Books and albums it took me awhile to get into
Discover books and albums that took time to love—from Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game to Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Explore slow-burn fiction and music worth the patience.
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The Glass Bead Game
by Hermann Hesse
Setting his story in the distant, post-Holocaust future, Hesse tells of an elite cult of intellectuals occupying themselves with an elaborate game that employs all the cultural and scientific knowledge of the ages. The most imaginative and prophetic of Hesse's works.
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Kolyma Tales
by Varlam Shalamov
It is estimated that some three million people died in the Soviet forced-labour camps of Kolyma, in the northeastern area of Siberia. Shalamov himself spent seventeen years there, and in these stories he vividly captures the lives of ordinary people caught up in terrible circumstances, whose hopes and plans extended to further than a few hours. This new enlarged edition combines two collections previously published in the United States as Kolyma Tales and Graphite. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
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Steppenwolf
by Hermann Hesse
An autobiographical novel featuring Harry Haller in "an experimental mix of symbolism, realism, and fantasy."--Cover.
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A Farewell to Arms
by Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway’s classic novel of love during wartime. Written when Ernest Hemingway was thirty years old and lauded as the best American novel to emerge from World War I, A Farewell to Arms is the unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Set against the looming horrors of the battlefield, this gripping, semiautobiographical work captures the harsh realities of war and the pain of lovers caught in its inexorable sweep. Hemingway famously rewrote the ending to A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times to get the words right. A classic novel of love during wartime, “A Farewell to Arms stands, more than eighty years after its first appearance, as a towering ornament of American literature” (The Washington Times).
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Cancer Ward
by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
One of the great allegorical masterpieces of world literature, Cancer Ward is both a deeply compassionate study of people facing terminal illness and a brilliant dissection of the "cancerous" Soviet police state. --Publisher
