One of the last plays Shakespeare penned on his own, **The Winter’s Tale **is a transcendent work of death and rebirth, exploring irrational sexual jealousy, the redemptive world of nature, and the magical power of art.
Under the editorial supervision of Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen, two of today’s most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, this Modern Library series incorporates definitive texts and authoritative notes from **William Shakespeare: Complete Works**. Each play includes an Introduction as well as an overview of Shakespeare’s theatrical career; commentary on past and current productions based on interviews with leading directors, actors, and designers; scene-by-scene analysis; key facts about the work; a chronology of Shakespeare’s life and times; and black-and-white illustrations.
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: 814
Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. Spanning from the Great Depression to the turbulent Vietnam War era, Wonderland is the epic account of Jesse Vogel, a boy who emerged from a family tragedy with his life spared but his world torn apart. Orphaned after watching his father murder his entire family, Jesse embarks on a personal odyssey that takes him from a Dickensian foster home to college and graduate school to the pinnacle of the medical profession. As an adult, Jesse must summon the strength to reach across the “generation gap” and rescue his endangered teenaged daughter, who has fallen into the drug-infused 1960s counterculture.
Hailed by Library Journal as “the greatest of Oates’s novels,” Wonderland is the capstone of a magnificent literary excursion that plunges beneath the glossy surface of American life.
Wonderland is the final novel in Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, A Garden of Earthly Delights, Expensive People, and them, are also available from the Modern Library.
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From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 814
John Wainwright is a freak - a human mutation with an extraordinary intelligence which is both awesome and frightening to all who come into contact with him. Ordinary humans were just playthings to John - subjects for an endless chain of experiments. Their feelings, and sometimes even their lives, are expendable.
Odd John has a plan - to create a new order on Earth, a new supernormal species. But the world is not ready for such a change... Views: 813
Nancy, Bess and George visit New Orleans for Mardi Gras. While on vacation for the festivities, the three friends become involved with pirates, ghosts, and investigating an old showboat, rumored to be haunted, that must be restored in time for the gala celebrations. This book is the original text. A revised text does not exist. Views: 813
The story of the Spanish Armada, sent crashing to destruction in stormy seas by English battleships, is one of the most famous & popular of British history. Philip II of Spain's crusade to conquer Protestant England was the culmination of an undeclared war between the two nations which had simmered for years. The dramatic destruction of the Spanish fleet by Howard, Drake & their men ensured that England kept her political & religious freedom--but it wasn't the end of the story. This history places the Spanish Armada in its true context, as the most spectacular of Spain's continued attempts to return England to Catholicism, first thru friendship, then by marriage, finally through war. It explains that the 1588 battle was only one in a series of Spanish naval campaigns against England--it wasn't until the 17th century that peace was fully assured. Winston Graham, author of the Poldark novels, brings all his gifts as a storyteller to this fascinating work, making the momentous sea battles come to life & telling a tale of human hostility & passions. Views: 813
An out-of-work actor, Hercules Feltwright, stumbles into a job tutoring Willet Goody, the only child of a widow living in a large, lonely house. Willet quickly involves his tutor in the search to discover the truth surrounding his father. The mystery unfolds with the discovery of hidden treasure, a gypsy seance, and the frightening exploration of the tomb of Midas Goody. Views: 813
Farely Mowat's best-loved book tells the splendidly entertaining story of his boyhood on the Canadian prairies. Mutt's pedigree was uncertain, but his madness was indisputable. He climbed tress and ladders, rode passenger in an open car wearing goggles and displaying hunting skills that bordered on sheer genius. He was a marvelous dog, worthy of an unusual boy growing up in a raw, untamed wilderness.
From the Paperback edition. Views: 812
The Street of Crocodiles in the Polish city of Drogobych is a street of memories and dreams where recollections of Bruno Schulz's uncommon boyhood and of the eerie side of his merchant family's life are evoked in a startling blend of the real and the fantastic. Most memorable - and most chilling - is the portrait of the author's father, a maddened shopkeeper who imports rare birds' eggs to hatch in his attic, who believes tailors' dummies should be treated like people, and whose obsessive fear of cockroaches causes him to resemble one. Bruno Schulz, a Polish Jew killed by the Nazis in 1942, is considered by many to have been the leading Polish writer between the two world wars.
Bruno Schulz's untimely death at the hands of a Nazi stands as one of the great losses to modern literature. During his lifetime, his work found little critical regard, but word of his remarkable talents gradually won him an international readership. This volume brings together his complete fiction, including three short stories and his final surviving work, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Illustrated with Schulz's original drawings, this edition beautifully showcases the distinctive surrealist vision of one of the twentieth century's most gifted and influential writers. Views: 811
The second novel by Don DeLillo, author of White Noise (winner of the National Book Award) and *Zero K
At Logos College in West Texas, huge young men, vacuum-packed into shoulder pads and shiny helmets, play football with intense passion. During an uncharacteristic winning season, the perplexed and distracted running back Gary Harkness has periodic fits of nuclear glee; he is fueled and shielded by his fear of and fascination with nuclear conflict. Among oddly afflicted and recognizable players, the terminologies of football and nuclear war—the language of end zones—become interchangeable, and their meaning deteriorates as the collegiate year runs its course. In this triumphantly funny, deeply searching novel, Don DeLillo explores the metaphor of football as war with rich, original zeal.
From the Trade Paperback edition.* Views: 811
This original, authorised version has been lovingly recreated electronically for the first time, with reproductions of Potter's unmistakeable artwork optimised for use on colour devices such as the iPad.
Peter Rabbit's cousin, Benjamin Bunny, has been a very popular character since this book's first publication in 1904. In this tale we hear all about his and Peter's adventures in Mr McGregor's vegetable garden, and what happens to them when they meet a cat! Even more frightening, is what happens to the two pesky bunnies when Old Mr Benjamin Bunny finds out what they have been up to!
The Tale of Benjamin Bunny is number four in Beatrix Potter's series of 23 little books, the titles of which are as follows:
1 The Tale of Peter Rabbit
2 The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin
3 The Tailor of Gloucester
4 The Tale of Benjamin Bunny
5 The Tale of Two Bad Mice
6 The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle
7 The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher
8 The Tale of Tom Kitten
9 The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck
10 The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies
11 The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse
12 The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes
13 The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse
14 The Tale of Mr. Tod
15 The Tale of Pigling Bland
16 The Tale of Samuel Whiskers
17 The Tale of The Pie and the Patty-Pan
18 The Tale of Ginger and Pickles
19 The Tale of Little Pig Robinson
20 The Story of a Fierce Bad Rabbit
21 The Story of Miss Moppet
22 Appley Dapply's Nursery Rhymes
23 Cecily Parsley's Nursery Rhymes Views: 811
Originally published in 1945, Prater Violet is a stingingly satirical novel about the film industry. It centers around the production of the vacuous fictional melodrama Prater Violet, set in nineteenth-century Vienna, providing ironic counterpoint to tragic events as Hitler annexes the real Vienna of the 1930s. The novel features the vivid portraits of imperious, passionate, and witty Austrian director Friedrich Bergmann and his disciple, a genial young screenwriter -- the fictionalized Christopher Isherwood. Views: 811
From the author of The Stars Look Down and The Citadel, and the creator of Dr Finlay's Casebook
A J Cronin was commissioned by The American Weekly to write a Christmas story for the December 21st issue in 1958. His vision for the story is described in his letter of acceptance:
“It came to me very strongly that to achieve the highest and most profoundly touching results I should go back to the first Christmas of all and create a vivid reconstruction of the effects of the birth of the Child upon certain characters, notably the wife of the innkeeper where no room was found for Mary and Joseph. The title of the story would be The Innkeper’s Wife, for she, as I imagine her, is the central human character—a good and tender-hearted woman, childless herself, and bullied by an assertive and miserly husband.”
Here now is the alternative story of Christmas, narrated with great skill, by the author of The Citadel, Hatter’s Castle and The Stars Look Down** Views: 811
In Oil! Upton Sinclair fashioned a novel out of the oil scandals of the Harding administration, providing in the process a detailed picture of the development of the oil industry in Southern California. Bribery of public officials, class warfare, and international rivalry over oil production are the context for Sinclair's story of a genial independent oil developer and his son, whose sympathy with the oilfield workers and socialist organizers fuels a running debate with his father. Senators, small investors, oil magnates, a Hollywood film star, and a crusading evangelist people the pages of this lively novel. Views: 811
He called himself Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever because he dared not believe in the strange alternate world in which he suddenly found himself.
Yet the Land tempted him. He had been sick; now he seemed better than ever before. Through no fault of his own, he had been outcast, unclean, a pariah. Now he was regarded as a reincarnation of the Land's greatest hero--Berek Halfhand--armed with the mystic power of White Gold. That power alone could protect the Lords of the Land from the ancient evil of Despiser, Lord Foul. Only...Covenant had no idea of how the power could be used!
Thus begins one of the most remarkable epic fantasies ever written... Views: 810
Jo, Bessie and Fanny take their cousin Rick on an adventure he'll never forget to the magic Faraway Tree, where he meets Moon-Face, Silky the fairy and Saucepan Man, and visits all the different lands at the top of the Faraway Tree. Like the Land of Spells, the crazy Land of Topsy-Turvy, and the land of Do-As-You-Please, where the children ride a runaway train! Views: 810
