Carti in categoria Literature & Biography

Although he feared death, he could not stop. If I stopped now, after coming all this way - well, theyd call me an idiot!A pair of short stories about greed, charity, life and death from one of Russias most influential writers and thinkers.Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguins 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian...

Salman Rushdie, a self-described emigrant from one place and a newcomer in two, explores the true meaning of home. Writing with insight, passion and humour, he looks at what it means to belong, whether roots are real and homelands imaginary, what it is like to reconfigure your past from fragments of memory and what happens when East meets West. Selected from the books Shame, Imaginary Homelands and East, West by Salman Rushdie VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.A series of short...

Saul Bellows Herzog is part confessional, part exorcism, and a wholly unique achievement in postmodern fiction. Is Moses Herzog losing his mind? His formidable wife Madeleine has left him for his best friend, and Herzog is left alone with his whirling thoughts - yet he still sees himself as a survivor, raging against private disasters and the myriad catastrophes of the modern age. In a crumbling house which he shares with rats, his head buzzing with ideas, he writes frantic, unsent letters to fr...

The brilliant tale of Anais Nins true love affair with Henry Miller, and her ambiguous, charged relationship with his wife, June. Drawn from the journals of a single momentous year in Paris, Henry and June provides a wildly lyrical account of a womans sexual awakening and the disillusion of idealized marriage.

The silence of the jungle is broken only by the ominous sound of drumming. Life on the river is brutal and unknown threats lurk in the darkness. Marlows mission to captain a steamer upriver into the dense interior leads him into conflict with the others who haunt the forest. But his decision to hunt down the mysterious Mr Kurtz, an ivory trader who is the subject of sinister rumours, leads him into more than just physical peril.

The Penguin English Library Edition of Hard Times by Charles DickensNow, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything elseCoketown is dominated by the figure of Mr Thomas Gradgrind, school owner and model of Utilitarian success. Feeding both his pupils and his family with facts, he bans fancy and wonder from young minds. As a consequence his obedient daughter Louisa marries the loveless businessma...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Gullivers Travels by Jonathan SwiftFifteen hundred of the Emperors largest horses, each about four inches and an half high, were employed to draw me towards the Metropolis, which, as I said, was half a Mile distantA savage and hilarious satire, Gullivers Travels sees Lemuel Gulliver shipwrecked and adrift, subject to bizarre and unnerving encounters with, among others, quarrelling Lilliputians, philosophizing horses and the brutish Yahoo tribe, that change ...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Great Expectations by Charles DickensWhat do you think that is? she asked me, again pointing with her stick; that, where those cobwebs are?I cant guess what it is, maam.Its a great cake. A bride-cake. Mine!Great Expectations, Dickenss funny, frightening and tender portrayal of the orphan Pips journey of self-discovery, is one of his best-loved works. Showing how a young mans life is transformed by a mysterious series of events - an encounter with an escaped...

Oh, good God, he kept saying with great relish. Good God...Gooseberries is accompanied here by The Kiss and The Two Volodyas - three exquisite depictions of love and loss in nineteenth-century Russia by Chekhov, the great master of the short story form.Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguins 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride ...

James Baldwins electrifying first novel.I had to deal with what hurt me most. I had to deal with my father.Drawing on James Baldwins own boyhood in a religious community in 1930s Harlem, his first novel tells the story of young Johnny Grimes. Johnny is destined to become a preacher like his father, Gabriel, at the Temple of the Fire Baptized, where the church swells with song and it is as if the Holy Ghost were riding on the air. But he feels only scalding hatred for Gabriel, whose fear and fana...

From a Modernist/Postmodernist perspective, this addresses questions of literary and cultural nationalism. The authors reveal that since the seventeenth century, American writing has reflected the political and historical climate of its time and helped define Americas cultural and social parameters.Aboe all they argue that American literature has always been essentially modern, illustrating this with a broad range of texts: from Poe and Melville to fitzgerald and Proud, to Wallace and Stevens, G...

What you create can destroy you. One freezing morning, a lone man wandering across the Acrtic ice caps is rescued from starvation by a ships captain. Victor Frankensteins story is one of ambition, murder and revenge. As a young scientist he pushed moral boundaries in order to cross the final frontier and create life. But his creation is a monster stitched together from grave-robbed body parts who has no place in the world, and his life can only lead to tragedy.Written when she was only nineteen,...

One of the BBCs 100 Novels That Shaped Our WorldThe Penguin English Library Edition of Frankenstein by Mary ShelleyNever did I behold a vision so horrible as his face, of such loathsome, yet appalling hideousnessA twisted, upside-down creation myth, Mary Shelleys chilling Gothic tale lays bare the dark side of science, and the horror within us all. It tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, who plunders graveyards to create a new being from the bodies of the dead - but whose botched creature cau...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Framley Parsonage by Anthony TrollopeHe was sickened also with all these lies. His very soul was dismayed by the dirt through which he was forced to wade. He had become unconsciously connected with the lowest dregs of mankind, and would have to see his name mingled with theirs in the daily newspapersMark Robarts is a clergyman with ambitions beyond his small country parish of Framley. In a naive attempt to mix in influential circles, he agrees to guarantee ...

A daring work of experimental, Modernist genius, James Joyces Finnegans Wake is one of the greatest literary achievements of the twentieth century, and the crowning glory of Joyces life. The Penguin Modern Classics edition of includes an introduction by Seamus Deaneriverrun, past Eve and Adams, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and EnvironsJoyces final work, Finnegans Wake is his masterpiece of the night as Ulysses is of the...

The most popular anthology of Jorge Luis Borgess short stories, Fictions is a wildly original and influential collection of fantastic tales, translated from the Spanish with an afterword by Andrew Hurley in Penguin Modern Classics.Jorge Luis Borgess Fictions introduced an entirely new voice into world literature. It is here that we find the astonishing accounts of Funes the Memorious, the man who can forget nothing; Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, who recreates Miguel de Cervantess epic wo...

A selection of Maupassants brilliant, glittering stories set in the Parisian beau monde and Normandy countryside.Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguins 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are sto...

Karl Ove Knausgaard explores the day to day realities of fatherhood in the ultimate literary gift for dads.How to be a good father? Childrens birthday parties, unsuccessful family holidays, humiliating antenatal music classes: the trials of parenthood are all found in Knausgaards compelling and honest account of family life. Contrasting moments of enormous love and tenderness towards his children with the boring struggles of domesticity, this is one fathers personal experience, and somehow, ever...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas HardyI cannot allow any man to - to criticise my private conduct! she exclaimed. Nor will I for a minuteHardys powerful novel of swift sexual passion and slow-burning loyalty centres on Bathsheba Everdene, a proud working woman whose life is complicated by three different men - respectable farmer Boldwood, seductive Sergeant Troy and devoted Gabriel - making her the object of scandal and betrayal. Vividly portraying the ...

The Penguin English Library Edition of Evelina by Frances BurneyO Sir, how much uneasiness must I suffer, to counterbalance one short morning of happiness!In this comic and sharply incisive satire of excess and affectations, beautiful young Evelina falls victim to the rakish advances of Sir Clement Willoughby on her entrance to the world of fashionable London. Colliding with the manners and customs of a society she doesnt understand, she finds herself without hope that she should ever deserve th...