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The Annotated Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov

ISBN 0679727299 (0-679-72729-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
In 1954 Vladimir Nabokov asked one American publisher to consider "a firebomb that I have just finished putting together." The explosive device: Lolita, his morality play about a middle-aged European's obsession with a 12-year-old American girl. Two years later, the New York Times called it "great art." Other reviewers staked a higher moral ground (the editor of the London Sunday Express declaring it "the filthiest book I've ever read"). Since then, the sinuous novel has never ceased to astound. Even Nabokov was astonished by its place in the popular imagination. One biographer writes that "he was quite shocked when a little girl of eight or nine came to his door for candy on Halloween, dressed up by her parents as Lolita." And when it came time to casting the film, Nabokov declared, "Let them find a dwarfess!"
The character Lolita's power now exists almost separately from the endlessly inventive novel. If only it were read as often as it is alluded to. Alfred Appel Jr., editor of the annotated edition, has appended some 900 notes, an exhaustive, good-humored introduction, and a recent preface in which he admits that the "reader familiar with Lolita can approach the apparatus as a separate unit, but the perspicacious student who keeps turning back and forth from text to Notes risks vertigo." No matter. The notes range from translations to the anatomical to the complex textual. Appel is also happy to point out the Great Punster's supposedly unintended word play: he defends the phrase "Beaver Eaters" as "a portmanteau of 'Beefeaters' (the yeoman of the British royal guard) and their beaver hats." [via]
More editions of The Annotated Lolita:
- The Annotated Lolita: ISBN 0679727299 (0-679-72729-9)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
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An Artist of the Floating World
by Kazuo Ishiguro

ISBN 0679722661 (0-679-72266-1)
Softcover, Vintage Books

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Book summary:
In An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro offers readers of the English language an authentic look at postwar Japan, "a floating world" of changing cultural behaviors, shifting societal patterns and troubling questions. Ishiguro, who was born in Nagasaki in 1954 but moved to England in 1960, writes the story of Masuji Ono, a bohemian artist and purveyor of the night life who became a propagandist for Japanese imperialism during the war. But the war is over. Japan lost, Ono's wife and son have been killed, and many young people blame the imperialists for leading the country to disaster. What's left for Ono? Ishiguro's treatment of this story earned a 1986 Whitbread Prize. [via]
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Atonement: A Novel
by Ian McEwan

ISBN 038572179X (0-385-72179-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her older sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching Cecilia is their housekeeper's son Robbie Turner, a childhood friend who, along with Briony's sister, has recently graduated from Cambridge.

By the end of that day the lives of all three will have been changed forever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had never before dared to approach and will have become victims of the younger girl's scheming imagination. And Briony will have committed a dreadful crime, the guilt for which will color her entire life.

In each of his novels Ian McEwan has brilliantly drawn his reader into the intimate lives and situations of his characters. But never before has he worked with so large a canvas: In Atonement he takes the reader from a manor house in England in 1935 to the retreat from Dunkirk in 1941; from the London's World War II military hospitals to a reunion of the Tallis clan in 1999.

Atonement is Ian McEwan's finest achievement. Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of childhood, love and war, England and class, the novel is at its center a profound-and profoundly moving-exploration of shame and forgiveness and the difficulty of absolution. [via]
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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
by Mark Haddon

ISBN 1400032717 (1-4000-3271-7)
Softcover, Vintage Books

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Book summary:
Mark Haddon's bitterly funny first novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, is a murder mystery of sorts--one told by an autistic version of Adrian Mole. Christopher John Francis Boone is a 15-year-old boy, mathematically gifted and socially hopeless, raised in a working-class home by parents who can barely cope with their child's quirks. He takes everything that he sees (or is told) at face value, and is unable to sort out the strange behaviour of his elders and peers.
Late one night, Christopher comes across his neighbour's poodle, Wellington, impaled on a garden fork. Wellington's owner finds him cradling her dead dog in his arms, and has him arrested. After spending a night in jail, Christopher resolves--against the objection of his father and neighbours--to discover just who has murdered Wellington. He is encouraged by Siobhan, a social worker at his school, to write a book about his investigations, and the result--quirkily illustrated, with each chapter given its own prime number--is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.
Haddon's novel is a startling performance. This is the sort of book that could turn condescending, or exploitative, or overly sentimental, or grossly tasteless very easily, but Haddon navigates those dangers with a sureness of touch that is extremely rare among first-time novelists. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is original, clever, and genuinely moving: this one is a must-read. --Jack Illingworth [via]
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F Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby

ISBN 1874166676 (1-874166-67-6)
Softcover, Totem Books

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F. Scott Fitzgerald has become something of a defining figure of the twenties - the decade he so famously described as 'The Jazz Age'. In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald's writing is at its finest, exposing a society's tendency towards decadence and moral collapse through a decade of hedonism. Regarded as the most searching and tightly written of his novels, The Great Gatsby was the work that assured Fitzgerald's place amongst the major writers of the twentieth century. In this Readers' Guide, Nicolas Tredell introduces and sets in context the key critical debates surrounding a novel about which more critical material exists than any other work of American fiction. The extracts and essays included here reflect on The Great Gatsby's place as one of the first American novels to make significant use of modernist techniques, and explore the influence of the work on later American writings. Considering secondary sources from the Twenties to the present, the Guide offers readers an invaluable resource for the study of this complex rendering of a moment in American history. [via]
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- F Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby: ISBN 1874166676 (1-874166-67-6)
  Softcover, Totem Books
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F. Scott Fitzgerald's the Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anthony S. Abbott

ISBN 0812034155 (0-8120-3415-5)
Softcover, Barrons Educational Series Inc

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Book summary:
A guide to reading "The Great Gatsby" with a critical and appreciative mind encouraging analysis of plot, style, form, and structure. Also includes background on the author's life and times, sample tests, term paper suggestions, and a reading list. [via]
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- F. Scott Fitzgerald's the Great Gatsby: ISBN 0812034155 (0-8120-3415-5)
  Softcover, Barrons Educational Series Inc
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The Good Soldier
by Ford Madox Ford

ISBN 1406502081 (1-4065-0208-1)
Softcover, Dodo Pr

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"The Good Soldier" is the story of two couples. The first couple is English, Edward Ashburnham, the good soldier referenced in the title, and his wife Leonora. The second couple is American, John and Florence Dowell, who have been living abroad for quite some time. In a German spa prior to World War I the two couples meet and subsequently Edward and Florence become engaged in an affair. "The Good Soldier" is a tragic tale of passion. As John Dowell laments at the beginning of the book, it is "the saddest story I have ever heard." [via]
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The Good Soldier
by Ford M. Hueffner

ISBN 0742630986 (0-7426-3098-6)
Hardcover, Classic Books

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- The Good Soldier: ISBN 0742630986 (0-7426-3098-6)
  Hardcover, Classic Books
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The Good Soldier
by Frank Kermode, Ford Madox Ford

ISBN 1593082681 (1-59308-268-1)
Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc

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Book summary:
The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influencesbiographical, historical, and literaryto enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

Handsome, wealthy, and a veteran of service in India, Captain Edward Ashburnham appears to be the ideal good soldier and the embodiment of English upper-class virtues. But for his creator, Ford Madox Ford, he also represents the corruption at societys core. Beneath Ashburnhams charming, polished exterior lurks a soul well-versed in the arts of deception, hypocrisy, and betrayal. Throughout the nine years of his friendship with an equally privileged American, John Dowell, Ashburnham has been having an affair with Dowells wife, Florence. Unlike Dowell, Ashburnhams own wife, Leonora, is well aware of it.

When The Good Soldier was first published in 1915, its pitiless portrait of an amoral society dedicated to its own pleasure and convinced of its own superiority outraged many readers. Stylistically daring, The Good Soldier is narrated, unreliably, by the naïve Dowell, through whom Ford provides a level of bitter irony. Dowells disjointed, stumbling storytelling not only subverts linear temporality to satisfying effect, it also reflects his struggle to accept a world without honor, order, or permanence. Called the best French novel in the English language, The Good Soldier is both tragic and darkly comic, and it established Ford as an important contributor to the development of literary modernism.
Frank Kermode has taught at Manchester, London, and Cambridge Universities as well as at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. Among his many books the most recent are Shakespeares Language, Pieces of My Mind, and The Age of Shakespeare.
[via]
More editions of The Good Soldier:
- The Good Soldier: ISBN 1593082681 (1-59308-268-1)
  Softcover, Sterling Pub Co Inc
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The Good Soldier
by Thomas C. Moser, Ford Madox Ford

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

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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:
- The Good Soldier: ISBN 019283620X (0-19-283620-X)
  Softcover, Oxford Univ Pr
The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion
by Ford Madox Ford

ISBN 1404305890 (1-4043-0589-0)
Softcover, IndyPublish.com

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Book summary:
Set just before World War I, The Good Soldier chronicles the tragedies of the lives of two seemingly perfect couples. The novel is told using a series of flashbacks, it also makes use of the device of the unreliable narrator as the main character gradually reveals a version of events that is quite different from what the introduction leads you to believe. The novel was loosely based on two incidents of adultery and on Ford's messy personal life. [via]
More editions of The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion:
- The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion: ISBN 0140283315 (0-14-028331-5)
  Softcover, Penguin Group (Canada)
- The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion: ISBN 1404305890 (1-4043-0589-0)
  Softcover, IndyPublish.com
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The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

ISBN 1551113945 (1-55111-394-5)
Softcover, Broadview Pr

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The Great Gatsby, a novel by American author F. Scott Fitzgerald that takes place from spring to autumn 1922, during the Roaring Twenties and Prohibition. [via]
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The Great Gatsby
by Hoffman, Frederick John, Ed

ISBN 0684412845 (0-684-41284-5)
Softcover, Macmillan Pub Co

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Book summary:
An assortment of articles treating issues surrounding the Great Gatsby. Part I - From This Side of Paradise to Great Gatsby, Part II, The Great Gatsby and its world, Part III, The Great Gatsby, and Part IV, The Permanence of the Great Gatsby. Includes a bibliography. [via]
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- The Great Gatsby: ISBN 0684412845 (0-684-41284-5)
  Softcover, Macmillan Pub Co
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Inexcusable
by Chris Lynch

ISBN 1416939725 (1-4169-3972-5)
Softcover, Simon Pulse

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Book summary:
"I am a good guy. Good guys don't do bad things. Good guys understand that no means no, and so I could not have done this because I understand." Keir Sarafian knows many things about himself. He is a talented football player, a loyal friend, a devoted son and brother. Most of all, he is a good guy. And yet the love of his life thinks otherwise. Gigi says Keir has done something awful. Something unforgivable. Keir doesn't understand. He loves Gigi. He would never do anything to hurt her. So Keir carefully recounts the events leading up to that one fateful night, in order to uncover the truth. Clearly, there has been a mistake. But what has happened is, indeed, something inexcusable. [via]
More editions of Inexcusable:
- Inexcusable: ISBN 0689847890 (0-689-84789-0)
  Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
- Inexcusable: ISBN 1416939725 (1-4169-3972-5)
  Softcover, Simon Pulse
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An Instance of the Fingerpost
by Iain Pears

ISBN 1573227951 (1-57322-795-1)
Softcover, Riverhead Books

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Book summary:
An Instance of the Fingerpost is that rarest of all possible literary beasts--a mystery powered as much by ideas as by suspects, autopsies, and smoking guns. Hefty, intricately plotted, and intellectually ambitious, Fingerpost has drawn the inevitable comparisons to Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and, for once, the comparison is apt.
The year is 1663, and the setting is Oxford, England, during the height of Restoration political intrigue. When Dr. Robert Grove is found dead in his Oxford room, hands clenched and face frozen in a rictus of pain, all the signs point to poison. Rashomon-like, the narrative circles around Grove's murder as four different characters give their version of events: Marco da Cola, a visiting Italian physician--or so he would like the reader to believe; Jack Prestcott, the son of a traitor who fled the country to avoid execution; Dr. John Wallis, a mathematician and cryptographer with a predilection for conspiracy theories; and Anthony Wood, a mild-mannered Oxford antiquarian whose tale proves to be the book's "instance of the fingerpost." (The quote comes from the philosopher Bacon, who, while asserting that all evidence is ultimately fallible, allows for "one instance of a fingerpost that points in one direction only, and allows of no other possibility.")
Like The Name of the Rose, this is one whodunit in which the principal mystery is the nature of truth itself. Along the way, Pears displays a keen eye for period details as diverse as the early days of medicine, the convoluted politics of the English Civil War, and the newfangled fashion for wigs. Yet Pears never loses sight of his characters, who manage to be both utterly authentic denizens of the 17th century and utterly authentic human beings. As a mystery, An Instance of the Fingerpost is entertainment of the most intelligent sort; as a novel of ideas, it proves equally satisfying. [via]
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Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov

ISBN 0679723161 (0-679-72316-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Despite its lascivious reputation, the pleasures of Lolita are as much intellectual as erogenous. It is a love story with the power to raise both chuckles and eyebrows. Humbert Humbert is a European intellectual adrift in America, haunted by memories of a lost adolescent love. When he meets his ideal nymphet in the shape of 12-year-old Dolores Haze, he constructs an elaborate plot to seduce her, but first he must get rid of her mother. In spite of his diabolical wit, reality proves to be more slippery than Humbert's feverish fantasies, and Lolita refuses to conform to his image of the perfect lover.
Playfully perverse in form as well as content, riddled with puns and literary allusions, Nabokov's 1955 novel is a hymn to the Russian-born author's delight in his adopted language. Indeed, readers who want to probe all of its allusive nooks and crannies will need to consult the annotated edition. Lolita is undoubtedly, brazenly erotic, but the eroticism springs less from the "frail honey-hued shoulders ... the silky supple bare back" of little Lo than it does from the wantonly gorgeous prose that Humbert uses to recount his forbidden passion:
She was musical and apple-sweet ... Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice ... and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty--between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.
Much has been made of Lolita as metaphor, perhaps because the love affair at its heart is so troubling. Humbert represents the formal, educated Old World of Europe, while Lolita is America: ripening, beautiful, but not too bright and a little vulgar. Nabokov delights in exploring the intercourse between these cultures, and the passages where Humbert describes the suburbs and strip malls and motels of postwar America are filled with both attraction and repulsion, "those restaurants where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended upon the cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads." Yet however tempting the novel's symbolism may be, its chief delight--and power--lies in the character of Humbert Humbert. He, at least as he tells it, is no seedy skulker, no twisted destroyer of innocence. Instead, Nabokov's celebrated mouthpiece is erudite and witty, even at his most depraved. Humbert can't help it--linguistic jouissance is as important to him as the satisfaction of his arrested libido. --Simon Leake [via]
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Lolita
by Harold Bloom

ISBN 0791009610 (0-7910-0961-0)
Hardcover, Facts on File

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- Lolita: ISBN 0791009610 (0-7910-0961-0)
  Hardcover, Facts on File
A Maze of Death
by Philip K. Dick

ISBN 0679752986 (0-679-75298-6)
Softcover, Vintage Books

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- A Maze of Death: ISBN 0575006943 (0-575-00694-3)
  Hardcover, Gollancz
- A Maze of Death: ISBN 0679752986 (0-679-75298-6)
  Softcover, Vintage Books
Monarch Great Gatsby
by Stanley Cooperman

ISBN 0671006673 (0-671-00667-3)
Hardcover, Pearson Education, Limited

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- Monarch Great Gatsby: ISBN 0671006673 (0-671-00667-3)
  Hardcover, Pearson Education, Limited
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Pale Fire
by Vladimir Nabokov

ISBN 0679723420 (0-679-72342-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
Like Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire is a masterpiece that imprisons us inside the mazelike head of a mad émigré. Yet Pale Fire is more outrageously hilarious, and its narrative convolutions make the earlier book seem as straightforward as a fairy tale. Here's the plot--listen carefully! John Shade is a homebody poet in New Wye, U.S.A. He writes a 999-line poem about his life, and what may lie beyond death. This novel (and seldom has the word seemed so woefully inadequate) consists of both that poem and an extensive commentary on it by the poet's crazy neighbor, Charles Kinbote.
According to this deranged annotator, he had urged Shade to write about his own homeland--the northern kingdom of Zembla. It soon becomes clear that this fabulous locale may well be a figment of Kinbote's colorfully cracked, prismatic imagination. Meanwhile, he manages to twist the poem into an account of Zembla's King Charles--whom he believes himself to be--and the monarch's eventual assassination by the revolutionary Jakob Gradus.
In the course of this dizzying narrative, shots are indeed fired. But it's Shade who takes the hit, enabling Kinbote to steal the dead poet's manuscript and set about annotating it. Is that perfectly clear? By now it should be obvious that Pale Fire is not only a whodunit but a who-wrote-it. There isn't, of course, a single solution. But Nabokov's best biographer, Brian Boyd, has come up with an ingenious suggestion: he argues that Shade is actually guiding Kinbote's mad hand from beyond the grave, nudging him into completing what he'd intended to be a 1,000-line poem. Read this magical, melancholic mystery and see if you agree. --Tim Appelo [via]
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Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro

ISBN 0679731725 (0-679-73172-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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The novel's narrator, Stevens, is a perfect English butler who tries to give his narrow existence form and meaning through the self-effacing, almost mystical practice of his profession. In a career that spans the second World War, Stevens is oblivious of the real life that goes on around him -- oblivious, for instance, of the fact that his aristocrat employer is a Nazi sympathizer. Still, there are even larger matters at stake in this heartbreaking, pitch-perfect novel -- namely, Stevens' own ability to allow some bit of life-affirming love into his tightly repressed existence. [via]
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What Was She Thinking? : Notes on a Scandal: A Novel
by Zoe Heller

ISBN 0805073337 (0-8050-7333-7)
Hardcover, Holt & Company, Henry

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Book summary:
Zoe Heller juggles journalism and novel-writing successfully in What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal and manages to say something interesting and complex about moral panics and the people who get caught up in them. Pottery teacher Sheba lets herself be talked into an affair with 15-year-old pupil Connolly; part of what is admirable about this novel is that there is no real attempt to extenuate this--it's wrong and she knows this from the start, enough to lie to herself and others about it. It's an abuse of her very limited power--he is one of the few of her pupils interested in art, not interested in perpetually disrupting her lessons.
Sheba is not alone in abusing power, though, and Heller forces us to confront this unpleasant truth about the moralising, managerial headmaster, the husband freed by Sheba's action to seduce his own very slightly older students, and the relatives who never liked her much and can now disown her. Above all, she devotes most of the novel to Barbara, the older colleague who becomes Sheba's confidante and slowly manipulates the situation to make Sheba entirely dependent on her. This is a brilliantly gloomy study in obsession--and the obsession in question is not actually Sheba's with her underage lover. --Roz Kaveney [via]
More editions of What Was She Thinking? : Notes on a Scandal: A Novel:
- What Was She Thinking? : Notes on a Scandal: A Novel: ISBN 0805073337 (0-8050-7333-7)
  Hardcover, Holt & Company, Henry
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When We Were Orphans
by Kazuo Ishiguro

ISBN 0375724400 (0-375-72440-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
When 9-year-old Christopher Banks's father--a British businessman involved in the opium trade--disappears from the family home in Shanghai, the boy and his friend Akira play at being detectives: "Until in the end, after the chases, fist-fights and gun-battles around the warren-like alleys of the Chinese districts, whatever our variations and elaborations, our narratives would always conclude with a magnificent ceremony held in Jessfield Park, a ceremony that would see us, one after another, step out onto a specially erected stage ... to greet the vast cheering crowds."
But Christopher's mother also disappears, and he is sent to live in England, where he grows up in the years between the world wars to become, he claims, a famous detective. His family's fate continues to haunt him, however, and he sifts through his memories to try to make sense of his loss. Finally, in the late 1930s, he returns to Shanghai to solve the most important case of his life. But as Christopher pursues his investigation, the boundaries between fact and fantasy begin to evaporate. Is the Japanese soldier he meets really Akira? Are his parents really being held in a house in the Chinese district? And who is Mr. Grayson, the British official who seems to be planning an important celebration? "My first question, sir, before anything else, is if you're happy with the choice of Jessfield Park for the ceremony? We will, you see, require substantial space."
In When We Were Orphans Kazuo Ishiguro uses the conventions of crime fiction to create a moving portrait of a troubled mind, and of a man who cannot escape the long shadows cast by childhood trauma. Sherlock Holmes needed only fragments--a muddy shoe, cigarette ash on a sleeve--to make his deductions, but all Christopher has are fading recollections of long-ago events, and for him the truth is much harder to grasp. Ishiguro writes in the first person, but from the beginning there are cracks in Christopher's carefully restrained prose, suggestions that his version of the world may not be the most reliable. Faced with such a narrator, the reader is forced to become a detective too, chasing crumbs of truth through the labyrinth of Christopher's memory.
Ishiguro has never been one for verbal pyrotechnics, but the unruffled surface of this haunting novel only adds to its emotional power. When We Were Orphans is an extraordinary feat of sustained, perfectly controlled imagination, and in Christopher Banks the author has created one of his most memorable characters. --Simon Leake [via]
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Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places
by Peter Nabokov

ISBN 0670034320 (0-670-03432-0)
Hardcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

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Book summary:
From the author of Native American Testimony comes a revelatory new look at the hallowed, diverse, and threatened landscapes of the American Indian

For thousands of years Native Americans have told stories about the powers of revered landscapes and sought spiritual direction at mysterious locations in their homelands. In Where the Lightning Strikes, Peter Nabokov offers sixteen "biographies of place" that dramatize the rich diversity of Indian cultures and their religious systems across North America. From the mountains of Maine to Tennessees Tellico Valley, from the Black Hills of South Dakota to Rainbow Canyon in Arizona to the high country of northwestern California, each chapter explores a host of relationships between Indian cultures and their environments and describes the myths, legends, practices, and rituals that sustained them.
Based on years of research and personal experience, Where the Lightning Strikes reveals a range of holy lands containing beneficial as well as malevolent forces and reminds us of the stubborn persistence of Indian beliefs in the sacredness of the American earth. [via]
More editions of Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places:
- Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places: ISBN 0670034320 (0-670-03432-0)
  Hardcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

Spanish

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El Curioso Incidente Del Perro A Medianoche
by Mark Haddon

ISBN 8478889108 (84-7888-910-8)
Softcover, Salamandra Publicacions Y Edicions

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2005 SALAMANDRA Spanish Edition SOFTCOVER [via]
More editions of El Curioso Incidente Del Perro A Medianoche:
- El Curioso Incidente Del Perro A Medianoche: ISBN 8478889108 (84-7888-910-8)
  Softcover, Salamandra Publicacions Y Edicions
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Expiacion / Atonement
by Ian R. Mcewan

ISBN 8433969757 (84-339-6975-7)
Softcover, Editorial Anagrama

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Book summary:
La trama de esta fascinante y perfecta novela, sucede en la gran casa de campo de la familia Tallis. El padre está en Londres, la madre con migraña encerrada en su habitación, la hija menor desesperada por ser adulta y ya herida por la literatura, el hermano que finalizó sus estudios y regresa con un amigo, la hermana mayor que tambien ha regresado con notas no tan altas, una prima nínfula quinceañera y seductora que ha venido a vivir para la casa, y el brillante hijo de la criada, protegido de la familia, que finaliza con excelentes notas sus estudios. La precoz escritora y menor de los Tallis, cambia irremediablemente el curso de varias vidas cuando acusa al amante de su hermana mayor de haber cometido un crimen en el que no tuvo nada que ver. Todos ellos conforman una novela que va abriéndose a distintas novelas de géneros diferentes: una intensa novela de amor, una durísima novela de guerra, y la novela de una novela, la narración de esta Expiación de la cual la hija menor escribió varias versiones en su vida.Considerada la mejor novela de McEwan, ha sido llevada al cine por Joe Wright, con un estruendoso éxito de taquilla y crítica. [via]
More editions of Expiacion / Atonement:
- Expiacion / Atonement: ISBN 8433969757 (84-339-6975-7)
  Softcover, Editorial Anagrama
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Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov, Enrique Tejedor

ISBN 8433920383 (84-339-2038-3)
Hardcover, Anagrama Editorial S. A.

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Esta es la historia de la obsesion de Humbert Humbert, un profesor cuarenton, por la doceañera Lolita. Es una extraordinaria novela de amor en la que intervienen dos componentes explosivos: la atraccion "perversa" por las ninfulas y el incesto. Narrada con autoironia y lirismo desenfrenado, es tambien un retrato acido y visionario de los Estados Unidos, de los horrores suburbanos y de la cultura del plastico y del motel. [via]
More editions of Lolita:
- Lolita: ISBN 8433920383 (84-339-2038-3)
  Hardcover, Anagrama Editorial S. A.
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Palido Fuego
by Nabokov V.

ISBN 843392060X (84-339-2060-X)
Softcover, Ld Books Inc

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Esta es una obra maestra, una novela originalisima, desconcertante y diabolicamente divertida, que figura entre las preferidas de su propio autor. Es la edicion postuma de un largo poema escrito por John Shade, gloria de las letras norteamericanas, un poco antes de ser asesinado. Ademas, un prologo, un corpus de notas y un indice comentado del editor, el profesor Charles Kinbote. Mediante sus entrometidos comentarios sobre el poema, su amistad con Shade los meses anteriores a su muerte, y el lejano reino de Zembla, Kinbote va trazando un hilarante autorretaro, en el que se delata como un individuo intolerante y altivo, excentrico y perverso, un autentico y peligroso chiflado. [via]
More editions of Palido Fuego:
- Palido Fuego: ISBN 843392060X (84-339-2060-X)
  Softcover, Ld Books Inc

German

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Das Buch Ruth
by Klaas Huizing

ISBN 381350168X (3-8135-0168-X)
Hardcover, Knaus

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Willkommen im Reich der postmodernen Narrativität ( Narri! Narro!). Nun gut, Scherz beiseite, wer Ishiguro kennt, wird, auch wenn es sich wie hier um eine Kriminalgeschichte handelt, ohnehin keinen Schlaf raubenden Reißer erwarten. Kunst darf (muss?) schließlich auch ein wenig anstrengen.
Was uns erwartet: Christopher Banks, der Protagonist des Romans, ist, nach erfolgreichem Universitätsbesuch, zum berühmtesten Londoner Detektiv der 30er Jahre geworden. Er ist ein Philosoph, ein Metaphysiker des Detektivischen. Doch was treibt ihn ins Investigative? Wir erfahren es mittels ausführlicher Rückblenden. Banks verbringt Kindheit und Jugend in Shanghai und muss erleben, dass eines Tages seine Eltern verschwunden sind. Er ist besessen davon, das Geheimnis dieses Verschwindens zu ergründen. Nach und nach wird jedoch deutlich, dass diese scheinbar präzisen Erinnerungen in den zahllosen Rückblenden nicht so sehr der Aufhellung der Vergangenheit, als der Konstruktion eines Idealbildes seiner Kindheit dienen. Wir hören, dezent, dezent, die postmoderne Nachtigall trapsen: Nicht die Geschichte als solche ist besonders wichtig, sondern die Beschreibung des postmodernen Ego im Prozess seiner Selbstfindung, seines Bemühens, Ordnung ins allgegenwärtige Chaos zu bringen.
In gewissem Sinne steht dieser Roman in einer Tradition des Kafkaesken ( nicht Kafkas!!): der Beschreibung des Unwirklichen und Unlogischen im vorgeblich Sinnhaften.
Lesbar und wider Erwarten unterhaltsam wird dieses Buch durch Ishiguros parodistisches Talent, auch wenn die manchmal unambitionierte bis fantasielose Übersetzung dem hohen literarischen Rang dieses Autors nicht immer gerecht wird. Trost und Versprechen zum Schluss: Das Mysterium des elterlichen Verschwindens wird tatsächlich enträtselt. --Dietrich Clausen [via]
More editions of Das Buch Ruth:
- Das Buch Ruth: ISBN 381350168X (3-8135-0168-X)
  Hardcover, Knaus
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Der Gross Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald

ISBN 3257201834 (3-257-20183-4)
Softcover, Diogenes Verlag AG

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»Der große Gatsby« bietet ein Sittengemälde der amerikanischen 1920er Jahre und beleuchtet den Zwiespalt zwischen Geld und Liebe, Machtgier und Treue. Sprache und Erzählstil machen den Roman zu einem der herausragenden poetischen Werke Amerikas in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts. [via]
More editions of Der Gross Gatsby:
- Der Gross Gatsby: ISBN 3257201834 (3-257-20183-4)
  Softcover, Diogenes Verlag AG

French

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Quand Nous Etions Orphelins
by Kazuo Ishiguro

ISBN 2264033746 (2-264-03374-6)
Softcover, Distribooks Inc

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383pages. 17x10,8x2,4cm. Poche. Christopher Banks, Anglais né à Shanghai à l'aube du XXe siècle, est devenu orphelin à 9 ans, à la suite de la disparition énigmatique de ses parents. Envoyé en Grande-Bretagne pour y poursuivre ses études, il devient un détective célèbre, résolvant les affaires les plus difficiles, avant de décider finalement de revenir sur les lieux de son enfance pour s'attaquer à l'énigme qui n'a cessé de le hanter : pourquoi ses parents ont-ils été enlevés ? Cet événement lourd de conséquences serait-il lié au trafic d'opium ? Mais est-il possible de cerner la vérité à partir de souvenirs évanescents, qui plus est dans une ville quotidiennement défigurée par les ravages de la guerre sino-japonaise ? Et peut-on faire confiance à un homme certes rigoureux, mais forcément impliqué émotionnellement dans son enquête ? Le lecteur est alors amené à endosser lui aussi l'habit de détective, en quête des bribes de vérité que livre la conscience labyrinthique du personnage. L'auteur virtuose des Vestiges du Jour explore ainsi à nouveau le territoire du dédale de la mémoire. Avec originalité et subtilité, perspicacité et finesse d'humour, il nous livre un roman remarquable, riche en émotions et en rebondissements. Le lecteur se laisse emporter avec plaisir par le souffle de cette ?uvre à l'atmosphère désenchantée, et qui invite à profiter des plaisirs minuscules de la vie. Un très bon cru, à consommer sans modération. -Nathalie Gouiffès [via]
More editions of Quand Nous Etions Orphelins:
- Quand Nous Etions Orphelins: ISBN 2264033746 (2-264-03374-6)
  Softcover, Distribooks Inc

Italian

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Quando Eravamo Orfani
by Kazuo Ishiguro

ISBN 8806162349 (88-06-16234-9)
Softcover, Distribooks Inc

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More editions of Quando Eravamo Orfani:
- Quando Eravamo Orfani: ISBN 8806162349 (88-06-16234-9)
  Softcover, Distribooks Inc

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