Classics - World
Book List Category:
By Erich Maria Remarque ; translated from the German by A.W. Wheen.
Depicts the experiences of a group of young German soldiers fighting and suffering during the last days of World War I.
By Leo Tolstoy ; translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endure the hypocrisies of society. Set against a vast and richly textured canvas of nineteenth-century Russia, the novel's seven major characters create a dynamic imbalance, playing out the contrasts of city and country life and all the variations on love and family happiness. While previous versions have softened the robust, and sometimes shocking, quality of Tolstoy's writing, Pevear and Volokhonsky have produced a translation true to his powerful voice. This award-winning team's authoritative edition also includes an illuminating introduction and explanatory notes. Beautiful, vigorous, and eminently readable, this Anna Karenina will be the definitive text for generations to come.
By Fyodor Dostoyevsky ; translated by Constance Garnett ; edited and with a foreword by Manuel Komroff ; and a new afterword by Sara Paretsky.
The story of the lives of three sons of an old drunkard are used to depict Russian character and investigate the concepts of good, evil, and faith.
By Voltaire ; translated from the French with an introduction and notes by Roger Pearson.
The spirit of satire flourished during the Enlightenment as in no other period, and the crowning achievement of that caustic, brilliantly learned age was Voltaire's Candide, published in 1759, at the height of its author's enormous European fame. Following the worldwide encounters - with shipwrecks, earthquakes, pestilence, and human insanity - of its hero and his incomparably absurd tutor, Dr. Pangloss, Candide is the most entertaining of all philosophical novels and the most philosophical of entertainments.
By Stendhal ; translated from the French by Richard Howard ; illustrations by Robert Andrew Parker.
Follows the adventures of young Fabrizio del Dongo as he joins Napoleon's army just before the Battle of Waterloo, and struggles to keep hidden his love for Clelia amid the intrigues and secrets of the small court of Parma.
By Boris Pasternak ; translated from the Russian by Manya Harari and Max Hayward ; introduced by John Bayley.
Yuri Zhivago, doctor and poet, lives and loves during the first three decades of 20th-century Russia.
By Miguel de Cervantes ; a new translation by Edith Grossman ; introduction by Harold Bloom.
"Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain."--BOOK JACKET.
By Ivan Turgenev ; translated by Rosemary Edmonds, with the Romanes lecture, Fathers and children, by Isaiah Berlin.
When first published in 1862, this novel of a divided Russia, with peasants set against masters and fathers set against sons, caused great outrage. But its enduring legacy of social insight and conscience mixed with drama has given it universal appeal. Features an introduction by Anna Tolstoy in an exciting new Bantam Classics' package.
By Richard LLewellyn.
The youngest son of a Welsh coal-mining family recalls the tender and tragic experiences of his youth at the turn of the century with his courageous and loving parents and brothers and sisters.
By Victor Hugo ; a new translation by Julie Rose ; introduction by Adam Gopnik ; notes by James Madden.
Story of Valjean, the ex-convict who rises against all odds from galley slave to mayor, and the fanatical police inspector who dedicates his life to recapturing Valjean.
By Gustave Flaubert ; translated with an introduction and notes by Lydia Davis.
For this novel of French bourgeois life in all its inglorious banality, Flaubert invented a paradoxically original and wholly modern style. His heroine, Emma Bovary, a bored provincial housewife, abandons her husband to pursue the libertine Rodolphe in a desperate love affair. A succès de scandale in its day, Madame Bovary remains a powerful and arousing novel.
By Thomas Mann ; translated from the German by John E. Woods ; with an introduction by A.S. Byatt.
In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps--a community devoted exclusively to sickness--as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.
By Honoré de Balzac ; translated with an introduction and notes by A.J. Krailsheimer.
From the Publisher: A masterful study of a father whose sacrifices for his daughters have become a compulsion, this novel marks Balzac's "real entree" into La Comedie Humaine, his series of almost one hundred novels and short stories meant to depict "the whole pell-mell of civilization."
By Albert Camus ; translated from the French by Stuart Gilbert.
Chaos prevails when the bubonic plague strikes the Algerian coastal city of Oran. A haunting tale of human resilience in the face of unrelieved horror, Camus' novel about a bubonic plague ravaging the people of a North African coastal town is a classic of twentieth-century literature.
By James Joyce ; edited with an introduction and notes by Seamus Deane.
"The chronicle of Stephen Dedalus's Dublin childhood and youth offers an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce. Exuberantly inventive, this coming-of-age story is a tour de force of style and technique"--Provided by publisher.
By Marcel Proust ; translated with an introduction and notes by Lydia Davis ; general editor, Christopher Prendergast.
Presents the first book of Proust's monumental work "Remembrance of Things Past", introducing such themes as the destructive force of obsessive love, the allure and the consequences of transgressive sex, and the selective eye that shapes memories.
By The Arthur Waley translation of Lady Murasaki's masterpiece, with a new foreword by Dennis Washburn.
In the eleventh century Murasaki Shikibu, a lady in the Heian court of Japan, wrote the world's first novel. But The Tale of Genji is no mere artifact. It is, rather, a lively and astonishingly nuanced portrait of a refined society where every dalliance is an act of political consequence, a play of characters whose inner lives are as rich and changeable as those imagined by Proust.
