books tagged “prose”

books tagged “prose”

›
› Find signed collectible books by ''
  • Absalom, Absalom!
    by William Faulkner
    ISBN 0679732187 (0-679-73218-7)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Absalom, Absalom!'
    Book summary:

    First published in 1936, Absalom, Absalom! is William Faulkners ninth novel and one of his most admired. It tells the story of Thomas Sutpen and his ruthless, single-minded attempt to forge a dynasty in Jefferson, Mississippi, in 1830. Although his grand design is ultimately destroyed by his own sons, a century later the figure of Sutpen continues to haunt young Quentin Compson, who is obsessed with his family legacy and that of the Old South. Faulkners novels have the quality of being lived, absorbed, remembered rather than merely observed, noted Malcolm Cowley. Absalom, Absalom! is structurally the soundest of all the novels in the Yoknapatawpha seriesand it gains power in retrospect. This edition follows the text of Absalom, Absalom! as corrected in 1986 under the direction of Faulkner expert Noel Polk and features a new Foreword by John Jeremiah Sullivan.

    [via]

    More editions of Absalom, Absalom!:

  • The Aeneid
    by Virgil
    ISBN 0679729526 (0-679-72952-6)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Aeneid'
    Book summary:

    Arma virumque cano: "I sing of warfare and a man at war." Long the bane of second-year Latin students thrust into a rhetoric of sweeping, seemingly endless sentences full of difficult verb forms and obscure words, Virgil's Aeneid finds a helpful translator in Robert Fitzgerald, who turns the lines into beautiful, accessible American English. Full of betrayal, heartache, seduction, elation, and violence, the Aeneid is the great founding epic of the Roman empire. Its pages sing of the Roman vision of self, the Roman ideal of what it meant to be a citizen of the world's greatest power. The epic's force carries across the centuries, and remains essential reading. [via]

    More editions of The Aeneid:

  • The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, Or, The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night
    by Bennett Alfred Cerf, Richard Francis Burton
    ISBN 0679602356 (0-679-60235-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, Or, The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night'
    Book summary:

    Full of mischief and valor, ribaldry and romance, The Arabian Nights is a work that has enthralled readers for centuries. The text presented here is that of the 1932 Modern Library edition for which Bennett A. Cerf chose the "most famous and representative" of the stories from the multivolume translation of Richard F. Burton.

       The origins of The Arabian Nights are obscure. About a thousand years ago a vast number of stories in Arabic from various countries began to be brought together; only much later was the collection called The Arabian Nights or the Thousand and One Nights. All the stories are told by Shahrazad (Scheherazade), who entertains her husband, King Shahryar, whose custom it was to execute his wives after a single night. Shahrazad begins a story each night but withholds the ending until the following night, thus postponing her execution.

       This selection includes many of the stories that are universally known though seldom read in this authentic form:
    "Alaeddin; or, the Wonderful Lamp," "Sindbad the Seaman and Sindbad the Landsman," and "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves." These, and the tales that accompany them, make delightful reading, demonstrating, as the Modern Library noted in 1932, that Shahrazad's spell remains unbroken. [via]

    More editions of The Arabian Nights' Entertainments, Or, The Book of a Thousand Nights and a Night:

  • Barabbas
    by Par Lagerkvist, Alan Blair
    ISBN 067972544X (0-679-72544-X)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Barabbas'
    Book summary:

    Barabbas is the acquitted; the man whose life was exchanged for that of Jesus of Nazareth, crucified upon the hill of Golgotha. Barabbas is a man condemned to have no god. "Christos Iesus" is carved on the disk suspended from his neck, but he cannot affirm his faith. He cannot pray. He can only say, "I want to believe."

    Translated from the Swedish by Alan Blair [via]

    More editions of Barabbas:

  • James, Henry: The Bostonians
    The Bostonians
    by Henry James, Alison Lurie, Library of America Staff
    ISBN 0679733817 (0-679-73381-7)
    Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Bostonians'

    More editions of The Bostonians:

  • Smart, Elizabeth: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept and the Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals
    By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept and the Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals
    by Elizabeth Smart
    ISBN 0679738045 (0-679-73804-5)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept and the Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals'

    More editions of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept and the Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals:

  • Candide : Or, Optimism
    by Peter Constantine, Voltaire, Diane Johnson
    ISBN 0679643133 (0-679-64313-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Candide : Or, Optimism'
    Book summary:

    In this splendid new translation of Voltaires satiric masterpiece, all the celebrated wit, irony, and trenchant social commentary of one of the great works of the Enlightenment is restored and refreshed.

    Voltaire may have cast a jaundiced eye on eighteenth-century Europea place that was definitely not the best of all possible worlds. But amid its decadent society, despotic rulers, civil and religious wars, and other ills, Voltaire found a mother lode of comic material. And this is why Peter Constantines thoughtful translation is such a pleasure, presenting all the books subtlety and ribald joys precisely as Voltaire had intended.

    The globe-trotting misadventures of the youthful Candide; his tutor, Dr. Pangloss; Martin, and the exceptionally trouble-prone object of Candides affections, Cunégonde, as they brave exile, destitution, cannibals, and numerous deprivation, provoke both belly laughs and deep contemplation about the roles of hope and suffering in human life.

    The transformation of Candides outlook from panglossian optimism to realism neatly lays out Voltaires philosophythat even in Utopia, life is less about happiness than survivalbut not before providing us with one of literatures great and rare pleasures. [via]

    More editions of Candide : Or, Optimism:

  • Caramelo
    by Sandra Cisneros
    ISBN 0679742581 (0-679-74258-1)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Caramelo'
    Book summary:

    Caramelo, Sandra Cisneros's first novel since her celebrated The House on Mango Street, weaves a large yet intricate pattern, much like the decorative fringe on a rebozo, the traditional Mexican shawl. Through the eyes of young Celaya, or Lala, the Reyes family saga twists and turns over three generations of truths, half-truths, and outright lies. And, like Celaya's grandmother's prized caramelo (striped) rebozo, so is "the universe a cloth, and all humanity interwoven.... Pull one string and the whole thing comes undone." The Reyes clan, from Awful Grandmother Soledad and her favorite son Inocencio to Celaya, follow their destinies from Mexico City to the U.S. armed forces, jobs upholstering furniture, and to Chicago and San Antonio. Celaya gathers and retells, in over 80 chapters, the stories that reinforce her family's, and subsequently her own, identity as they travel between the U.S.-Mexican border and within the United States. Rich with sensory descriptions and animated conversations and peppered with Mexican cultural and historical details, this novel can hardly contain itself. Also an acclaimed poet, Cisneros writes fiercely and thoroughly, and her characters enter and exit the page with uncommon humanity. Although the book is long--over 400 pages plus a relevant U.S.-Mexico chronology--in many ways it's not long enough. The world of the 20th-century Mexican family, and of the Reyeses in particular, is as complicated, timeless, and satisfying as our own family stories. --Emily Russin [via]

    More editions of Caramelo:

  • Stendhal: The Charterhouse of Parma
    The Charterhouse of Parma
    by Stendhal, Richard Howard, Robert A. Parker
    ISBN 0679602453 (0-679-60245-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Charterhouse of Parma'

    More editions of The Charterhouse of Parma:

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

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Cider House Rules'
    Book summary:

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

    More editions of Cider House Rules:

  • Auden, W. H.: Collected Poems
    Collected Poems
    by W. H. Auden, Edward Mendelson
    ISBN 0679731970 (0-679-73197-0)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Collected Poems'
    Book summary:

    To commemorate the centennial of W. H. Audens birth, the Modern Library offers this elegant edition of the collected poems of one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century.

    This volume includes all the poems that Auden wished to preserve, in a text that includes his final revisions, with corrections based on the latest research. Auden divided his poems into sections that corresponded to what he referred to as chapters in his life, each one beginning with a change in his inner life or external circumstances: the moment in 1933 when he first knew exactly what it means to love ones neighbor as oneself; his move from Britain to America in 1939; his first summer in Italy in 1948; his move to a summerhouse in Austria in 1958; and his return to England in 1972.

    Audens work has perhaps the widest range and the greatest depth of any English poet of the past three centuries. From the anxious warnings of his early verse through the expansive historical perspectives of his middle years to the celebrations and thanksgiving in his later work, Auden wrote in a voice that addressed readers personally rather than as part of a collective audience. His styles and forms extend from ballads and songs to haiku and limericks to sonnets, sestinas, prose poems, and dozens of other constructions of his own invention. His tone ranges from spirited comedy to memorable profundityoften within the same work. His poems manage to be secular and sacred, philosophical and erotic, personal and universal.

    All the poems I have written were written for love, Auden once said. This book includes his famous early poems about transient love (Lay your sleeping head, my love, Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone) and his later poems about enduring love (In Sickness and in Health, First Things First). The book also includes Audens longer, more thematically varied poems, from the expressionist charade Paid on Both Sides to the formal couplets of New Year Letter; the darkly comic sequel to The Tempest, The Sea and the Mirror; and a baroque eclogue set in a wartime bar, The Age of Anxiety.

    This new edition includes a critical appreciation of Auden by Edward Mendelson, the editor of the present volume and Audens literary executor.

    W. H. Auden had the greatest gifts of any of our poets in the twentieth century, the greatest lap full of seed.
    James Fenton, The New York Review of Books

    At the beginning of the new century, [Auden] is an indispensable poet. Even people who dont read poems often turn to poetry at moments when it matters, and Auden matters now.
    Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker [via]

    More editions of Collected Poems:

  • Complete Novels of Jane Austen
    by Jane Austen
    ISBN 0679600256 (0-679-60025-6)
    Hardcover, Modern Library

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Complete Novels of Jane Austen'
    Book summary:

    "How Jane Austen can write!...She is a miniaturist, but never two-dimensional....All Jane Austen characters are ready for an extended life, for a life which the scheme of her books seldom requires them to lead, and that is why they lead their actual lives so satisfactorily." --E. M. Forster [via]

    More editions of Complete Novels of Jane Austen:

  • The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne
    by John Donne, Charles M. Coffin
    ISBN 0679601023 (0-679-60102-3)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne'
    Book summary:

    This Modern Library edition contains all of John Donne's great metaphysical love poetry.  Here are such well-known songs and sonnets as "A Valediction:  Forbidding Mourning", "The Extasie", and "A Nocturnall Upon S. Lucies Day," along with the love elegies "Jealosie", "His Parting From Her", and "To His Mistris Going to Bed".  Presented as well are Donne's satires, epigrams, verse letters, and holy sonnets, along with his most ambitious and important poems, the Anniversaries.  In addition, there is a generous sampling of Donne's prose, including many of his private letters; B>Ignatius His Conclave, a satiric onslaught on the Jesuits; excerpts from Biathanatos, his celebrated defense of suicide; and his most famous sermons, concluding with the final "Death's Duell".  "We have only to read [Donne]," wrote Virginia Woolf, "to submit to the sound of that passionate and penetrating voice, and his figure rises again across the waste of the years more erect, more imperious, more inscrutable than any of his time." [via]

    More editions of The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne:

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

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Crime and Punishment'
    Book summary:

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

    More editions of Crime and Punishment:

  • Crime and Punishment
    by Richard Pevear, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Larissa Volokhonsky
    ISBN 0679734503 (0-679-73450-3)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Crime and Punishment'
    Book summary:

    Mired in poverty, the student Raskolnikov nevertheless thinks well of himself. Of his pawnbroker he takes a different view, and in deciding to do away with her he sets in motion his own tragic downfall. Dostoyevsky's penetrating novel of an intellectual whose moral compass goes haywire, and the detective who hunts him down for his terrible crime, is a stunning psychological portrait, a thriller and a profound meditation on guilt and retribution. [via]

    More editions of Crime and Punishment:

  • David Copperfield
    by Charles Dickens
    ISBN 0679603204 (0-679-60320-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'David Copperfield'
    Book summary:

            

    "        Like so many fond parents I have in my heart of hearts a favourite child," wrote Charles Dickens. "And his name is David Copperfield."
            Of all of Dickens's novels, David Copperfield most closely reflects the events of his own life. The story of an abandoned waif who discovers life and love in an indifferent world, this classic tale of childhood is populated with a cast of eccentrics, innocents, and villains who number among the author's greatest creations.
            "David Copperfield is filled with characters of the most astonishing variety, vividness, and originality," noted Somerset Maugham. "They are not realistic and yet they abound with life. There never were such people as the Micawbers, Pegotty and Barkis, Traddles, Betsey Trotwood and Mr. Dick, Uriah Heep and his mother. They are fantastic inventions of Dickens's exultant imagination, but they have so much vigor, they are so consistent, they are presented with so much conviction, that you believe in them. They are extravagant, but not unreal, and when you have once to know them you can never quite forget them." T. S. Eliot agreed: "Dickens excelled in character; in the creation of characters of greater intensity than human beings." And Virginia Woolf concluded: "In David Copperfield, though char-
    acters swarm and life flows into every creek and cranny, some common feelings--youth, gaiety, hope--envelops the tumult, brings the scattered parts together, and invests the most perfect of all the Dickens novels with an atmosphere of beauty."

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

    More editions of David Copperfield:

  • Mishima, Yukio: The Decay of the Angel
    The Decay of the Angel
    by Yukio Mishima, Edward Seidensticker
    ISBN 0679722432 (0-679-72243-2)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Decay of the Angel'

    More editions of The Decay of the Angel:

  • The Defense: A Novel
    by Michael Scammell, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokvov
    ISBN 0679727221 (0-679-72722-1)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Defense: A Novel'
    Book summary:

    Nabokov's third novel, The Luzhin Defense, is a chilling story of obsession and madness. As a young boy, Luzhin was unattractive,  distracted, withdrawn, sullen--an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates. He takes up chess as a refuge from the anxiety of his everyday life.  His talent is prodigious and he rises to the rank of grandmaster--but at a cost:  in Luzhin' s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants the world of reality.   His own world falls apart during a crucial championship match, when the intricate defense he has devised withers  under his opponent's unexpected and unpredictabke lines of assault. [via]

    More editions of The Defense: A Novel:

  • Doctor Faustus
    by Thomas Mann, H.T. Lowe-Porter
    ISBN 067973905X (0-679-73905-X)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Doctor Faustus'
    Book summary:

    Tells the story of Adrian Leverkuhn, a theological student turned composer, who symbolically enters into a pact with the Devil, selling his soul and body in return for twenty-four years of musical genius. [via]

    More editions of Doctor Faustus:

  • Doctor Faustus : The Life of the German Composer, Adrian Leverkuhn, As Told by a Friend
    by Thomas Mann, Helen T. Lowe-Porter
    ISBN 0679600426 (0-679-60042-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Doctor Faustus : The Life of the German Composer, Adrian Leverkuhn, As Told by a Friend'
    Book summary:

    "The thorn was in my flesh," Mann said about the genesis of Doctor Faustus, which was composed during World War II.  "I knew what I was setting out to do and what task I was imposing upon myself:  to write nothing else than the novel of my era, disguised as the story of an artist's life, a terribly imperilled and sinful artist."
    Adrian Leverkuhn, a former theological student who has become a composer, enters symbolically into a pact with the devil in exchange for two and a half decades of inspired work.  Narrated by Serenus Zeitblom, Leverkuhn's faithful friend, this retelling of the Faust legend turns on the composer's slow descent into syphilitic paralysis.  Densely orchestrated with musical constructions and what Mann called historical "montage", the book discourses on the tragedy of Germany, the Schonbergian twelve-tone system, Nietzche, the life of Tchaikovsky, and the introduction of syphilis into Europe.  Mann described Doctor Faustus as "difficult, weird, uncanny, sad as life." [via]

    More editions of Doctor Faustus : The Life of the German Composer, Adrian Leverkuhn, As Told by a Friend:

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

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Dracula'
    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]

    More editions of Dracula:

  • Levi, Primo: The Drowned and the Saved
    The Drowned and the Saved
    by Primo Levi
    ISBN 067972186X (0-679-72186-X)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Drowned and the Saved'

    More editions of The Drowned and the Saved:

  • The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays
    by W. H. Auden
    ISBN 0679724842 (0-679-72484-2)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays'

    More editions of The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays:

  • El Doctor Zhivago / The Doctor Zhivago
    by Boris Leonidovich Pasternak
    ISBN 0679731237 (0-679-73123-7)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'El Doctor Zhivago / The Doctor Zhivago'
    Book summary:

    This new trade paperback edition of Pasternak's classic evokes the life and loves of the poet-physician Zhivago during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. This edition features a thorough introduction by Oxford University scholar John Bayley. [via]

    More editions of El Doctor Zhivago / The Doctor Zhivago:

  • The Elephant Vanishes
    by Haruki Murakami
    ISBN 0679750533 (0-679-75053-3)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Elephant Vanishes'
    Book summary:

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

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

    More editions of The Elephant Vanishes:

  • Farewell, My Lovely
    by Raymond Chandler
    ISBN 0679740902 (0-679-74090-2)
    Hardcover, Vintage Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Farewell, My Lovely'
    Book summary:

    Private Detective Philip Marlow is in trouble. He witnesses a murder and knows who the killer is, but for some reason the police don't want to find the murderer, so Marlowe decides to find out for himself. "Penguin Readers" is a series of simplified novels, film novelizations and original titles that introduce students at all levels to the pleasures of reading in English. Originally designed for teaching English as a foreign language, the series' combination of high interest level and low reading age makes it suitable for both English-speaking teenagers with limited reading skills and students of English as a second language. Many titles in the series also provide access to the pre-20th century literature strands of the National Curriculum English Orders. "Penguin Readers" are graded at seven levels of difficulty, from "Easystarts" with a 200-word vocabulary, to Level 6 (Advanced) with a 3000-word vocabulary. In addition, titles fall into one of three sub-categories: "Contemporary", "Classics" or "Originals". At the end of each book there is a section of enjoyable exercises focusing on vocabulary building, comprehension, discussion and writing. Some titles in the series are available with an accompanying audio cassette, or in a book and cassette pack. Additionally, selected titles have free accompanying "Penguin Readers Factsheets" which provide stimulating exercise material for students, as well as suggestions for teachers on how to exploit the Readers in class. [via]

    More editions of Farewell, My Lovely:

  • The Fire Next Time
    by James Baldwin
    ISBN 067974472X (0-679-74472-X)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Fire Next Time'
    Book summary:

    It's shocking how little has changed between the races in this country since 1963, when James Baldwin published this coolly impassioned plea to "end the racial nightmare." The Fire Next Time--even the title is beautiful, resonant, and incendiary. "Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?" Baldwin demands, flicking aside the central race issue of his day and calling instead for full and shared acceptance of the fact that America is and always has been a multiracial society. Without this acceptance, he argues, the nation dooms itself to "sterility and decay" and to eventual destruction at the hands of the oppressed: "The Negroes of this country may never be able to rise to power, but they are very well placed indeed to precipitate chaos and ring down the curtain on the American dream."

    Baldwin's seething insights and directives, so disturbing to the white liberals and black moderates of his day, have become the starting point for discussions of American race relations: that debasement and oppression of one people by another is "a recipe for murder"; that "color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality"; that whites can only truly liberate themselves when they liberate blacks, indeed when they "become black" symbolically and spiritually; that blacks and whites "deeply need each other here" in order for America to realize its identity as a nation.

    Yet despite its edgy tone and the strong undercurrent of violence, The Fire Next Time is ultimately a hopeful and healing essay. Baldwin ranges far in these hundred pages--from a memoir of his abortive teenage religious awakening in Harlem (an interesting commentary on his first novel Go Tell It on the Mountain) to a disturbing encounter with Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad. But what binds it all together is the eloquence, intimacy, and controlled urgency of the voice. Baldwin clearly paid in sweat and shame for every word in this text. What's incredible is that he managed to keep his cool. --David Laskin [via]

    More editions of The Fire Next Time:

  • Gift from the Sea
    by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
    ISBN 0679732411 (0-679-73241-1)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Gift from the Sea'
    Book summary:

    In this inimitable, beloved classic-graceful, lucid and lyrical-Anne Morrow Lindbergh shares her meditations on youth and age; love and marriage; peace, solitude and contentment as she set them down during a brief vacation by the sea. Drawing inspiration from the shells on the shore, Lindbergh's musings on the shape of a woman's life bring new understanding to both men and women at any stage of life. A mother of five, an acclaimed writer and a pioneering aviator, Lindbergh casts an unsentimental eye on the trappings of modernity that threaten to overwhelm us: the time-saving gadgets that complicate rather than simplify, the multiple commitments that take us from our families. And by recording her thoughts during a brief escape from everyday demands, she helps readers find a space for contemplation and creativity within their own lives.With great wisdom and insight Lindbergh describes the shifting shapes of relationships and marriage, presenting a vision of life as it is lived in an enduring and evolving partnership. A groundbreaking, best-selling work when it was originally published in 1955, Gift from the Sea continues to be discovered by new generations of readers. With a new introduction by Lindbergh's daughter Reeve, this fiftieth-anniversary edition will give those who are revisiting the book and those who are coming upon it for the first time fresh insight into the life of this remarkable woman.The sea and the beach are elements that have been woven throughout Anne Morrow Lindbergh's life. She spent her childhood summers with her family on a Maine island. After her marriage to Charles Lindbergh in 1929, she accompanied him on his survey flights around the North Atlantic to launch the first transoceanic airlines. The Lindberghs eventually established a permanent home on the Connecticut coast, where they lived quietly, wrote books and raised their family. [via]

    More editions of Gift from the Sea:

  • The Golden Gate
    by Vikram Seth
    ISBN 0679734570 (0-679-73457-0)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Golden Gate'
    Book summary:

    Can 690 sonnets, rhyming a-b-a-b-c-c-d-d-e-f-f-e-g-g, be a novel? Definitely! First published in 1986 and still fresh (the sole sign of its publication date being the frequent use of the word yuppie), Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate will turn the verse-fearing into admiring acolytes. Janet Hayakawa, a yet-to-be-discovered sculptor and drummer in the Liquid Sheep, secretly places a personal ad for her friend John, even though she too is single. "Only her cats provide distraction,/Twin paradigms of lazy action." The seventh letter does the trick. Lawyer Liz Donati's submission is two sonnets in toto and disarms John into meeting her. Soon they fall into brief bliss, as do her brother, Ed, and John's old college roommate, Phil. Unfortunately, the first couple's love is too soon destroyed, partly by a pet, partly by politics; and the second is rent by religion. Ed pulls away thanks to the Bible: "I have to trust my faith's decisions, / Not batten on my own volitions."

    The rest of the novel leads less to the traditional comic ending--rapprochement and marriage all around--than to surprising sadness. But in between there is wit, wordplay, abounding allusion, and some marvelous animals, among them the iguana Schwarzenegger. The author even steps onto the stage on occasion: at a frou-frou publishing party a powerful editor accosts him, curious to hear about his new novel. When Seth tells him it's in verse, the temperature plummets. "'How marvelously quaint,' he said, / And subsequently cut me dead." Luckily, Seth's real editor did anything but. [via]

    More editions of The Golden Gate:

  • The Good Soldier
    by Ford Madox Ford
    ISBN 0679722181 (0-679-72218-1)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Good Soldier'
    Book summary:

    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:

  • Gulliver's Travels
    by Jonathan Swift
    ISBN 0679601880 (0-679-60188-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Gulliver's Travels'
    Book summary:

    "It is universally read, from the
    cabinet council to the nursery," remarked Alexander Pope when Gulliver's Travels was published in 1726. One of the unique books of world literature, Swift's masterful satire describes the astonishing voyages of one Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon, to surreal kingdoms inhabited by miniature people and giants, quack philosophers and scientists, horses endowed with reason and men who behave like beasts. Written with great wit and invention, Gulliver's Travels is a savage parody on man and his institutions that has captivated readers for nearly three centuries.
    The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with afford-
    able hardbound editions of impor-
    tant works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-
    fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring
    as its emblem the running torch-
    bearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inau-
    gurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.   As bestselling author and critic Allan Bloom observed: "Gulliver's Travels is an amazing rhetorical achievement. Swift had not only the judgment with which to arrive at a reasoned view of the world but the fancy by means of which he could re-create that world in a form which teaches where argument fails and which satisfies all while misleading none." [via]

    More editions of Gulliver's Travels:

  • Hard Times
    by Charles Dickens
    ISBN 067964217X (0-679-64217-X)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Hard Times'
    Book summary:

    Dickens's widely read satirical account of the Industrial Revolution.

    Dickens creates the Victorian industrial city of Coketown, in northern England, and its unforgettable citizens, such as the unwavering utilitarian Thomas Gradgrind and the factory owner Josiah Bounderby, and the result is his famous critique of capitalist philosophy, the exploitative force he believed was destroying human creativity and joy. This edition includes new notes to the text. [via]

    More editions of Hard Times:

  • A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
    by Julian Barnes
    ISBN 0679731377 (0-679-73137-7)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters'
    Book summary:

    This is, in short, a complete, unsettling, and frequently exhilarating vision of the world, starting with the voyage of Noah's ark and ending with a sneak preview of heaven! [via]

    More editions of A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters:

  • Howards End
    by E. M. Forster
    ISBN 0679722556 (0-679-72255-6)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Howards End'
    Book summary:

    Margaret Schlegel, engaged to the much older, widowed Henry Wilcox, meets her intended the morning after accepting his proposal and realizes that he is a man who has lived without introspection or true self-knowledge. As she contemplates the state of Wilcox's soul, her remedy for what ails him has become one of the most oft-quoted passages in literature:

    Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.
    Like all of Forster's work, Howards End concerns itself with class, nationality, economic status, and how each of these affects personal relationships. It follows the intertwined fortunes of the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, and the Wilcox family over the course of several years. The Schlegels are intellectuals, devotees of art and literature. The Wilcoxes, on the other hand, can't be bothered with the life of the mind or the heart, leading, instead, outer lives of "telegrams and anger" that foster "such virtues as neatness, decision, and obedience, virtues of the second rank, no doubt, but they have formed our civilization." Helen, after a brief flirtation with one of the Wilcox sons, has developed an antipathy for the family; Margaret, however, forms a brief but intense friendship with Mrs. Wilcox, which is cut short by the older woman's death. When her family discovers a scrap of paper requesting that Henry give their home, Howards End, to Margaret, it precipitates a spiritual crisis among them that will take years to resolve.

    Forster's 1910 novel begins as a collection of seemingly unrelated events--Helen's impulsive engagement to Paul Wilcox; a chance meeting between the Schlegel sisters and an impoverished clerk named Leonard Bast at a concert; a casual conversation between the sisters and Henry Wilcox in London one night. But as it moves along, these disparate threads gradually knit into a tightly woven fabric of tragic misunderstandings, impulsive actions, and irreparable consequences, and, eventually, connection. Though set in the early years of the 20th century, Howards End seems even more suited to our own fragmented era of e-mails and anger. For readers living in such an age, the exhortation to "only connect" resonates ever more profoundly. --Alix Wilber [via]

    More editions of Howards End:

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

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame'
    Book summary:

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

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




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

    More editions of The Hunchback of Notre Dame:

  • In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences
    by Truman Capote
    ISBN 0679745580 (0-679-74558-0)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences'
    Book summary:

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

    More editions of In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences:

  • Invisible Man
    by Ralph Ellison
    ISBN 0679732764 (0-679-73276-4)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Invisible Man'
    Book summary:

    A classic from the moment it first appeared in 1952, The Invisible Man chronicles the travels of its narrator, a young, nameless black man, as he moves through the hellish levels of American intolerance and cultural blindness. Searching for a context in which to know himself, he exists in a very peculiar state. "I am an invisible man," he says in his prologue, "When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me." But this is hard-won self-knowledge, earned over the course of many years.

    As the book gets started, the narrator is expelled from his Southern Negro college for inadvertently showing a white trustee the reality of black life in the south, including an incestuous farmer and a rural whorehouse. The college director chastises him: "Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie! What kind of an education are you getting around here?" Mystified, the narrator moves north to New York City, where the truth, at least as he perceives it, is dealt another blow when he learns that his former headmaster's recommendation letters are, in fact, letters of condemnation.

    What ensues is a search for what truth actually is, which proves to be supremely elusive. The narrator becomes a spokesman for a mixed-race band of social activists called "The Brotherhood" and believes he is fighting for equality. Once again, he realises he's been duped into believing what hethought was the truth, when in fact it is only another variation. Of the Brothers, he eventually discerns: "They were blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their voices. And because they were blind they would destroy themselves.... Here I thought they accepted me because they felt that colour made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn't see either colour or men".

    Invisible Man is certainly a book about race in America, andsadly enough, few of the problems it chronicles have disappeared even now. But Ellison's first novel transcends such a narrow definition. It's also a book about the human race stumbling down the path to identity, challenged and successful to varying degrees. None of us can ever be sure of the truth beyond ourselves, and possibly not even there. The world isa tricky place, and no one knows this better than the invisible man, who leaves us with these chilling, provocative words: "And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" --Melanie Rehak, Amazon.com [via]

    More editions of Invisible Man:

  • Jane Eyre
    by Charlotte Bronte
    ISBN 0679602690 (0-679-60269-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Jane Eyre'
    Book summary:

    Jane Eyre is a wildly emotional romance with a lonely heroine and a tormented Byronic hero, pathetic orphans, dark secrets, and a madwoman in the attic. When it was
    published in 1847, it was a great popular success. The power of the writing, the masterly
    handling of the narrative, and the boldly realistic style were much admired. But many found it difficult to believe that Currer Bell, the pseudonymous author, was Charlotte Brontë, a young woman from a bleak Yorkshire parsonage.
        Time has served Jane Eyre well. Charlotte Brontë's social commentary still fascinates; the novel is still powerful, full of erotic tension, passion, and irony. It can be read as an astonishing paradigm of feminist writing. At its heart is the assertion that a woman has the right to be independent, and its insistence on that fact and on the equality of the sexes makes it a truly revolutionary work of art. Above all, Jane Eyre is a marvelous love story, as affecting as any in fiction.
       Diane Johnson has provided a new Introduction to this Modern Library edition, which is the companion volume to the A&E television presentation. The Modern Library also publishes Charlotte Brontë's three other completed novels: The Professor, Shirley, and Villette.

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

    More editions of Jane Eyre:

  • Lady Chatterley's Lover
    by D. H. Lawrence, Archibald Macleish, Mark Schorer
    ISBN 0679600655 (0-679-60065-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Lady Chatterley's Lover'
    Book summary:

    Lyric and sensual, D.H. Lawrence's last novel is one of the major works of fiction of the twentieth century. Filled with scenes of intimate beauty, explores the emotions of a lonely woman trapped in a sterile marriage and her growing love for the robust gamekeeper of her husband's estate. The most controversial of Lawrence's books, Lady Chatterly's Lover joyously affirms the author's vision of individual regeneration through sexual love. The book's power, complexity, and psychological intricacy make this a completely original worka triumph of passion, an erotic celebration of life.


    From the Paperback edition. [via]

    More editions of Lady Chatterley's Lover:

  • Magic Mountain
    by Thomas Mann
    ISBN 067973645X (0-679-73645-X)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Magic Mountain'

    More editions of Magic Mountain:

  • Meditations
    by Marcus Aurelius, Gregory Hays
    ISBN 0679642609 (0-679-64260-9)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Meditations'
    Book summary:

    One measure, perhaps, of a book's worth, is its intergenerational pliancy: do new readers acquire it and interpret it afresh down through the ages? The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, translated and introduced by Gregory Hays, by that standard, is very worthwhile, indeed. Hays suggests that its most recent incarnation--as a self-help book--is not only valid, but may be close to the author's intent. The book, which Hays calls, fondly, a "haphazard set of notes," is indicative of the role of philosophy among the ancients in that it is "expected to provide a 'design for living.'" And it does, both aphoristically ("Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now take what's left and live it properly.") and rhetorically ("What is it in ourselves that we should prize?"). Whether these, and other entries ("Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life.") sound life-changing or like entries in a teenager's diary is up to the individual reader, as it should be. Hays's introduction, which sketches the life of Marcus Aurelius (emperor of Rome A.D. 161-180) as well as the basic tenets of stoicism, is accessible and jaunty. --H. O'Billovich [via]

    More editions of Meditations:

  • Northanger Abbey
    by Jane Austen
    ISBN 0679601929 (0-679-60192-9)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Northanger Abbey'
    Book summary:

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

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

    More editions of Northanger Abbey:

  • Conrad, Joseph: Nostromo : A Tale of the Seaboard
    Nostromo : A Tale of the Seaboard
    by Joseph Conrad
    ISBN 067960202X (0-679-60202-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Nostromo : A Tale of the Seaboard'

    More editions of Nostromo : A Tale of the Seaboard:

  • Our Mutual Friend
    by Charles Dickens
    ISBN 0679600221 (0-679-60022-1)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Our Mutual Friend'
    Book summary:

    Our Mutual Friend was the last novel Charles Dickens completed and is, arguably, his darkest and most complex. The basic plot is vintage Dickens: an inheritance up for grabs, a murder, a rocky romance or two, plenty of skullduggery, and a host of unforgettable secondary characters. But in this final outing the author's heroes are more flawed, his villains more sympathetic, and the story as a whole more harrowing and less sentimental. The mood is set in the opening scene in which a riverman, Gaffer Hexam, and his daughter Lizzie troll the Thames searching for drowned men whose pockets Gaffer will rifle before turning the body over to the authorities. On this particular night Gaffer finds a corpse that is later identified as that of John Harmon, who was returning from abroad to claim a large fortune when he was apparently murdered and thrown into the river.

    Harmon's death is the catalyst for everything else that happens in the novel. It seems the fortune was left to the young man on the condition that he marry a girl he'd never met, Bella Wilfer. His death, however, brings a new heir onto the scene, Nicodemus Boffin, the kind-hearted but low-born assistant to Harmon's father. Boffin and his wife adopt young Bella, who is determined to marry money, and also hire a mysterious young secretary, John Rokesmith, who takes an uncommon interest in their ward. Not content with just one plot, Dickens throws in a secondary love story featuring the riverman's daughter, Lizzie Hexam; a dissolute young upper-class lawyer, Eugene Wrayburn; and his rival, the headmaster Bradley Headstone. Dark as the novel is, Dickens is careful to leaven it with secondary characters who are as funny as they are menacing--blackmailing Silas Wegg and his accomplice Mr. Venus, the avaricious Lammles, and self-centered Charlie Hexam. Our Mutual Friend is one of Dickens's most satisfying novels, and a fitting denouement to his prolific career. --Alix Wilber [via]

    More editions of Our Mutual Friend:

  • Paradise
    by Dante Alighieri, Anthony M. Esolen, Gustave Dore
    ISBN 0679642692 (0-679-64269-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Paradise'
    Book summary:

    The Divine Comedy is a complete scale of the depths and heights of human emotion," wrote T.S. Eliot.  "The last canto of the Paradiso is to my thinking the highest point that poetry has ever reached or ever can reach."

    The Divine Comedy stands as one of the towering creations of world literature, and its climactic section, the Paradiso, is perhaps the most ambitious poetic attempt ever made to represent the merging of individual destiny with universal order.  Having passed through Hell and Purgatory, Dante is led by his beloved Beatrice to the upper sphere of Paradise, wherein lie the sublime truths of Divine will and eternal salvation, to at last experience a rapturous vision of God.

    "A spectacular achievement," said poet and critic Archibald MacLeish of John Ciardi's version of Dante's masterpiece.  "A text with the clarity and sobriety of a first-rate prose translation which at the same time suggests in powerful and unmistakable ways the run and rhythm of the great original." [via]

    More editions of Paradise:

  • Paradiso
    by Dante Alighieri, John Ciardi
    ISBN 0679602119 (0-679-60211-9)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Paradiso'
    Book summary:

    The Divine Comedy is a complete scale of the depths and heights of human emotion," wrote T.S. Eliot.  "The last canto of the Paradiso is to my thinking the highest point that poetry has ever reached or ever can reach."

    The Divine Comedy stands as one of the towering creations of world literature, and its climactic section, the Paradiso, is perhaps the most ambitious poetic attempt ever made to represent the merging of individual destiny with universal order.  Having passed through Hell and Purgatory, Dante is led by his beloved Beatrice to the upper sphere of Paradise, wherein lie the sublime truths of Divine will and eternal salvation, to at last experience a rapturous vision of God.

    "A spectacular achievement," said poet and critic Archibald MacLeish of John Ciardi's version of Dante's masterpiece.  "A text with the clarity and sobriety of a first-rate prose translation which at the same time suggests in powerful and unmistakable ways the run and rhythm of the great original." [via]

    More editions of Paradiso:

  • The Passion
    by Jeanette Winterson
    ISBN 0679724370 (0-679-72437-0)
    Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Passion'

    More editions of The Passion:

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

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Persuasion'
    Book summary:

    (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]

    More editions of Persuasion:

  • Pnin
    by Vladimir Nabokov
    ISBN 0679723412 (0-679-72341-2)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Pnin'
    Book summary:

    Pnin is a professor of Russian at an American college who takes the wrong train to deliver a lecture in a language he cannot master. Pnin is a tireless lover who writes to his treacherous Liza: "A genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do." Pnin is the focal point of subtle academic conspiracies he cannot begin to comprehend, yet he stages a faculty party to end all faculty parties forever. [via]

    More editions of Pnin:

  • James, Henry: The Portrait of a Lady
    The Portrait of a Lady
    by Henry James, Richard Poirier, Library of America Staff
    ISBN 0679736352 (0-679-73635-2)
    Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Portrait of a Lady'

    More editions of The Portrait of a Lady:

  • Possession
    by A. S. Byatt
    ISBN 0679735909 (0-679-73590-9)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Possession'
    Book summary:


    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]

    More editions of Possession:

  • Purgatorio
    by Dante Alighieri, John Ciardi
    ISBN 0679602100 (0-679-60210-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Purgatorio'

    More editions of Purgatorio:

  • Purgatory
    by Anthony M. Esolen, Dante, Gustave Dore
    ISBN 0679642684 (0-679-64268-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Purgatory'
    Book summary:

    A brilliant new translation of the centerpiece of The Divine Comedy

    Purgatory, the mountain that straightens souls made crooked by the world, is Dantes single most conceptually brilliant creation. Anthony Esolens vivid and innovative new rendering unearths Dantes own voice with unprecedented vigor, accuracy, and a masterly use of English meter. It will set the standard for years to come.

    Esolens Introduction incisively explores Dantes theological universe: the nature of Purgatory, how Dante came to invent it, and how Purgatory is finally about restoration, liberation, and friendship. Special features, from an appendix that reproduces key sources to extensive explanatory notes, make this a particularly illuminating edition for both expert and newcomer. [via]

    More editions of Purgatory:

  • Runaway Horses
    by Michael Gallagher, Yukio Mishima
    ISBN 0679722408 (0-679-72240-8)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Runaway Horses'
    Book summary:

    The chronicle of a conspiracy and a novel about the roots and nature of Japanese fanaticism in the years that led to war--an era marked by depression, social change and political violence. [via]

    More editions of Runaway Horses:

  • The Scarlet Letter
    by Nathaniel Hawthorne
    ISBN 0679725261 (0-679-72526-1)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Scarlet Letter'
    Book summary:

    This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1871 edition. Excerpt: ...scholar-like renown still lived in Oxford, was considered by his more fervent admirers as little less than a heavenly-ordained apostle, destined, should he live and labor for the ordinary term of life, to do as great deeds for the now feeble New England Church, as the early Fathers had achieved for the infancy of the Christian faith. About this period, however, the health of Mr. Dimmesdale had evidently' begun to fail. By those best acquainted with his habits, the paleness of the young minister's cheek was accounted for by his too earnest devotion to study, his scrupulous fulfilment of parochial duty, and, more than all, by the fasts and vigils of which he made a frequent practice, in order to keep the grossness of this earthly state from clogging and obscuring his spiritual lamp. Some declared, that, if Mr. Dimmesdale were really going to die, it was cause enough, that the world was not worthy to be any onger trodden by his feet. He himself, on the other hand, with characteristic humility, avowed his belief, that, if Providence should see fit to remove him, it would be because of his own unworthiness to perform its humblest mission here on earth. With all this difference of opinion as to the cause of his decline, there could be no question of the fact. His form grew emaciated; his voice, though still rich and sweet, had a certain melancholy prophecy of decay in it; he was often observed, on any slight alarm or other sudden accident, to put his hand over his heart, with first a flush and then a paleness, indicative of pain. Such was the young clergyman's condition, and so imminent the prospect that his dawning light would be extinguished, all untimely, when Koger Chillingworth made his advent to the town. His first entry on the scene, few people... [via]

    More editions of The Scarlet Letter:

  • Mason, Wyatt Alexander: Season in Hell, And, the Illuminations
    Season in Hell, And, the Illuminations
    by Wyatt Alexander Mason, Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud
    ISBN 0679643273 (0-679-64327-3)
    Softcover, Modern Library

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Season in Hell, And, the Illuminations'

    More editions of Season in Hell, And, the Illuminations:

  • Brontë, Charlotte: Shirley
    Shirley
    by Charlotte Brontë
    ISBN 0679602755 (0-679-60275-5)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Shirley'

    More editions of Shirley:

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

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Siddhartha'
    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]

    More editions of Siddhartha:

  • Slouching Towards Bethlehem : Essays
    by Joan Didion, Elizabeth Hardwick
    ISBN 0679640266 (0-679-64026-6)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem : Essays'
    Book summary:

    Upon its publication in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem confirmed Joan Didion as one of the most prominent writers on the literary scene. Her unblinking vision and deadpan tone have influenced subsequent generations of reporters and essayists, changing our expectations of style, voice, and the artistic possibilities of nonfiction.
            
    "In her portraits of people," The New York Times Book Review wrote, "Didion is not out to expose but to understand, and she shows us actors and millionaires, doomed brides and naïve acid-trippers, left-wing ideologues and snobs of the Hawaiian aristocracy in a way that makes them neither villainous nor glamorous, but alive and botched and often mournfully beautiful. . . . A rare display of some of the best prose written today in this country."
            
    In essay after essay, Didion captures the dislocation of the 1960s, the disorientation of a country shredding itself apart with social change. Her essays not only describe the subject at hand--the murderous housewife, the little girl trailing the rock group, the millionaire bunkered in his mansion--but also offer a broader vision of America, one that is both terrifying and tender, ominous and uniquely her own.
            
    Joyce Carol Oates has written, "Joan Didion is one of the very few writers of our time who approaches her terrible subject with absolute seriousness, with fear and humility and awe. Her powerful irony is often sorrowful rather than clever. . . . She has been an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time, a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing; always in control." [via]

    More editions of Slouching Towards Bethlehem : Essays:

  • Sophie's Choice
    by William Styron
    ISBN 0679736379 (0-679-73637-9)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Sophie's Choice'
    Book summary:

    "[One morning] in the early spring, I woke up with the remembrance of a girl I'd once known, Sophie. It was a very vivid half-dream, half-revelation, and all of a sudden I realized that hers was a story I had to tell." That very day, William Styron began writing the first chapter of Sophie's Choice.
        First published in 1979, this complex and ambitious novel opens with Stingo, a young southerner, journeying north in 1947 to become a writer. It leads us into his intellectual and emotional entanglement with his neighbors in a Brooklyn rooming house: Nathan, a tortured, brilliant Jew, and his lover, Sophie, a beautiful Polish woman whose wrist bears the grim tattoo of a concentration camp...and whose past is strewn with death that she alone survived.
       "Sophie's Choice is a passionate, courageous book...a philosophical novel on the most important subject of the twentieth century," said novelist and critic John Gardner in The New York Times Book Review. "One of the reasons Styron succeeds so well in Sophie's Choice is that, like Shakespeare (I think the comparison is not too grand), Styron knows how to cut away from the darkness of his material, so that when he turns to it again it strikes with increasing force....Sophie's Choice is a thriller of the highest order, all the more thrilling for the fact that the dark, gloomy secrets we are unearthing one by one--sorting through lies and terrible misunderstandings like a hand groping for a golden nugget in a rattlesnake's nest--may be authentic secrets of history and our own human nature."

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

    More editions of Sophie's Choice:

  • The Sorrows of Young Werther
    by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Burton Pike
    ISBN 0679643087 (0-679-64308-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Sorrows of Young Werther'
    Book summary:

    A Major New Translation

    For more than two centuries the very title of this book has evoked the sensitivity of youth, the suffering of the artist, the idea of a hero too full of love to live. When it was first published in Germany, in 1774, The Sorrows of Young Werther created a sensation. Banned and condemned but embracedespecially by the youngit has continued to captivate.

    Now Burton Pikes startlingly new translation expresses as never before all the anguish, ideas, and ardor of this seminal, iconic novel. And his Introduction reveals both Goethes inspirations and his influenceon works ranging from Madame Bovary to Frankenstein and beyond.

    Here is the classic story of Werther, a young man seeking the infinite in an art he cannot master and a woman he cannot havethe prototype of the Romantic hero in a work that anticipated the Romantic Age. Here is a bold new look at a masterpiece that has changed lives and, like its beloved hero, will never grow old. [via]

    More editions of The Sorrows of Young Werther:

  • Auden, W. H.: The Sorrows of Young Werther
    The Sorrows of Young Werther
    by W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Mayer, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Louise Bogan
    ISBN 0679729518 (0-679-72951-8)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Sorrows of Young Werther'

    More editions of The Sorrows of Young Werther:

  • Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: The Sorrows of Young Werther and Novella
    The Sorrows of Young Werther and Novella
    by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, W. H. Auden
    ISBN 0679600647 (0-679-60064-7)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Sorrows of Young Werther and Novella'

    More editions of The Sorrows of Young Werther and Novella:

  • The Souls of Black Folk
    by W. E. B. Du Bois
    ISBN 0679725199 (0-679-72519-9)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Souls of Black Folk'
    Book summary:

    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]

    More editions of The Souls of Black Folk:

  • Speak, Memory
    by Vladimir Nabokov
    ISBN 0679723390 (0-679-72339-0)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Speak, Memory'
    Book summary:

    The late Vladimir Nabokov always did things his way, and his classic autobiography is no exception. No dry recital of dates, names, and addresses for this linguistic magician--instead, Speak, Memory is a succession of lapidary episodes, in which the factoids play second fiddle to the development of Nabokov's sensibility. There is, to be sure, an impressionistic whirl through the author's family history (including a gallery of Tartar princes and fin-de-siècle oddities). And Nabokov's account of his tenure at St. Petersburg's famous Tenishev School--where he counted Osip Mandelstam among his schoolmates--offers a lovely glimpse into the heart of Russia's silver age. Still, Nabokov is much too artful an autobiographer to present Speak, Memory as a slice of reality--a word, by the way, that he insisted must always be surrounded by quotation marks. [via]

    More editions of Speak, Memory:

  • Spring Snow
    by Yukio Mishima
    ISBN 0679722416 (0-679-72241-6)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Spring Snow'
    Book summary:

    The first novel of Mishima's landmark tetralogy, The Sea of fertility

    Spring Snow is set in Tokyo in 1912, when the hermetic world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders -- rich provincial families unburdened by tradition, whose money and vitality make them formidable contenders for social and political power.

    Among this rising new elite are the ambitious Matsugae, whose son has been raised in a family of the waning aristocracy, the elegant and attenuated Ayakura. Coming of age, he is caught up in the tensions between old and new -- fiercely loving and hating the exquisite, spirited Ayakura Satoko. He suffers in psychic paralysis until the shock of her engagement to a royal prince shows him the magnitude of his passion, and leads to a love affair that is as doomed as it was inevitable. [via]

    More editions of Spring Snow:

  • The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
    by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
    ISBN 0679729976 (0-679-72997-6)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov'
    Book summary:

    These stories, written between the early 1920s to the mid-1950s, reveal the fascinating progress of Nabokov's early development as they remind us that we are in the presence of a magnificent original, a genuine master. Edited by his son and translator, Dmitri Nabokov, this volume is a literary event. [via]

    More editions of The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov:

  • A Tale of Two Cities
    by Charles Dickens
    ISBN 0679729658 (0-679-72965-8)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'A Tale of Two Cities'
    Book summary:

    A Tale of Two Cities is Charles Dickens's great historical novel, set against the violent upheaval of the French Revolution. The most famous and perhaps the most popular of his works, it compresses an event of immense complexity to the scale of a family history, with a cast of characters that includes a bloodthirsty ogress and an antihero as believably flawed as any in modern fiction. Though the least typical of the author's novels, A Tale of Two Cities still underscores many of his enduring themes--imprisonment, injustice, and social anarchy, resurrection and the renunciation that fosters renewal.

    Over the years the Modern Library has become a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable, beautifully produced, hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. Perfect for students, the Modern Library comprises over 170 titles by such oft-studied authors as Plato, Chaucer, Bronte, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Joyce, Keats, Shakespeare and Chekhov.

    And coming soon, more Modern Library titles on the Random House Web Site. [via]

    More editions of A Tale of Two Cities:

  • Mishima, Yukio: Temple of Dawn
    Temple of Dawn
    by Yukio Mishima
    ISBN 0679722424 (0-679-72242-4)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Temple of Dawn'

    More editions of Temple of Dawn:

  • Tess of the D'urbervilles : A Pure Woman
    by Thomas Hardy
    ISBN 0679603182 (0-679-60318-2)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Tess of the D'urbervilles : A Pure Woman'
    Book summary:

            

    Etched against the background of a dying rural society, Tess of the d'Urbervilles was Thomas Hardy's "bestseller," and Tess Durbeyfield remains his most striking and tragic heroine. Of all the characters he created, she meant the most to him. Hopelessly torn between two men--Alec d'Urberville, a wealthy, dissolute young man who seduces her in a lonely wood, and Angel Clare, her provincial, moralistic, and unforgiving husband--Tess escapes from her vise of passion through a horrible, desperate act.
    ----"Like the greatest characters in literature, Tess lives beyond the final pages of the book as a permanent citizen of the imagination," said Irving Howe. "In Tess he stakes everything on his sensuous apprehension of a young woman's life, a girl who is at once a simple milkmaid and an archetype of feminine strength. . . . Tess is that rare creature in literature: goodness made interesting."
    ----Now Tess of the d'Urbervilles has been brought to television in a magnificent new co-production from A&E Network and London Weekend Television. Justine Waddell (Anna Karenina) stars as the tragic heroine, Tess; Oliver Milburn (Chandler & Co.) is Angel Clare; and Jason Flemyng is Alec d'Urberville. The cast also includes John McEnery (Black Beauty) as Jack Durbeyfield and Lesley Dunlop (The Elephant Man) as Joan Durbeyfield. Tess of the d'Urbervilles is directed by Ian Sharp and produced by Sarah Wilson, with a screenplay by Ted Whitehead; it was filmed in Hardy country, the beautiful English countryside in Dorset where Thomas Hardy set his novels.

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

    More editions of Tess of the D'urbervilles : A Pure Woman:

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

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'This Side of Paradise'
    Book summary:

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

    More editions of This Side of Paradise:

  • Tristram Shandy and a Sentimental Journey
    by Laurence Sterne
    ISBN 0679600914 (0-679-60091-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Tristram Shandy and a Sentimental Journey'
    Book summary:

    Tristram Shandy provoked a literary sensation when it first appeared in a series of installments between 1759 and 1767. The ribald, high-spirited book prompted Diderot to hail Sterne as 'the English Rabelais.' An ingeniously structured novel (about writing a novel) that fascinates like a verbal game of chess, Tristram Shandy is both a joyful celebration of the infinite possibilities of the art of fiction and a wry demonstration of its limitations. Many view this picaresque masterpiece as the precursor of the modern novel.

    A Sentimental Journey, which came out in 1768, begins as a travelogue. Yet it ends as a treasury of portraits, sketches, and philosophical musings, for as Virginia Woolf observed: 'A Sentimental Journey, for all its levity and wit, is based upon something fundamentally philosophic--the philosophy of pleasure.' [via]

    More editions of Tristram Shandy and a Sentimental Journey:

  • Chandler, Raymond: Trouble Is My Business
    Trouble Is My Business
    by Raymond Chandler
    ISBN 0679740864 (0-679-74086-4)
    Hardcover, Vintage Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Trouble Is My Business'

    More editions of Trouble Is My Business:

  • Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories
    by Joseph Mitchell
    ISBN 0679746315 (0-679-74631-5)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories'
    Book summary:

    Journalist Joseph Mitchell, whose death in in May 1996 at the age of 87 merited a half-page obituary in the New York Times, pioneered a style of journalism while crafting brilliant magazine pieces for the New Yorker from the 1930s to the early 1960s. Up in the Old Hotel, a collection of his best reporting, is a 700-page joy to read.

    Mitchell lovingly chronicled the lives of odd New York characters. In the pages of Up In the Old Hotel, the reader passes through places such as McSorley's Old Ale House or the Fulton Fish Market that many observers might have found ordinary. But when experienced through Mitchell's gifted eye, the reader will see that these haunts of old New York possess poetry, beauty, and meaning. [via]

    More editions of Up in the Old Hotel and Other Stories:

  • The Vintage Mencken
    by Alistair Cooke, H. L. Mencken
    ISBN 0679728953 (0-679-72895-3)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Vintage Mencken'
    Book summary:

    The anthology that spans an entire lifetime of writing by America's greatest curmudgeon, with a "flick of mischief on nearly every page." [via]

    More editions of The Vintage Mencken:

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

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Voyage Out'
    Book summary:

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

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

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

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

    More editions of The Voyage Out:

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

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'War and Peace'
    Book summary:

    (Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)

    Three-Volume Boxed Set [via]

    More editions of War and Peace:

  • Where I'm Calling from
    by Raymond Carver
    ISBN 0679722319 (0-679-72231-9)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Where I'm Calling from'
    Book summary:

    The last story collection published during Carver's life (he died in 1988) contains most of his greatest hits from his earlier books, as well as seven stories that hadn't been collected up to that point. The breadth of the collection makes these 37 stories an extremely complete map of Carver territory, of a particular area of America and of the specific texture of the people Carver writes about -- their difficult attempts at survival in a world where happiness does not arrive wrapped up in neat packages but comes in far more peculiar parcels, if it comes at all. [via]

    More editions of Where I'm Calling from:

  • Calvino, Italo: Why Read the Classics?
    Why Read the Classics?
    by Italo Calvino
    ISBN 0679743499 (0-679-74349-9)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Why Read the Classics?'

    More editions of Why Read the Classics?:

  • Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories
    by Sandra Cisneros
    ISBN 0679738568 (0-679-73856-8)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories'
    Book summary:

    A collection of stories, whose characters give voice to the vibrant and varied life on both sides of the Mexican border. The women in these stories offer tales of pure discovery, filled with moments of infinite and intimate wisdom. [via]

    More editions of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories:

  • The Woman in the Dunes
    by Kobo Abe
    ISBN 0679733787 (0-679-73378-7)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'The Woman in the Dunes'
    Book summary:

    This beautiful novel by one of Japan's most important writers is also one of the most strangely terrifying and memorable books you'll ever read. The Woman in the Dunes is the story of an amateur entomologist who wanders alone into a remote seaside village in pursuit of a rare beetle he wants to add to his collection. But the townspeople take him prisoner. They lower him into the sand-pit home of a young widow, a pariah in the poor community, who the villagers have condemned to a life of shoveling back the ever-encroaching dunes that threaten to bury the town. An amazing book. [via]

    More editions of The Woman in the Dunes:

  • Written on the Body
    by Jeanette Winterson
    ISBN 0679744479 (0-679-74447-9)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Written on the Body'
    Book summary:

    The most beguilingly seductive novel to date from the author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. Winterson chronicles the consuming affair between the narrator, who is given neither name nor gender, and the beloved, a complex and confused married woman. "At once a love story and a philosophical meditation."--New York Times Book Review. [via]

    More editions of Written on the Body:

  • Wuthering Heights
    by Emily Brontë, Diane Johnson
    ISBN 067960135X (0-679-60135-X)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

    Find This Book

     

    › Find signed collectible books: 'Wuthering Heights'
    Book summary:

    Wuthering Heights, first published in 1847, the year before the author's death at the age of thirty, endures today as perhaps the most powerful and intensely original novel in the English language. "Only Emily Brontë," V. S. Pritchett said about the author and her contemporaries, "exposes her imagination to the dark spirit." And Virginia Woolf wrote, "It is as if she could tear up all that we know human beings by, and fill these unrecognisable transparencies with such a gust of life that they transcend reality. Hers, then, is the rarest of all powers. She could free life from its dependence on facts, with a few touches indicate the spirit of a face so that it needs no body; by speaking of the moor make the wind blow and the thunder roar."
    ----This Modern Library edition contains a biographical note and preface by the author's sister Charlotte Brontë, and an Introduction by Diane Johnson. [via]

    More editions of Wuthering Heights: