Crime fiction master Raymond Chandler's sixth novel featuring Philip Marlowe, the quintessential urban private eye (Los Angeles Times). In noir master Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe befriends a down on his luck war veteran with the scars to prove it. Then he finds out that Terry Lennox has a very wealthy nymphomaniac wife, whom he divorced and remarried and who ends up dead. And now Lennox is on the lam and the cops and a crazy gangster are after Marlowe. View More...
This collection by crime fiction master Raymond Chandler features four long stories in which private eye Philip Marlowe is hired to protect a rich old guy from a gold digger, runs afoul of crooked politicos, gets a line on some stolen jewels with a reward attached, and stumbles across a murder victim who may have been an extortionist. View More...
Nevill Coghill's masterly and vivid modern English verse translation with all the vigor and poetry of Chaucer's fourteenth-century Middle EnglishA Penguin Classic In The Canterbury Tales Chaucer created one of the great touchstones of English literature, a masterly collection of chivalric romances, moral allegories and low farce. A story-telling competition between a group of pilgrims from all walks of life is the occasion for a series of tales that range from the Knight's account of courtly love and the ebullient Wife of Bath's Arthurian legend, to the ribald anecdotes of the Miller and the C... View More...
As the well-educated and socially skilled wife of a prominent Confederate, Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut (1823-86) was ideally situated--and intellectually equipped--to record the narrative of daily life in the Confederacy during the Civil War. Yet while she is widely recognized for the significant contribution of her "diaries," Mary Chesnut's other works chronicling her experiences in the Civil War South have remained--until now--unpublished and virtually unknown. Intensely autobiographical novels, The Captain and the Colonel and Two Years--or The Way We Lived Then are Chesnut's fictionalized ac... View More...
Rejecting his era's genteel hypocrisy about miscegenation, lynching, and passing, Charles W. Chesnutt broke new ground in American literature with his innovative explorations of racial identity and use of African-American speech and folklore. Chesnutt exposed the deformed logic of the Jim Crow system-creating, in the process, the modern African-American novel. Here is the best of Chesnutt's fiction and nonfiction in the largest and most comprehensive edition ever published, featuring a newly researched chronology of the writer's life. The Conjure Woman (1899) introduced Chesnutt to the public ... View More...
Unlike the popular Uncle Remus stories of Joel Chandler Harris, Charles W. Chesnutt's tales probe psychological depths in black people unheard of before in Southern regional writing. They also expose the anguish of mixed-race men and women and the consequences of racial hatred, mob violence, and moral compromise. This important collection contains all the stories in his two published volumes, The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth, along with two uncollected works: the tragic Dave's Neckliss and Baxter's Procustes, Chesnutt's parting shot at prejudice. For more than seventy years, Penguin... View More...
Perhaps the most light-hearted of all Chesterton's "serious" works, Manalive pits a group of disillusioned young people against Mr. Innocent Smith, a bubbly, high-spirited gentleman who literally falls into their midst. Accused of murder and denounced for repeatedly marrying his wife and attempting to live in various houses (all of which turn out to be his own), Smith prompts his newfound acquaintances to recognize an important idea: that life is worth living. View More...
Kate Chopin's groundbreaking depiction of a woman who dares to defy the expectations of society in the pursuit of her desireWhen The Awakening was first published in 1899, charges of sordidness and immorality seemed to consign it into obscurity and irreparably damage its author's reputation. But a century after her death, it is widely regarded as Kate Chopin's great achievement. Through careful, subtle changes of style, Chopin shows the transformation of Edna Pontellier, a young wife and mother, who - with tragic consequences - refuses to be caged by married and domestic life, and claims for h... View More...
"Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life." Kate Chopin was enjoying wide popularity as a writer, mainly of short stories, when her second novel, The Awakening, was published to widespread criticism of its immorality. A wake-up call to women all over the country, this landmark novel of early American feminism tells of a Louisiana wife who discovers the strength of her own sexuality and tries to wrench it from the hands of a patriarchal society. And just as Edna Pontellier is ostracized for trying to master her own sexua... View More...
Twain's collection of 145 stories of the most distinguished and popular humorists of the 19th century. Includes 20 stories by Twain himself as well as work by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ambrose Bierce, Bret Harte, James Russell Lowell, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and more. 200 amusing black-and-white illustrations. View More...
Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is an imaginative achievement without parallel in the twentieth century. Any critic who sets out to discuss the book in the full variety of its concerns will find that his own powers of insight and judgement are relentlessly put to the test. John Cocking is one of the few critics who have taken up this challenge with outstanding success and have tackled all the major Proustian issues in a consistently illuminating way. When first published in the fifties, his critical monograph on Proust soon established itself as one of the finest introductions to its su... View More...
The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his charming friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism. For more than seventy years... View More...
The enduring children's tale The Adventures of Pinocchio, retold for a new generation in this spectacular full-color deluxe gift edition, packed with beautiful artwork and seven interactive features created by the award-winning design studio behind the graphics for the Harry Potter film franchise, MinaLima.Originally published in 1883, The Adventures of Pinocchio is one of the best known and beloved children's classics. Written by Italian political satirist Carlo Collodi, it is the story of Geppetto, a poor puppeteer who uses an enchanted piece of wood to carve a marionette boy he calls Pinocc... View More...