books tagged “twentieth century”

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  • Absalom, Absalom!
    by William Faulkner
    ISBN 0375508724 (0-375-50872-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    Absalom! Absalom! is William Faulkners major work--his most important and ambitious contribution to American literature. In the dramatic texture of this story of the founding, flourishing and decay of the plantation of Sutpen's Hundred, and of the family that demonic Stephen Sutpen brought into the world a generation before the Civil War, there rises the lament of the South for its own vanished splendor. From its magnificent and bold inception, when with his wild Negroes the founder of the great plantation appeared out of nowhere to seize his hundred square miles of land and build his mansion, through the destruction of the Civil War and its aftermath, and the drab beginnings of the new South, the narrative is colored by the authors glowing imagery, his command of a powerful and magical prose style. Beneath its brilliant surface and dark undercurrents, the novel sweeps backward and forward through time. The story in all its ramifications becomes crystallized in the mind of a relative of this strange family, young Quentin Compson, a Harvard student. At the terrifying and abrupt end of the tale there remain in the crumbling shell of the old house only the dying son of its builder, an ancient Negro woman who had been his slave, and the idiot mulatto youth who was to be the only direct descendant of the Sutpen blood.

    This edition is set from the first American edition of 1936 and commemorates the seventy-fifth anniversary of Random House. [via]

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  • Alias Grace
    by Margaret Atwood
    ISBN 0385490445 (0-385-49044-5)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    In the astonishing new novel by the author of the bestsellers The Robber Bride, Cat's Eye, and The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood takes us back in time and into the life and mind of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the nineteenth century. Grace Marks has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer, the wealthy Thomas Kinnear, and of Nancy Montgomery, his housekeeper and mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Now serving a life sentence after a stint in Toronto's lunatic asylum, Grace herself claims to have no memory of the murders.

    Dr. Simon Jordan, an up-and-coming expert in the burgeoning field of mental illness, is engaged by a group of reformers and spiritualists who seek a pardon for Grace. He listens to her story, from her family's difficult passage out of Ireland into Canada, to her time as a maid in Thomas Kinnear's household. As he brings Grace closer and closer to the day she cannot remember, he hears of the turbulent relationship between Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery, and of the alarming behavior of Grace's fellow servant, James McDermott. Jordan is drawn to Grace, but he is also baffled by her. What will he find in attempting to unlock her memories? Is Grace a female fiend, a bloodthirsty femme fatale? Or is she a victim of circumstances?

    Alias Grace is a beautifully crafted work of the imagination that reclaims a profoundly mysterious and disturbing story from the past century. With compassion, an unsentimental lyricism, and her customary narrative virtuosity, Margaret Atwood mines the often convoluted relationships between men and women, and between the affluent and those without position. The result is her most captivating, disturbing, and ultimately satisfying work since The Handmaid's Tale--in short, vintage Atwood. [via]

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  • Doubleday Staff: Anne Frank
    Anne Frank
    by Doubleday Staff
    ISBN 038542695X (0-385-42695-X)
    Softcover, Doubleday Canada, Limited

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  • Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
    by Anne Frank, B. M. Mooyaart, Eleanor Roosevelt
    ISBN 0385040199 (0-385-04019-9)
    Hardcover, Doubleday Publishing

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    Book summary:

    Anne Frank's diaries have always been among the most moving and eloquent documents of the Holocaust. This new edition restores diary entries omitted from the original edition, revealing a new depth to Anne's dreams, irritations, hardships, and passions. Anne emerges as more real, more human, and more vital than ever. If you've never read this remarkable autobiography, do so. If you have read it, you owe it to yourself to read it again. [via]

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  • The Autobiography of Malcolm X
    by Alex Haley, Malcolm X, M. S. Handler
    ISBN 0345376714 (0-345-37671-4)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    Malcolm X's searing memoir belongs on the small shelf of great autobiographies. The reasons are many: the blistering honesty with which he recounts his transformation from a bitter, self-destructive petty criminal into an articulate political activist, the continued relevance of his militant analysis of white racism, and his emphasis on self-respect and self-help for African Americans. And there's the vividness with which he depicts black popular culture--try as he might to criticize those lindy hops at Boston's Roseland dance hall from the perspective of his Muslim faith, he can't help but make them sound pretty wonderful. These are but a few examples. The Autobiography of Malcolm X limns an archetypal journey from ignorance and despair to knowledge and spiritual awakening. When Malcolm tells coauthor Alex Haley, "People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book," he voices the central belief underpinning every attempt to set down a personal story as an example for others. Although many believe his ethic was directly opposed to Martin Luther King Jr.'s during the civil rights struggle of the '60s, the two were not so different. Malcolm may have displayed a most un-Christian distaste for loving his enemies, but he understood with King that love of God and love of self are the necessary first steps on the road to freedom. --Wendy Smith [via]

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  • The Autobiography of Malcolm X
    by Malcolm X, Alex Hailey
    ISBN 0345350685 (0-345-35068-5)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    Malcolm X's searing memoir belongs on the small shelf of great autobiographies. The reasons are many: the blistering honesty with which he recounts his transformation from a bitter, self-destructive petty criminal into an articulate political activist, the continued relevance of his militant analysis of white racism, and his emphasis on self-respect and self-help for African Americans. And there's the vividness with which he depicts black popular culture--try as he might to criticize those lindy hops at Boston's Roseland dance hall from the perspective of his Muslim faith, he can't help but make them sound pretty wonderful. These are but a few examples. The Autobiography of Malcolm X limns an archetypal journey from ignorance and despair to knowledge and spiritual awakening. When Malcolm tells coauthor Alex Haley, "People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book," he voices the central belief underpinning every attempt to set down a personal story as an example for others. Although many believe his ethic was directly opposed to Martin Luther King Jr.'s during the civil rights struggle of the '60s, the two were not so different. Malcolm may have displayed a most un-Christian distaste for loving his enemies, but he understood with King that love of God and love of self are the necessary first steps on the road to freedom. --Wendy Smith [via]

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  • Babbitt
    by Sinclair Lewis, Richard Lingeman
    ISBN 0375759255 (0-375-75925-5)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    In the fall of 1920, Sinclair Lewis began a novel set in a fast-growing city with the heart and mind of a small town. For the center of his cutting satire of American business he created the bustling, shallow, and myopic George F. Babbitt, the epitome of middle-class mediocrity. The novel cemented Lewiss prominence as a social commentator.

    Babbitt basks in his pedestrian success and the popularity it has brought him. He demands high moral standards from those around him while flirting with women, and he yearns to have rich friends while shunning those less fortunate than he. But Babbitts secure complacency is shattered when his best friend is sent to prison, and he struggles to find meaning in his hollow life. He revolts, but finds that his former routine is not so easily thrown over. [via]

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  • Breakfast of Champions
    by Kurt Vonnegut
    ISBN 0385334206 (0-385-33420-6)
    Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    "We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane." So reads the tombstone of downtrodden writer Kilgore Trout, but we have no doubt who's really talking: his alter ego Kurt Vonnegut. Health versus sickness, humanity versus inhumanity--both sets of ideas bounce through this challenging and funny book. As with the rest of Vonnegut's pure fantasy, it lacks the shimmering, fact-fueled rage that illuminates Slaughterhouse-Five. At the same time, that makes this book perhaps more enjoyable to read.

    Breakfast of Champions is a slippery, lucid, bleakly humorous jaunt through (sick? inhumane?) America circa 1973, with Vonnegut acting as our Virgil-like companion. The book follows its main character, auto-dealing solid-citizen Dwayne Hoover, down into madness, a condition brought on by the work of the aforementioned Kilgore Trout. As Dwayne cracks, then crumbles, Breakfast of Champions coolly shows the effects his dementia has on the web of characters surrounding him. It's not much of a plot, but it's enough for Vonnegut to air unique opinions on America, sex, war, love, and all of his other pet topics--you know, the only ones that really count. [via]

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  • Bridget Jones's Diary
    by Helen Fielding
    ISBN 0330332767 (0-330-33276-7)
    Hardcover, Picador

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    Book summary:

    In the course of the year recorded in Bridget Jones's Diary, Bridget confides her hopes, her dreams, and her monstrously fluctuating poundage, not to mention her consumption of 5277 cigarettes and "Fat units 3457 (approx.) (hideous in every way)." In 365 days, she gains 74 pounds. On the other hand, she loses 72! There is also the unspoken New Year's resolution--the quest for the right man. Alas, here Bridget goes severely off course when she has an affair with her charming cad of a boss. But who would be without their e-mail flirtation focused on a short black skirt? The boss even contends that it is so short as to be nonexistent.

    At the beginning of Helen Fielding's exceptionally funny second novel, the thirtyish publishing puffette is suffering from postholiday stress syndrome but determined to find Inner Peace and poise. Bridget will, for instance, "get up straight away when wake up in mornings." Now if only she can survive the party her mother has tricked her into--a suburban fest full of "Smug Marrieds" professing concern for her and her fellow "Singletons"--she'll have made a good start. As far as she's concerned, "We wouldn't rush up to them and roar, 'How's your marriage going? Still having sex?'"

    This is only the first of many disgraces Bridget will suffer in her year of performance anxiety (at work and at play, though less often in bed) and living through other people's "emotional fuckwittage." Her twin-set-wearing suburban mother, for instance, suddenly becomes a chat-show hostess and unrepentant adulteress, while our heroine herself spends half the time overdosing on Chardonnay and feeling like "a tragic freak." Bridget Jones's Diary began as a column in the London Independent and struck a chord with readers of all sexes and sizes. In strokes simultaneously broad and subtle, Helen Fielding reveals the lighter side of despair, self-doubt, and obsession, and also satirizes everything from self-help books (they don't sound half as sensible to Bridget when she's sober) to feng shui, Cosmopolitan-style. She is the Nancy Mitford of the 1990s, and it's impossible not to root for her endearing heroine. On the other hand, one can only hope that Bridget will continue to screw up and tell us all about it for years and books to come. --Kerry Fried [via]

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  • Cold Mountain
    by Charles Frazier
    ISBN 0375700757 (0-375-70075-7)
    Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE

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

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

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  • The Complete Stories
    by Flannery O'Connor
    ISBN 0374515360 (0-374-51536-0)
    Softcover, Noonday Pr

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    Book summary:

    Winner of the National Book Award

    The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including twelve that do not appear in the only two story collections O'Connor put together in her short lifetime--Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find.

    O'Connor published her first story, "The Geranium," in 1946, while she was working on her master's degree at the University of Iowa. Arranged chronologically, this collection shows that her last story, "Judgement Day"--sent to her publisher shortly before her deathis a brilliantly rewritten and transfigured version of "The Geranium." Taken together, these stories reveal a lively, penetrating talent that has given us some of the most powerful and disturbing fiction of the twentieth century. Also included is an introduction by O'Connor's longtime editor and friend, Robert Giroux.
    [via]

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  • The Complete Short Stories
    by Evelyn Waugh, Ann Pasternak Slater
    ISBN 0375404309 (0-375-40430-9)
    Hardcover, Everymans Library

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    Book summary:

    (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

    Evelyn Waugh's short stories are the marvelous, concentrated riffs of his comic genius, revealing in miniaturized perfection all the elements that made him the greatest comic writer of our century. We find in them Waugh's almost superhuman technical skill as a writer and his quicksilver attentiveness to the minutiae of human absurdity, as well as his worldly knowledge, his tenderness, his perceptive compassion, and his sophisticated, disabused, but nevertheless forceful idealism.

    The thirty-nine stories collected here include such small masterpieces as "Mr. Loveday's Little Outing" and "Scott-King's Modern Europe"; an alternative ending to Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust; a "missing chapter" in the life of Charles Ryder, the hero of Brideshead Revisited; and two linked stories, remnants of an abandoned novel that Waugh considered his best writing.

    This edition contains the original illustrations to "Love Among the Ruins," as well as more than thirty graphics produced by the author as an Oxford undergraduate in the 1920s. [via]

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  • The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh
    by Evelyn Waugh
    ISBN 0316926604 (0-316-92660-4)
    Softcover, Back Bay Books

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    Book summary:

    Mordant, mirthful, and unrelenting in their lampoon of aristocratic mischief, Evelyn Waugh's novels have earned him a permanent place in the literary pantheon. But this cantankerous master--the scion, by the way, of a decidedly middle-class family of publishers and writers--was no less adept when it came to the short form. Indeed, Waugh first broke into print in 1926 with "The Balance: A Yarn of the Good Old Days of Broad Trousers and High Necked Jumpers," an early story that suggests a modernized and misanthropic P.G. Wodehouse. And he continued to write short fiction throughout the rest of his career, all of which has now been collected in the delectable Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh.

    The first few entries in the collection capture a kinder, gentler author, not yet red at the verbal tooth and claw. But by 1932, when he wrote "Love in the Slump," Waugh's eye for the black-comic detail was firmly in place:

    It rained heavily on the day of the wedding, and only the last-ditchers among the St. Margaret's crowd turned out to watch the melancholy succession of guests popping out of their dripping cars and plunging up the covered way into the church.... A doctor was summoned to attend the bridegroom's small nephew, who, after attracting considerable attention as a page at the ceremony by his outspoken comments, developed a high temperature and numerous disquieting symptoms of food poisoning.
    Waugh's wit only sharpened throughout the succeeding decades, and the very texture of his prose thickened (although it never took on much in the way of modernist adipose tissue). In "Compassion," a 1949 tale that belies the author's vaunted anti-Semitism, a mere glimpse of some Yugoslavian partisans leads to this superabundant sentence: "He passed ragged, swaggering partisans, all young, some scarcely more than children; girls in battle dress, bandaged, bemedalled, girdled with grenades, squat, chaste, cheerful, sexless, barely human, who had grown up in mountain bivouacs, singing patriotic songs, arm-in-arm along the pavements where a few years earlier rheumatics had crept with parasols and light, romantic novels." Nobody can accuse Waugh of squishy sentimentality--remember, romantic prose is strictly for convalescents. Still, The Complete Stories offers an accurate and stupendously entertaining vision of human folly, no less effective for being administered in smaller doses. [via]

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  • The Devil's Dream
    by Lee Smith
    ISBN 0345382919 (0-345-38291-9)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    "She writes lyric, luminous prose; her craft is so strong it becomes transparent, and, like the best of storytellers, she knows how to get out of the way so that the story can tell itself."
    SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
    Moses Bailey, a preacher's son, forbade his fiddle-loving wife Kate Malone to play. But while he was gone on his travels, looking for God, Kate couldn't help herself, and began fiddling for her three children. For the love of music, Kate is willing to defy anyone who tries to stop her. From generation to generation, the gift and love of music cannot be stopped, and no Malone is immune from its spell. [via]

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  • The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition
    by Anne Frank, Mirjam Pressler, Otto H. Frank
    ISBN 0385473788 (0-385-47378-8)
    Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Book summary:

    Anne Frank's diaries have always been among the most moving and eloquent documents of the Holocaust. This new edition restores diary entries omitted from the original edition, revealing a new depth to Anne's dreams, irritations, hardships, and passions. Anne emerges as more real, more human, and more vital than ever. If you've never read this remarkable autobiography, do so. If you have read it, you owe it to yourself to read it again. [via]

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  • Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Editon
    by Anne Frank, Mirjam Pressler, Otto H. Frank, Susan Massotty
    ISBN 0385480334 (0-385-48033-4)
    Softcover, Anchor Books

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    The basis for and official tie-in edition to the PBS Masterpiece Classic movie titled The Diary of Anne Frank , directed by Jon Jones from a screenplay by Deborah Moggach. First airing April 11, 2010. More than fifty years after its first publication, Doubleday's definitive edition of Anne Frank's famous diary generated an extraordinary amount of excitement when it was published in early 1995. Enthusiastically received by critics and readers alike, it reigned for nine weeks on The New York Times bestseller list and will remain for all time the version that millions of readers will cherish.In a handsome package with flaps, rough front, and printed endpapers, this Anchor trade paperback will be the perfect gift for anyone who seeks insight into the indestructible nature of the human spirit. [via]

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  • The Diary of Anne Frank: The Revised Critical Edition
    by Anne Frank, David Barnouw, Gerrold van der Stroom, H. J. J. Hardy, Gerrold Van Der Stroom, Barnouw. David, Arnold J. Pomerans, Susan Massotty, B. M. Mooyaart-Doubleday
    ISBN 0385508476 (0-385-50847-6)
    Hardcover, Doubleday

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    Book summary:

    A comparison of the three versions of Anne Frank's diary; Anne's original entries, including never-before-published material; the diary as she herself edited it while in hiding; and the best-known version, edited by her father.

    B & W photographs throughout [via]

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  • The Dispossessed
    by Ursula K. Le Guin
    ISBN 0380003821 (0-380-00382-1)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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    The ideas of Shevek, a brilliant physicist from the anarchist world of Anarres are being stifled by jealous colleagues. So he goes to the hell-planet Urras, seeking a different kind of freedom - and finds himself embroiled in deadly intrigue and bloody revoulution. [via]

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  • Eric
    by Terry Pratchett
    ISBN 0380821214 (0-380-82121-4)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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    Eric, also known as Faust Eric, is the ninth Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett. It was originally published in 1990[1] as a "Discworld story", in a larger format than the other novels and illustrated by Josh Kirby.[2] It was later reissued as a normal paperback without any illustrations, and in some cases, with the title given on the cover and title pages simply as Eric. (The page headers, however, continued to alternate between Faust and Eric.) The story is a parody of the tale of Faust,[3] and follows the events of Sourcery in which the Wizard Rincewind was trapped in the Dungeon Dimensions. Rincewind wakes in a strange place, having been summoned by the 13-year-old demonologist, Eric Thursley, who wants the mastery of all kingdoms, to meet the most beautiful woman who ever existed, and to live forever. He is disappointed when Rincewind tells him he is unable to deliver any of these things, and embarrassed when Rincewind sees through his disguise. Rincewind is disheartened to learn that the spells to confine the demon summoned are working on him; Eric's parrot tells him that because he was summoned as a demon, he is subject to the same terms. [via]

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  • Trombley, Stephen: The Execution Protocol: Inside America's Capital Punishment Industry
    The Execution Protocol: Inside America's Capital Punishment Industry
    by Stephen Trombley
    ISBN 0385471785 (0-385-47178-5)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Hemingway, Ernest: A Farewell to Arms
    A Farewell to Arms
    by Ernest Hemingway
    ISBN 0317562185 (0-317-56218-5)
    Softcover, Ingram Book Co

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  • Foucault's Pendulum
    by Umberto Eco
    ISBN 0345368754 (0-345-36875-4)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    "As brilliant and quirky as THE NAME OF THE ROSE, as mischievous and wide-raning....A virtuoso performance."
    THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
    Three clever book editors, inspired by an extraordinary fable they heard years befoe, decide to have a little fun. Randomly feeding esoteric bits of knowledge into an incredible computer capable of inventing connections between all their entires, they think they are creating a long lazy game--until the game starts taking over....
    Here is an incredible journey of thought and history, memory and fantasy, a tour de force as enthralling as anything Umberto Eco--or indeed anyone--has ever devised.


    From the Paperback edition. [via]

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  • Franny and Zooey
    by J. D. Salinger
    ISBN 0316769029 (0-316-76902-9)
    Softcover, Little Brown & Co

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    The author writes: franny came out in the new yorker in 1955, and was swiftly followed, in 1957 by zooey. Both stories are early, critical entries in a narrative series i'm doing about a family of settlers in twentieth-century new york, the glasses. It is a long-term project, patently an ambiguous one, and there is a real-enough danger, i suppose that sooner or later i'll bog down, perhaps disappear entirely, in my own methods, locutions, and mannerisms. On the whole, though, i'm very hopeful. I love working on these glass stories, i've been waiting for them most of my life, and i think i have fairly decent, monomaniacal plans to finish them with due care and all-available skill [via]

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  • The Giver
    by Lois Lowry
    ISBN 0385732554 (0-385-73255-4)
    Softcover, Random House Childrens Books

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    In a world with no poverty, no crime, no sickness and no unemployment, and where every family is happy, 12-year-old Jonas is chosen to be the community's Receiver of Memories. Under the tutelage of the Elders and an old man known as the Giver, he discovers the disturbing truth about his utopian world and struggles against the weight of its hypocrisy. With echoes of Brave New World, in this 1994 Newbery Medal winner, Lowry examines the idea that people might freely choose to give up their humanity in order to create a more stable society. Gradually Jonas learns just how costly this ordered and pain-free society can be, and boldly decides he cannot pay the price. [via]

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  • Atwood, Margaret: Good Bones and Simple Murders
    Good Bones and Simple Murders
    by Margaret Atwood
    ISBN 0385471106 (0-385-47110-6)
    Hardcover, Doubleday Publishing

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  • Ford, Ford Madox: The Good Soldier
    The Good Soldier
    by Ford Madox Ford
    ISBN 0374927731 (0-374-92773-1)
    Hardcover, Octagon Books

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  • The Guns of August
    by Barbara W. Tuchman
    ISBN 034538623X (0-345-38623-X)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    paperback [via]

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  • The House of Mirth
    by Edith Wharton
    ISBN 0375753753 (0-375-75375-3)
    Softcover, Modern Library

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  • The Hundred Secret Senses
    by Amy Tan
    ISBN 0375701524 (0-375-70152-4)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    The Hundred Secret Senses is an exultant novel about China and America, love and loyalty, the identities we invent and the true selves we discover along the way. Olivia Laguni is half-Chinese, but typically American in her uneasiness with her patchwork family. And no one in Olivia's family is more embarrassing to her than her half-sister, Kwan Li. For Kwan speaks mangled English, is cheerfully deaf to Olivia's sarcasm, and sees the dead with her "yin eyes."

    Even as Olivia details the particulars of her decades-long grudge against her sister (who, among other things, is a source of infuriatingly good advice), Kwan Li is telling her own story, one that sweeps us into the splendor, squalor, and violence of Manchu China. And out of the friction between her narrators, Amy Tan creates a work that illuminates both the present and the past sweetly, sadly, hilariously, with searing and vivid prose.

    "Truly magical...unforgettable...this novel...shimmer[s] with meaning."--San Diego Tribune

    "The Hundred Secret Senses doesn't simply return to a world but burrows more deeply into it, following new trails to fresh revelations."--Newsweek [via]

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  • I Capture the Castle
    by Dodie Smith
    ISBN 0312201656 (0-312-20165-6)
    Softcover, St Martins Pr

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    Seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain wants to become a writer. Trouble is, she's the daughter of a once-famous author with a severe case of writer's block. Her family--beautiful sister Rose, brooding father James, ethereal stepmother Topaz--is barely scraping by in a crumbling English castle they leased when times were good. Now there's very little furniture, hardly any food, and just a few pages of notebook paper left to write on. Bravely making the best of things, Cassandra gets hold of a journal and begins her literary apprenticeship by refusing to face the facts. She writes, "I have just remarked to Rose that our situation is really rather romantic, two girls in this strange and lonely house. She replied that she saw nothing romantic about being shut up in a crumbling ruin surrounded by a sea of mud."

    Rose longs for suitors and new tea dresses while Cassandra scorns romance: "I know all about the facts of life. And I don't think much of them." But romantic isolation comes to an end both for the family and for Cassandra's heart when the wealthy, adventurous Cotton family takes over the nearby estate. Cassandra is a witty, pensive, observant heroine, just the right voice for chronicling the perilous cusp of adulthood. Some people have compared I Capture the Castle to the novels of Jane Austen, and it's just as well-plotted and witty. But the Mortmains are more bohemian--as much like the Addams Family as like any of Austen's characters. Dodie Smith, author of 101 Dalmations, wrote this novel in 1948. And though the story is set in the 1930s, it still feels fresh, and well deserves its reputation as a modern classic. --Maria Dolan [via]

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  • The Illustrated Story of O
    by Doris Kloster, Pauline Reage, Jean-Jacques Pauvert
    ISBN 0312266057 (0-312-26605-7)
    Hardcover, St. Martin's Press

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    "...I was convinced that Story of O was going to revolutionize the book trade, that I would sell hundreds of thousands of copies across the world, and that moral attitudes would change overnight. The audacity of this novel seemed to me to be liberating rather than provocative. I perceived the promise of a new freedom. And I expected to cause a shock."--Jean-Jacques Pauvert, from the Introduction

    When Story of O was first published in 1954 in Paris by Jean-Jacques Pauvert, it narrowly escaped censorship by the Department of the Interior and eventually became the most widely translated French novel in the world.

    It describes in cool, elegant language the experiences of a young woman as she willingly enters a dark maze of perverse sexual practices within a clandestine amoral society. Revelling in pure fantasy, its theme is total submission through love to excesses of sadism and masochism, and the bond of "ownership."

    Now Doris Kloster, a photographer specializing in issues of women's sexuality and power, has realized a long-standing dream. She has created a photographic representation of one of the most famous and controversial erotic novels ever published.

    The result is another sensation. The Illustrated Story of O presents over 50 superb images which mirror perfectly the intense eroticism of the novel. Shooting entirely in Paris and its environs, Doris Kloster has succeeded in matching characters, locations, costumes and props to the original descriptions. And each magnificent color photograph is accompanied by a short extract from the novel. In addition, there is a Preface from Doris Kloster herself and an Introduction from Jean-Jacques Pauvert, the original publisher of the novel.

    The Illustrated Story of O presents a rich visual feast that will delight fans of Doris Kloster's work, and appeal strongly to connoisseurs of the darker excesses of sexuality. It is destined to become a classic collector's edition.
    [via]

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  • J.R.R. Tolkien
    by J. R. R. Tolkien
    ISBN 0345340426 (0-345-34042-6)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    Four book set includes the Hobbit and Complete Lord of the Rings; the Fellowship of the Ring; The Two Towers; The Return of The King. [via]

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  • Jonathan Livingston Seagull
    by Richard Bach
    ISBN 0380012863 (0-380-01286-3)
    Softcover, Avon Books

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    "Most gulls don't bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flight--how to get from shore to food and back again," writes author Richard Bach in this allegory about a unique bird named Jonathan Livingston Seagull. "For most gulls it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight." Flight is indeed the metaphor that makes the story soar. Ultimately this is a fable about the importance of seeking a higher purpose in life, even if your flock, tribe, or neighborhood finds your ambition threatening. (At one point our beloved gull is even banished from his flock.) By not compromising his higher vision, Jonathan gets the ultimate payoff: transcendence. Ultimately, he learns the meaning of love and kindness. The dreamy seagull photographs by Russell Munson provide just the right illustrations--although the overall packaging does seem a bit dated (keep in mind that it was first published in 1970). Nonetheless, this is a spirituality classic, and an especially engaging parable for adolescents. --Gail Hudson [via]

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  • The Journals of Sylvia Plath
    by Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Frances Monson McCullough
    ISBN 0385493916 (0-385-49391-6)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    No other major contemporary American writer has inspired such intense curiosity about her life as Sylvia Plath. Now the intimate and eloquent personal diaries of the twentieth century's most important female poet reveal for the first time the true story behind "The Bell Jar" and her tragic suicide at thirty. They paint, as well, a revealing portrait of the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet whose stature has seldom been equalled.
    "A revelation." The New York Times [via]

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  • Lady Chatterley's Lover
    by D. H. Lawrence, Kathryn Harrison
    ISBN 0375758003 (0-375-75800-3)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Adler, Stephen J.: Letters of the Century: America, 1900-1999
    Letters of the Century: America, 1900-1999
    by Stephen J. Adler, Lisa Grunwald
    ISBN 0385315902 (0-385-31590-2)
    Hardcover, Dial Pr

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  • Lord Jim
    by Joseph Conrad
    ISBN 0393096564 (0-393-09656-4)
    Softcover, W W Norton & Co Inc

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    This compact novel, completed in 1900, as with so many of the great novels of the time, is at its baseline a book of the sea. An English boy in a simple town has dreams bigger than the outdoors and embarks at an early age into the sailor's life. The waters he travels reward him with the ability to explore the human spirit, while Joseph Conrad launches the story into both an exercise of his technical prowess and a delicately crafted picture of a character who reaches the status of a literary hero. A classic novel. [via]

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  • Lord of the Rings Trilogy
    by J. R. R. Tolkien
    ISBN 0345247868 (0-345-24786-8)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Let's face it--even some adults find Tolkien's mammoth fantasy a daunting mouthful but children now have this special seven-book box set of The Lord of The Rings to make the epic tale just that bit easier to chew on. Split into its seven constituent parts, these slim volumes tell the ageless tale of young Frodo's quest to destroy The Ring and defeat the forces of evil. It's beautifully presented in a black presentation box with the movie logo and an illustration on the side and the spines of the books also form the movie logo. A contemporary look and plenty of "cool appeal" will grab kids' interest and ensure they don't miss out on reading this classic of the genre. --Jonathan Weir [via]

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  • The Lover
    by Marguerite Duras, Barbara Bray, Maxine Hong Kingston
    ISBN 0375700528 (0-375-70052-8)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    An international best-seller with more than one million copies in print and a winner of France's Prix Goncourt, The Lover has been acclaimed by critics all over the world since its first publication in 1984.

    Set in the prewar Indochina of Marguerite Duras's childhood, this is the haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her Chinese lover. In spare yet luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins of Saigon in the waning days of France's colonial empire, and its representation in the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts.

    Long unavailable in hardcover, this edition of The Lover includes a new introduction by Maxine Hong Kingston that looks back at Duras's world from an intriguing new perspective--that of a visitor to Vietnam today. [via]

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  • The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
    by G. K. Chesterton
    ISBN 0375757910 (0-375-75791-0)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    In an article published the day before his death, G.K. Chesterton called The Man Who Was Thursday "a very melodramatic sort of moonshine." Set in a phantasmagoric London where policemen are poets and anarchists camouflage themselves as, well, anarchists, his 1907 novel offers up one highly colored enigma after another. If that weren't enough, the author also throws in an elephant chase and a hot-air-balloon pursuit in which the pursuers suffer from "the persistent refusal of the balloon to follow the roads, and the still more persistent refusal of the cabmen to follow the balloon."

    But Chesterton is also concerned with more serious questions of honor and truth (and less serious ones, perhaps, of duels and dualism). Our hero is Gabriel Syme, a policeman who cannot reveal that his fellow poet Lucian Gregory is an anarchist. In Chesterton's agile, antic hands, Syme is the virtual embodiment of paradox:

    He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and self-realization; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinthe and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike.... Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left--sanity.
    Elected undercover into the Central European Council of anarchists, Syme must avoid discovery and save the world from any bombings in the offing. As Thursday (each anarchist takes the name of a weekday--the only quotidian thing about this fantasia) does his best to undo his new colleagues, the masks multiply. The question then becomes: Do they reveal or conceal? And who, not to mention what, can be believed? As The Man Who Was Thursday proceeds, it becomes a hilarious numbers game with a more serious undertone--what happens if most members of the council actually turn out to be on the side of right? Chesterton's tour de force is a thriller that is best read slowly, so as to savor his highly anarchic take on anarchy. --Kerry Fried [via]

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  • The Martian Chronicles
    by Ray Bradbury
    ISBN 0380973839 (0-380-97383-9)
    Hardcover, Harpercollins

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    Man, was a a distant shore, and the men spread upon it in wave... Each wave different, and each wave stronger.

    The Martian Chronicles

    Ray Bradbury is a storyteller without peer, a poet of the possible, and, indisputably, one of America's most beloved authors. In a much celebrated literary career that has spanned six decades, he has produced an astonishing body of work: unforgettable novels, including Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes; essays, theatrical works, screenplays and teleplays; The Illustrated Mein, Dandelion Wine, The October Country, and numerous other superb short story collections. But of all the dazzling stars in the vast Bradbury universe, none shines more luminous than these masterful chronicles of Earth's settlement of the fourth world from the sun.

    Bradbury's Mars is a place of hope, dreams and metaphor-of crystal pillars and fossil seas-where a fine dust settles on the great, empty cities of a silently destroyed civilization. It is here the invaders have come to despoil and commercialize, to grow and to learn -first a trickle, then a torrent, rushing from a world with no future toward a promise of tomorrow. The Earthman conquers Mars ... and then is conquered by it, lulled by dangerous lies of comfort and familiarity, and enchanted by the lingering glamour of an ancient, mysterious native race.

    Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is a classic work of twentieth-century literature whose extraordinary power and imagination remain undimmed by time's passage. In connected, chronological stories, a true grandmaster once again enthralls, delights and challenges us with his vision and his heart-starkly and stunningly exposing in brilliant spacelight our strength, our weakness, our folly, and our poignant humanity on a strange and breathtaking world where humanity does not belong.

    [via]

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  • Mason & Dixon
    by Thomas Pynchon
    ISBN 0312423209 (0-312-42320-9)
    Softcover, St Martins Pr

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    A sprawling, complex, and comic work from one of the country's most celebrated and idiosyncratic authors, Mason & Dixon is Thomas Pynchon's Most Magickal reinvention of the 18th-century novel. It follows the lifelong partnership and adventures of the English surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon (of Mason-Dixon Line fame) as they travel the world mapping and measuring through an uncharted pre-Revolutionary America of Native Americans, white settlers, taverns, and bawdy establishments of ill-repute. Fans of the postmodern master of paranoia will recognize Pynchon's personality in the novel's first phrase: "Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs," a brief echo of the rockets that curve across the skies in the writer's masterpiece Gravity's Rainbow. [via]

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  • Me Talk Pretty One Day
    by David Sedaris
    ISBN 0316776963 (0-316-77696-3)
    Softcover, Little Brown & Co

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    Book summary:

    David Sedaris became a star autobiographer on public radio, onstage in New York, and on bestseller lists, mostly on the strength of "SantaLand Diaries," a scathing, hilarious account of his stint as a Christmas elf at Macy's. (It's in two separate collections, both worth owning, Barrel Fever and the Christmas-themed Holidays on Ice.) Sedaris's caustic gift has not deserted him in his fourth book, which mines poignant comedy from his peculiar childhood in North Carolina, his bizarre career path, and his move with his lover to France. Though his anarchic inclination to digress is his glory, Sedaris does have a theme in these reminiscences: the inability of humans to communicate. The title is his rendition in transliterated English of how he and his fellow students of French in Paris mangle the Gallic language. In the essay "Jesus Shaves," he and his classmates from many nations try to convey the concept of Easter to a Moroccan Muslim. "It is a party for the little boy of God," says one. "Then he be die one day on two... morsels of... lumber," says another. Sedaris muses on the disputes between his Protestant mother and his father, a Greek Orthodox guy whose Easter fell on a different day. Other essays explicate his deep kinship with his eccentric mom and absurd alienation from his IBM-exec dad: "To me, the greatest mystery of science continues to be that a man could father six children who shared absolutely none of his interests."

    Every glimpse we get of Sedaris's family and acquaintances delivers laughs and insights. He thwarts his North Carolina speech therapist ("for whom the word pen had two syllables") by cleverly avoiding all words with s sounds, which reveal the lisp she sought to correct. His midget guitar teacher, Mister Mancini, is unaware that Sedaris doesn't share his obsession with breasts, and sings "Light My Fire" all wrong--"as if he were a Webelo scout demanding a match." As a remarkably unqualified teacher at the Art Institute of Chicago, Sedaris had his class watch soap operas and assign "guessays" on what would happen in the next day's episode.

    It all adds up to the most distinctively skewed autobiography since Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia. The only possible reason not to read this book is if you'd rather hear the author's intrinsically funny speaking voice narrating his story. In that case, get Me Talk Pretty One Day on audio. --Tim Appelo [via]

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  • Butler, Octavia E.: Mind of My Mind
    Mind of My Mind
    by Octavia E. Butler
    ISBN 038512600X (0-385-12600-X)
    Hardcover, Doubleday

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  • Jacques, Brian: Mossflower
    Mossflower
    by Brian Jacques, Gary Chalk
    ISBN 0380708280 (0-380-70828-0)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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  • Naomi
    by Jun Ichiro Tanizaki, Anthony H. Chambers
    ISBN 0375724745 (0-375-72474-5)
    Softcover, Vintage Books

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    Na-o-mi. The three syllables of this name, unusual in 1920s Japan, captivate a 28-year-old engineer, who soon becomes infatuated with the girl so named, a teenaged café waitress. Drawn to her Eurasian features and innocent demeanor, Joji is eager to whisk young Naomi away from the seamy underbelly of post-World War I Tokyo and to mold her into his ideal wife. But when the two come together to indulge their shared passion for Western culture, Joji discovers that Naomi is far from being the naïve girl of his fantasies, and his passion descends into a comically helpless masochism. A literary masterpiece that helped to establish Junichiro Tanizaki as Japan's greatest novelist, Naomi is both a hilarious story of one man's obsession and torment, and a brilliant evocation of a nation's cultural confusion. [via]

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  • Night
    by Elie Wiesel, Marion Wiesel
    ISBN 0374500010 (0-374-50001-0)
    Softcover, Hill & Wang Pub

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    A New Translation From The French By Marion Wiesel

    Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author's original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man's capacity for inhumanity to man.

    Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.
    [via]

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  • Of Human Bondage
    by W. Somerset Maugham, Gore Vidal
    ISBN 037575315X (0-375-75315-X)
    Softcover, Modern Library

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    It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham," wrote Gore Vidal. "He was always so entirely there."
            Originally published in 1915, Of Human Bondage is a potent expression of the power of sexual obsession and of modern man's yearning for freedom. This classic bildungsroman tells the story of Philip Carey, a sensitive boy born with a clubfoot who is orphaned and raised by a religious aunt and uncle. Philip yearns for adventure, and at eighteen leaves home, eventually pursuing a career as an artist in Paris. When he returns to London to study medicine, he meets the androgynous but alluring Mildred and begins a doomed love affair that will change the course of his life. There is no more powerful story of sexual infatuation, of human longing for connection and freedom.
            "Here is a novel of the utmost importance," wrote Theodore Dreiser on publication. "It is a beacon of light by which the wanderer may be guided. . . . One feels as though one were sitting before a splendid Shiraz of priceless texture and intricate weave, admiring, feeling, responding sensually to its colors and tones."

    With an Introduction by Gore Vidal

    Commentary by Theodore Dreiser and Graham Greene [via]

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  • Wilder, Thornton Niven: Our Town: A Play in Three Acts
    Our Town: A Play in Three Acts
    by Thornton Niven Wilder
    ISBN 0380005573 (0-380-00557-3)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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  • Leroux, Gaston: Phantom Of The Opera
    Phantom Of The Opera
    by Gaston Leroux
    ISBN 0375761136 (0-375-76113-6)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • Poems of Thomas Hardy: A New Selection
    by Thomas Hardy, T. R. M. Creighton
    ISBN 0333136829 (0-333-13682-9)
    Softcover, Macmillan

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  • Portnoy's Complaint
    by Philip Roth
    ISBN 0375507930 (0-375-50793-0)
    Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

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

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  • The Rainbow
    by D. H. Lawrence, Keith Cushman
    ISBN 0375759654 (0-375-75965-4)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Pronounced obscene when it was first published in 1915, The Rainbow is the epic story of three generations of the Brangwens, a Midlands family. A visionary novel, considered to be one of Lawrences finest, it explores the complex sexual and psychological relationships between men and women in an increasingly industrialized world. Lives are separate, but life is continuousit continues in the fresh start by the separate life in each generation, wrote F. R. Leavis. No work, I think, has presented this perception as an imaginatively realized truth more compellingly than The Rainbow. [via]

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  • Jian, Ma: Red Dust: A Path Through China
    Red Dust: A Path Through China
    by Ma Jian, Flora Drew
    ISBN 0385720238 (0-385-72023-8)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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  • The Right Stuff
    by Tom Wolfe
    ISBN 0374250324 (0-374-25032-4)
    Hardcover, Farrar, Straus & Giroux

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    Tom Wolfe began The Right Stuff at a time when it was unfashionable to contemplate American heroism. Nixon had left the White House in disgrace, the nation was reeling from the catastrophe of Vietnam, and in 1979--the year the book appeared--Americans were being held hostage by Iranian militants. Yet it was exactly the anachronistic courage of his subjects that captivated Wolfe. In his foreword, he notes that as late as 1970, almost one in four career Navy pilots died in accidents. "The Right Stuff," he explains, "became a story of why men were willing--willing?--delighted!--to take on such odds in this, an era literary people had long since characterized as the age of the anti-hero."

    Wolfe's roots in New Journalism were intertwined with the nonfiction novel that Truman Capote had pioneered with In Cold Blood. As Capote did, Wolfe tells his story from a limited omniscient perspective, dropping into the lives of his "characters" as each in turn becomes a major player in the space program. After an opening chapter on the terror of being a test pilot's wife, the story cuts back to the late 1940s, when Americans were first attempting to break the sound barrier. Test pilots, we discover, are people who live fast lives with dangerous machines, not all of them airborne.

    Wolfe traces Alan Shepard's suborbital flight and Gus Grissom's embarrassing panic on the high seas (making the controversial claim that Grissom flooded his Liberty capsule by blowing the escape hatch too soon). The author also produces an admiring portrait of John Glenn's apple-pie heroism and selfless dedication. By the time Wolfe concludes with a return to Yeager and his late-career exploits, the narrative's epic proportions and literary merits are secure. Certainly The Right Stuff is the best, the funniest, and the most vivid book ever written about America's manned space program. --Patrick O'Kelley [via]

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  • Rushdie, Salman: Shame
    Shame
    by Salman Rushdie, Salman Rudhdie
    ISBN 0312270933 (0-312-27093-3)
    Softcover, Picador USA

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  • Sons and Lovers
    by D. H. Lawrence
    ISBN 0375753737 (0-375-75373-7)
    Softcover, Modern Library

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    Sons and Lovers was the first modern portrayal of a phenomenon that later, thanks to Freud, became easily recognizable as the Oedipus complex. Never was a son more indentured to his mother's love and full of hatred for his father than Paul Morel, D.H. Lawrence's young protagonist. Never, that is, except perhaps Lawrence himself. In his 1913 novel he grappled with the discordant loves that haunted him all his life--for his spiritual childhood sweetheart, here called Miriam, and for his mother, whom he transformed into Mrs. Morel. It is, by Lawrence's own account, a book aimed at depicting this woman's grasp: "as her sons grow up she selects them as lovers--first the eldest, then the second. These sons are urged into life by their reciprocal love of their mother--urged on and on. But when they come to manhood, they can't love, because their mother is the strongest power in their lives."

    Of course, Mrs. Morel takes neither of her two elder sons (the first of whom dies early, which further intensifies her grip on Paul) as a literal lover, but nonetheless her psychological snare is immense. She loathes Paul's Miriam from the start, understanding that the girl's deep love of her son will oust her: "She's not like an ordinary woman, who can leave me my share in him. She wants to absorb him." Meanwhile, Paul plays his part with equal fervor, incapable of committing himself in either direction: "Why did his mother sit at home and suffer?... And why did he hate Miriam, and feel so cruel towards her, at the thought of his mother. If Miriam caused his mother suffering, then he hated her--and he easily hated her." Soon thereafter he even confesses to his mother: "I really don't love her. I talk to her, but I want to come home to you."

    The result of all this is that Paul throws Miriam over for a married suffragette, Clara Dawes, who fulfills the sexual component of his ascent to manhood but leaves him, as ever, without a complete relationship to challenge his love for his mother. As Paul voyages from the working-class mining world to the spheres of commerce and art (he has fair success as a painter), he accepts that his own achievements must be equally his mother's. "There was so much to come out of him. Life for her was rich with promise. She was to see herself fulfilled... All his work was hers."

    The cycles of Paul's relationships with these three women are terrifying at times, and Lawrence does nothing to dim their intensity. Nor does he shirk in his vivid, sensuous descriptions of the landscape that offers up its blossoms and beasts and "shimmeriness" to Paul's sensitive spirit. Sons and Lovers lays fully bare the souls of men and earth. Few books tell such whole, complicated truths about the permutations of love as resolutely without resolution. It's nothing short of searing to be brushed by humanity in this manner. --Melanie Rehak [via]

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  • Speak, Memory
    by Vladimir Nabokov, Brian Boyd
    ISBN 0375405534 (0-375-40553-4)
    Hardcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    Even if you already own Nabokov's earthy, otherworldly account of his astounding life, you must buy this 1999 edition. And if you've never read Speak, Memory, you must do so at once. This volume is essential because it includes the unpublished last chapter, a pseudo-review comparing Speak, Memory with another, nonexistent memoir called When Lilacs Last. (That title refers to Whitman's poem on Lincoln's assassination and to the lilacs of Nabokov's childhood home) Chapter 16 is a key to what the imaginary reviewer accurately calls a "unique freak as autobiographies go," revealing its novel-like nature and unifying themes and images (chess, puzzles, spirals, jewels, rainbows, exile, the stained-glass shadow patterns that the future casts on the present). Maybe Nabokov thought he gave too much away, and one sees the formal superiority of ending the book with chapter 15. But the added essay is a gem that dazzles and illuminates.

    You have to consult biographies like Brian Boyd's for the full, remarkable facts of Nabokov's life. A millionaire at 17 (his sister danced in Diaghilev gowns with Fabergé gems at the Winter Palace), repeatedly exiled, forced to bust out of one chrysalis after another into new lives, the writer retained only the infinite wealth of his memory and art. This book is a mosaic shaped by a mind so metaphorical that, as a babe, Nabokov perceived letters as colors, the alphabet as a rainbow.

    The loss of his father is at Speak, Memory's core. This memoir is worth owning for a single paragraph alone, about the sight of Nabokov senior being tossed aloft by grateful peasants he'd been generous to--a dozen or so with locked arms flinging him up in a hip-hip-hooray ritual.

    There, for an instant, the figure of my father in his wind-rippled white summer suit would be displayed, gloriously sprawled in midair.... Thrice, to the mighty heave-ho of his invisible tossers, he would fly up ... and then there he would be, on his last and loftiest flight, reclining, as if for good, against the cobalt blue of the summer noon, like one of those paradisiac personages who comfortably soar, with such a wealth of folds in their garments, on the vaulted ceiling of a church while below, one by one, the wax tapers in mortal hands light up to make a swarm of minute flames in the mist of incense, and the priest chants of eternal repose, and funeral lilies conceal the face of whoever lies there, among the swimming lights, in the open coffin.
    Nabokov recaptures the paradise of his youth, and acquits himself of the coldness of which some accuse him. He plays literary games, but he plays for keeps. --Tim Appelo [via]

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  • Story of O
    by Pauline Reage
    ISBN 0345301110 (0-345-30111-0)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    Dust jacket notes: "Travel to the most secret corners of the human psyche...to a perverse world of dark passion...twisted seduction, amourous betrayal and blood lust. this modern classic, from the mysterious woman writer whose name will forever be remembered for sexual humiliation mixed with love, is 'a total, authentic literary experience' (The New York Times). First published in France in 1954, Story of O is a tale of a woman willing to subject her mind and her body to the strange torments and tortures conceived by her lover. O's erotic journey begins when her lover brings her to a small chateau in the country...a place where any man can have her...a place where she learns total obedience. This is a shocking and disturbing erotic masterpiece." [via]

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  • Dean, Pamela: Tam Lin
    Tam Lin
    by Pamela Dean
    ISBN 0312851375 (0-312-85137-5)
    Hardcover, St Martins Pr

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  • The Trial
    by Franz Kafka, Douglas Scott, Christopher Waller, J. P. Stern
    ISBN 033024468X (0-330-24468-X)
    Softcover, Pan Macmillan

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  • The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    by Douglas Adams
    ISBN 0345453743 (0-345-45374-3)
    Softcover, Ballantine Books

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    Book summary:

    At last in paperback in one complete volume, here are the five classic novels from Douglas Adamss beloved Hitchiker series.

    The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
    Seconds before the Earth is demolished for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is saved by Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised Guide. Together they stick out their thumbs to the stars and begin a wild journey through time and space.

    The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
    Facing annihilation at the hands of warmongers is a curious time to crave tea. It could only happen to the cosmically displaced Arthur Dent and his comrades as they hurtle across the galaxy in a desperate search for a place to eat.

    Life, the Universe and Everything
    The unhappy inhabitants of planet Krikkit are sick of looking at the night sky so they plan to destroy it. The universe, that is. Now only five individuals can avert Armageddon: mild-mannered Arthur Dent and his stalwart crew.

    So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
    Back on Earth, Arthur Dent is ready to believe that the past eight years were all just a figment of his stressed-out imagination. But a gift-wrapped fishbowl with a cryptic inscription conspires to thrust him back to reality. So to speak.

    Mostly Harmless
    Just when Arthur Dent makes the terrible mistake of starting to enjoy life, all hell breaks loose. Can he save the Earth from total obliteration? Can he save the Guide from a hostile alien takeover? Can he save his daughter from herself? [via]

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  • Watership Down
    by Richard George Adams
    ISBN 0380002930 (0-380-00293-0)
    Softcover, Harpercollins

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    Watership Down has been a staple of high-school English classes for years. Despite the fact that it's often a hard sell at first (what teenager wouldn't cringe at the thought of 400-plus pages of talking rabbits?), Richard Adams's bunny-centric epic rarely fails to win the love and respect of anyone who reads it, regardless of age. Like most great novels, Watership Down is a rich story that can be read (and reread) on many different levels. The book is often praised as an allegory, with its analogs between human and rabbit culture (a fact sometimes used to goad skeptical teens, who resent the challenge that they won't "get" it, into reading it), but it's equally praiseworthy as just a corking good adventure.

    The story follows a warren of Berkshire rabbits fleeing the destruction of their home by a land developer. As they search for a safe haven, skirting danger at every turn, we become acquainted with the band and its compelling culture and mythos. Adams has crafted a touching, involving world in the dirt and scrub of the English countryside, complete with its own folk history and language (the book comes with a "lapine" glossary, a guide to rabbitese). As much about freedom, ethics, and human nature as it is about a bunch of bunnies looking for a warm hidey-hole and some mates, Watership Down will continue to make the transition from classroom desk to bedside table for many generations to come. --Paul Hughes [via]

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  • Welcome to the Monkey House
    by Kurt Vonnegut
    ISBN 0385333501 (0-385-33350-1)
    Softcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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    Welcome to the Monkey House is a collection of Kurt Vonneguts shorter works. Originally printed in publications as diverse as The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Atlantic Monthly, these superb stories share Vonneguts audacious sense of humor and extraordinary range of creative vision.
      [via]

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  • A Wild Sheep Chase: Library Edition
    by Alfred Birnbaum, Haruki Murakami
    ISBN 037571894X (0-375-71894-X)
    Softcover, Random House Inc

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    Book summary:

    A marvelous hybrid of mythology and mystery, A Wild Sheep Chase is the extraordinary literary thriller that launched Haruki Murakamis international reputation.

    It begins simply enough: A twenty-something advertising executive receives a postcard from a friend, and casually appropriates the image for an insurance companys advertisement. What he doesnt realize is that included in the pastoral scene is a mutant sheep with a star on its back, and in using this photo he has unwittingly captured the attention of a man in black who offers a menacing ultimatum: find the sheep or face dire consequences. Thus begins a surreal and elaborate quest that takes our hero from the urban haunts of Tokyo to the remote and snowy mountains of northern Japan, where he confronts not only the mythological sheep, but the confines of tradition and the demons deep within himself. Quirky and utterly captivating, A Wild Sheep Chase is Murakami at his astounding best. [via]

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  • Wild Swans : Three Daughters of China
    by Jung Chang
    ISBN 0385425473 (0-385-42547-3)
    Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group

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    Book summary:

    In Wild Swans Jung Chang recounts the evocative, unsettling, and insistently gripping story of how three generations of women in her family fared in the political maelstrom of China during the 20th century. Chang's grandmother was a warlord's concubine. Her gently raised mother struggled with hardships in the early days of Mao's revolution and rose, like her husband, to a prominent position in the Communist Party before being denounced during the Cultural Revolution. Chang herself marched, worked, and breathed for Mao until doubt crept in over the excesses of his policies and purges. Born just a few decades apart, their lives overlap with the end of the warlords' regime and overthrow of the Japanese occupation, violent struggles between the Kuomintang and the Communists to carve up China, and, most poignant for the author, the vicious cycle of purges orchestrated by Chairman Mao that discredited and crushed millions of people, including her parents. [via]

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  • Winesburg, Ohio
    by Sherwood Anderson
    ISBN 0375753133 (0-375-75313-3)
    Softcover, Modern Library

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    Library Journal praised this edition of Sherwood Anderson's famed short stories as "the finest edition of this seminal work available." Reconstructed to be as close to the original text as possible, Winesburg, Ohio depicts the strange, secret lives of the inhabitants of a small town. In "Hands," Wing Biddlebaum tries to hide the tale of his banishment from a Pennsylvania town, a tale represented by his hands. In "Adventure," lonely Alice Hindman impulsively walks naked into the night rain. Threaded through the stories is the viewpoint of George Willard, the young newspaper reporter who, like his creator, stands witness to the dark and despairing dealings of a community of isolated people. [via]

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  • Wise Children
    by Angela Carter
    ISBN 0374291330 (0-374-29133-0)
    Hardcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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    Dora and Nora Chance are a famous song-and-dance team of the British music halls. Billed as The Lucky Chances, the sisters are the illegitimate and unacknowledged daughters of Sir Melchoir Hazard, the greatest Shakespearean actor of his day. At once ribald and sentimental, glittery and tender, this rambunctious family saga is Angela Carter at her bewitching best. [via]

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