Carti in categoria Literature & Biography

Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) and his brother Wilhelm (1786-1859) were philologists and folklorists. The brothers rediscovered a host of fairy tales, telling of princes and princesses in their castles, witches in their towers and forests, of giants and dwarfs, of fabulous animals and dark deeds.Together with the well-known tales of Rapunzel, The Goose-Girl, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel and Snow White, there are the darker tales such as Death's Messengers which deserve to be better known, and whi...

Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) is famed for his magical stories, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, here illustrated throughout the inner pages by Sir John Tenniel's much loved drawings. However, inspired by the insatiable Victorian appetite for party games, tricks and conundrums, this eccentric and polymathical Englishman also wrote many other works of a humorous, witty, whimsical and nonsensical nature such as the mock-heroic nonsense verse 'The Hunting of the Snark',...

Jane Austen is without question, one of England's most enduring and skilled novelists. With her wit, social precision, and unerring ability to create some of literature's most charismatic and believable heroines, she mesmerises her readers as much today as when her novels were first published.Whether it is her sharp, ironic gaze at the Gothic genre invoked by the adventures of Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey; the diffident and much put-upon Fanny Price struggling to cope with her emotions ...

Major General Sir Richard Hannay is the fictional secret agent created by writer and diplomat John Buchan, who was himself an Intelligence officer during the First World War. The strong and silent type, combining the dour temperament of the Scot with the stiff upper lip of the Englishman, Hannay is pre-eminent among early spy-thriller heroes. Caught up in the first of these five gripping adventures just before the outbreak of war in 1914, he manages to thwart the enemy's evil plan and solve the ...

When Uncle Henry and Aunt Em's grey, grim Kansas farmhouse was picked up by the great summer cyclone, a wondrous adventure had begun. The whole house whirled around two or three times then rose slowly through the air with little Dorothy and dog Toto inside.After what seemed an age to Dorothy the house landed with a great crash and upon opening the door she and Toto were amazed to see a beautiful brilliant green land full of sunshine and flowers. It is not long before she and Toto meet the motley...

Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina, the greatest novels ever written, did not emerge from a vacuum. They were preceded by at least twenty prose works of different kinds, some of them masterpieces in their own right. These stories may be viewed as a fascinating encounter with literary predecessors such as Rousseau and Pushkin, and they are never far removed from autobiography, but in them Tolstoy can be seen forging a strong, new cultural personality. Their virtues lie in local colour,...

The Forsyte Saga is Galsworthy's enduringly popular masterpiece. Initially, the plot centres on Soames Forsyte, a successful solicitor living in London with his beautiful wife, Irene.A pillar of the late-Victorian upper middle class, wealthy and well-connected, he seems to lead an enviable life. But beneath the respectable exterior lie acute tensions and frustrations. The marriage of Soames and Irene culminates in sexual violence and recriminations. The consequent feud within the family will be ...

Henry James's last completed novel, The Golden Bowl, is the story of two flawed marriages. The lives and relationships of Maggie Verver and her widowed American millionaire father, Adam, are changed and challenged by the beautiful and charming Charlotte Stant, who is the former lover of Maggie's husband, the impoverished Italian, Prince Amerigo.The narrative is underpinned by complex symbolism. The gilded crystal bowl with its almost invisible flaw is the vehicle which James uses to reveal past ...

The Good Soldier is a masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction, an inspiration for many later, distinguished writers, including Graham Greene. Set before the First World War, it tells the tale of two wealthy and sophisticated couples, one English, one American, as they travel, socialise, and take the waters in the spa towns of Europe.They are 'playing the game', in style. That game has begun to unravel, however, and with compelling attention to the comic, as well as the tragic, results the Ameri...

Gogol's works constitute one of Russian literature's supreme achievements, yet the nature of their brilliant originality, comic genius, and complex workings is difficult to summarize precisely. The Government Inspector, a perennial favourite on stage and screen, is considered a national institution in Russia, and Gogol's stories present us with one of the most marvellous worlds a writer has ever created. His quirky characters - the lowly official who imagines himself to be the King of Spain, the...

Dostoevsky's fascination for mental breakdown and violence (20 murders in his four main novels) was based on his own life, and these two unmistakably autobiographical works bear this out.The House of the Dead is fiction, but based on his four years in a Siberian prison. An educated upper-class man is condemned to live among criminals and brutal guards, with arbitrary punishments, lousy food, disgusting living conditions, hard toil and many floggings. Somehow he avoids bitterness and recriminatio...

As Fyodor Karamazov awaits an amorous encounter, he is violently done to death. The three sons of the old debauchee are forced to confront their own guilt or complicity. Who will own to parricide? The reckless and passionate Dmitri? The corrosive intellectual Ivan? Surely not the chaste novice monk Alyosha? The search reveals the divisions which rack the brothers, yet paradoxically unite them. Around the writhings of this one dysfunctional family Dostoevsky weaves a dense network of social, psyc...

Almayer's Folly was Conrad's outstanding debut novel: as well as exploring the culture of a part of the world previously unknown to English fiction, it showed immense sophistication in its handling of narrative, time-shifts and point of view. Hailed as `a writer of genius' by contemporary reviewers, Conrad returned to the same riverine settlement in Borneo in his second novel, An Outcast of the Islands. Set some 15 years earlier, this prequel to Almayer's Folly tells how Lingard lost his monopol...

Moscow, 1929: a city that has lost its way amid corruption and fear, inhabited by people who have abandoned their morals and forsaken spirituality. But when a mysterious stranger arrives in town with a bizarre entourage that includes a giant talking cat and a fanged assassin, all hell breaks loose. Among those caught up in the strange and inexplicable events that transpire in the capital are the Master, a writer whose life has been destroyed by Soviet repression, and his beloved Margarita. Their...

Here is a book no Christmas stocking should be without, a book that positively distils the spirit of the season. The title poem, familiar to children and adults the world over, introduces a collection of stories and verse with a Christmas theme, guaranteed to engage and amuse readers young and old.Likely to provoke laughter and sometimes to bring a sentimental tear to the driest eye, this festive treasure trove is ideal for reading aloud or curling up with in a comfy corner. Scrooge himself woul...

When Princess Irene and her nursemaid stay out too late one night and are chased home by goblins, a young miner boy called Curdie comes to their rescue. So begins a fantastic adventure in which Irene and Curdie must try to stop a goblin invasion, helped by Irene's mysterious great-great-grandmother. This much-loved tale was a personal favourite of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. This edition includes the sequel, The Princess and Curdie.An aparitie: 2013Format: 19,6 X 12,6Numar pagini: 336...

In The Prisoner of Zenda, Rudolf Rassendyll's close resemblance to the King of Ruritania leads him into intrigue, romance and perilous escapades. Enmeshed in a plot by the villainous Duke of Strelsau to depose the King, Rudolf is entranced by the beautiful Princess Flavia, and finds that both his life and his honour are imperilled.The sequel, Rupert of Hentzau, tells how Rupert'who feared neither man nor devil') seeks to ruin Flavia's reputation and wreak vengeance on Rudolf. Events accelerate t...

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a classic representation of the impoverished and politically powerless underclass of British society in Edwardian England, ruthlessly exploited by the institutionalized corruption of their employers and the civic and religious authorities. Epic in scale, the novel charts the ruinous effects of the laissez-faire mercantilist ethics on the men, women, and children of the working classes, and through its emblematic characters, argues for a socialist politics ...

The Red and the Black has been hailed as the first great `realist' novel of the nineteenth century, offering a lively and detailed picture of social and political life in the provinces and in Paris towards the end of the 1820s, the close of the stifling reactionary period of the Bourbon Restoration. Stendhal himself claimed that no-one before him had ventured to portray with such verisimilitude the `moral and morose' France of 1830. However `moral and morose' his novel is definitely not. Ironic,...

The Sea-Wolf belongs in the honorific tradition of American sea fiction where the voyage motif became a means of exploring the meaning of life, as in Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast (1840), Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), and Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851).The dominant subject is an intellectual conflict between a ship-wrecked literary figure, Humphrey Van Weyden, and the brutal captain of a seal-hunting schooner, Wolf Larsen, who rescues Van Weyde...