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Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the twentieth century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.
2) The pearl
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Terrible events follow the discovery of a magnificent pearl by a poor Mexican fisherman.
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Tells a story about the strange relationship of two migrant workers, who are able to realize their dreams of an easy life until one of them succumbs to his weakness for soft, helpless creatures and strangles the farmer's wife. Tragic tale of a retarded man and the friend who loves and tries to protect him. With illustrations from the movie starring John Malkovich and Gary Sinise.
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Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet are arguably the most famous and beloved letters of the twentieth century. Written when the poet was himself still a young man, with most of his greatest work before him, they were addressed to a student who had sent Rilke some of his own writing, asking for advice on becoming a writer. The two never met, but over a period of several years Rilke wrote him these ten letters. Eloquent and personal, Rilke's meditations...
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This early work by James Joyce was originally published in 1939 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introduction. 'Finnegans Wake' is a an experimental novel of comic fiction. James Joyce was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1882. He excelled as a student at the Jesuit schools Clongowes and Belvedere, and then at University College Dublin, where he studied English, French, and Italian. Joyce produced several prominent works, including: 'Ulysses',...
6) The Odyssey
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Composed at the rosy-fingered dawn of world literature almost three millennia ago, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty and power; about marriage and family; about travelers, hospitality, and the yearning for home. This fresh, authoritative translation captures the beauty of this ancient poem as well as the drama of its narrative. Its characters are unforgettable, none more so than the "complicated"...
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Saul Bellow evokes all the rich colors and exotic customs of a highly imaginary Africa in this acclaimed comic novel about a middle-aged American millionaire who, seeking a new, more rewarding life, descends upon an African tribe. Henderson's awesome feats of strength and his unbridled passion for life win him the admiration of the tribe-but it is his gift for making rain that turns him from mere hero into messiah. A hilarious, often ribald story,...
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The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide. The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned...
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Soon to be a major motion picture starring Salma Hayek, John C. Reilly, Toby Jones, and Vincent Cassel: a rollicking, bawdy, fantastical cycle of 50 fairy tales told by 10 storytellers over 5 days
Before the Brothers Grimm, before Charles Perrault, before Hans Christian Andersen, there was Giambattista Basile, a seventeenth-century poet from Naples, Italy, whom the Grimms credit with recording the first national collection of...
Before the Brothers Grimm, before Charles Perrault, before Hans Christian Andersen, there was Giambattista Basile, a seventeenth-century poet from Naples, Italy, whom the Grimms credit with recording the first national collection of...
11) Ivanhoe
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Ivanhoe, a trusted ally of Richard-the-Lion-Hearted, returns from the Crusades to reclaim the inheritance his father denied him. Rebecca, a vibrant, beautiful Jewish woman is defended by Ivanhoe against a charge of witchcraft--but it is Lady Rowena who is Ivanhoe's true love. The wicked Prince John plots to usurp England's throne, but two of the most popular heroes in all of English literature, Richard-the-Lion-Hearted and the well-loved famous outlaw,...
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Jane Austen's first published novel, sparkling with wit and artistry, captures the inequities of birth, class, and marriage faced by the sisters Dashwood. Published in 1811, Sense and Sensibility has delighted generations of readers with its masterfully crafted portrait of two sisters, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood. Forced to leave their home after their father's death, Elinor and Marianne must rely on making good marriages as their means of support....
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In the most seminal slave narrative ever written, Frederick Douglass writes, "From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom." Reading this narrative is to witness...
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Fresh from his escapades with Tom Sawyer, with six thousand dollars in the bank and the Widow Douglas as his guardian, Huck Finn faces a new challenge: his father, Pap, who is so determined to get his hands on Huck's fortune that he kidnaps Huck and threatens to kill him. Escaping from Pap, Huck meets the runaway slave, Jim, who plans to head north and buy his wife and children our of slavery. Huck joins Jim on a salvaged raft, and together the two...
15) Dracula
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First published in 1897, Dracula by Bram Stoker has become the standard against which all other vampire stories are compare and the inspiration for countless film and stage adaptations. Indeed, the name "Dracula" has been synonymous with the Undead for at least a century, and the original novels till has the power to chill. Come then to Castle Dracula, hidden in the forbidding peaks of the Carpathian Mountains, where an undying creature of evil casts...
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A Tale of Two Cities is Charles Dickens's great historical novel, set against the French Revolution. The most famous and perhaps the most popular of his works, it compresses an event of immense complexity to the scale of a family history, with a cast of characters that includes a bloodthirsty ogress and an antihero as believably flawed as any in modern fiction. Though the least typical of the author's novels, A Tale of Two Cities still underscores...
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First published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads-driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet...
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When Elizabeth Bennet meets Fitzwilliam Darcy for the first time at a ball, she writes him off as an arrogant and obnoxious man. He not only acts like an insufferable snob, but she also overhears him rejecting the very idea of asking her for a dance! As life pits them against each other again and again, Darcy begins to fall for Elizabeth's wit and intelligence and Elizabeth begins to question her feelings about Darcy. But when Darcy saves her youngest...
19) Emma
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"The culmination of Jane Austen's genius, a sparkling comedy of love and marriage--now in a stunning 200th-anniversary Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition Beautiful, clever, rich--and single--Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr. Knightley and attempts to...
