellen Olenska, who opens his eyes and has the power to make him feel. He knows that in sweet-tempered May, he can expect stability and the steadying comfort of duty. But what new worlds could he discover with Ellen? Written with elegance and wry precision, Edith Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece is a tragic love story and a powerful homily about the perils of a perfect marriage. Commentary by William Lyon Phelps and E. M. Forster [via]

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ISBN 9780393059465 (0-393-05946-4, 0393059464)

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The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin

by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Louis Gates, Hollis Robbins, Karen C.C. Dalton

ISBN 0393059464 (0-393-05946-4)
Hardcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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Book summary:

Henry Louis Gates Jr. redefines Uncle Tom's Cabin with this seminal interpretation of the great American novel.

Declared worthless and dehumanizing by James Baldwin in 1949, Uncle Tom's Cabin has lacked literary credibility for fifty years. Now, in a ringing refutation of Baldwin, Henry Louis Gates Jr. demonstrates the literary transcendence of Harriet Beecher Stowe's masterpiece. Uncle Tom's Cabin, first published in 1852, galvanized the American public as no other work of fiction has ever done. The editors animate pre-Civil War life with rich insights into the lives of slaves, abolitionists, and the American reading public. Examining the lingering effects of the novel, they provide new insights into emerging race-relation, women's, gay, and gender issues. With reproductions of rare prints, posters, and photographs, this book is also one of the most thorough anthologies of Uncle Tom images up to the present day. [via]

More editions of The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin:

The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin: ISBN 0393059464 (0-393-05946-4)
Hardcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

ISBN 9780395926840 (0-395-92684-X, 039592684X)

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The Best American Short Stories, 1999

by Amy Tan, Katrina Kenison

ISBN 039592684X (0-395-92684-X)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin

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Book summary:

A great story gets its hooks into you right from the start; you know you're in the hands of a good writer when the very first sentence transports you wholly into another world. "Mother preferred Zulu servants." "It must be, Ruth thought, that she was going to die in the spring." "Who would have thought that a war of such proportions would bother to turn in its fury against the fools of Chelm?"

The 21 fictions featured in The Best American Short Stories 1999 have very little in common--but whether they're about ranchers or commuters, romantic seekers or New Age pilgrims, what they do share is a sense of urgency. In each of them, there's a kind of voice that announces its need to be heard. "I'm not a bad guy," pleads the narrator of "The Sun, the Moon, the Stars," and even though he cheats on his girlfriend, by the end of Junot Díaz's story you might be tempted to agree anyway. (Especially considering the charming way he turns Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener into a verb--as in, "A lot of the time she Bartlebys me, says, 'No, I'd rather not.'") "Real Estate," by that master of bittersweet comedy Lorrie Moore, starts by repeating "Ha! Ha! Ha!" for two solid pages but becomes a rueful take on marriage, house-hunting, and even death: "The body, hauling sadnesses, pursued the soul, hobbled after. The body was like a sweet dim dog trotting lamely toward the gate as you tried slowly to drive off, out the long driveway. Take me, take me too, barked the dog."

Other standouts in this collection include Alice Munro's "Save the Reaper," a kind of "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" where no one is killed or saved; Rick Bass's haunting evocation of winter in the north country, "The Hermit's Story"; and Tim Gautreax's "The Piano Tuner," about a manic-depressive Creole princess playing cocktail piano in a motel lounge. (This is one tale that truly does end with a bang, not a whimper.) Taken together, they are ample evidence that the American short story is alive, well, and eminently able to--in the words of guest editor Amy Tan--"help us live interesting lives." --Chloe Byrne [via]

More editions of The Best American Short Stories, 1999:

The Best American Short Stories, 1999: ISBN 039592684X (0-395-92684-X)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin

ISBN 9780375700750 (0-375-70075-7, 0375700757)

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Cold Mountain

by Charles Frazier

ISBN 0375700757 (0-375-70075-7)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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Book summary:

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE

One of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain is a masterpiece that is at once an enthralling adventure, a stirring love story, and a luminous evocation of a vanished American in all its savagery, solitude, and splendor.

Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, Inman, a Confederate soldier, decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains and to Ada, the woman he loved there years before. His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. At the same time, Ada is trying to revive her father's derelict farm and learn to survive in a world where the old certainties have been swept away. As it interweaves their stories, Cold Mountain asserts itself as an authentic American Odyssey--hugely powerful, majestically lovely, and keenly moving. [via]

More editions of Cold Mountain:

Cold Mountain: ISBN 0375700757 (0-375-70075-7)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

ISBN 9780393966343 (0-393-96634-8, 0393966348)

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The Good Soldier

by Ford Madox Ford

ISBN 0393966348 (0-393-96634-8)
Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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"A Tale of Passion," as its subtitle declares, The Good Soldier relates the complex social and sexual relationships between two couples, one English, one American, and the growing awareness by the American narrator John Dowell of the intrigues and passions behind their orderly Edwardian facade. It is the attitude of Dowell, his puzzlement, uncertainty, and the seemingly haphazard manner of his narration that make the book so powerful and mysterious. Despite its catalogue of death, insanity, and despair, the novel has many comic moments, and has inspired the work of several distinguished writers, including Graham Greene. This is the only annotated edition available. [via]

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ISBN 9780192836205 (0-19-283620-X, 019283620X)

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The Good Soldier

by Thomas C. Moser, Ford Madox Ford

ISBN 019283620X (0-19-283620-X)
Softcover, Oxford Univ Pr

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First published in 1915, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier begins, famously and ominously, "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." The book then proceeds to confute this pronouncement at every turn, exposing a world less sad than pathetic, and more shot through with hypocrisy and deceit than its incredulous narrator, John Dowell, cares to imagine. Somewhat forgotten as a classic, The Good Soldier has been called everything from the consummate novelist's novel to one of the greatest English works of the century. And although its narrative hook--the philandering of an otherwise noble man--no longer shocks, its unerring cadences and doleful inevitabilities proclaim an enduring appeal.

Ford's novel revolves around two couples: Edward Ashburnham--the title's soldier--and his capable if off-putting wife, Leonora; and long-transplanted Americans John and Florence Dowell. The foursome's ostensible amiability, on display as they pass parts of a dozen pre-World War I summers together in Germany, conceals the fissures in each marriage. John is miserably mismatched with the garrulous, cuckolding Florence; and Edward, dashing and sentimental, can't refrain from falling in love with women whose charms exceed Leonora's. Predictably, Edward and Florence conduct their affair, an indiscretion only John seems not to notice. After the deaths of the two lovers, and after Leonora explains much of the truth to John, he recounts the events of their four lives with an extended inflection of outrage. From his retrospective perch, his recollections simmer with a bitter skepticism even as he expresses amazement at how much he overlooked.

Dowell's resigned narration is flawlessly conversational--haphazard, sprawling, lusting for sympathy. He exudes self-preservation even as he alternately condemns and lionizes Edward: "If I had had the courage and the virility and possibly also the physique of Edward Ashburnham I should, I fancy, have done much what he did." Stunningly, Edward's adultery comes to seem not merely excusable, but almost sublime. "Perhaps he could not bear to see a woman and not give her the comfort of his physical attractions," John surmises. Ford's novel deserves its reputation if for no other reason than the elegance with which it divulges hidden lives. --Ben Guterson [via]

More editions of The Good Soldier:

The Good Soldier: ISBN 019283620X (0-19-283620-X)
Softcover, Oxford Univ Pr

ISBN 9780312066659 (0-312-06665-1, 0312066651)

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Gulliver's Travels

by Jonathan Swift, Christopher Fox

ISBN 0312066651 (0-312-06665-1)
Softcover, Bedford/st Martins

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Book summary:

This new edition of Swift's satiric classic is based on the 1726 textthe edition textual scholars now consider the most authoritative.

It is accompanied by detailed explanatory annotations.

"Contexts" collects materials that influenced Swift's writing of the novel, as well as documents that suggest its initial reception, including Swift's correspondence, Alexander Pope's poems on Gulliver's Travels, and relevant passages from Gargantua and Pantagruel.

"Criticism" includes fourteen assessments of Gulliver's Travels by the Earl of Orrery, Sir Walter Scott, Pat Rogers, Michael McKen, J.A. Downie, J. Paul Hunter, Laura Brown, Douglas Lane Patey, Dennis Todd, Richard H. Rodino. Irvin Ehrenpreis, Janine Barchas, Claude Rawson, and Howard D. Weinbrot.

A Chronology and a Selected Bibliography are included. [via]

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ISBN 9780192805348 (0-19-280534-7, 0192805347)

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Gulliver's Travels

by Claude Rawson, Jonathan Swift, Ian Higgins

ISBN 0192805347 (0-19-280534-7)
Softcover, Oxford Univ Pr

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Book summary:

In Gulliver's Travels, the narrator represents himself as a reliable reporter of the fantastic adventures he has just experienced. But how far can we rely on a narrator who has been impersonated by someone else? The work purports to be a travel book, and describes the shipwrecked Gulliver's encounters with the inhabitants of four extraordinary places: Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, and the country of the Houyhnhnms. An extraordinarily skillful blend of fantasy and realism makes Gulliver's Travels by turns hilarious, frightening, and profound. Swift's alter ego plays tricks on us, and our gullibility uncovers one of the world's most disturbing satires of the human condition.

The fullest, most up-to-date paperback of Gulliver's Travels currently available, this new edition contains an astute analysis of the nature of Swift's satire. It includes the changing frontispiece portraits of Gulliver that appeared in successive early editions and whose subtle changes contribute to the reader's uncertainty about the veracity of the author. A new introduction by Claude Rawson draws on the latest scholarship and considers Swift's role-playing and the relationship of the author to Gulliver. [via]

More editions of Gulliver's Travels:

Gulliver's Travels: ISBN 0192805347 (0-19-280534-7)
Softcover, Oxford Univ Pr

ISBN 9780192741783 (0-19-274178-0, 0192741780)

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Gulliver's Travels

by James Riordan, Jonathan Swift, Victor G. Ambrus

ISBN 0192741780 (0-19-274178-0)
Softcover, Oxford Univ Pr

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Book summary:

Embark on a journey with one of the greatest world travelers of all time. Ride with him across the South Seas to the miniature island of Liliput, where people grow no taller than six inches high. Round the Cape of Good Hope to the land of Brobdingnag, home of giants tall as church steeples, and sail on to the exotic lands of Laputa, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrip, and more. Share Gulliver's incredible adventures, from his singlehanded defeat of an entire naval fleet (albeit one whose ships are toy boat-sized), to his harrowing abduction by a giant eagle, to his unfortunate dunking in a reservoir-sized pot of cream by a jealous dwarf!
These are the stories of Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift's classic tale of fantastic adventures in far-off lands, brilliantly retold by James Riordan in rich, vivid prose that captures all the whimsy and satire of the original in the modern language of today's children. The illustrations by noted artist Victor Ambrus are rich and colorful, delicate in detail, strong in composition, and permeated with humor. And the insightful--often scathing--social commentary that Swift wove into his original tale remains intact, providing fascinating reading for adults as well as children. [via]

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Gulliver's Travels: ISBN 0192741780 (0-19-274178-0)
Softcover, Oxford Univ Pr

Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings

by Jonathan Swift, Louis A. Landa

ISBN 0192812068 (0-19-281206-8)
Hardcover, Oxford University Press

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More editions of Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings:

Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings: ISBN 0192812068 (0-19-281206-8)
Hardcover, Oxford University Press

ISBN 9780192833679 (0-19-283367-7, 0192833677)

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Hard Times

by Charles Dickens, Paul Schlicke

ISBN 0192833677 (0-19-283367-7)
Softcover, Oxford Univ Pr

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Book summary:

This text, that of the 1854 first edition, has been re-edited in light of recent scholarly findings. Annotations have been revised and expanded."Backgrounds, Sources, and Contemporary Reactions" reprints all of the documents on industrialism, education, and utilitarianism that appeared in the Second Edition, save one, and introduces new pieces by R. D. Butterworth and Thomas Carlyle. "Criticism" collects seventeen important essays on Hard Times-seven of them new to the Third Edition-by Hippolyte Taine, John Ruskin, George Gissing, Bernard Shaw, F. R. Leavis, Monroe Engel, Robert Barnard, David Craig, David Lodge, Roger Fowler, Patricia E. Johnson, Gorman Beauchamp, Martha C. Nussbaum, David L. Cowles, Jean Ferguson Carr, Eric P. Levy, and Leona Toker. A Chronology and revised Selected Bibliography are also included. [via]

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Hard Times: A Longman Cultural Edition

by Jeff Nunokawa, Gage McWeeny

ISBN 0321107217 (0-321-10721-7)
Softcover, Longman Pub Group

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More editions of Hard Times: A Longman Cultural Edition:

Hard Times: A Longman Cultural Edition: ISBN 0321107217 (0-321-10721-7)
Softcover, Longman Pub Group

Hard Times. for These Times

by Charles Dickens

ISBN 0192545159 (0-19-254515-9)
Hardcover, Oxford Univ Pr

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More editions of Hard Times. for These Times:

Hard Times. for These Times: ISBN 0192545159 (0-19-254515-9)
Hardcover, Oxford Univ Pr

ISBN 9780399134203 (0-399-13420-4, 0399134204)

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The Joy Luck Club

by Amy Tan

ISBN 0399134204 (0-399-13420-4)
Hardcover, Putnam Pub Group

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Book summary:

Four mothers, four daughters, four families whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's "saying" the stories. In 1949 four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, begin meeting to eat dim sum, play mahjong, and talk. United in shared unspeakable loss and hope, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Rather than sink into tragedy, they choose to gather to raise their spirits and money. "To despair was to wish back for something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable." Forty years later the stories and history continue.

With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery. [via]

More editions of The Joy Luck Club:

The Joy Luck Club: ISBN 0399134204 (0-399-13420-4)
Hardcover, Putnam Pub Group

ISBN 9780375758003 (0-375-75800-3, 0375758003)

Lady Chatterley's Lover

by D. H. Lawrence, Kathryn Harrison

ISBN 0375758003 (0-375-75800-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:

Perhaps the most famous of Lawrence's novels, the 1928 Lady Chatterley's Lover is no longer distinguished for the once-shockingly explicit treatment of its subject matter--the adulterous affair between a sexually unfulfilled upper-class married woman and the game keeper who works for the estate owned by her wheelchaired husband. Now that we're used to reading about sex, and seeing it in the movies, it's apparent that the novel is memorable for better reasons: namely, that Lawrence was a masterful and lyrical writer, whose story takes us bodily into the world of its characters. [via]

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ISBN 9780394514703 (0-394-51470-X, 039451470X)

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Midnight's Children

by Salman Rushdie

ISBN 039451470X (0-394-51470-X)
Hardcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:

Anyone who has spent time in the developing world will know that one of Bombay's claims to fame is the enormous film industry that churns out hundreds of musical fantasies each year. The other, of course, is native son Salman Rushdie--less prolific, perhaps than Bollywood, but in his own way just as fantastical. Though Rushdie's novels lack the requisite six musical numbers that punctuate every Bombay talkie, they often share basic plot points with their cinematic counterparts. Take, for example, his 1980 Booker Prize-winning Midnight's Children: two children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947--the moment at which India became an independent nation--are switched in the hospital. The infant scion of a wealthy Muslim family is sent to be raised in a Hindu tenement, while the legitimate heir to such squalor ends up establishing squatters' rights to his unlucky hospital mate's luxurious bassinet. Switched babies are standard fare for a Hindi film, and one can't help but feel that Rushdie's world-view--and certainly his sense of the fantastical--has been shaped by the films of his childhood. But whereas the movies, while entertaining, are markedly mediocre, Midnight's Children is a masterpiece, brilliant written, wildly unpredictable, hilarious and heartbreaking in equal measure.

Rushdie's narrator, Saleem Sinai, is the Hindu child raised by wealthy Muslims. Near the beginning of the novel, he informs us that he is falling apart--literally:

I mean quite simply that I have begun to crack all over like an old jug--that my poor body, singular, unlovely, buffeted by too much history, subjected to drainage above and drainage below, mutilated by doors, brained by spittoons, has started coming apart at the seams. In short, I am literally disintegrating, slowly for the moment, although there are signs of an acceleration.

In light of this unfortunate physical degeneration, Saleem has decided to write his life story, and, incidentally, that of India's, before he crumbles into "(approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust." It seems that within one hour of midnight on India's independence day, 1,001 children were born. All of those children were endowed with special powers: some can travel through time, for example; one can change gender. Saleem's gift is telepathy, and it is via this power that he discovers the truth of his birth: that he is, in fact, the product of the illicit coupling of an Indian mother and an English father, and has usurped another's place. His gift also reveals the identities of all the other children and the fact that it is in his power to gather them for a "midnight parliament" to save the nation. To do so, however, would lay him open to that other child, christened Shiva, who has grown up to be a brutish killer. Saleem's dilemma plays out against the backdrop of the first years of independence: the partition of India and Pakistan, the ascendancy of "The Widow" Indira Gandhi, war, and, eventually, the imposition of martial law.

We've seen this mix of magical thinking and political reality before in the works of Günter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez. What sets Rushdie apart is his mad prose pyrotechnics, the exuberant acrobatics of rhyme and alliteration, pun, wordplay, proper and "Babu" English chasing each other across the page in a dizzying, exhilarating cataract of words. Rushdie can be laugh-out-loud funny, but make no mistake--this is an angry book, and its author's outrage lends his language wings. Midnight's Children is Salman Rushdie's irate, affectionate love song to his native land--not so different from a Bombay talkie, after all. --Alix Wilber [via]

More editions of Midnight's Children:

Midnight's Children: ISBN 039451470X (0-394-51470-X)
Hardcover, Random House Inc

ISBN 9780380789016 (0-380-78901-9, 0380789019)

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Neverwhere

by Neil Gaiman

ISBN 0380789019 (0-380-78901-9)
Softcover, Avon Books

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Book summary:

Neverwhere's protagonist, Richard Mayhew, learns the hard way that no good deed goes unpunished. He ceases to exist in the ordinary world of London Above, and joins a quest through the dark and dangerous London Below, a shadow city of lost and forgotten people, places, and times. His companions are Door, who is trying to find out who hired the assassins who murdered her family and why; the Marquis of Carabas, a trickster who trades services for very big favors; and Hunter, a mysterious lady who guards bodies and hunts only the biggest game. London Below is a wonderfully realized shadow world, and the story plunges through it like an express passing local stations, with plenty of action and a satisfying conclusion. The story is reminiscent of Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but Neil Gaiman's humor is much darker and his images sometimes truly horrific. Puns and allusions to everything from Paradise Lost to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz abound, but you can enjoy the book without getting all of them. Gaiman is definitely not just for graphic-novel fans anymore. --Nona Vero [via]

More editions of Neverwhere:

ISBN 9780192834737 (0-19-283473-8, 0192834738)

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Orlando: A Biography

by Virginia Woolf

ISBN 0192834738 (0-19-283473-8)
Softcover, Oxford Univ Pr on Demand

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Book summary:

Virginia Woolf's "biography" tells the story of the cross-dressing, sex-changing Orlando who begins life as a young noble in the 16th century and moves through numerous historical and geographical worlds to finish as a modern woman writer in the 1920s. The book is in part a happy tribute to the life that her love for Vita Sackville-West had breathed into Virginia Woolf's own day-to-day existence; it is also Woolf's light-hearted and light-handed teasing out of the assumptions that lie behind the normal conventions for writing about a fictional or historical life. [via]

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ISBN 9780321427137 (0-321-42713-0, 0321427130)

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Oscar Wilde's the Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

ISBN 0321427130 (0-321-42713-0)
Softcover, Longman Pub Group

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A lush, cautionary tale of a life of vileness and deception or a loving portrait of the aesthetic impulse run rampant? Why not both? After Basil Hallward paints a beautiful, young man's portrait, his subject's frivolous wish that the picture change and he remain the same comes true. Dorian Gray's picture grows aged and corrupt while he continues to appear fresh and innocent. After he kills a young woman, "as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife," Dorian Gray is surprised to find no difference in his vision or surroundings. "The roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden."

As Hallward tries to make sense of his creation, his epigram-happy friend Lord Henry Wotton encourages Dorian in his sensual quest with any number of Wildean paradoxes, including the delightful "When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy." But despite its many languorous pleasures, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an imperfect work. Compared to the two (voyeuristic) older men, Dorian is a bore, and his search for ever new sensations far less fun than the novel's drawing-room discussions. Even more oddly, the moral message of the novel contradicts many of Wilde's supposed aims, not least "no artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style." Nonetheless, the glamour boy gets his just deserts. And Wilde, defending Dorian Gray, had it both ways: "All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment." [via]

More editions of Oscar Wilde's the Picture of Dorian Gray:

Oscar Wilde's the Picture of Dorian Gray: ISBN 0321427130 (0-321-42713-0)
Softcover, Longman Pub Group

ISBN 9780192807298 (0-19-280729-3, 0192807293)

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The Picture of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde, Joseph Bristow

ISBN 0192807293 (0-19-280729-3)
Softcover, Oxford Univ Pr

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A lush, cautionary tale of a life of vileness and deception or a loving portrait of the aesthetic impulse run rampant? Why not both? After Basil Hallward paints a beautiful, young man's portrait, his subject's frivolous wish that the picture change and he remain the same comes true. Dorian Gray's picture grows aged and corrupt while he continues to appear fresh and innocent. After he kills a young woman, "as surely as if I had cut her little throat with a knife," Dorian Gray is surprised to find no difference in his vision or surroundings. "The roses are not less lovely for all that. The birds sing just as happily in my garden."

As Hallward tries to make sense of his creation, his epigram-happy friend Lord Henry Wotton encourages Dorian in his sensual quest with any number of Wildean paradoxes, including the delightful "When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy." But despite its many languorous pleasures, The Picture of Dorian Gray is an imperfect work. Compared to the two (voyeuristic) older men, Dorian is a bore, and his search for ever new sensations far less fun than the novel's drawing-room discussions. Even more oddly, the moral message of the novel contradicts many of Wilde's supposed aims, not least "no artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style." Nonetheless, the glamour boy gets his just deserts. And Wilde, defending Dorian Gray, had it both ways: "All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment." [via]

More editions of The Picture of Dorian Gray:

ISBN 9780451523846 (0-451-52384-9, 0451523849)

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Picture of Dorian Gray and Selected Stories

by Oscar Wilde

ISBN 0451523849 (0-451-52384-9)
Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

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More editions of Picture of Dorian Gray and Selected Stories:

Picture of Dorian Gray and Selected Stories: ISBN 0451523849 (0-451-52384-9)
Softcover, New Amer Library Classics

ISBN 9780374530716 (0-374-53071-8, 0374530718)

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Sophie's World

by Jostein Gaarder, Paulette Moller

ISBN 0374530718 (0-374-53071-8)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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Book summary:

Wanting to understand the most fundamental questions of the universe isn't the province of ivory-tower intellectuals alone, as this book's enormous popularity has demonstrated. A young girl, Sophie, becomes embroiled in a discussion of philosophy with a faceless correspondent. At the same time, she must unravel a mystery involving another young girl, Hilde, by using everything she's learning. The truth is far more complicated than she could ever have imagined. [via]

More editions of Sophie's World:

ISBN 9780375758867 (0-375-75886-0, 0375758860)

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This Side of Paradise

by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Susan Orlean

ISBN 0375758860 (0-375-75886-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:

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

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ISBN 9780192827876 (0-19-282787-1, 0192827871)

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Uncle Tom's Cabin

by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Jean Fagan Yellin

ISBN 0192827871 (0-19-282787-1)
Softcover, Oxford Univ Pr

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Book summary:

Bedford College Editions reprint enduring literary works in a handsome, readable, and affordable format. The text of each work is lightly but helpfully annotated. Prepared by eminent scholars and teachers, the editorial matter in each volume includes a chronology of the life of the author; an illustrated introduction to the contexts and major issues of the text in its time and ours; an annotated bibliography for further reading (contexts, criticism, and Internet resources); and a concise glossary of literary terms. This title is available in print or as a Bedford e-Book to Go.

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More editions of Uncle Tom's Cabin:

ISBN 9780451526700 (0-451-52670-8, 0451526708)

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Uncle Tom's Cabin : Or, Life among the Lowly

by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Darryl Pinckney

ISBN 0451526708 (0-451-52670-8)
Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

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Arguably the most influential novel in American history, Uncle Tom's Cabin fanned the embers of the struggle between free states and slave states into the fire of the Civil War-and is as powerful and relevant today as when it was first published a century and a half ago. [via]

More editions of Uncle Tom's Cabin : Or, Life among the Lowly:

Uncle Tom's Cabin : Or, Life among the Lowly: ISBN 0451526708 (0-451-52670-8)
Softcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

ISBN 9780192829955 (0-19-282995-5, 0192829955)

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Women in Love

by D. H. Lawrence, David Bradshaw

ISBN 0192829955 (0-19-282995-5)
Softcover, Oxford Univ Pr

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With an Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates
foreword by the author
Commentary by Carl van Doren, Rebecca West,
Aldous Huxley, and Henry Miller

It is . . . the world of the poets and the preponderance of the poet in [Lawrence] that is the key to his work. He magnified and deepened experience in the manner of a poet," wrote Anaïs Nin in 1934.
Privately printed in 1920 and published commercially in 1921, Women in Love is the novel Lawrence himself considered his masterpiece. Set in the English Midlands, the novel traces the lives of two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, and the men with whom they fall in love. All four yearn for fufillment in their romantic lives, yet struggle in a world that is increasingly violent and destructive. Commenting on the novel, which was composed in the midst of the First World War in 1916, Lawrence wrote, "The bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters." Rich in symbolism and lyrical prose, Women in Love is a complex meditation on the meaning of love in the modern world.
To the critic Alfred Kazin, "No other writer of [Lawrence's] imaginative standing has in our time written books that are so open to life."

D. H. LAWRENCE (1885-1930), the son of a coal miner and a lace worker, completed his formal studies at University College, Nottingham, in 1908 and began teaching at a boys' school. By 1912, he had abandoned teaching to write full-time. His novels include The White Peacock (1911), The Trespasser (1912), Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), The Plumed Serpent (1926), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), which was banned as pornographic in England until 1960. [via]

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