George Bowling, the hero of this comic novel, is a middle-aged insurance salesman who lives in an average English suburban row house with a wife and two children. One day, after winning some money from a bet, he goes back to the village where he grew up, to fish for carp in a pool he remembers from thirty years before. The pool, alas, is gone, the village has changed beyond recognition, and the principal event of his holiday is an accidental bombing by the RAF.
"Cry, the Beloved Country is a beautifully told and profoundly compassionate story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son Absalom, set in the troubled and changing South Africa of the 1940s.
The book is written with such keen empathy and understanding that to read it is to share fully in the gravity of the characters' situations. It both touches your heart deeply and inspires a renewed faith in the dignity of mankind. "Cry, the Beloved Country is a classic tale, passionately African, timeless and universal, and beyond all, selfless. View More...
A beautifully designed Harper Perennial Deluxe Edition of this haunting American classic"It is this perfectly wrought prose and the freshness of Plath's voice in The Bell Jar that make this book enduring in its appeal." -- USA TodayA realistic and emotional look at a woman who falls into the grips of insanity written by the iconic American writer Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under--maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with s... View More...
The writings in this anthology represent a highly personal and qualitative selection from both the "golden period" of Russian prose immediately following the 1917 revolution and the period from Stalin's death to the present -- a time of "thaw," protest, and a new revival of art.A number of the stories have been published previously, but about half are original translations. They vary in length from five to over a hundred pages. Each volume in the anthology contains an introductory essay by Krystyna Pomorska and brief biographical sketches of the authors.Volume 1 presents fifteen stories by wri... View More...
A number of intellectual and literary events in Russia after 1953 led to a break in the code of Socialist Realism. Several courageous writers invoked sharp debate and attack by defending the individual's right to freely display his creative abilities in works that contained fundamental political and moral realities, couched in the unpredictable plot and the not-so-happy ending.Volume 2 of this anthology brings together stories by Russian writers of this new period. The pieces by Yashin, Nagibin, and Zhdanov have been taken from Literary Moscow, an almanac whose role in the revival of Russian l... View More...
Novelist, short-story writer, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, Katherine Anne Porter is one of America's most respected and enduring literary figures. Upon her death in 1980 at the age of ninety, she left behind thousands of letters, from which Isabel Bayley, Porter's close friend for over twenty-five years and her literary archivist, selected the best. "The book was conceived as a whole," Bayley explains. "The letters will carry you, if you wish to read in sequence, from point to point during her major working years, 1930 to 1963. Little bridges form from idea to idea... View More...
The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter compiles three books of her short fiction into one National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning volume.From the gothic Old South to revolutionary Mexico, few writers have evoked such a multitude of worlds, both exterior and interior, as powerfully as Katherine Anne Porter. This collection gathers together the best of her award-winning short stories, including "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," where a young woman lies in a fever during the 1918 influenza epidemic, her childhood memories mingling with fears for her boyfriend on his way to war, and "Noon W... View More...
In the PENGUIN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CLASSICS series, a novel in which the author presents a scathing and at times comic portrait of French society at the end of the 19th century. From the author of REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST. View More...
These 94 gender-specific monologues are all original, recently produced works not found in other published versions. Suitable for classroom discussion, performance or audition, the chapters are divided into "thematic" ages from The Age of Innocence through The Golden Age. Each monologue includes a brief character analysis and an appropriate age range to help promote authentic character portraits in performance. Featured authors include both well-established writers who voice traditional views on current women's issues and new, contemporary writers who offer fresh and provocative insights on si... View More...
Malte Laurids Brigge is a young Danish nobleman and poet living in Paris. Obsessed with death and the reality that lurks behind appearances, Brigge muses on his family's history and on the teeming alien life of the city. First published in 1910, Rilke's masterpiece has proven to be one of the most influential and enduring works of fiction of our century. View More...
This paperback edition contains the complete text of Roethke's seven published volumes in addition to sixteen previously uncollected poems. Included are his Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners The Walking, Words for the Wind, and The Far Field. These two hundred poems demonstrate the variety of Roethke's themes and styles, the comic and serious sides of his temperament, and his breakthroughs in the use of language. Together they document the development of an extraordinary creative source of American poetry. View More...
