The Solar Empire has become a major commercial power along the rim of the Milky Way. For the past 22 years a virtual stream of emigrants has been flowing out to suitable colonial worlds. Also on many of the planets inhabited by other intelligences, Terran embassies have been established as well as far-flung trading settlements. In spite of all this, however, the situation is tense. An ominous discovery has been made: there is a super power in the galaxy which is friendly neither to Arkonides nor to Terrans! These are the Akons of the so-called Blue System. This terrible race will unleash the most incredible and frightening creation humanity has ever seen...THE PLASMA MONSTER! Views: 613
Readers of all ages will find fresh enchantment in familiar fables with this charming storybook. Famed children's writer E. Nesbit, author of Five Children and It and Shakespeare's Stories for Young Readers, offers captivating retellings of nine famous fairy tales.
This treasury of folklore begins with "Cinderella," "Beauty and the Beast," "Jack the Giant-Killer," and "Puss in Boots." Other timeless tales include "Jack and the Beanstalk," "Dick Whittington and His Cat," "The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood," "The White Cat," and "Hop-o'-my-Thumb." Views: 613
In Mr. Pritchett's view, rules, regulations and blitzes have brought things to such a pass that the moment will come when only the reader "and the hundred best authors are left in the world and have somehow to shake down together." To prepare for this "unnerving situation" he has re-read and re-assessed some of these authors, and the essays collected in this book are the fruit of his cogitations. Gibbon, Mrs. Gaskell, Dostoevsky, Fielding, Kilvert, Twain, Synge, Swift, Browning, are some of the writers Mr. Pritchett discusses. Names and dates are diverse, but nearly all have one common characteristic: they demonstrate the axiom that past and present are often parallel in most unexpected ways. Swift anticipated modern science and its consequences nearly two hundred years ago. Thackeray drew a modern Mayfair playboy when he created Rawdon Crawley. Huckleberry Finn is blood relation to Charlie Chaplin. These essays should appeal to scholars and the unlearned alike. Those who have... Views: 612
Chess Story, also known as The Royal Game, is the Austrian master Stefan Zweig’s final achievement, completed in Brazilian exile and sent off to his American publisher only days before his suicide in 1942. It is the only story in which Zweig looks at Nazism, and he does so with characteristic emphasis on the psychological.
Travelers by ship from New York to Buenos Aires find that on board with them is the world champion of chess, an arrogant and unfriendly man. They come together to try their skills against him and are soundly defeated. Then a mysterious passenger steps forward to advise them and their fortunes change. How he came to possess his extraordinary grasp of the game of chess and at what cost lie at the heart of Zweig’s story.
This new translation of Chess Story brings out the work’s unusual mixture of high suspense and poignant reflection. Views: 612
Goethe’s masterpiece and perhaps the greatest work in German literature, Faust has made the legendary German alchemist one of the central myths of the Western world. Here indeed is a monumental Faust, an audacious man boldly wagering with the devil, Mephistopheles, that no magic, sensuality, experience, or knowledge can lead him to a moment he would wish to last forever. Here, in Faust, Part I, the tremendous versatility of Goethe’s genius creates some of the most beautiful passages in literature. Here too we experience Goethe’s characteristic humor, the excitement and eroticism of the witches’ Walpurgis Night, and the moving emotion of Gretchen’s tragic fate.
This authoritative edition, which offers Peter Salm’s wonderfully readable translation as well as the original German on facing pages, brings us Faust in a vital, rhythmic American idiom that carefully preserves the grandeur, integrity, and poetic immediacy of Goethe’s words. Views: 612
Taylor Caldwell's unforgettable novel of John Turnbull, who fled Victorian England in heartbreak and disgrace, his life broken by one night of drunken lust, to build an empire of wealth and power in a brash new world... and Eugenia MacNeill, whose naked passion could not be crushed by bitter betrayal, whose hungry desire reached across an ocean to defy the morals of an age.
This is the story of two rebellious spirits, bound together by a forbidden love that spanned two decades and warped the destinies of many.
It is a big novel, vivid with color and bold with the turbulent life that only a great writer could give it. Views: 612
Robert Silverberg has been nominated for and won more awards for his fiction than any other writer in the science fiction genre. This classic, now finally back in print, sweeps us--and Clay, the main character--into Earth's far-away future. It's a time when no one has heard of Shakespeare, Mozart, or Darwin, and when the planet is inhabited by beings of great intelligence, ambivalent sexuality, and extraordinary powers. Clay embarks on a panoramic journey, encompassing a billion years, and comes to understand that the era from which he came is nothing more than a minute fiber in the band of time. Views: 612
EDITORIAL REVIEW:The tyrant of Tuglan, betrayer of his planet’s people, has been destroyed. Pucky, the perpetually playful mouse-beaver, born on the world called Vagabond, is now himself a wanderer of the void as he has become an honorary (or is it ornery?) member of Perry Rhodan’s crew. A peaceful return to Ferrol was anticipated by the Peacelord–but such was not to be. Emerging from hyperspace in the mighty Stardust II, Rhodan encounters chaos of cosmic proportions: Vega, a stable sun, is unaccountably turning into a nova! If the Ferrons, threatened with fiery extinction, are to be saved, there is only one course open to Rhodan; he must fulfill the destiny demanded of him by... THE IMMORTAL UNKNOWN! Views: 611
When The Fountainhead was first published, Ayn Rand''s daringly original literary vision and her groundbreaking philosophy, Objectivism, won immediate worldwide interest and acclaim. This instant classic is the story of an intransigent young architect, his violent battle against conventional standards, and his explosive love affair with a beautiful woman who struggles to defeat him. This edition contains a special afterword by Rand's literary executor, Leonard Peikoff, which includes excerpts from Ayn Rand's own notes on the making of The Fountainhead. As fresh today as it was then, here is a novel about a hero-and about those who try to destroy him. Views: 611
For the first time: the Nobel Prize winner’s stunning short fiction collected in one volume, with an introduction by the author.
Over the course of his distinguished career, V. S. Naipaul has written a remarkable array of short fiction that moves from Trinidad to London to Africa. Here are the stories from his Somerset Maugham Award–winning Miguel Street (1959), in which he takes us into a derelict corner of Trinidad’s capital to meet, among others, Man-Man, who goes from running for public office to staging his own crucifixion. The tales in A Flag on the Island (1967), meanwhile, roam from a Chinese bakery in Trinidad to a rooming house in London. And in the celebrated title story from the Booker Prize– winning In a Free State (1971), an English couple traveling in an unnamed African country discover, under a veneer of civilization, a landscape of squalor and ethnic bloodletting.
No writer has rendered our postcolonial world more acutely or prophetically than V. S. Naipaul, or given its upheavals such a hauntingly human face. Views: 611
Parallel German text and English translation.
The influence and popularity of Rilke’s poetry in America have never been greater than they are today, more than fifty years after his death. Rilke is unquestionably the most significant and compelling poet of romantic transformation, of spiritual quest, that the twentieth century has known. His poems of ecstatic identification with the world exert a seemingly endless fascination for contemporary readers.
In Stephen Mitchell’s versions, many readers feel that they have discovered an English rendering that captures the lyric intensity, fluency, and reach of Rilke’s poetry more accurately and convincingly than has ever been done before.
Mr. Mitchell is impeccable in his adherence to Rilke’s text, to his formal music, and to the complexity of his thought; at the same time, his work has authority and power as poetry in its own right. Few translators of any poet have arrived at the delicate balance of fidelity and originality that Mr. Mitchell has brought off with seeming effortlessness.
Originally published: New York : Random House, 1982. Views: 611
** *“They do not love that do not show their love.”* **
**—Two Gentlemen of Verona**
** * * **
Eminent Shakespearean scholars Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen provide a fresh new edition of the classic comedy of courtship and delicious rivalry.
**THIS VOLUME ALSO INCLUDES MORE THAN A HUNDRED PAGES OF EXCLUSIVE FEATURES:**
• an original Introduction to *Two Gentlemen of Verona*
• incisive scene-by-scene synopsis and analysis with vital facts about the work
• commentary on past and current productions based on interviews with leading directors, actors, and designers
• photographs of key RSC productions
• an overview of Shakespeare’s theatrical career and chronology of his plays
Ideal for students, theater professionals, and general readers, these modern and accessible editions from the Royal Shakespeare Company set a new standard in Shakespearean literature for the twenty-first century. Views: 611
Bitter Lemons of Cyprus is Lawrence Durrell's unique account of his time in Cyprus, during the 1950s Enosis movement for freedom of the island from British colonial rule. Winner of the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, it is a document at once personal, poetic and subtly political - a masterly combination of travelogue, memoir and treatise.
'He writes as an artist, as well as a poet; he remembers colour and landscape and the nuances of peasant conversation . . . Eschewing politics, it says more about them than all our leading articles . . . In describing a political tragedy it often has great poetic beauty.' Kingsley Martin, New Statesman
'Durrell possesses exceptional qualifications. He speaks Greek fluently; he has a wide knowledge of modern Greek history, politics and literature; he has lived in continental Greece and has spent many years in other Greek islands . . . His account of this calamity is revelatory, moving and restrained. It is written in the sensitive and muscular prose of which he is so consummate a master.' Harold Nicolson, Observer Views: 610
The Ingalls family leaves Plum Creek.
Pa heads west to the unsettled wilderness of the Dakota Territory. When Ma, Laura, Mary, Carrie, and Grace join him, they become the first settlers in the town of DeSmet. And Pa begins work on the first building in what will soon be a brand-new town on the shores of Silver Lake. Views: 610
Nick and Nora Charles are Hammett's most enchanting creations, a rich, glamorous couple who solve homicides in between wisecracks and martinis. At once knowing and unabashedly romantic, The Thin Man is a murder mystery that doubles as a sophisticated comedy of manners. "From the Trade Paperback edition." Views: 610
