Catalog Search Results
61) Eugénie Grandet
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Depicting the fatal clash between material desires and the liberating power of human passions, Honoré de Balzac's Eugénie Grandet is translated with an introduction by M.A. Crawford in Penguin Classics. In a gloomy house in provincial Saumur, the miser Grandet lives with his wife and daughter, Eugénie, whose lives are stifled and overshadowed by his obsession with gold. Guarding his piles of glittering treasures and his only child equally closely,...
63) North and South
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Elizabeth Gaskell's nineteenth-century novel about class, labor, and religious conflicts in northern England, and the southern woman who moves there, falls in love with the local mill's owner, and has sympathy for the plight of his workers.
65) Shame
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The novel that set the stage for his modern classic, The Satanic Verses, Shame is Salman Rushdie's phantasmagoric epic of an unnamed country that is "not quite Pakistan." In this dazzling tale of an ongoing duel between the families of two men-one a celebrated wager of war, the other a debauched lover of pleasure-Rushdie brilliantly portrays a world caught between honor and humiliation-"shamelessness, shame: the roots of violence." Shame is an astonishing...
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Fire from Within is the author's most brilliant thought-provoking and unusual book, one in which Castaneda, under the tutelage of don Juan and his "disciples," at last constructs, from the teachings of don Juan and his own experiences, a stunning portrait of the "sorcerer's world" that is crystal-clear and dizzying in its implications. Each of Carlos Castaneda's books is a brilliant and tantalizing burst of illumination into the depths of our deepest...
67) Mr. Palomar
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Throughout these twenty-seven intricately structured chapters, the musings of the crusty Mr. Palomar consistently render the world sublime and ridiculous. Like the telescope for which he is named, Mr. Palomar is a natural observer. "It is only after you have come to know the surface of things," he believes, "that you can venture to seek what is underneath." Whether contemplating a fine cheese, a hungry gecko, or a topless sunbather, he tends to let...
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Against a backdrop of late-night tattoo sessions and soldier-of-fortune trade shows, Dr. Thompson is at his apocalyptic best--covering emblematic events such as the 1987-88 presidential campaign, with Vice President George Bush, Sr., fighting for his life against Republican competitors like Alexander Haig, Pat Buchanan, and Pat Robertson; detailing the GOP's obsession with drugs and drug abuse; while at the same time capturing momentous social phenomena...
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"One of the most rigorously presented and beautifully illustrated critical testaments in all of literature."-Boston Globe "A brilliant, original approach to literature, a key to Calvino's own work and a thoroughly delightful and illuminating commentary on some of the world's greatest writing."-San Francisco Chronicle At the time of his death, Italo Calvino was at work on six lectures setting forth the qualities in writing he most valued, and which...
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Allan Gurganus's Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All became an instant classic upon its publication. Critics and readers alike fell in love with the voice of ninety-nine-year-old Confederate widow Lucy Marsden, one of the most entertaining and loquacious heroines in American literature. Lucy married at the turn of the twentieth century, when she was fifteen and her husband was fifty. If Colonel William Marsden was a veteran of the "War for Southern...
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Halloween Night, 1954. A young, film-obsessed scriptwriter has just been hired at one of the great studios. An anonymous investigation leads from the giant Maximus Films backlot to an eerie graveyard separated from the studio by a single wall. There he makes a terrifying discovery that thrusts him into a maelstrom of intrigue and mystery-and into the dizzy exhilaration of the movie industry at the height of its glittering power.
73) Vineland
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On California's fog-hung North Coast, the enchanted redwood groves of Vineland County harbor a wild assortment of sixties survivors and refugees from the "Nixonian Reaction," still struggling with the consequences of their past lives. Aging hippie freak Zoyd Wheeler is revving up for his annual act of televised insanity when news reaches that his old nemesis, sinister federal agent Brock Vond, has come storming into Vineland at the head of a heavily...
74) Cousin Bette
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Cousin Bette is a woman of breath-taking malice. She plans and executes a diabolic plot of revenge against her own family for slights more imagined than real, destroying herself in the process.
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By one of the most profoundly influential thinkers of our century, The Rebel is a classic essay on revolution. For Albert Camus, the urge to revolt is one of the “essential dimensions” of human nature, manifested in man's timeless Promethean struggle against the conditions of his existence, as well as the popular uprisings against established orders throughout history. And yet, with an eye toward the French Revolution and its regicides and deicides,...
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Carlos Castaneda was one of the most influential spiritual teachers of the 20th century. In this edition of his bestselling book, he takes the listener on an amazing journey of the soul via the teachings of the great sorcerer don Juan and reveals that there are worlds existing within our own that can be visited through dreams.
77) Child of God
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Cormac McCarthy has won nearly every major literary honor, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Set in Tennessee in the 1960s, this chilling novel sees Lester Ballard become increasingly isolated from society. After taking a deceased woman as a girlfriend, he "saves her" from a fire - and his life spirals into deepening depravity.
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Philosopher, naturalist, poet and rugged individualist, Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) has inspired generations of readers to think for themselves, to follow the dictates of their own conscience and to make an art of their lives. This representative sampling of his thought includes five of his most frequently cited and read essays: 'Civil Disobedience, ' his most powerful and influential political essay, exalts the law of conscience over civil law...
80) Daniel Deronda
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"A revealing portrait of the hypocrisy and superficiality of high society, George Eliot's final novel also offers a rare contemporary view of Jewish life in Victorian Britain. Daniel Deronda traces the intertwined lives of two markedly different characters: spirited, selfish Gwendolen Harleth, who maintains her social position and secures her family's future by entering a loveless and increasingly destructive marriage; and compassionate Daniel, whose...