Fiction
Here are the first two volumes of Proust's monumental achievement, Swann's Way and Within a Budding Grove. The famous overture to Swann's Way sets down the grand themes that govern In Search of Lost Time as the narrator recalls his childhood in Paris and Combray, exquisite memories, long since passed--his mother's good-night kiss, the water lilies on the Vivonne, his love for Swann's daughter Gilberte--spring vividly into being. In Within a Budding Grove--which won the Prix Goncourt in 1919, bringing the author instant fame--the narrator turns from his childhood recollections and begins to explore the memories of his adolescence. As his affections for Gilberte grow dim, the narrator discovers a new object of attention in the bright-eyed Albertine. Their encounters unfold by the shores of Balbec. One of the great works of Western literature, now in the new definitive French Pleiade edition translated by C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin.
This distressing but hugely important text has influenced countless individuals throughout history: Flaubert and Baudelaire both read Sade; the surrealists were obsessed with him; film-makers like Pasolini saw parallels with twentieth-century history in his writings; and feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Angela Carter clashed over him. This new translation brings Sade's provocative novel into Penguin Classics for the first time, and will reignite the debate around this most controversial of writers. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Foreword by Dennis F. Mahoney
The German Library is a new series of the major works of German literature and thought from medieval times to the present. The volumes have forwards by internationally known writers and introductions by prominent scholars. Excerpts six texts (by La Roche, Forster, Wieland, Moritz, Heinse, and Braker) that show a cross-section of forms and themes that are representative as well as special examples of 18th-century German prose.
The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo. A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver's enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 --"Q is for 'question mark.' A world that bears a question." Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled. As Aomame's and Tengo's narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector. A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell's--1Q84 is Haruki Murakami's most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers.
A "sharply satirical" novel about an oppressive religious dictatorship and one man's discovery of an underground resistance (Library Journal).
2015 Winner of the Le Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie française A tribute to George Orwell's dystopian classic 1984 and a cry of protest against totalitarianism of all kinds, Boualem Sansal's 2084 tells the story of a near future in which religious extremists have established a caliphate that forbids autonomous thought. In the year 2084, in the kingdom of Abistan--named after the prophet Abi, earthly messenger of the god Yölah--citizens submit to a single god, demonstrating their devotion by kneeling in prayer nine times a day. Remembering the past is forbidden, and an omnipresent surveillance system instantly informs the authorities of every deviant act, thought, or idea.The kingdom is blessed and its citizens are happy, filled with purpose and piety. Those who are not--the heretics--are put to death by stoning or beheading in city squares. But Ati has met people who think differently: In ghettos and caves, hidden from the authorities, exist the last living heretics and free-thinkers of Abistan. Under their influence, Ati begins to doubt. He begins to think. Now, he will have to defend his thoughts with his life.
2084 is "a rare, powerful book, at the intersection of fable and lampoon, of satire and science fiction," a cry of freedom, a gripping novel of ideas, and an indictment of the kind of closed-minded fundamentalism that threatens our democracies and the ideals on which they are founded (Lire). "Alison Anderson's deft and intelligent translation [conveys] Sansal's abhorrence of a system that controls people's minds, while explaining that the religion was not originally evil but has been corrupted. A moving and cautionary story."--The Times Literary Supplement "A powerful novel that celebrates resistance."--The Guardian
A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER
New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2008Time Magazine's Best Book of 2008
Los Angeles Times Best Books of 2008
San Francisco Chronicle's 50 Best Fiction Books of 2008
Seattle Times Best Books of 2008
New York Magazine Top Ten Books of 2008
Three academics on the trail of a reclusive German author; a New York reporter on his first Mexican assignment; a widowed philosopher; a police detective in love with an elusive older woman--these are among the searchers drawn to the border city of Santa Teresa, where over the course of a decade hundreds of women have disappeared. In the words of The Washington Post, With 2666, Roberto Bolaño joins the ambitious overachievers of the twentieth-century novel, those like Proust, Musil, Joyce, Gaddis, Pynchon, Fuentes, and Vollmann, who push the novel far past its conventional size and scope to encompass an entire era, deploying encyclopedic knowledge and stylistic verve to offer a grand, if sometimes idiosyncratic, summation of their culture and the novelist's place in it. Bolaño has joined the immortals.
The road to Shu is hard, but harder still is to convey the spirit with which these poems were first written over a thousand years ago. And yet the translators have given us translations that feel alive, as if they were more like a dance between poet and translator, both of whom live on through the beauty of these poems. The night is young, and this book is full of music.--Red Pine
Three Hundred Tang Poems includes great names like Li Bai, Du Fu, and Wang Wei, as well as a splendid sampling of the rest of poets who helped to make the Tang the golden age of Chinese poetry.
Sulfurously funny and intellectually provocative, 7 Tattoos is a journey without maps through the labyrinth of a human soul. There are only a few landmarks as guideposts: the ones carved on the author's own flesh. Each section of this innovative book is the story of one of Peter Trachtenberg's tattoos, as well as a daring, intelligent exploration of the themes that each tattoo evokes: death, sacrilege, primitivism, rebellion, atonement, sadomasochism, and downfall. 7 Tattoos introduces us to a man responding ingeniously and emotionally to the harrowing events of his life: funerary rites in Borneo, heroin addiction on Manhattan's Lower East Side, the deathwatches of both his parents. Though it features deft portraits of famous tattoo artists like Spider Webb, Trachtenberg's book is not about tattoos; rather it is an arsenal of ideas fired off with great emotional power. At once memoir, wild anthropology, and meditation on love, faithlessness, and faith, this stunningly original book redefines what a literary memoir can be.
In 1913, Frost published A Boy's Will, his first collection of poems. A series of sharply observed impressions of New England rural life touching upon universal themes, it included such poems as "Into My Own," "Asking for Roses," "Spoils of the Dead," and "Reluctance." A second volume, North of Boston, followed in 1914 and contained several of Frost's finest and best-known works: "Mending Wall," "After Apple-Picking," "The Death of the Hired Man," and others. Both volumes are reprinted here complete and unabridged ― a treasury of fine early verse by one of the 20th century's most admired poets.
Few readers need introduction to Charles Dickens's great Christmas classic of Ebenezer Scrooge, his dastardly treatment of his employees and family, and his "ba-humbug" attitude towards Christmas--all changed by a nightmarish sleep of visions of past, present, and future.
Although numerous other editions of this book are in print, few are as lovely as the Green Integer edition, edited from the original 1843 edition and corrected by Douglas Messerli. The book will be available for Christmas 2001.
In Anthony Burgess's influential nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, a teen who talks in a fantastically inventive slang that evocatively renders his and his friends' intense reaction against their society. Dazzling and transgressive, A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil and the meaning of human freedom. This edition includes the controversial last chapter not published in the first edition, and Burgess's introduction, "A Clockwork Orange Resucked."
The title of this book is taken from an account by Thomas F. Hornbein on his travels in the Himalayas. It seemed to me, Horenbein wrote, that here man lived in continuous harmony with the land, as much as briefly a part of it as all its other occupants. Wendell Berry's second collection of essays, A Continuous Harmony was first published in 1972, and includes the seminal Think Little, which was printed in The Last Whole Earth Catalogue and reprinted around the globe, and the splendid centerpiece, Discipline and Hope, an insightful and articulate essay making a case for what he calls a new middle.
Nathanael West was only thirty-seven when he died in 1940, but his depictions of the sometimes comic, sometimes horrifying aspects of the American scene rival those of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. A Cool Million, written in 1934, is a satiric Horatio Alger story set in the midst of the Depression. The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931) was described by one critic as "a fantasy about some rather scatological adventures of the hero in the innards of the Trojan horse."
This novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1955. An allegorical story of World War I, set in the trenches in France and dealing ostensibly with a mutiny in a French regiment, it was originally considered a sharp departure for Faulkner. Recently it has come to be recognized as one of his major works and an essential part of the Faulkner oeuvre. His descriptions of the war "rise to magnificence," according to The New York Times, and include, in Malcolm Cowley's words, "some of the most powerful scenes he ever conceived."
Set in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion and on the cusp of Kenya's independence from Britain, A Grain of Wheat follows a group of villagers whose lives have been transformed by the 1952-1960 Emergency. At the center of it all is the reticent Mugo, the village's chosen hero and a man haunted by a terrible secret. As we learn of the villagers' tangled histories in a narrative interwoven with myth and peppered with allusions to real-life leaders, including Jomo Kenyatta, a masterly story unfolds in which compromises are forced, friendships are betrayed, and loves are tested. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Pulitzer Prize Finalist A book that redefines both family and narrative for the twenty-first century. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the moving memoir of a college senior who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother. Here is an exhilarating debut that manages to be simultaneously hilarious and wildly inventive as well as a deeply heartfelt story of the love that holds a family together. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is an instant classic that will be read for decades to come.
Las Vegas, New Mexico Territory, nineteenth-century edge of the future. Fear, greed, and real estate turn the windmill into a hanging tree. Each train into this booming railroad town unloads a cargo of carpetbaggers, entrepreneurs, seekers, Civil War veterans, and strong, lonely women--like Eliza Pelham. Good mother, drunk and unfaithful wife, Eliza stands at this juncture of raw change and random justice, caught in a reality of callousness and redemption. As Eliza searches for her stolen children, she discovers three allies: an Irish saloon girl, an Apache man who reads Melville, and La Llorona, the weeping mother, fierce in a black dress, thousands of years old.
The New York Times - The Washington Post - The Wall Street Journal - NPR - Vanity Fair - Vogue - Minneapolis Star Tribune - St. Louis Post-Dispatch - The Guardian - O, The Oprah Magazine - Slate - Newsday - Buzzfeed - The Economist - Newsweek - People - Kansas City Star - Shelf Awareness - Time Out New York - Huffington Post - Book Riot - Refinery29 - Bookpage - Publishers Weekly - Kirkus WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE
A MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST
A NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
A Little Life follows four college classmates--broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition--as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara's stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves.
A national best seller, deemed one of Morrison's most haunting works by the New York Times, A Mercy reveals what lies beneath the surface of slavery. But at its heart, like Beloved, it is the story of a mother and a daughter--a mother who casts off her daughter in order to save her, and a daughter who may never exorcise that abandonment.
In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in "flesh," he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland. This is Florens, who can read and write and might be useful on his farm. Rejected by her mother, Florens looks for love, first from Lina, an older servant woman at her new master's house, and later from the handsome blacksmith, an African, never enslaved, who comes riding into their lives.
A short, spellbinding novel about a WWI veteran finding a way to re-enter--and fully embrace--normal life while spending the summer in an idyllic English village.
In J. L. Carr's deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where he is to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the bell tower, surrounded by the resplendent countryside of high summer, and laboring each day to uncover an anonymous painter's depiction of the apocalypse, Birkin finds that he himself has been restored to a new, and hopeful, attachment to life. But summer ends, and with the work done, Birkin must leave. Now, long after, as he reflects on the passage of time and the power of art, he finds in his memories some consolation for all that has been lost.
"A remarkable novel. . . . A Prayer for Owen Meany is a rare creation in the somehow exhausted world of late twentieth-century fiction--it is an amazingly brave piece of work . . . so extraordinary, so original, and so enriching. . . . Readers will come to the end feeling sorry to leave [this] richly textured and carefully wrought world."
-- STEPHEN KING, Washington Post
A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice--not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
In the summer of 1953, two eleven-year-old boys--best friends--are playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills the other boy's mother. The boy who hits the ball doesn't believe in accidents; Owen Meany believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul ball is extraordinary.
"Roomy, intelligent, exhilarating, and darkly comic . . . Dickensian in scope . . . Quite stunning and very ambitious." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Brilliantly cinematic . . . Irving shows considerable skill as scene after scene mounts to its moving climax. -- ALFRED KAZIN, New York Times
An intimate and exhilarating journey through the world of books by the internationally celebrated author
In this major collection of his essays, Alberto Manguel, whom George Steiner has called "the Casanova of reading," argues that the activity of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species. "We come into the world intent on finding narrative in everything," writes Manguel, "landscape, the skies, the faces of others, the images and words that our species create." Reading our own lives and those of others, reading the societies we live in and those that lie beyond our borders, reading the worlds that lie between the covers of a book are the essence of A Reader on Reading.The thirty-nine essays in this volume explore the crafts of reading and writing, the identity granted to us by literature, the far-reaching shadow of Jorge Luis Borges, to whom Manguel read as a young man, and the links between politics and books and between books and our bodies. The powers of censorship and intellectual curiosity, the art of translation, and those "numinous memory palaces we call libraries" also figure in this remarkable collection. For Manguel and his readers, words, in spite of everything, lend coherence to the world and offer us "a few safe places, as real as paper and as bracing as ink," to grant us room and board in our passage.
A Spot of Bother is Mark Haddon's unforgettable follow-up to the internationally beloved bestseller The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. At sixty-one, George Hall is settling down to a comfortable retirement. When his tempestuous daughter, Katie, announces that she is getting married to the deeply inappropriate Ray, the Hall family is thrown into a tizzy. Unnoticed in the uproar, George discovers a sinister lesion on his hip, and quietly begins to lose his mind. As parents and children fall apart and come together, Haddon paints a disturbing yet amusing portrait of a dignified man trying to go insane politely.
A Washington Post Best Book of the Year
In this exuberantly praised book -- a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner -- David Foster Wallace brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal facility that has delighted readers of his fiction, including the bestselling Infinite Jest.
--Chicago Sun-Times
When Larry Cook, the aging patriarch of a rich, thriving farm in Iowa, decides to retire, he offers his land to his three daughters. For Ginny and Rose, who live on the farm with their husbands, the gift makes sense--a reward for years of hard work, a challenge to make the farm even more successful. But the youngest, Caroline, a Des Moines lawyer, flatly rejects the idea, and in anger her father cuts her out--setting off an explosive series of events that will leave none of them unchanged. A classic story of contemporary American life, A THOUSAND ACRES strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a father, a daughter, a family.
"While she has written beautifully about families in all of her seven preceding books, [this] effort is her best: a family portrait that is also a near-epic investigation into the broad landscape, the thousand dark acres, of the human heart".
--The Washington Post Book World
"A full, commanding novel . . . This is a story bound and tethered to a lonely road in the Midwest, but drawn from a universal source. . . . A profoundly American novel.1
--The Boston Globe
"A TOUR DE FORCE".
--Newsweek
"POWERFUL AND POIGNANT".
--The New York Times Book Review
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
PEN/Faulkner Award Finalist
A New York Times Book Review Best Book
One of our best contemporary writers explores the tension between science and religion and reveals how our concept of mind determines how we understand and value human nature and human civilization
In this ambitious book, acclaimed writer Marilynne Robinson applies her astute intellect to some of the most vexing topics in the history of human thought--science, religion, and consciousness. Crafted with the same care and insight as her award-winning novels, Absence of Mind challenges postmodern atheists who crusade against religion under the banner of science. In Robinson's view, scientific reasoning does not denote a sense of logical infallibility, as thinkers like Richard Dawkins might suggest. Instead, in its purest form, science represents a search for answers. It engages the problem of knowledge, an aspect of the mystery of consciousness, rather than providing a simple and final model of reality.By defending the importance of individual reflection, Robinson celebrates the power and variety of human consciousness in the tradition of William James. She explores the nature of subjectivity and considers the culture in which Sigmund Freud was situated and its influence on his model of self and civilization. Through keen interpretations of language, emotion, science, and poetry, Absence of Mind restores human consciousness to its central place in the religion-science debate.
fundamental beauty of existence, as she explores what it means to experience life fully, to learn from it, and to grow both as an individual and as part of a greater spiritual community. About Walker's Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful, America said, "In the tradition of Whitman, Walker sings, celebrates and agonizes over the ordinary vicissitudes that link and separate all of humankind," and the same can be said about this astonishing new collection, Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth.
Adjustment Day is an ingenious darkly comic work in which Chuck Palahniuk does what he does best: skewer the absurdities in our society. Geriatric politicians bring the nation to the brink of a third world war to control the burgeoning population of young males, while working-class men dream of burying the elites. Adjustment Day's arrival makes real the logical conclusion of every separatist fantasy, alternative fact, and conspiracy theory lurking in the American psyche.
-The New York Times Book Review "A marvelous dovetailing of fantasy, history and religion . . . This sensitive new translation by Musharraf Ali Farooqi is filled with lyrical resonance. . . . [Readers] will love losing themselves in this complex yet ancient world of the imagination."
-The Washington Post Book World "It's hard to think of an epic more dazzlingly splendid . . . Farooqi has given world literature a gift."
-Time "With prose as embroidered as the tales themselves, the book should be savored under the covers like a secret lover."
-The Austin Chronicle "[A] revelatory translation of a masterpiece of world literature . . . unequivocally an amazing piece of publishing history."
-The Buffalo News