Summer Classics

This new translation of Montaigne's immortal Essays received great acclaim when it was first published in The Complete Works of Montaigne in the 1957 edition. The New York Times said, It is a matter for rejoicing that we now have available a new translation that offers definite advantages over even the best of its predecessors, and The New Republic stated that this edition gives a more adequate idea of Montaigne's manner, his straight and unpretentious style, than any of the half-dozen previous English translations.

In his Essays Montaigne warns us from the outset that he has set himself no goal but a domestic and private one; yet he is one author whose modernity and universality have been acclaimed by each age since he wrote. Probing into his emotions, attitudes, and behavior, Montaigne reveals to us much about ourselves.

As new editions of the Essays were published during his lifetime, Montaigne interpolated many new passages--often of considerable length. This volume indicates the strata of composition, so that the reader may follow the development of Montaigne's thought over the years. The detailed index provides a convenient means of locating the many famous passages that occur throughout the work.

In the early summer of the year 1348, as a terrible plague ravages the city, ten charming young Florentines take refuge in country villas to tell each other stories - a hundred stories of love, adventure and surprising twists of fortune which later inspired Chaucer, Keats and Shakespeare. While Dante is a stern moralist, Boccaccio has little time for chastity, pokes fun at crafty, hypocritical clerics and celebrates the power of passion to overcome obstacles and social divisions. Like the Divine Comedy, the Decameron is a towering monument of medieval pre-Renaissance literature, and incorporates certain important elements that are not at once apparent to today's readers. In a new introduction to this revised edition, which also includes additional explanatory notes, maps, bibliography and indexes, Professor McWilliam shows us Boccaccio for what he is - one of the world's greatest masters of vivid and exciting prose fiction.

Still the benchmark of Russian literature 175 years after its first publication--now in a marvelous new translation

Pushkin's incomparable poem has at its center a young Russian dandy much like Pushkin in his attitudes and habits. Eugene Onegin, bored with the triviality of everyday life, takes a trip to the countryside, where he encounters the young and passionate Tatyana. She falls in love with him but is cruelly rejected. Years later, Eugene Onegin sees the error of his ways, but fate is not on his side. A tragic story about love, innocence, and friendship, this beautifully written tale is a treasure for any fan of Russian literature.

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.

Having done the longest day in literature with his monumental Ulysses, James Joyce set himself even greater challenges for his next book -- the night.

A nocturnal state...That is what I want to convey: what goes on in a dream, during a dream. The work, which would exhaust two decades of his life and the odd resources of some sixty languages, culminated in the 1939 publication of Joyce's final and most revolutionary masterpiece, Finnegans Wake.

A story with no real beginning or end (it ends in the middle of a sentence and begins in the middle of the same sentence), this book of Doublends Jined is as remarkable for its prose as for its circular structure. Written in a fantantic dream language, forged from polyglot puns and portmanteau words, the Wake features some of Joyce's most brilliant inventive work. Sixty years after its original publication, it remains, in Anthony Burgess's words, a great comic vision, one of the few books of the world that can make us laugh aloud on nearly every page.

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.

With its intricate structure and reverberative imagery, "Four Quartets" is the culminating achievement of T.S. Eliot's career. Its greatness is done full justice in this rendition by the Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes.

Containing some of the most melodic passages in modern poetry, "Four Quartets" blends the religious, the philosophical and the personal themes that preoccupied Eliot. The four parts, "Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages" and "Little Gidding," are interconnected both by theme and by symbol. A poem of war, of Christianity, of literature and of history, "Four Quartets" speaks for a whole generation and is an enduring masterpiece.

Eating is a multisensory experience, yet chefs and scientists have only recently begun to deconstruct food's components, setting the stage for science-based cooking. In this global collaboration of essays, chefs and scientists advance culinary knowledge by testing hypotheses rooted in the physical and chemical properties of food. Using traditional and cutting-edge tools, ingredients, and techniques, these pioneers create, and sometimes revamp, dishes that respond to specific desires and serve up an original encounter with gastronomic practice.

From the seemingly mundane to the food fantastic--from grilled cheese sandwiches, pizzas, and soft-boiled eggs to Turkish ice cream, sugar glasses, and jellified beads--the essays in The Kitchen as Laboratory cover a range of creations and their history and culture. They consider the significance of an eater's background and dining atmosphere and the importance of a chef's methods, as well as the strategies used to create a great diversity of foods and dishes. This collection will delight experts and amateurs alike, especially as restaurants rely more on science-based cooking and recreational cooks increasingly explore the physics and chemistry behind their art. Contributors end each essay with their personal thoughts on food, cooking, and science, offering rare insight into a professional's passion for playing with food.

In this great philosophical essay, Henri Bergson explores why people laugh and what laughter means. Written at the turn of the twentieth century, Laughter explores what it is in language that makes a joke funny and what it is in us that makes us laugh.
One of the functions of humor, according to Bergson, is to help us retain our humanity during an age of mechanization. Like other philosophers, novelists, poets, and humorists of his era, Bergson was concerned with the duality of man and machine. His belief in life as a vital impulse, indefinable by reason alone, informs his perception of comedy as the relief we experience upon distancing ourselves from the mechanistic and materialistic. A situation is always comic, Bergson notes, if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings. The philosopher's thought-provoking insights (e.g., It seems that laughter needs an echo. Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.) keep this work ever-relevant as a thesis on the principles of humor.

"Moments like this are buds on the tree of life. Flowers of darkness they are."

In this vivid portrait of a single day in a woman's life, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of preparation for a party while in her mind she is something much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house for friends and neighbors, she is flooded with remembrances of the past--the passionate loves of her carefree youth, her practical choice of husband, and the approach and retreat of war. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa reexamines the choices that brought her there, hesitantly looking ahead to the unfamiliar work of growing old.

From the introspective Clarissa, to the lover who never fully recovered from her rejection, to a war-ravaged stranger in the park, the characters and scope of Mrs. Dalloway reshape our sense of ordinary life making it one of the most "moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century" (Michael Cunningham).

A kitchen classic for over 35 years, and hailed by Time magazine as a minor masterpiece when it first appeared in 1984, On Food and Cooking is the bible which food lovers and professional chefs worldwide turn to for an understanding of where our foods come from, what exactly they're made of, and how cooking transforms them into something new and delicious.

For its twentieth anniversary, Harold McGee prepared a new, fully revised and updated edition of On Food and Cooking. He has rewritten the text almost completely, expanded it by two-thirds, and commissioned more than 100 new illustrations. As compulsively readable and engaging as ever, the new On Food and Cooking provides countless eye-opening insights into food, its preparation, and its enjoyment.

On Food and Cooking pioneered the translation of technical food science into cook-friendly kitchen science and helped birth the inventive culinary movement known as molecular gastronomy. Though other books have been written about kitchen science, On Food and Cooking remains unmatched in the accuracy, clarity, and thoroughness of its explanations, and the intriguing way in which it blends science with the historical evolution of foods and cooking techniques.

Among the major themes addressed throughout the new edition are:
- Traditional and modern methods of food production and their influences on food quality
- The great diversity of methods by which people in different places and times have prepared the same ingredients
- Tips for selecting the best ingredients and preparing them successfully
- The particular substances that give foods their flavors, and that give us pleasure
- Our evolving knowledge of the health benefits and risks of foods

On Food and Cooking is an invaluable and monumental compendium of basic information about ingredients, cooking methods, and the pleasures of eating. It will delight and fascinate anyone who has ever cooked, savored, or wondered about food.

The Oresteia is the only trilogy of tragedy plays to survive from Ancient Greece. Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and Eumenides have established the enduring themes of Greek tragedy--the inexorable nature of Fate, the relationship between justice, revenge, and religion. In this family history,
Fate and the gods decree that each generation will repeat the crimes and endure the suffering of their forebears. When Agamemnon is murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, their son Orestes must avenge his father's death. Only Orestes' appeal to the goddess Athena saves him from his mother's Furies,
breaking the bloody chain; together gods and humans inaugurate a way of just conduct that will ensure stable families and a strong community.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert
introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The Oresteia is majestic as theater and as literature, and this new translation seeks to preserve both these qualities. The introduction and notes emphasize the relationship between the scenes, ideas, and language that distinguishes this unique work.

Blaise Pascal, the precociously brilliant contemporary of Descartes, was a gifted mathematician and physicist, but it is his unfinished apologia for the Christian religion upon which his reputation now rests. The Penseés is a collection of philosohical fragments, notes and essays in which Pascal explores the contradictions of human nature in pscyhological, social, metaphysical and - above all - theological terms. Mankind emerges from Pascal's analysis as a wretched and desolate creature within an impersonal universe, but who can be transformed through faith in God's grace.

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.

This volume contains new translations of two dialogues of Plato, the Protagoras and the Meno, together with explanatory notes and substantial interpretive essays. Robert C. Bartlett's translations are as literal as is compatible with sound English style and take into account important textual variations. Because the interpretive essays both sketch the general outlines of the dialogues and take up specific theoretical or philosophic difficulties, they will be of interest not only to those reading the dialogues for the first time but also to those already familiar with them.The Protagoras and the Meno are linked by the attention each pays to the idea of virtue: the latter dialogue focuses on the fundamental Socratic question, What is virtue?; the former on the specific virtue of courage, especially in its relation to wisdom. An appendix contains a short extract from Xenophon's Anabasis of Cyrus that vividly portrays the figure of Meno.

One of the most influential books in the history of literature, recognized as the greatest literary masterpiece in Arabic, the Qur'an is the supreme authority and living source of all Islamic teaching, the sacred text that sets out the creed, rituals, ethics, and laws of Islam. Yet despite the growing interest in Islamic teachings and culture, there has never been a truly satisfactory English translation of the Qur'an, until now.

This superb new translation of the Qur'an is written in contemporary language that remains faithful to the meaning and spirit of the original, making the text crystal clear while retaining all of this great work's eloquence. The translation is accurate and completely free from the archaisms, incoherence, and alien structures that mar existing translations. Thus, for the first time, English-speaking readers will have a text of the Qur'an which is easy to use and comprehensible. Furthermore, Haleem includes notes that explain geographical, historical, and personal allusions as well as an index in which Qur'anic material is arranged into topics for easy reference. His introduction traces the history of the Qur'an, examines its structure and stylistic features, and considers issues related to militancy, intolerance, and the subjection of women.

Clearly written and filled with helpful information and guidance, this brilliant translation of the Qur'an is the best available introduction to the faith of Moslems around the world.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Anton Chekhov's Selected Stories contains a wide spectrum of classics and new favorites, including "Ward No. 6," "The Lady with the Little Dog," "Anna on the Neck," "The Name-Day Party," "The Kiss," An Incident at Law," and "Elements Most Often Found in Novels, Short Stories, Etc." This edition features twenty-five brand-new translations, commissioned expressly for this volume from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Peter Constantine, Rosamund Bartlett, Michael Henry Heim, among others. Twenty translations have been selected from the published work of such master translators as Patrick Miles and Harvey Pitcher, Ann Dunnigan, and Ronald Hingley. Seven additional translations are by Constance Garnett, substantially revised by Cathy Popkin. All stories are annotated to clarify unfamiliar material and to point out differences in the translators' strategies.

Life and Letters includes a rich selection of Chekhov's letters, some in English for the first time, some with previously redacted passages restored, as well as Aileen Kelly's portrait of Chekhov.

"Criticism" explores the wide range of approaches and interpretations in two sections. "Approaches" juxtaposes five different perspectives on how to read Chekhov, represented by Peter Bitsilli, Alexander Chudakov, Robert Louis Jackson, Vladimir Kataev, and Radislav Lapushin. "Interpretations" contains ten divergent readings of stories in this edition. Case studies include Michael Finke on "At Sea"; Cathy Popkin on "[A Nervous] Breakdown"; Julie de Sherbinin on "Peasant Women"; Liza Knapp on "Ward No. 6"; Robert Louis Jackson on "Rothschild's Fiddle" and "The Student"; Wolf Schmid on "The Student"; John Freedman on "Man in a Case," "Gooseberries," and "About Love"; Caryl Emerson on "A Calamity," "Anna on the Neck," "About Love," and "The Lady with the Little Dog"; and Rufus Mathewson on "The Lady with the Little Dog" and "The Beauties."

A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are included, as is a postscript on the translators and their work. A special section, "Comparison Translations," gives passages from selected stories in multiple translations.