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books tagged “world literature”
books tagged “world literature”
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Ada or Ardor a Family Chronicleby Vladimir NabokovISBN 0679725229 (0-679-72522-9)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Ada or Ardor a Family Chronicle'Book summary:Published two weeks after his seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of Nabokov's greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest. But more: it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat.
This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom. [via]More editions of Ada or Ardor a Family Chronicle:
The Adventures of Tom Sawyerby Mark Twain, Russell BakerISBN 0679735011 (0-679-73501-1)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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The Age of Reasonby Jean Paul SartreISBN 0679738959 (0-679-73895-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Age of Reason'Book summary:The first novel of Sartre's monumental Roads to Freedom series, The Age of Reason is set in 1938 and tells of Mathieu, a French professor of philosophy who is obsessed with the idea of freedom. As the shadows of the Second World War draw closer -- even as his personal life is complicated by his mistress's pregnancy -- his search for a way to remain free becomes more and more intense. [via]
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And Quiet Flows the Donby Mikhail Sholokhov, Stephen GarryISBN 0679725210 (0-679-72521-0)
Softcover, Random House, Incorporated
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› Find signed collectible books: 'And Quiet Flows the Don'Book summary:The first episode in Mikhail Sholokhov's portrayal of life in a Cossack village, 1910-20. In it he juxtaposes the character of Gregor, a proud and rebellious peasant farmer, against that of Misha, an obedient Party man. The author won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965. [via]
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An Artist of the Floating Worldby Kazuo IshiguroISBN 0679722661 (0-679-72266-1)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'An Artist of the Floating World'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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Barabbasby Par Lagerkvist, Alan BlairISBN 067972544X (0-679-72544-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Barabbas'Book summary:Barabbas is the acquitted; the man whose life was exchanged for that of Jesus of Nazareth, crucified upon the hill of Golgotha. Barabbas is a man condemned to have no god. "Christos Iesus" is carved on the disk suspended from his neck, but he cannot affirm his faith. He cannot pray. He can only say, "I want to believe."
Translated from the Swedish by Alan Blair [via]More editions of Barabbas:
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Beauty and Sadnessby Yasunari Kawabata, Howard S. HibbettISBN 0679761055 (0-679-76105-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Beauty and Sadness'Book summary:The successful writer Oki has reached middle age and is filled with regrets. He returns to Kyoto to find Otoko, a young woman with whom he had a terrible affair many years before, and discovers that she is now a painter, living with a younger woman as her lover. Otoko has continued to love Oki and has never forgotten him, but his return unsettles not only her but also her young lover. This is a work of strange beauty, with a tender touch of nostalgia and a heartbreaking sensitivity to those things lost forever. [via]
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Bend Sinisterby Vladimir NabokovISBN 0679727272 (0-679-72727-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Bend Sinister'Book summary:The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic. While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and foremost, a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man caught in the tyranny of a police state. It is first and foremost a compelling narrative about a civilized man and his child caught up in the tyranny of a police state. Professor Adam Krug, the country's foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man. In a folly of bureaucratic bungling and ineptitude, the government attempts to co-opt Krug's support in order to validate the new regime. [via]
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Buddenbrooksby Thomas Mann, John E. WoodsISBN 0679752609 (0-679-75260-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Buddenbrooks'Book summary:A Major Literary Event: a brilliant new translation of Thomas Mann's first great novel, one of the two for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929.
Buddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1900, when Mann was only twenty-five, has become a classic of modem literature -- the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois family in northern Germany. With consummate skill, Mann draws a rounded picture of middle-class life: births and christenings; marriages, divorces, and deaths; successes and failures. These commonplace occurrences, intrinsically the same, vary slightly as they recur in each succeeding generation. Yet as the Buddenbrooks family eventually succumbs to the seductions of modernity -- seductions that are at variance with its own traditions -- its downfall becomes certain.
In immensity of scope, richness of detail, and fullness of humanity, Buddenbrooks surpasses all other modem family chronicles; it has, indeed, proved a model for most of them. Judged as the greatest of Mann's novels by some critics, it is ranked as among the greatest by all. Thomas Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929.
From the Hardcover edition. [via] -
The Charterhouse of Parmaby Richard Howard, Henri Stendhal, Robert Andrew ParkerISBN 0679783180 (0-679-78318-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Charterhouse of Parma'Book summary:Officer, diplomat, spy, journalist, and intermittent genius, Marie Henri Beyle employed more than 200 aliases in the course of his crowded career. His most famous moniker, however, was Stendhal, which he affixed to his greatest work, The Charterhouse of Parma. The author spent a mere seven weeks cranking out this marvel in 1838, setting the fictional equivalent of a land-speed record. To be honest, there are occasional signs of haste, during which he clearly bypassed le mot juste in favor of narrative zing. So what? Stendhal at his sloppiest is still wittier, and wiser about human behavior, than just about any writer you could name. No wonder so meticulous a stylist as Paul Valéry was happy to forgive his sins against French grammar: "We should never be finished with Stendhal. I can think of no greater praise than that."
The plot of The Charterhouse of Parma suggests a run-of-the-mill potboiler, complete with court intrigue, military derring-do, and more romance than you can shake a saber at. But Stendhal had an amazing, pre-Freudian grasp of psychology (at least the Gallic variant). More than most of his contemporaries, he understood the incessant jostling of love, sex, fear, and ambition, not to mention our endless capacity for self-deception. No wonder his hero, Fabrizio de Dongo, seems to know everything and nothing about himself. Even under fire at the Battle of Waterloo, the young Fabrizio has a tendency to lose himself in Napoleonic reverie:
Suddenly everyone galloped off. A few moments later Fabrizio saw, twenty paces ahead, a ploughed field that seemed to be strangely in motion; the furrows were filled with water, and the wet ground that formed their crests was exploding into tiny black fragments flung three or four feet into the air. Fabrizio noticed this odd effect as he passed; then his mind returned to daydreams of the Marshal's glory. He heard a sharp cry beside him: two hussars had fallen, riddled by bullets; and when he turned to look at them, they were already twenty paces behind the escort.
The quote above, a famous one, captures something of Stendhal's headlong style. Until now, most English-speaking readers have experienced it via C.K. Scott-Moncrieff's superb 1925 translation. But now Richard Howard has modernized his predecessor's period touches, streamlined some of the fussier locutions, and generally given Stendhal his high-velocity due. The result is a timely version of a timeless masterpiece, which shouldn't need to be updated again until, oh, 2050. Crammed with life, lust, and verbal fireworks, The Charterhouse of Parma demonstrates the real truth of its creator's self-composed epitaph: "He lived. He wrote. He loved." --James Marcus [via]More editions of The Charterhouse of Parma:
The Collected Works of Billy the Kidby Michael OndaatjeISBN 067976786X (0-679-76786-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Confessions of Felix Krullby Thomas MannISBN 0679739041 (0-679-73904-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Confessions of Felix Krull'Book summary:Recounts the enchanted career of the con man extraordinaire Felix Krull--a man unhampered by the moral precepts that govern the conduct of ordinary people. [via]
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Confessions of Zenoby Italo Svevo, Beryl de ZoeteISBN 0679722343 (0-679-72234-3)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Confessions of Zeno'Book summary:The pliant protagonist of Italo Svevo's 1923 classic Confessions of Zeno is, among other things, a bumbling businessman, a guilt-ridden adulterer, and a hardcore nicotine addict. What Zeno Cosini most definitely is not is wordless. For the novel is in fact a dense and comically excruciating exercise in self-revelation, undertaken by the narrator as part of his psychoanalytic treatment. Zeno never finds a cure for his affliction, which seems to be a strain of continental angst. Yet his reflections remain as audacious as they are exhaustive--and, much of the time, masterfully absorbing.
As we soon discover, Zeno is a master is the convoluted rationalization. He concocts numerous reasons why his "last cigarette" needn't truly become his last; he strives endlessly to convince himself that he loves his wife; he tirelessly justifies an awkward affair, all the while vacillating between a paralysis of action and a lazy submission. "My resolutions are less drastic and, as I grow older, I become more indulgent to my weaknesses," Zeno proclaims early on. (Later he backpedals even further, confessing that his "resolutions existed for their own sake and had no practical results whatever.") As a last-ditch tactic, he transmutes his disappointments into inevitabilities--an act of creative bookkeeping that becomes steadily creepier as the narrative unfolds.
There are times, to be sure, when Zeno seems to grasp that life isn't merely feints and games, that subterfuge and dark motivation aren't the whole of human transaction. Yet he always retreats back into his extravagant, consoling fantasies. Perhaps that's why Svevo's book still has the power to discomfit: Zeno's ingenious whitewashing of an indifferent world feels alarmingly like the fictions we tell ourselves on a daily basis. --Ben Guterson [via]
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Crossing the Riverby Caryl PhillipsISBN 0679757945 (0-679-75794-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Cry, the Beloved Countryby Alan PatonISBN 0684155591 (0-684-15559-1)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Cry, the Beloved Country'Book summary:Set in the troubled South Africa of the 1940s, this is the deeply moving story of a Zulu pastor, his son, and a land and a people riven by racial injustice. Passionately African, yet timeless and universal, it is a work of searing beauty. [via]
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Dance, Dance, Danceby Alfred Birnbaum, Haruki MurakamiISBN 0679753796 (0-679-75379-6)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Dance, Dance, Dance'Book summary:Paperback [via]
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The Decay of the Angelby Yukio Mishima, Edward SeidenstickerISBN 0679722432 (0-679-72243-2)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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Demonsby Richard Pevear, Fyodor DostoevskyISBN 0679734511 (0-679-73451-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Demons'Book summary:Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horried Russians in 1869, Fyodor Dostoevsky conceived of Demons as a "novel-pamphlet" in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. What emerged was a prophetic and ferociously funny masterpiece of ideology and murder in pre-revolutionary Russia. [via]
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Diana O LA Cazadora Solitariaby Carlos FuentesISBN 067976528X (0-679-76528-X)
Softcover, Santillana USA Pub Co Inc
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Doctor Faustusby Thomas Mann, H.T. Lowe-PorterISBN 067973905X (0-679-73905-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Doctor Faustus'Book summary:Tells the story of Adrian Leverkuhn, a theological student turned composer, who symbolically enters into a pact with the Devil, selling his soul and body in return for twenty-four years of musical genius. [via]
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The English Patientby Michael OndaatjeISBN 0679745203 (0-679-74520-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The English Patient'Book summary:With unsettling beauty and intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an abandoned Italian villa at the end of World War II.The nurse Hana, exhausted by death, obsessively tends to her last surviving patient. Caravaggio, the thief, tries to reimagine who he is, now that his hands are hopelessly maimed. The Indian sapper Kip searches for hidden bombs in a landscape where nothing is safe but himself. And at the center of his labyrinth lies the English patient, nameless and hideously burned, a man who is both a riddle and a provocation to his companions-and whose memories of suffering, rescue, and betrayal illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning. [via]
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Federico Garcia Lorca: A Lifeby Ian Gibson, Altie KarperISBN 0679774017 (0-679-77401-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Federico Garcia Lorca: A Life'Book summary:Back in print to coincide with the release of the upcoming motion picture Death in Granada on the life of Lorca, this "monumental biography" (New York Times) goes to the heart of his explosive genius. When, at the age of 38, Federico Garcia Lorca was executed by anti-republican rebels during the Spanish Civil War, he was already one of the world's most celebrated poets and playwrights. [via]
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Fine Balanceby Rohinton MistryISBN 0679776451 (0-679-77645-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fine Balance'Book summary:With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future. As the characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, A Fine Balance creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state [via]
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Fountainheadby Ayn RandISBN 0684869713 (0-684-86971-3)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fountainhead'Book summary:The Fountainhead is an unprecedented phenomenon in modern literature. Arguably the century's most challenging novel of ideas, when first published in 1943 it created a public furor and worldwide interest in its brilliant author, Ayn Rand.
On the surface, it is a story of a gifted young architect, his violent battle with conventional standards, and his explosive love affair with the beautiful woman who struggles to defeat him. In his fight for success, he first discovers then rejects the seductive power of fame and money, finding that creative genius must ultimately triumph.
This novel also addresses a number of universal themes: the strength of the individual, the tug between good and evil, the threat of fascism. The confrontation of these themes, along with the amazing stroke of Rand's writing, combine to give The Fountainhead its enduring influence. Indeed, it is as relevant today as it was when written. [via]
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Furyby Salman RushdieISBN 0679783504 (0-679-78350-4)
Softcover, Modern Library
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Fury'Book summary:Fury is a gloss on fin-de-siècle angst from the master of the quintuple entendre. Salman Rushdie hauls his hero, Malik Solanka, from Bombay to London to New York, and finally to a fictional Third World country, all in order to show off a preternatural ability to riff on anything from Bollywood musicals to revolutionary politics. Professor Solanka is propelled on this path by his strange love of dolls. He plays with them as a child; as an adult he quits his post at Cambridge in order to produce a TV show wherein an animated doll, Little Brain, meets the great thinkers of history. Little Brain becomes a smash hit, and perhaps inevitably, Solanka finds himself in America. (It's not only the show-biz version of manifest destiny that brings him to the New World: one night in London he finds himself standing over the sleeping figures of his beloved wife and child, frighteningly close to stabbing them. This intellectual puppeteer is, of course, fleeing himself.)
Now, in New York, he is filled with wrath. Solanka is far from being an Everyman, but his fury is a kind of Everyfury. It's road rage writ large--the natural reaction to an excess of mental traffic. There are several books running simultaneously here: a mystery, a family romance, a bitingly satirical portrait of millennial Manhattan, and a sci-fi revolutionary fantasy. A single fragment gives a sense of Rushdie's reflexive multiplicity: when Solanka finally faces his memories of childhood, he recalls "his damn Yoknapatawpha, his accursed Malgudi." Here's a writer who, leading us into the tender places of his protagonist's soul, stops long enough to reference not just Faulkner but Narayan as well. If it sounds like a bit of a mess, it is. If it sounds frighteningly intelligent, it's that too. --Claire Dederer [via]
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Garden of Maliceby Susan KenneyISBN 0684179687 (0-684-17968-7)
Hardcover, Scribner
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The Geography of the Imagination : Forty Essaysby Guy DavenportISBN 0679738592 (0-679-73859-2)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Great Books: My Adventures With Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western Worldby David DenbyISBN 0684835339 (0-684-83533-9)
Softcover, Touchstone Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Great Books: My Adventures With Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World'Book summary:At the age of forty-eight, film critic David Denby, dissatisfied with his life within the media bubble, went back to Columbia University and took again the two famous courses in Western classics Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization required of all students--courses he first took in 1961. In recent years, collections of literary and philosophical masterpieces such as those taught in these courses have been reviled by the left as oppressive and exclusionary and adored by the right as bulwarks of patriotism. Denby, the film critic for "New York magazine, wanted to dispel these cliches and to confront the books in their naked power; he wanted to find the self he had lost in a daze of media images. In "Great Books, Denby lives the common adult fantasy of returning to school with some worldly knowledge and experience of life. A gifted storyteller, he leads us on a glorious tour--by turns eloquent, witty, and moving--through the works themselves and through his experiences as a middle-aged man among freshmen. He recounts his failures and triumphs as a reader and student taking an exam led to a hilarious near-breakdown . He celebrates his rediscovery or new appreciation of such authors as Homer, Plato, the biblical writers, Augustine, Boccaccio, Hegel, Austen, Marx, Nietzsche, and Virginia Woolf. He re-creates the atmosphere of the classroom--the strategies used by a remarkable group of teachers and the strengths and weaknesses of media-age students as they grapple with these difficult, sometimes frightening works. And all year long he watches the students grow and his own life and memories break out of hiding. The result is an extraordinarily engaging blend ofcriticism, reporting, autobiography, and cultural commentary, a book about self-discovery. Denby offers a nonprofessor's look at life on campus; he addresses the vexing questions of political correctness and relativism, and he suggests that a larger crisis surrounds the teaching of the humanities. [via]
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- Great Books : My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World: ISBN 0684809753 (0-684-80975-3)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster - Great Books: My Adventures With Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World: ISBN 0684835339 (0-684-83533-9)
Softcover, Touchstone Books
- Great Books : My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World: ISBN 0684809753 (0-684-80975-3)
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The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the Worldby Haruki Murakami, Alfred BirnbaumISBN 0679743464 (0-679-74346-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World'Book summary:Japan's most widely-read and controversial writer, author of A Wild Sheep Chase, hurtles into the consciousness of the West with this narrative about a split-brained data processor, a deranged scientist, his shockingly undemure granddaughter, and various thugs, librarians, and subterranean monsters--not to mention Bob Dylan and Lauren Bacall. [via]
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Haveliby Suzanne Fisher StaplesISBN 0679865691 (0-679-86569-1)
Softcover, Random House Childrens Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Haveli'Book summary:The world of Newbery Honor book Shabanu is vividly re-created in this novel of a young Pakistani woman's heartbreaking struggle against the tyranny of custom and ancient law. Shabanu, now a mother at 18, faces daily challenges to her position in her husband's household, even as she plans for her young daughter's education and uncertain future. Then, during a visit to the haveli, their home in the city of Lahore, Shabanu falls in love with Omar, in spite of traditions that forbid their union. [via]
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How Proust Can Change Your Lifeby Alain De BottonISBN 0679779159 (0-679-77915-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'How Proust Can Change Your Life'Book summary:This is a genius-level piece of writing that manages to blend literary biography with self-help and tongue-in-cheek with the profound. The quirky, early 1900s French author Marcel Proust acts as the vessel for surprisingly impressive nuggets of wisdom on down-to-earth topics such as why you should never sleep with someone on the first date, how to protect yourself against lower back pain, and how to cope with obnoxious neighbors. Here's proof that our ancestors had just as much insight as the gurus du jour and perhaps a lot more wit. De Botton simultaneously pokes fun at the self-help movement and makes a significant contribution to its archives. [via]
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In an Antique Landby Amitav GhoshISBN 0679727833 (0-679-72783-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'In an Antique Land'Book summary:In an Antique Land is a subversive history in the guise of a traveller's tale. When the author stumbles across a slave narrative in the margins of an ancient text, his curiosity is piqued. What follows is a ten year search, which brings author and slave together across 800 hundred years of colonial history. Bursting with anecdote and exuberant detail, it offers a magical, intimate biography of the private life of a country, Egypt, from the Crusades to Operation Desert Storm. [via]
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In the Skin of a Lionby Michael OndaatjeISBN 0679772669 (0-679-77266-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Independent Peopleby Halldor Laxness, Brad Leithauser, J. A. ThompsonISBN 0679767924 (0-679-76792-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Independent People'Book summary:This magnificent novelwhich secured for its author the 1955 Nobel Prize in Literatureis at least available to contemporary American readers. Although it is set in the early twentieth century, it recalls both Iceland's medieval epics and such classics as Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. And if Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to achieve independence is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic.
[via]
Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude, Bjartur wants nothing more than to raise his flocks unbeholden to any man. But Bjartur's spirited daughter wants to live unbeholden to him. What ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. Vast in scope and deeply rewarding, Independent People is a masterpiece.More editions of Independent People:
Isara : A Voyage Around Essayby Wole SoyinkaISBN 0679732462 (0-679-73246-2)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Kaby Tim Parks, Roberto CalassoISBN 0679775471 (0-679-77547-1)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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King, Queen, Knaveby Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, Dmitri NabokovISBN 0679723404 (0-679-72340-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'King, Queen, Knave'Book summary:The novel is the story of Dreyer, a wealthy and boisterous proprietor of a men's clothing emporium store. Ruddy, self-satisfied, and thoroughly masculine, he is perfectly repugnant to his exquisite but cold middle-class wife Martha. Attracted to his money but repelled by his oblivious passion, she longs for their nephew instead, the myopic Franz. Newly arrived in Berlin, Franz soon repays his uncle's condescension in his aunt's bed. [via]
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Kiss of the Spider Womanby Manuel PuigISBN 0679724494 (0-679-72449-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Kiss of the Spider Woman'Book summary:Sometimes they talk all night long. In the still darkness of their cell, Molina re-weaves the glittering and fragile stories of the film he loves, and the cynical Valentin listens. Valentin believes in the just cause which makes all suffering bearable; Molina believes in the magic of love which makes all else endurable. Each has always been alone, and always - especially now - in danger of betrayal. But in cell 7 each surrenders to the other something of himself that he has never surrendered before. [via]
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The Koran Interpreted: A Translationby A.J. ArberryISBN 0684825074 (0-684-82507-4)
Softcover, Touchstone Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Koran Interpreted: A Translation'Book summary:No other book ever written, with the possible exception of the Bible, has so dramatically influenced the course of civilization as the Koran. Yet this important text remains little understood in the West. Since its first publication in 1955, Professor A.J. Arberry's translation has been the finest one available, its magnificently written verse making the Koran accessible to a Western audience. Professor Arberry has rendered the Koran into clear and lyrical English while carefully preserving the incomparable artistry of the Arabic original. "The Koran Interpreted" is universally recognized as not only the most authoritative translation but also the most beautiful one in the English language. [via]
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Krik? Krakby Edwidge DanticatISBN 067976657X (0-679-76657-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Le Pere Goriot/Pbn 757by BalzacISBN 0685114864 (0-685-11486-4)
Softcover, French & European Pubns
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Magic Mountainby Thomas Mann, John E. Woods, Luann WaltherISBN 0679772871 (0-679-77287-1)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Magic Mountain'Book summary:In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps--a community devoted exclusively to sickness--as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death. [via]
The Makioka Sistersby Edward Seidensticker, Jun Ichiro TanizakiISBN 0679761640 (0-679-76164-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Man in the Queueby Josephine Tey, Robert BarnardISBN 0684815028 (0-684-81502-8)
Softcover, Touchstone Books
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Mansions of the Godsby Albert Uderzo, Goscinny, R. & Uderzo, M.ISBN 0686562100 (0-686-56210-0)
Hardcover, French & European Pubns
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The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmonyby Roberto Calasso, Tim ParksISBN 0679733485 (0-679-73348-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Mary: A Novelby Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, Michael GlennyISBN 0679726209 (0-679-72620-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Mary: A Novel'Book summary:Mary is a gripping tale of youth, first love, and nostalgia--Nabokov's first novel. In a Berlin rooming house filled with an assortment of seriocomic Russian émigrés, Lev Ganin, a vigorous young officer poised between his past and his future, relives his first love affair. His memories of Mary are suffused with the freshness of youth and the idyllic ambience of pre-revolutionary Russia. In stark contrast is the decidedly unappealing boarder living in the room next to Ganin's, who, he discovers, is Mary's husband, temporarily separated from her by the Revolution but expecting her imminent arrival from Russia. [via]
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The Master of Goby Yasunari Kawabata, Edward SeidenstickerISBN 0679761063 (0-679-76106-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Master of Go'Book summary:In 1938 Kawabata covered a championship Go match for two leading Japanese newspapers. But it was not until after World War II that he published the events of that epic contest as fiction, and when he did so he was faithful to his declaration of 1945: that henceforth he would write only elegies. [via]
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The Metamorphosis and Other Stories/the Great Short Works of Franz Kafkaby Franz Kafka, Joachim NeugroschelISBN 0684194260 (0-684-19426-0)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Metamorphosis and Other Stories/the Great Short Works of Franz Kafka'Book summary:A new translation of the Kafka classics, The Metamorphosis, The Judgment, The Stoker, and others, preserves the humor and quirks of Kafka's original style, while injecting a freshness intended to appeal to modern readers. [via]
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Moor's Last Sighby Salman RushdieISBN 0679744665 (0-679-74466-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Moor's Last Sigh'Book summary:Time Magazine's Best Book of the YearBooker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie combines a ferociously witty family saga with a surreally imagined and sometimes blasphemous chronicle of modern India and flavors the mixture with peppery soliloquies on art, ethnicity, religious fanaticism, and the terrifying power of love. Moraes "Moor" Zogoiby, the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinese spice merchants and crime lords, is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerized offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave. "Fierce, phantasmagorical...a huge, sprawling, exuberant novel."--New York Times [via]
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The New York Public Library Literature Companionby New York Public Library Staff, Anne SkillionISBN 0684868903 (0-684-86890-3)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The New York Public Library Literature Companion'Book summary:Pick up "The New York Public Library Literature Companion to check the dates of Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past or to find out how James Joyce's "Ulysses changed U.S. obscenity laws, and you may find yourself hours later absorbed in the imaginary worlds of Camelot and The Matrix or sidetracked by the fascinating history of "The New Yorker. Designed to satisfy the curious browser as well as the serious researcher, this exciting new resource offers the most up-to-date information on literature available in English from around the world, from the invention of writing to the age of the computer.
Interwoven throughout the more than 2,500 succinct and insightful entries on Creators, Works of Literature, and Literary Facts and Resources are the fascinating facts and quirky biographical details that make literature come alive. Readers will discover, for instance, that Walt Whitman was fired from his government job after his personal copy of "Leaves of Grass was discovered in his desk by the Secretary of the Interior, who was scandalized by it; that James Baldwin remembered listening to blues singer Bessie Smith ("playing her till I fell asleep") when he was writing his first book; and that a publisher turned down the serialization rights to "Gone with the Wind, saying, "Who needs the Civil War now -- who cares?"
Looking for information about book burning or how many Nobel laureates have come from Japan? You'll find it here. Trying to remember the name of that movie based on a favorite book? Read the "Variations" section -- you'll be amazed at the pervasive presence of great literature in today's entertainment. From Aristophanes to Allende, from Bergson to Bloom, thebiographical entries will inform readers about the men and women who have shaped -- and are shaping -- the literary world. Look into "Works of Literature" to discover the significance of "Beowulf, The Fountainhead, Doctor Zhivago, and nearly 1,000 other titles. Check the "Dictionary of Literature" to find out what the critics and theorists are talking about. And if you wish to delve even deeper, "Websites for Literature" and "Literary Factbooks and Handbooks" are just two of the bibliographies that will point readers in the right direction.
Unique in scope and design and easy to use, "The New York Public Library Literature Companion will be at home on every reader's shelf. Whether you are immersed in Stephen King or "King Lear, this book has the insights, facts, and fascinating stories that will enrich your reading forever.
With four major research centers and 85 branch libraries, The New York Public Library is internationally recognized as one of the greatest institutions of its kind. Founded in 1895, the library now holds more than 50 million items, including several world-renowned collections of literary manuscripts and rare books. Among the books published from the library in recent years are "The New York Public Library Desk Reference (1998); "The Hand of the Poet (1997); "Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss (1999); "A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980 (1998); and "Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World (2000). [via]More editions of The New York Public Library Literature Companion:
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Notes from Undergroundby Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Richard PevearISBN 067973452X (0-679-73452-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Notes from Underground'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Dostoevskys most revolutionary novel, Notes from Underground marks the dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and between the visions of self each century embodied. One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In full retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of mans essentially irrational nature.Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose Dostoevsky translations have become the standard, give us a brilliantly faithful edition of this classic novel, conveying all the tragedy and tormented comedy of the original.
From the Hardcover edition. [via]More editions of Notes from Underground:
Numbers in the Darkby Italo Calvino, Tim ParksISBN 0679743537 (0-679-74353-7)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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Of Love and Other Demonsby Gabriel García MárquezISBN 0679762841 (0-679-76284-1)
Softcover, Random House Large Print
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Of Love and Other Demons'Book summary:On her twelfth birthday, Sierva Maria the only child of a decaying noble family in an eighteenth-century South American seaport is bitten by a rabid dog. Believed to be possessed, she is brought to a convent for observation. And into her cell stumbles Father Cayetano Delaura, who has already dreamed about a girl with hair trailing after her like a bridal train. As he tends to her with holy water and sacramental oils, Delaura feels something shocking begin to occur. He has fallen in love and it is not long until Sierva Maria joins him in his fevered misery. Unsettling and indelible, Of Love and Other Demons is an evocative, majestic tale of the most universal experiences known to woman and man. [via]
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The Old Wives' Fairy Tale Bookby Angela CarterISBN 0679740376 (0-679-74037-6)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Old Wives' Fairy Tale Book'Book summary:Fairy tales, folk tales, stories from the oral tradition, are all of them the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labour created our world."
-- From the Introduction
There was a time when fairy tales weren't meant just for children -- they were part of an oral folklore tradition passed down through generations. This volume of sixty enchanting and enduring tales, collected by master storyteller Angela Carter, revives the industry, eccentricity, spirit, and worldly wisdom of women in preindustrial times. Drawn from narrative traditions all around the world -- from ancient Swahili legends to Appalachian tall tales to European spirit stories and more -- these tales together comprise a unique feminine mythology.
Angela Carter (1940-1992) was widely known for her novels, short stories, and journalism. Her many books include The Magic Toy Shop, The Sadeian Woman, Nights at the Circus, Fireworks, and Saints and Strangers. [via]More editions of The Old Wives' Fairy Tale Book:
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The Origin of Species: Library Editionby Charles Robert DarwinISBN 0679749551 (0-679-74955-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Origin of Species: Library Edition'Book summary:It's hard to talk about The Origin of Species without making statements that seem overwrought and fulsome. But it's true: this is indeed one of the most important and influential books ever written, and it is one of the very few groundbreaking works of science that is truly readable.
To a certain extent it suffers from the Hamlet problem--it's full of clichés! Or what are now clichés, but which Darwin was the first to pen. Natural selection, variation, the struggle for existence, survival of the fittest: it's all in here.
Darwin's friend and "bulldog" T. H. Huxley said upon reading the Origin, "How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that." Alfred Russel Wallace had thought of the same theory of evolution Darwin did, but it was Darwin who gathered the mass of supporting evidence--on domestic animals and plants, on variability, on sexual selection, on dispersal--that swept most scientists before it. It's hardly necessary to mention that the book is still controversial: Darwin's remark in his conclusion that "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history" is surely the pinnacle of British understatement. --Mary Ellen Curtin, Amazon.com [via]
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Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grassby Isak DinesenISBN 0679724753 (0-679-72475-3)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Out of Africa and Shadows on the Grass'Book summary:With classic simplicity and a painter's feeling for atmosphere and detail, Isak Dinesen tells of the years she spent from 1914 to 1931 managing a coffee plantation in Kenya. [via]
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Pencil Letterby Irina RatushinskayaISBN 0679726004 (0-679-72600-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Petits Poemes En Prose: Spleen De Parisby Charles BaudelaireISBN 0685114899 (0-685-11489-9)
Softcover, French & European Pubns
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Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imaginationby Toni MorrisonISBN 0679745424 (0-679-74542-4)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination'Book summary:The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Beloved and Jazz now gives us a learned, stylish, and immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that promises to change the way we read American literature even as it opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race.
Toni Morrison's brilliant discussions of the "Africanist" presence in the fiction of Poe, Melville, Cather, and Hemingway leads to a dramatic reappraisal of the essential characteristics of our literary tradition. She shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came to serve white authors as embodiments of their own fears and desires.
Written with the artistic vision that has earned Toni Morrison a pre-eminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark will be avidly read by Morrison admirers as well as by students, critics, and scholars of American literature.
"By going for the American literary jugular...she places her arguments...at the very heart of contemporary public conversation about what it is to be authentically and originally American. [She] boldly...reimagines and remaps the possibility of America."
--Chicago Tribune
"Toni Morrison is the closest thing the country has to a national writer."
The New York Times Book Review [via]More editions of Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination:
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Pride and Prejudiceby Jane AustenISBN 0679783261 (0-679-78326-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Pride and Prejudice'Book summary:"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife."
Next to the exhortation at the beginning of Moby-Dick, "Call me Ishmael," the first sentence of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice must be among the most quoted in literature. And certainly what Melville did for whaling Austen does for marriage--tracing the intricacies (not to mention the economics) of 19th-century British mating rituals with a sure hand and an unblinking eye. As usual, Austen trains her sights on a country village and a few families--in this case, the Bennets, the Philips, and the Lucases. Into their midst comes Mr. Bingley, a single man of good fortune, and his friend, Mr. Darcy, who is even richer. Mrs. Bennet, who married above her station, sees their arrival as an opportunity to marry off at least one of her five daughters. Bingley is complaisant and easily charmed by the eldest Bennet girl, Jane; Darcy, however, is harder to please. Put off by Mrs. Bennet's vulgarity and the untoward behavior of the three younger daughters, he is unable to see the true worth of the older girls, Jane and Elizabeth. His excessive pride offends Lizzy, who is more than willing to believe the worst that other people have to say of him; when George Wickham, a soldier stationed in the village, does indeed have a discreditable tale to tell, his words fall on fertile ground.
Having set up the central misunderstanding of the novel, Austen then brings in her cast of fascinating secondary characters: Mr. Collins, the sycophantic clergyman who aspires to Lizzy's hand but settles for her best friend, Charlotte, instead; Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mr. Darcy's insufferably snobbish aunt; and the Gardiners, Jane and Elizabeth's low-born but noble-hearted aunt and uncle. Some of Austen's best comedy comes from mixing and matching these representatives of different classes and economic strata, demonstrating the hypocrisy at the heart of so many social interactions. And though the novel is rife with romantic misunderstandings, rejected proposals, disastrous elopements, and a requisite happy ending for those who deserve one, Austen never gets so carried away with the romance that she loses sight of the hard economic realities of 19th-century matrimonial maneuvering. Good marriages for penniless girls such as the Bennets are hard to come by, and even Lizzy, who comes to sincerely value Mr. Darcy, remarks when asked when she first began to love him: "It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley." She may be joking, but there's more than a little truth to her sentiment, as well. Jane Austen considered Elizabeth Bennet "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print". Readers of Pride and Prejudice would be hard-pressed to disagree. --Alix Wilber [via]
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Remains of the Dayby Kazuo IshiguroISBN 0679731725 (0-679-73172-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Remains of the Day'Book summary:A must read. [via]
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The Reprieveby Jean Paul SartreISBN 0679740783 (0-679-74078-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Reprieve'Book summary:An extraordinary picture of life in France during the critical eight days before the signing of the fateful Munich Pact and the subsequent takeover of Czechoslovakia in September 1938. Translated from the French by Eric Sutton. [via]
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The Republicby PlatoISBN 0679733876 (0-679-73387-6)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Republic'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Toward the end of the astonishing period of Athenian creativity that furnished Western civilization with the greater part of its intellectual, artistic, and political wealth, Plato wrote The Republic, his discussion of the nature and meaning of justice and of the ideal state and its ruler. All subsequent European thinking about these subjects owes its character, directly or indirectly, to this most famous (and most accessible) of the Platonic dialogues. Although he describes a society that looks to some like the ideal human community and to others like a totalitarian nightmare, in the course of his description Plato raises enduringly relevant questions about politics, art, education, and the general conduct of life.Translated by A. D. Lindsay [via]
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Runaway Horsesby Michael Gallagher, Yukio MishimaISBN 0679722408 (0-679-72240-8)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Runaway Horses'Book summary:The chronicle of a conspiracy and a novel about the roots and nature of Japanese fanaticism in the years that led to war--an era marked by depression, social change and political violence. [via]
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Seven Gothic Talesby Isak DinesenISBN 0679736417 (0-679-73641-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Seven Gothic Tales'Book summary:Originally published in 1934, Seven Gothic Tales, the first book by "one of the finest and most singular artists of our time" (The Atlantic), is a modern classic. Here are seven exquisite tales combining the keen psychological insight characteristic of the modern short story with the haunting mystery of the nineteenth-century Gothic tale, in the tradition of writers such as Goethe, Hoffmann, and Poe. [via]
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Seven Japanese Talesby Junichiro Tanizaki, Howard HibbettISBN 0679761071 (0-679-76107-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Shabanu : Daughter of the Windby Suzanne Fisher StaplesISBN 0679810307 (0-679-81030-7)
Softcover, Random House Children's Books
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Shalimar the Clownby Salman RushdieISBN 0679783482 (0-679-78348-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Shalimar the Clown'Book summary:
Dazzling . . . Modern thriller, Ramayan epic, courtroom drama, slapstick comedy, wartime adventure, political satire, village legendtheyre all blended here magnificently.
The Washington Post Book World
This is the story of Maximilian Ophuls, Americas counterterrorism chief, one of the makers of the modern world; his Kashmiri Muslim driver and subsequent killer, a mysterious figure who calls himself Shalimar the clown; Maxs illegitimate daughter India; and a woman who links them, whose revelation finally explains them all. It is an epic narrative that moves from California to Kashmir, France, and England, and back to California again. Along the way there are tales of princesses lured from their homes by demons, legends of kings forced to defend their kingdoms against evil. And there is always love, gained and lost, uncommonly beautiful and mortally dangerous.
A commanding story . . . [a] harrowing climax . . . Revenge is an ancient and powerful engine of narrative.
The New York Times Book Review
Absorbing . . . Everywhere [Rushdie] takes us there is both love and war, in strange and terrifying combinations, painted in swaying, swirling, world-eating prose that annihilates the borders between East and West, love and hate, private lives and the history they make.
Time
A vast, richly peopled, beautiful and deeply rageful book that serves as a profound and disturbing artifact of our times.
San Francisco Chronicle
Marvelous . . . brilliant . . . a story worthy of [Rushdies] genius.
Detroit Free Press
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
The Washington Post Book World Los Angeles Times Book Review St. Louis Post-Dispatch Rocky Mountain News
ONE OF THE BEST NOVELS OF THE YEAR
Time Chicago Tribune The Christian Science Monitor [via]More editions of Shalimar the Clown:
A Shilling for Candlesby Josephine TeyISBN 0684842386 (0-684-84238-6)
Softcover, Touchstone Books
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Six Memos for the Next Millenium/the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1985-86by Italo Calvino, Patrick CreaghISBN 0679742379 (0-679-74237-9)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Six Memos for the Next Millenium/the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1985-86'Book summary:Italo Calvino cast his lofty thoughts toward the pending millennium long before the rest of us. Now that the zeitgeist has caught up with him, it seems a good time to revisit his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, an investigation into the literary values that he wished to bequeath to future generations. Calvino, the author of Invisible Cities, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, and other postmodern fictional works, was to deliver these five "memos" (there was to be a sixth) as Harvard's Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1985-86, but he died before doing so. These lectures are dense, rigorous, and seemingly full of contradiction. The first is a paean to lightness (though "light like a bird," as Paul Valéry wrote, "and not like a feather"). Lightness is followed by quickness (without "presum[ing] to deny the pleasures of lingering"), exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. The perfect antidote to writerly laziness. [via]
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Sleepwalker in a Fogby Tatyana Tolstaya, Jamey GambrellISBN 067973063X (0-679-73063-X)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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Snow Countryby Yasunari Kawabata, Edward SeidenstickerISBN 0679761047 (0-679-76104-7)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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A Song of Stoneby Iain M. BanksISBN 0684855364 (0-684-85536-4)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'A Song of Stone'Book summary:This brutal tale starts in a bleak, brutal European any-war. Abel and Morgan live in a forboding castle, alone and isolated, until the conflict intrudes on their numb lives in the form of a cruel mercenary lieutenant and her violent, ravaging men who take up residence. From there, the tale disintegrates into darkness and atrocity, punctuated by Abel's memories of earlier joy and pain. Iain Banks pushes the story steadily downward, dragging the morbidly fascinated reader into the depths of human despair. Gang rape, torture, and incest are seen through Abel's uncaring eyes--this book is not for the squeamish. And although Banks strives for a Passion play in the end, what's missing is even the tiniest kernel of real redemption. Fans of The Wasp Factory and Banks's other non-science fiction works will find familiar details here, but A Song of Stone stands alone as a fable of hopelessness. --Therese Littleton [via]
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The Sound and the Furyby William FaulknerISBN 0679732241 (0-679-73224-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sound and the Fury'Book summary:The ostensible subject of The Sound and the Fury is the dissolution of the Compsons, one of those august old Mississippi families that fell on hard times and wild eccentricity after the Civil War. But in fact what William Faulkner is really after in his legendary novel is the kaleidoscope of consciousness--the overwrought mind caught in the act of thought. His rich, dark, scandal-ridden story of squandered fortune, incest (in thought if not in deed), madness, congenital brain damage, theft, illegitimacy, and stoic endurance is told in the interior voices of three Compson brothers: first Benjy, the "idiot" man-child who blurs together three decades of inchoate sensations as he stalks the fringes of the family's former pasture; next Quentin, torturing himself brilliantly, obsessively over Caddy's lost virginity and his own failure to recover the family's honor as he wanders around the seedy fringes of Boston; and finally Jason, heartless, shrewd, sneaking, nursing a perpetual sense of injury and outrage against his outrageous family.
If Benjy's section is the most daringly experimental, Jason's is the most harrowing. "Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say," he begins, lacing into Caddy's illegitimate daughter, and then proceeds to hurl mud at blacks, Jews, his sacred Compson ancestors, his glamorous, promiscuous sister, his doomed brother Quentin, his ailing mother, and the long-suffering black servant Dilsey who holds the family together by sheer force of character.
Notoriously "difficult," The Sound and the Fury is actually one of Faulkner's more accessible works once you get past the abrupt, unannounced time shifts--and certainly the most powerful emotionally. Everything is here: the complex equilibrium of pre-civil rights race relations; the conflict between Yankee capitalism and Southern agrarian values; a meditation on time, consciousness, and Western philosophy. And all of it is rendered in prose so gorgeous it can take your breath away. Here, for instance, Quentin recalls an autumnal encounter back home with the old black possum hunter Uncle Louis:
And we'd sit in the dry leaves that whispered a little with the slow respiration of our waiting and with the slow breathing of the earth and the windless October, the rank smell of the lantern fouling the brittle air, listening to the dogs and to the echo of Louis' voice dying away. He never raised it, yet on a still night we have heard it from our front porch. When he called the dogs in he sounded just like the horn he carried slung on his shoulder and never used, but clearer, mellower, as though his voice were a part of darkness and silence, coiling out of it, coiling into it again. WhoOoooo. WhoOoooo. WhoOooooooooooooooo.
What Faulkner has created is a modernist epic in which characters assume the stature of gods and the primal family events resonate like myths. It is The Sound and the Fury that secures his place in what Edmund Wilson called "the full-dressed post-Flaubert group of Conrad, Joyce, and Proust." --David Laskin [via]More editions of The Sound and the Fury:
The Stories of Eva Lunaby Isabel AllendeISBN 0684873591 (0-684-87359-1)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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The Story of My Wifeby Milan FustISBN 0679722173 (0-679-72217-3)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanityby Primo Levi, Stuart WoolfISBN 0684826801 (0-684-82680-1)
Softcover, Touchstone Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity'Book summary:Survival in Auschwitz is a mostly straightforward narrative, beginning with Primo Levi's deportation from Turin, Italy, to the concentration camp Auschwitz in Poland in 1943. Levi, then a 25-year-old chemist, spent 10 months in the camp. Even Levi's most graphic descriptions of the horrors he witnessed and endured there are marked by a restraint and wit that not only gives readers access to his experience, but confronts them with it in stark ethical and emotional terms: "[A]t dawn the barbed wire was full of children's washing hung out in the wind to dry. Nor did they forget the diapers, the toys, the cushions and the hundred other small things which mothers remember and which children always need. Would you not do the same? If you and your child were going to be killed tomorrow, would you not give him something to eat today?" --Michael Joseph Gross [via]
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Temple of Dawnby Yukio MishimaISBN 0679722424 (0-679-72242-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Temple of the Golden Pavilionby Yukio MishimaISBN 0679752706 (0-679-75270-6)
Softcover, Vintage Books
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Temple of the Golden Pavilion'Book summary:Because of the boyhood trauma of seeing his mother make love to another man in the presence of his dying father, Mizoguchi becomes a hopeless stutterer. Taunted by his schoolmates, he feels utterly alone until he becomes an acolyte at a famous temple in Kyoto. He quickly becomes obsessed with the beauty of the temple. Even when tempted by a friend into exploring the geisha district, he cannot escape its image. In the novel's soaring climax, he tries desperately to free himself from his fixation. [via]
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Terre Des Hommesby Antoine De Saint-ExuperyISBN 0686554191 (0-686-55419-1)
Softcover, French & European Pubns
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Terre Des Hommes'Book summary:"Nous habitons une planète errante." Saint-Exupéry, qui vient d'être nommé pilote de ligne, découvre, admire, médite notre planète. Assurant désormais le courrier entre Toulouse et Dakar, il hérite d'une vaste responsabilité à l'égard des hommes, mais surtout de lui-même et de son rapport au monde. Tout en goûtant "la pulpe amère des nuits de vol", il apprend à habiter la planète et la condition d'homme, lit son chemin intérieur à travers les astres. En plus du langage universel, il jouit aussi chaque jour de la fraternité qui le lie à ses camarades du ciel. Il rend hommage à Mermoz ou à Guillaumet, à qui est dédicacé le roman, et dont il rappelle les célèbres paroles : "Ce que j'ai fait, je le jure, jamais aucune bête ne l'aurait fait."
Dès Courrier Sud et Vol de nuit, l'homme d'action a su admirablement se mettre au diapason de l'homme de pensée et de l'humaniste qu'était tout à la fois Saint-Exupéry. Dans Terre des hommes, l'aviateur-écrivain s'intéresse particulièrement à la rigueur qu'exigent les relations humaines. --Laure Anciel [via]
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Texacoby Patrick Chamoiseau, Rose-Myriam Rejouis, Val VinokurovISBN 0679751750 (0-679-75175-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritchby Philip K. DickISBN 0679736662 (0-679-73666-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Troubled Sleep: A Novelby Jean-Paul Sartre, Gerard Manley HopkinsISBN 0679740791 (0-679-74079-1)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Troubled Sleep: A Novel'Book summary:Powerfully depicts the fall of France in 1940, and the anguished response of the French people to the German occupation. Translated from the French by Gerard Hopkins. [via]
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The Ways of My Grandmothersby Beverly Hungry WolfISBN 0688004717 (0-688-00471-7)
Softcover, William Morrow & Co
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› Find signed collectible books: 'The Ways of My Grandmothers'Book summary:A young Native American woman creates a hauntingly beautiful tribute to an age-old way of life in this fascinating portrait of the women of the Blackfoot Indians. A captivating tapestry of personal and tribal history, legends and myths, and the wisdom passed down through generations of women, this extraordinary book is also a priceless record of the traditional skills and ways of an ancient culture that is vanishing all too fast.Including many rare photographs, The Ways of My Grandmothers is an authentic contribution to our knowledge and understanding of Native American lore -- and a classic that will speak to women everywhere. [via]
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Why Read the Classics?by Italo CalvinoISBN 0679743499 (0-679-74349-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc
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Works of Victor Hugo: The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Les Miserablesby Victor HugoISBN 0681410566 (0-681-41056-6)
Hardcover, Longmeadow Pr
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Yann Andrea Steinerby Marguerite Duras, Barbara BrayISBN 0684195909 (0-684-19590-9)
Hardcover, Simon & Schuster
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› Find signed collectible books: 'Yann Andrea Steiner'Book summary:A memoir by the author of The Lover and Summer Rain describes her relationship with a man thirty years her junior who has helped her overcome, despair, illness, and alcoholism. [via]
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El Beso De La Mujer Arana / Kiss of the Spider Womanby Manuel PuigISBN 0679755454 (0-679-75545-4)
Softcover, Random House Espanol
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