Famously written in free verse and brimming with sensuous imagery and an unbridled love of nature and life in all its forms, and containing celebrated poems such as the ebullient Song of Myself - described by Jay Parini as the greatest American poem ever written - and the elegiac When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, Leaves of Grass is not only the finest achievement of a highly unique poet, but a founding text for American literature and modern poetry. First published in 1855 and extended by the author over the course of more than three decades, Leaves of Grass embodies Walt Whitman's lifetime ambition to ... |
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Louis-Ferdinand Celine's disgust with human folly, malice, greed and the chaotic state in which man has left society lies behind the bitterness that distinguishes his idiosyncratic, colloquial and visionary writing and gives it its force. First published in 1932, Journey to the End of the Night was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece and a turning point in French literature. Told in the first person by Celine's fictional alter ego Bardamu, the novel is loosely based on the author's own experiences during the First World War, in French colonial Africa, in the USA and, later, as a young doctor in a working- ... |
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Headstrong David Balfour, orphaned at seventeen, sets out from the Scottish lowlands to seek his fortune in Edinburgh and finds himself abducted on the orders of his wealthy Uncle Ebenezer. He's carried away to sea to be sold into slavery in the Carolinas, where he secures a timely alliance with Jacobite adventurer Alan Breck, and together they make an epic escape across the western Highlands. Inspired by real events, Kidnapped is a swashbuckling adventure of bizarre encounters, political assassination and wild carousings with Robert Louis Stevenson's unique counterpoint of low morals and high comedy threaded ... |
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After losing his mother at a very young age, the narrator is thrust from his comfortable, middle-class environment, afforded by his distant but aristocratic father, into the wider world. His passion for music begins in Georgia's all-black church community and takes him from New York, where he plays ragtime for a rich white gentleman, to the South, where he witnesses lynchings and out of fear gives up his passion, as well as his race, to pass for white. Relevant to this day, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is an unflinching account of black experience in America. James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an ... |
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First encountered in Lawrence's novel The Rainbow, sisters Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen are now grown-up women living in the English Midlands at the time of the First World War. Each becomes involved in a love affair: Ursula with the misanthropic intellectual Rupert Birkin, and Gudrun with Gerald Crich, a successful industrialist. The contrast between the two relationships - the former happy and fulfilling, the latter tempestuous and violent - facilitates an examination of both the regenerative and destructive aspects of human passion, while the novel's Alpine climax is revelatory of the intensity of close male ... |
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Born into a poor family, Fanny Price is raised amid the daunting splendour of Mansfield Park by her rich uncle, Sir Thomas Bertram. Treated as an inferior by most of the family, Fanny forms a close attachment to her cousin Edmund, the only person to show her kindness. With the departure of her uncle to the West Indies and the arrival from London of the fashionable Henry and Mary Crawford, flirtation and romantic intrigue abound. As Fanny becomes increasingly uncomfortable with the conduct of her companions, she finds herself isolated and forced to face the conflict between her sense of integrity and social expectation. ... |
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The sequel to Little Women. ... Three years have passed since the events narrated in Little Women, and the four March sisters are approaching adulthood, with all its accompanying challenges and expectations. Meg is preparing for her wedding, Beth continues to struggle with her health, Jo is more than ever devoting herself to literature and Amy is about to go on a tour of Europe with her aunt. Their experiences, hopes and ambitions are set in counterpoint to each other, until the whole family is brought together by tragedy and misfortune. Following on the immediate commercial success of Little Women, Good Wives completes ... |
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In this classic Victorian Bildungsroman, David Copperfield makes his way through life, from his happy Suffolk childhood and his subsequent adventures in London, where he is dispatched by his unsympathetic stepfather, through to his first steps as a writer and his search for love and happiness. Along the way he encounters a vast array of characters - among them, some of Dickens's most memorable ones - such as the eccentric aunt Betsey Trotwood, the deluded optimist Wilkins Micawber and the obsequious villain Uriah Heep. Much admired by Freud and Dostoevsky, and cited by Dickens as the favourite among his own ... |
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Mr Biswas has been told since the day of his birth that misfortune will follow him - and so it has. Meaning only to avoid punishment, he causes the death of his father and the dissolution of his family. Wanting simply to flirt with a beautiful woman, he ends up marrying her. But in spite of endless setbacks, Mr Biswas is determined to achieve independence, and so he begins the gruelling struggle to buy a home of his own. Heart-rending and darkly comic, V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas has been hailed as one of the twentieth century's finest novels, a classic that evokes a man's quest for autonomy ... |
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It is a variable early summer's day, and there is an unusual bustle in the grounds of Pointz Hall, a country house in a remote village in the very heart of England. The local community is all astir, intent on putting the finishing touches to preparations for the annual pageant, which is to be performed there that evening. Among the medley of attendees are Mr Oliver, the owner of the house, the flirtatious Mrs Manresa and her friend William Dodge, who is rumoured to be homosexual, the troubled married couple Giles and Isa, as well as the eccentric spinster Miss La Trobe, the author of the pageant - an ambitious journey ... |
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First published in 1861, Humiliated and Insulted plunges the reader into a world of moral degradation, childhood trauma, unrequited love and irreconcilable relationships. At the centre of the story are a young struggling author, an orphaned teenager and a depraved aristocrat, who not only foreshadows the great figures of evil in Dostoevsky's later fiction, but is a powerful and original presence in his own right. This new translation catches the verve and tumult of the original, which - in concept and execution - affords a refreshingly unfamiliar glimpse of the author. You can also find the edition in Bulgarian - ... |
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Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man and a deluded American religious seeker. An Area of Darkness also abounds with Naipaul's strikingly original responses to India's paralyzing caste system, its acceptance of poverty and squalor, and the conflict between its desire for self-determination and its nostalgia for the British raj. This may be the most ... |
