The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath is a remarkable compilation that brings together 224 poems, including a selection from her earliest works. This comprehensive collection offers readers an immersive experience into the poetic genius of Plath, showcasing her unique style and emotional depth.
This edition, edited and introduced by Ted Hughes, presents a chronological order of Plath's work, allowing readers to trace the evolution of her poetic voice. The collection includes uncollected and unpublished pieces, making it an essential read for those who wish to explore the full scope of Plath's literary achievements.
Immerse yourself in the emotional journey and the artistic expression of one of the most celebrated poets of the 20th century. This volume is not just a collection of poems; it's an inspirational masterpiece that continues to resonate with readers worldwide.
Every family lives in an evolving story, told by all its members, inside a landscape of portentous events and characters. Their view of themselves is not shared by people looking from outside in—visitors, and particularly not relatives—for they have to see something pretty humdrum, even if, as in this case, the fecklessness they complain of is extreme.
After ten years of marriage, Sam and Henny Pollit find themselves with too many children, insufficient money, and an abundant loathing for each other. As Sam uses the children's adoration to feed his own voracious ego, Henny becomes a geyser of rage against her improvident husband. And, caught in the midst of it all, is Louisa, Sam's watchful eleven-year-old daughter.
Set in a country crippled by the Great Depression, this novel is a masterpiece of dysfunctional family life. Sam torments and manipulates his children in an esoteric world of his own imagining. Henny looks on desperately, all too aware of the madness at the root of her husband’s behavior. And Louie, the damaged, precocious adolescent girl at the center of their clashes, is the "ugly duckling" whose struggle will transfix contemporary readers.
The Great Indian Novel, masterfully written by Shashi Tharoor, is an ambitious and daring satire that brilliantly recasts the two-thousand-year-old epic, The Mahabharata, with fictional but highly recognizable events and characters from twentieth-century Indian politics.
In this hilarious and often outrageous satire, Tharoor directs his wit against Indian foibles and failings as well as the bumblings of the British rulers. It is a dazzling tapestry of prose and verse that satirically, but also poignantly, chronicles the struggle for Indian freedom and independence.
Nothing is sacred in this deliciously irreverent, witty, and deeply intelligent retelling of modern Indian history and the ancient Indian epic. Alternately outrageous and instructive, hilarious and moving, this novel is a must-read for anyone interested in a satirical take on history and politics.
Memory Wall is a stunning collection of stories set on four continents, penned by the award-winning and extraordinarily eloquent author, Anthony Doerr, whose prose dazzles readers worldwide. This is his second collection, focusing on the theme of memory: the source of meaning and coherence in our lives, the fragile thread that connects us to ourselves and to others.
Every hour, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear. Yet, at the same time, children, surveying territory that is entirely new to them, push back the darkness, form fresh memories, and remake the world.
In the luminous and beautiful title story, a young boy in South Africa comes to possess an old woman's secret, a piece of the past with the power to redeem a life. In The River Nemunas, a teenage orphan moves from Kansas to Lithuania to live with her grandfather and discovers a world in which myth becomes real. Village 113, winner of an O'Henry Prize, is about the building of the Three Gorges Dam and the seed keeper who guards the history of a village soon to be submerged.
In Afterworld, the radiant, cathartic final story, a woman who escaped the Holocaust is haunted by visions of her childhood friends in Germany, yet finds solace in the tender ministrations of her grandson. Every story in Memory Wall is a reminder of the grandeur of life—of the mysterious beauty of seeds, of fossils, of sturgeon, of clouds, of radios, of leaves, of the breathtaking fortune of living in this universe.
Doerr's language, his witness, his imagination, and his humanity are unparalleled in fiction today.
Cicero returns to continue his struggle to grasp supreme power in the state of Rome. Amidst treachery, vengeance, violence, and treason, this brilliant lawyer, orator, and philosopher finally reaches the summit of all his ambitions. Cicero becomes known as the world's first professional politician, using his compassion and deviousness to overcome all obstacles.
Compelling historical fiction at its best: Harris employs historical detail and an engrossing plot to give readers a man who is by turns a sympathetic hero and compromising manipulator who sets himself up for his own massive, violent ruin. This trilogy charges forward, propelled by the strength of Harris's stunningly fascinating prose.
On the eve of Cicero’s inauguration as consul of Rome, a grisly discovery sends fear rippling through a city already racked by unrest. A young slave boy has been felled by a hammer, his throat slit and his organs removed, apparently as a human sacrifice. For Cicero, the ill omens of this hideous murder only increase his dangerous situation: elected leader by the people but despised by the heads of the two rival political camps.
Caught in a shell game that leaves him forever putting out fires only to have them ignite elsewhere, Cicero plays for the future of the republic…and his life. There is a plot to assassinate him, abetted by a rising young star of the Roman senate named Gaius Julius Caesar—and it will take all the embattled consul’s wit, strength, and force of will to stop the plot and keep Rome from becoming a dictatorship.
Nearing her one-hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental hospital where she's spent the best part of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks often with her psychiatrist Dr. Grene, and their relationship intensifies and complicates.
Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges is at once shocking and deeply beautiful. Refracted through the haze of memory and retelling, Roseanne's story becomes an alternative, secret history of Ireland's changing character and the story of a life blighted by terrible mistreatment and ignorance, and yet marked still by love and passion and hope.
Once upon a time there was a war... and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American. That's me.
This is the story of Skip Sands—spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong—and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness, whether in sex or death or by the grace of God, this is a story like nothing in our literature.
Tree of Smoke is Denis Johnson's first full-length novel in nine years, and his most gripping, beautiful, and powerful work to date.
Everyman is a captivating tale by the esteemed author Philip Roth, exploring the profound themes of mortality and the human condition. The story traces the life of its protagonist from his childhood, marked by idyllic summers on the beach, through the trials of adulthood and into the challenges of his old age.
The novel delves into the protagonist's inner struggles as he grapples with his health, the complexities of family relationships, and his own sense of identity. He is a successful commercial artist, yet finds himself estranged from his two sons, while cherished by a daughter from a second marriage.
As his health deteriorates, he becomes envious of his more physically robust brother, and reflects on his failed marriages. This powerful narrative is set against the backdrop of the universal fear of mortality, making it a compelling read for anyone interested in the human experience.
When Quoyle's two-timing wife meets her just deserts, he retreats with his two daughters to his ancestral home on the starkly beautiful Newfoundland coast, where a rich cast of local characters and family members all play a part in Quoyle's struggle to reclaim his life. As Quoyle confronts his private demons--and the unpredictable forces of nature and society--he begins to see the possibility of love without pain or misery.
A vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family, The Shipping News shows why Annie Proulx is recognized as one of the most gifted and original writers in America today.
The Last World is acclaimed as a modern masterpiece and one of the most important novels of our time. It tells the story of a young man's quest for the exiled poet Ovid and the masterwork he has consigned to the flames.
Christoph Ransmayr has created a visionary landscape, a transformed place where the ancient world meets the twentieth century. It is a metaphysical thriller, both compelling and profound. The Last World draws the reader into a universe governed by the power of mythology, a world of decay on the brink of apocalypse.
This novel explores themes of exile, censorship, and the destruction of the planet. It serves as a cultural and political fable that is blazingly topical, yet timeless.
Widely regarded as D. H. Lawrence's greatest novel, Women in Love is both a lucid account of English society before the First World War and a brilliant evocation of the inexorable power of human desire.
Women in Love continues where The Rainbow left off, with the third generation of Brangwens: Ursula Brangwen, now a teacher at Beldover, a mining town in the Midlands, and her sister Gudrun, who has returned from art school in London. The focus of the novel is primarily on their relationships: Ursula's with Rupert Birkin, a school inspector, and Gudrun's with industrialist Gerald Crich, and later with a sculptor, Loerke.
Quintessentially modernist, Women in Love is one of Lawrence's most extraordinary, innovative, and unsettling works.
The Stone Diaries is one ordinary woman's story of her journey through life. Born in 1905, Daisy Stone Goodwill drifts through the roles of child, wife, widow, and mother, and finally into her old age. Bewildered by her inability to understand her place in her own life, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography. Her life is vivid with incident, and yet she feels a sense of powerlessness. She listens, she observes, and through sheer force of imagination she becomes a witness of her own life: her birth, her death, and the troubling missed connections she discovers between.
Daisy's struggle to find a place for herself in her own life is a paradigm of the unsettled decades of our era. A witty and compassionate anatomist of the human heart, Carol Shields has made distinctively her own that place where the domestic collides with the elemental. With irony and humor she weaves the strands of The Stone Diaries together in this, her richest and most poignant novel to date.
Libra is a powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Authored by Don DeLillo, this novel chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from a troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history.
When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives, they decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism. The scales are irrevocably tipped, leading to a gripping, masterful blend of fact and fiction.
The novel is alive with meticulously portrayed characters, both real and created. Libra is a grave, haunting, and brilliant examination of an event that has become an indelible part of the American psyche.
Ghalib was an outstanding poet in both Persian and Urdu, though his family may have come from Afghanistan. His father and uncle both led mercenary soldiers in the service of one rajah or another in Northern India. Unfortunately for Ghalib, they both died when he was young, and he had to find a way to support himself.
He found his calling as a court poet, in and out of favor. When the Sepoy Mutiny took place around him, he addressed a letter to Queen Victoria, offering his services — for a price — to her.
The intimate relationship to God took many ironic forms. As he lived next to a mosque, he said he was God's neighbor. His love affair with God was the occasion of many poems of unrequited love, of the cruel mistress. Such an erotic connection to the divine may seem alien to Western minds, but Ghalib was not alone in this personal relationship; he merely took it to its height.
The Ghazal format of poetry is composed of a short series of two rhyming lines (not kept in the translation), each one a complete thought in itself. The resulting poem has a theme, but not continuity — much like a stand-up comic's delivery of short jokes on a topic. Ghalib was a master at double-entendres and shades of meaning; this translation aims for simplicity rather than to be overloaded with baggage.
Life: A User's Manual is an unclassified masterpiece, a sprawling compendium as encyclopedic as Dante's Commedia and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and, in its break with tradition, as inspiring as Joyce's Ulysses. Perec's spellbinding puzzle begins in an apartment block in the XVIIth arrondissement of Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, like an onion being peeled, an extraordinary rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, moving, funny, or (sometimes) quite ordinary. From the confessions of a racing cyclist to the plans of an avenging murderer, from a young ethnographer obsessed with a Sumatran tribe to the death of a trapeze artist, from the fears of an ex-croupier to the dreams of a sex-change pop star to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime, Life is a manual of human irony, portraying the mixed marriages of fortunes, passions and despairs, betrayals and bereavements, of hundreds of lives in Paris and around the world.
But the novel in more than an extraordinary range of fictions; it is a closely observed account of life and experience. The apartment block's one hundred rooms are arranged in a magic square, and the book as a whole is peppered with a staggering range of literary puzzles and allusions, acrostics, problems of chess and logic, crosswords, and mathematical formulae. All are there for the reader to solve in the best tradition of the detective novel.
The internationally renowned novel about the life and death of Jesus Christ. Hailed as a masterpiece by critics worldwide, The Last Temptation of Christ is a monumental reinterpretation of the Gospels that brilliantly fleshes out Christ’s Passion. This literary rendering of the life of Jesus Christ has courted controversy since its publication by depicting a Christ far more human than the one seen in the Bible. He is a figure who is gloriously divine but earthy and human, a man like any other—subject to fear, doubt, and pain.
In elegant, thoughtful prose Nikos Kazantzakis, one of the greats of modern literature, follows this Jesus as he struggles to live out God’s will for him, powerfully suggesting that it was Christ’s ultimate triumph over his flawed humanity, when he gave up the temptation to run from the cross and willingly laid down his life for mankind, that truly made him the venerable redeemer of men.
The vanished way of life of Eastern European Jews in the early part of the twentieth century is the subject of this extraordinary novel. All the strata of this complex society were populated by powerfully individual personalities, and the whole community pulsated with life and vitality.
The affairs of the patriarchal Meshulam Moskat and the unworldly Asa Heshel Bannet provide the center of the book, but its real focus is the civilization that was destroyed forever in the gas chambers of the Second World War.
The White Hotel is a dream of electrifying eroticism and inexplicable violence, recounted by a young woman to her analyst, Sigmund Freud. It presents a horrifying yet restrained narrative of the Holocaust, offering a searing vision of the wounds of our century, and an attempt to heal them.
Interweaving poetry and case history, fantasy and historical truth-telling, The White Hotel is a modern classic of enduring emotional power that attempts nothing less than to reconcile the notion of individual destiny with that of historical fate.
Thomas Bernhard is one of the greatest twentieth-century writers in the German language. Extinction, his last novel, takes the form of the autobiographical testimony of Franz-Josef Murau. The intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning family, Murau lives in self-exile in Rome. Obsessed and angry with his identity as an Austrian, he resolves never to return to the family estate of Wolfsegg.
But when news comes of his parents' deaths, he finds himself master of Wolfsegg and must decide its fate. Written in Bernhard's seamless style, Extinction is the ultimate proof of his extraordinary literary genius.
Remembrance of Things Past: Volume II delves into the intricate tapestry of Belle Epoque France, unfolding through the profound reflections of its narrator. This volume encompasses The Guermantes Way and Cities of the Plain, capturing the essence of art, time, and memory.
As the narrator grows up, falls in love, and experiences the tumultuous events of the First World War, the narrative mesmerizes readers with its intricate portrayal of human emotions and societal norms. The translation by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, later revised by Terence Kilmartin, has been celebrated for capturing the essence of Proust's monumental work.
This literary masterpiece invites readers into a world where personal experiences are intertwined with historical events, offering a unique perspective on the passage of time and the power of memory.
Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, is regarded as one of the most original and daring writers in the English language. His work is illuminated by a dazzling imagination, a gift for character and plot, and a talent for surprise. In Earthly Powers, Burgess created his masterpiece.
At its center are two twentieth-century men who represent different kinds of power—Kenneth Toomey, eminent novelist, a man who has outlived his contemporaries to survive into honored, bitter, luxurious old age as a celebrity of dubious notoriety; and Don Carlo Campanati, a man of God, eventually beloved Pope, who rises through the Vatican as a shrewd manipulator to become the architect of church revolution and a candidate for sainthood.
Through the lives of these two modern men, Burgess explores the very essence of power. As each pursues his career—one to sainthood, one to wealthy exile—their relationship becomes the heart of a narrative that incorporates almost everyone of fame and distinction in the social, literary, and political life of America and Europe.
This astonishing company is joined together by the art of a great novelist into an explosive and entertaining tour de force that will captivate fans of sweeping historic fiction.
Illuminations is a collection of prose poems by the great French Symbolist, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891). These poems have acquired enormous prestige among readers everywhere and have been a revolutionary influence on poetry in the twentieth century.
Rimbaud's Illuminations are presented here both in their original texts and in superb English translations by Louise Varèse. This edition also includes two additional series of prose poems, featuring two poems only recently discovered in France. The introduction by Miss Varèse discusses the complexities of Rimbaldien scholarship and the unique qualities of Rimbaud’s writing.
Rimbaud, known for his work A Season in Hell, wrote these prose poems during a period he described as filled with interest in hallucinations—"des vertiges, des silences, des nuits." These perceptions were captured by the poet in a beam of pellucid and strangely active language, illuminating unexplored aspects of experience and thought.
حالا همهچیز به رنگ خاکستری بنفش متمایل بود و برف شل و چسبنده.
سرما به همه جای آدم سر میکشید و دنبال قلب میگشت. در اطرافشان کوچکترین اثری از حرکت محسوس نبود. سکونی بود که انسان را فرو میبلعید و مغز را که هنوز زنده بود و آنها همه در شخص دیگری میگذشت.
دیگر نه در درون انسان اثری از کثافتکاریهای روانی بود نه در بیرون. لنی کمکم داشت به قدری به این مسائل بیاعتنا میشد که حتی امکان داشت برگردد و...