For a child in the great city of Venice in the thirteenth century, there could be nothing better than the stories of sailors. There were stories animals, wonderful cities, sweet spices, and terrible wild deserts where a traveller could die. One young boy listened, waited, and dreamed. Perhaps one day his father and uncle would return. Perhaps he too could travel with them to great markets in fa…
from the back cover: 'It's a good place for gold,' said people in the 1840s, and they came from all over the world. 'It's a good place for a prison,' said the US government in the 1920s, and they put Al Capone there on the island of Alcatraz. 'It's a good place for love,' said the hippies in the 1960s, and they put flowers in their hair and came to Haight Ashbury. And San Francisco is still a …
Originally written in German, but the German manuscript was lost & only the manuscript of the English translation survived. Darkness At Noon stands as an unequaled fictional portrayal of the nightmare politics of our time. Its hero is an aging revolutionary, imprisoned & psychologically tortured by the Party to which he has dedicated his life. As the pressure to confess preposterous crimes inc…
Hardy's masterpiece traces a poor stonemason's ill-fated romance with his free-spirited cousin. No Victorian institution is spared — marriage, religion, education — and the outrage following publication led the embittered author to renounce fiction. Modern critics hail this novel as a pioneering work of feminism and socialist thought.
In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas at a country fair. Over the course of the following years, he manages to establish himself as a respected and prosperous pillar of the community of Casterbridge, but behind his success there always lurk the shameful secret of his past and a personality prone to self-destructive pride and temper. Subtit…