In The Pool in the Desert, first published in 1903, Sara Jeannette Duncan explores the impact of isolation on the small British communities of Victorian India. In the four stories collected here—“The Pool in the Desert,” “A Mother in India,” “An Impossible Ideal,” and “The Hesitation of Miss Anderson”—Duncan’s women have certain freedoms living amidst the reaches of Empire, but they also must negotiate their way through a landscape dominated by the constraints of small military societies. The stories that result combine a delicacy of manners and movement that recalls Henry James, with a wit and sharp eye for small town foibles that bring Stephen Leacock to mind.
'An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this act of madness or despair.'Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London's Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be 'ASimple Tale' proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats and London's fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations.Based on the text which Conrad's first English readers enjoyed, this new edition includes a critical introduction which describes Conrad's great London novel as the realization of a 'monstrous town', a place of idiocy, madness, criminality, and butchery.
During World War I, Gabriel Bagradian learns of Turkish plans to exterminate the Armenians and leads five thousand inhabitants from his village to the mountain of Musa Dagh in hopes of defending themselves against a seige by a Turkish army bent on genoicde. Reprint.
First published in 1954 in the wake of the partition of India, John Masters' great novel Bhowani Junction has increased in stature over the years. Standing between E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and the acclaimed works of later writers such as Paul Scott and Salman Rushdie, Bhowani Junction is both a richly intriguing novel and a superb evocation of the tensions and conflicts at the birth of modern India.It is one of John Masters' seven novels which followed several generations of the Savage family serving in the British Army in India.Bhowani Junction is set in the wake of the partition of India, as the British prepare to withdraw from the newly independent country. Evoking the tensions and conflicts that accompanied the birth of modern India, the characters struggle to find their place in the new India that is emerging. In the last hectic days of the British Raj, Victoria has to choose between marrying a British Army officer or a Sikh, Ranjit, as she struggles to find her place in the new, independent India.It is Masters' most famous novel, and was made into a film in 1956, starring Ava Gardener and Stewart Granger.John Masters evokes the tensions and conflicts that accompanied the birth of modern India in his classic novel Bhowani Junction. Set in the late 1940's in the wake of partition it has become one of the great novels of India, alongside E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and the work of Paul Scott and Salman Rushdie. In the last hectic days of the British Raj, as the British prepare to withdraw from India, Victoria has to choose between marrying a British Army officer or a Sikh, Ranjit, as she struggles to find her place in the new India that is emerging.
Born into a noble family with a strong military tradition, Armand de Caulaincourt had been Napoleon’s Ambassador to Russia; Minister for Foreign Affairs; political advisor; and during the disastrous Russian campaign, his personal aide. In this unique document—the first English translation of the original French manuscript—the French statesman presents a comprehensive picture of the supreme crisis of Napoleon’s career, with graphic accounts of the French army’s advance into Russia, the occupation of Moscow, and the horrors of retreat. “By far the most important addition to Napoleonic documentation published in modern times.”—The London Times “When General de Caulaincourt laid down his pen he had completed, whether he knew it or not, a masterpiece.”—The New York Times A superb biography, history, and memoir in one unforgettable volume, the work will fascinate students, teachers, scholars, and history buffs alike.
Presents a new translation of the classic reflecting the life and times of Russian society during the Napoleonic Wars, in a book accompanied by an index of historical figures, textual annotation, a chapter summary, and an introduction.
Since its publication in 1842, Dead Souls has been celebrated as a supremely realistic portrait of provincial Russian life and as a splendidly exaggerated tale; as a paean to the Russian spirit and as a remorseless satire of imperial Russian venality, vulgarity, and pomp. As Gogol's wily antihero, Chichikov, combs the back country wheeling and dealing for "dead souls"--deceased serfs who still represent money to anyone sharp enough to trade in them--we are introduced to a Dickensian cast of peasants, landowners, and conniving petty officials, few of whom can resist the seductive illogic of Chichikov's proposition. This lively, idiomatic English version by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky makes accessible the full extent of the novel's lyricism, sulphurous humor, and delight in human oddity and error.
Leo Tolstoy's evocative tale of doomed love—one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century. Anna Karenina startled the world with its powerful portrayal of the human need for love and purpose. In a story that brings to vivid life nineteenth century Russia across various social classes, Anna renounces a respectable yet stifling marriage for a passionate affair that weighs her happiness against her love for her son, her family’s status and the rigid demands of society. Her story contrasts with that of Levin, a young self-doubting agnostic who takes a different journey to fulfillment and finds faith and satisfaction in an age of repression. Considered one of the greatest novels of the nineteenth century, Anna Karenina has been called Tolstoy’s spiritual autobiography. Anna and Levin personify Tolstoy’s lifelong struggle to reconcile his physical desires and intellectual ideals in order to create a more meaningful existence. Translated by David Magarshack Includes an Introduction by Priscilla Meyer
First published in 1865, these endearing tales of an imaginative child's dream world by Lewis Carroll, pen name for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, are written with charming simplicity. While delighting children with a heroine who represents their own thoughts and feelings about growing up, the tale is appreciated by adults as a gentle satire on education, politics, literature, and Victorian life in general. All the delightful and bizarre inhabitants of Wonderland are here: the White Rabbit and the Cheshire Cat, the hooka-smoking Caterpillar and the Mad Hatter, the March Hare and the Ugly Duchess. . . and, of course, Alice herself - growing alternately taller and smaller, attending demented tea parties and eccentric croquet games, observing everything with clarity and rational amazement.
