My desert island books part 18
Discover essential fiction and history for your reading list in My Desert Island Books Part 18, featuring timeless classics by Annie Proulx, Gabriel García Márquez, Simone de Beauvoir, and Thomas Mann.
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On War
by Carl von Clausewitz
Carl von Clausewitz was not only an officer who served with great distinction during the Napoleonic campaigns but was also a military historian and intellectual of the highest order—at ease with both the strategic doctrines of his time and the larger movements of thought in the world around him. Out of these elements he distilled his classic discussion of the nature and meaning of one of humankind's central endeavors, war—which he famously declared to be "the continuation of politics by different means." Though unfinished at his death, On War contains all his important ideas about absolute versus limited war, the intrinsic violence of war, and its necessary subjugation to political ends. It would be impossible to overestimate the influence of this book on subsequent strategic thinking, on the political considerations that underlie such thinking, and on the general understanding of human conflict.
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Collected Stories
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Collected here are twenty-six of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's most brilliant and enchanting short stories, presented in the chronological order of their publication in Spanish from three volumes: Eyes of a Blue Dog,Big Mama's Funeral, and The Incredible and Sad Tale of lnnocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother. Combining mysticism, history, and humor, the stories in this collection span more than two decades, illuminating the development of Marquez's prose and exhibiting the themes of family, poverty, and death that resound throughout his fiction.
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The Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER • A monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, The Magic Mountain is an enduring classic. With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps–a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War. To this hermetic and otherworldly realm comes Hans Castorp, an “ordinary young man” who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying for seven years, during which he succumbs both to the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas.
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A Suitable Boy
by Vikram Seth
Tells the story of four large extended families in 1950s India against the political and religious upheavals of the time.
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Close Range
by Annie Proulx
A collection of short stories, which includes the short story, Brokeback Mountain.
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The Mandarins
by Simone de Beauvoir
In her most famous novel, The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir takes an unflinching look at Parisian intellectual society at the end of World War II. In fictionally relating the stories of those around her -- Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Arthur Koestler, Nelson Algren -- de Beauvoir dissects the emotional and philosophical currents of her time. At once an engrossing drama and an intriguing political tale, The Mandarins is the emotional odyssey of a woman torn between her inner desires and her public life. "Much more than a roman a clef . . . a moving and engrossing novel." -- New York Times