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About the Author
Kurt Vonnegut was a master of contemporary American literature. His black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America’s attention in The Sirens of Titan in 1959 and established him as “a true artist” with Cat’s Cradle in 1963. He was, as Graham Greene declared, “one of the best living American writers.” Mr. Vonnegut passed away in April 2007.
Reviews
“Listen: Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.” So begins Vonnegut’s absurdist 1969 classic. Hawke rises to the occasion of performing this sliced-and-diced narrative, which is part sci-fi and partially based on Vonnegut’s experience as a American prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany during the firebombing of 1945 that killed thousands of civilians. Billy travels in time and space, stopping here and there throughout his life, including his long visit to the planet Tralfamador, where he is mated with a porn star. Hawke adopts a confidential, whisper-like tone for his reading. Listening to him is like listening to someone tell you a story in the back of a bus-the perfect pitch for this book. After the novel ends, Vonnegut himself speaks for a short while about his survival of the Dresden firestorm and describes and names the man who inspired this story. Tacked on to the very end of this audio smorgasbord is music, a dance single that uses a vintage recording of Vonnegut reading from the book. Though Hawke’s reading is excellent, one cannot help but wish Vonnegut himself had read the entire text. (Nov. 2003) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
“Poignant and hilarious, threaded with compassion and, behind everything, the cataract of a thundering moral statement.”–Boston Globe Very tough and very funny . . . sad and delightful . . . very Vonnegut.”–New York Times “Splendid art . . . a funny book at which you are not permitted to laugh, a sad book without tears.”–Life Poignant and hilarious, threaded with compassion and, behind everything, the cataract of a thundering moral statement. Boston Globe Very tough and very funny . . . sad and delightful . . . very Vonnegut. New York Times Splendid art . . . a funny book at which you are not permitted to laugh, a sad book without tears. Life” “Poignant and hilarious, threaded with compassion and, behind everything, the cataract of a thundering moral statement.”-“Boston Globe “Very tough and very funny . . . sad and delightful . . . very Vonnegut.”-“New York Times “”Splendid art . . . a funny book at which you are not permitted to laugh, a sad book without tears.”-“Life” “From the Trade Paperback edition.”
Drawing on Vonnegut’s own experience as a prisoner of war in Dresden, Germany, Slaughterhouse-Five is an absurdist time-travel story in which mild-mannered Billy Pilgrim is jerked back and forth between past and future. As a soldier during World War II, he is taken prisoner by the Germans and sent to Dresden, where he witnesses the Allied firebombing that killed more people than the atom bomb that was later dropped on Hiroshima. In the future, Billy is put on display as an alien specimen in a remote planet’s zoo. Despite its absurdities, the novel is anchored in the grim reality of the pointless destruction of Dresden. Slaughterhouse is a powerful and popular work that is sure to attract many listeners; it is therefore a shame that actor Ethan Hawke’s narration is not stronger. His reading is tolerable, but much of it is in a conspiratorial whisper that sounds as if Hawke were reading a bedtime story to children. Still, recommended.-R. Kent Rasmussen, Thousand Oaks, CA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
‘Trifles’ and ‘A Jury of her Peers’
Here in one convenient volume are the two versions of the same story that Susan Glaspell wrote. ‘Trifles’, her first play, was performed and published in 1916; the following year, Glaspell wrote ‘A Jury of Her Peers as a short story version of the same story in order to reach a wider audience. Both texts are early feminist masterpieces, and with this edition readers can read both versions of this classic story which challenges male prejudice.
1819
$21.501819. That was the year Stamford Raffles landed at South Point and founded Singapore. It was also the year that the famous Muslim saint Habib Nuh came to Singapore from Penang. The story unfolds the tense and colourful relationship between the two significant figures in Singapore history between the early and late 1800s. Other characters that shaped the social, economic and political developments of the Malays in Singapore then were Sultan Hussein, Temenggung Abdul Rahman, Wak Cantuk, Munshi Abdullah, William Farquhar and John Crawfurd.
300 Arguments
$23.10A brilliant and exhilarating sequence of aphorisms from one of our greatest essayists There will come a time when people decide you’ve had enough of your grief, and they’ll try to take it away from you. Bad art is from no one to no one. Am I happy? Damned if I know, but give me a few minutes and I’ll tell you whether you are. Thank heaven I don’t have my friends’ problems. But sometimes I notice an expression on one of their faces that I recognize as secret gratitude. I read sad stories to inoculate myself against grief. I watch action movies to identify with the quick-witted heroes. Both the same fantasy: I’ll escape the worst of it. —from 300 Arguments A “Proustian minimalist on the order of Lydia Davis” (Kirkus Reviews), Sarah Manguso is one of the finest literary artists at work today. To read her work is to witness acrobatic acts of compression in the service of extraordinary psychological and spiritual insight. 300 Arguments, a foray into the frontier of contemporary nonfiction writing, is at first glance a group of unrelated aphorisms. But, as in the work of David Markson, the pieces reveal themselves as a masterful arrangement that steadily gathers power. Manguso’s arguments about desire, ambition, relationships, and failure are pithy, unsentimental, and defiant, and they add up to an unexpected and renegade wisdom literature.
365 Days / 365 Plays
On 13 November 2002 – just seven months after winning the Pulitzer Prize for “Topdog/Underdog” – Suzan-Lori Parks got the idea to write a play every day for the forthcoming 365 days. She began that very day, finishing exactly one year later. Each play is a response to what happened on a personal or a public level on that particular day. Each play is unique, however short – many are less than a page in length – and each has its own distinctive character.
About the Author
Suzan-Lori Parks is one of the leading Black American playwrights, the author of The America Play, Venus, Red Letter Plays and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Topdog/Underdog, seen at the Royal Court Theatre in 2003. All are available from NHB.
A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books
$19.00‘What was merry Christmas to Scrooge? Out upon merry Christmas! What good had it ever done to him?’ Ebenezer Scrooge is a bad-tempered skinflint who hates Christmas and all it stands for, but a ghostly visitor foretells three apparitions who will thaw Scrooge’s frozen heart. A Christmas Carol has gripped the public imagination since it was first published in 1843, and it is now as much a part of Christmas as mistletoe or plum pudding. This edition reprints the story alongside Dickens’s four other Christmas Books: The Chimes, The Cricket on the Hearth, The Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man. All five stories show Dickens at his unpredictable best, jumbling together comedy and melodrama, genial romance and urgent social satire, in pursuit of his aim ‘to awaken some loving and forbearing thoughts, never out of season in a Christian land’. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers 1st Thus Edition
Twenty-three-year-old Zhuang (or Z as she calls herself – Westerners cannot pronounce her name) arrives in London to spend a year learning English. Struggling to find her way in the city, and through the puzzles of tense, verb and adverb; she falls for an older Englishman and begins to realise that the landscape of love is an even trickier terrain…Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2007.
About the Author
Xiaolu Guo was born in south China. She studied film at the Beijing Film Academy and published six books in China before she moved to London in 2002. The English translation of Village of Stone was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her first novel written in English, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, and 20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth, published in 2008, was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Xiaolu’s film career continues to flourish; her feature, She, A Chinese, was released in 2009 and her documentary Once Upon a Time Proletarian has been screened at international film festivals such as Venice and Toronto Film Festivals. I Am China is her most recent novel. In 2013 she was named as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists.
A Darkness More Than Night
Terry McCaleb, the retired FBI agent who starred in the bestseller “Blood Work,” is asked by the LAPD to help them investigate aseries of murders that have them baffled. They are the kind of ritualized killings McCaleb specialized in solving with the FBI, and he is reluctantly drawn from his peaceful new life back into the horror and excitement of tracking down a terrifying homicidal maniac. More horrifying still, the suspect who seems to fit the profile that McCaleb develops is someone he has known and worked with in the past: LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch.
About the Author
Michael Connelly is the author of twenty-five previous novels including the #1 New York Times bestsellers The Black Box, The Drop, The Fifth Witness, The Reversal, “The Scarecrow,” “The Brass Verdict,” and “The Lincoln Lawyer, ” as well as the bestselling Harry Bosch series of novels. He is a former newspaper reporter who has won numerous awards for his journalism and his novels. He spends his time in California and Florida.
A Farewell to Arms
In 1918 Ernest Hemingway went to war, to the ‘war to end all wars’. He volunteered for ambulance service in Italy, was wounded and twice decorated. Out of his experiences came A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway’s description of war is unforgettable. He recreates the fear, the comradeship, the courage of his young American volunteer and the men and women he meets in Italy with total conviction. But A Farewell to Arms is not only a novel of war. In it Hemingway has also created a love story of immense drama and uncompromising passion.
About the Author
Ernest Miller Hemingway was born in Chicago in 1899 as the son of a doctor and the second of six children. After a stint as an ambulance driver at the Italian front, Hemingway came home to America in 1919, only to return to the battlefield – this time as a reporter on the Greco-Turkish war – in 1922. Resigning from journalism to focus on his writing instead, he moved to Paris where he renewed his earlier friendship with fellow American expatriates such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Through the years, Hemingway travelled widely and wrote avidly, becoming an internationally recognized literary master of his craft. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, following the publication of The Old Man and the Sea. He died in 1961.
A Fine Balance 1st Edition
$28.60With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall masters from Balzac to Dickens, this magnificant novel caputures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers–a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the cast violence of their native village–will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future.
As the cahracters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love. “A Fine Balance” creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state.
About the Author
Rohinton Mistry was born in Bombay and now lives near Toronto. His first novel, Such a Long Journey, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and received, among other awards, the Governor General’s Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book of the Year. A Fine Balance” “is his second novel, winner of the “Los Angeles Times “Book Prize in Fiction, the Giller Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers Prize as well as a Booker Prize finalist. Mistry is also the author of Swimming Lessons, a collection of short stories.
A Grain of Wheat
$27.50The Nobel Prize nominated Kenyan writer sbest-known novelSet in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion and on the cusp of Kenya’s independence from Britain, A Grain of Wheatfollows a group of villagers whose lives have been transformed by the 1952 1960 Emergency. At the center of it all is the reticent Mugo, the village’s chosen hero and a man haunted by a terrible secret. As we learn of the villagers’ tangled histories in a narrative interwoven with myth and peppered with allusions to real-life leaders, including Jomo Kenyatta, a masterly story unfolds in which compromises are forced, friendships are betrayed, and loves are tested. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust theseries to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-datetranslations by award-winning translators.”
About the Author
Ngugi wa Thiong’o is an award-winning novelist, playwright, and essayist from Kenya whose novels have been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in Irvine, California, where he is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Abdulrazak Gurnah is the author of the Booker Prize shortlisted novel Paradise, among other novels. He was born in Zanzibar, Tanzania, and teaches English literature at the University of Kent in England.”
A Grain of Wheat
A masterly story of myth, rebellion, love, friendship and betrayal from one of Africa’s great writers, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat includes an introduction by Abdulrazak Gurnah, author of By the Sea, in Penguin Modern Classics. It is 1963 and Kenya is on the verge of Uhuru – Independence Day. The mighty british government has been toppled, and in the lull between the fighting and the new world, colonized and colonizer alike reflect on what they have gained and lost. In the village of Thabai, the men and women who live there have been transformed irrevocably by the uprising. Kihika, legendary rebel leader, was fatally betrayed to the whiteman. Gikonyo’s marriage to the beautiful Mumbi was destroyed when he was imprisoned, while her life has been shattered in other ways. And Mugo, brave survivor of the camps and now a village hero, harbours a terrible secret. As events unfold, compromises are forced, friendships are betrayed and loves are tested. Kenyan novelist and playwright Ngugi wa Thiong’o is the author of Weep Not Child (1964), The River Between (1965), and Petals of Blood (1977). Ngugi was chair of the Department of Literature at the University of Nairobi from 1972 to 1977. He left Kenya in 1982 and taught at various universities in the United States before he became professor of comparative literature and performance studies at New York University in 1992. If you enjoyed A Grain of Wheat, you might like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. ‘With Ngugi history is a living tissue … this book adds cubits to his already considerable stature’Guardian
A Little Princess
Alone in a new country, wealthy Sara Crewe tries to make friends at boarding school and settle in. But when she learns that she’ll never see her beloved father again, her life is turned upside down. Transformed from princess to pauper, she must swap dancing lessons and luxury for drudgery and a room in the attic. Will she find that kindness and generosity are all the riches she truly needs? With deeply poignant introduction written by bestselling author of Chinese Cinderella, A Little Princess is one of the twenty wonderful classic stories being reissued in Puffin Classics in March 2015.
About the Author
Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924) was born in Manchester. She had a very poor upbringing and used to escape from the horror of her surroundings by writing stories. In 1865 her family emigrated to the USA where she married and became the successful author of many children’s books including Little Lord Fauntleroy andThe Secret Garden.
A Passage to India (Penguin Classics)
$22.60When Adela and her elderly companion Mrs Moore arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, they quickly feel trapped by its insular and prejudiced British community. Determined to explore the real India’, they seek the guidance of the charming and mercurial Dr Aziz, a cultivated Indian Muslim. But a mysterious incident occurs while they are exploring the Marabar caves with Aziz, and the well-respected doctor soon finds himself at the centre of a scandal that rouses violent passions among both the British and their Indian subjects. A masterly portrait of a society in the grip of imperialism, A Passage to India compellingly depicts the fate of individuals caught between the great political and cultural conflicts of the modern world.
About the Author
Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970) wrote six novels – Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), A Passage to India (1924). Maurice , written in 1914, was published posthumously in 1971. He also published two volumes of short stories; two collections of essays; a critical work (Aspects of the Novel); The Hill of Devi; two biographies; two books about Alexandria; and the libretto for Britten’s opera Billy Budd. Pankaj Mishra was born in North India in 1969 and is the author of The Romantics: A Novel and An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
The first, shortest and most approachable of James Joyce’s novels, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man portrays the Dublin upbringing of Stephen Dedalus, from his youthful days at Clongowes Wood College to his radical questioning of all convention. In doing so, it provides an oblique self-portrait of the young Joyce himself. At its center lie questions of origin and source, authority and authorship, and the relationship of an artist to his family, culture, and race. Exuberantly inventive in style, the novel subtly and beautifully orchestrates the patterns of quotation and repetition instrumental in its hero;s quest to create his own character, his own language, life, and art: ‘to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
This edition, published for the novel’s centennial, is the definitive text, authorized by Joyce estate and collated from all known proofs, manuscripts, and impressions to reflect the author’s original wishes.
About The Author
James Joyce was born in Dublin on February 2, 1882. He was the oldest of ten children in a family that, after brief prosperity, collapsed into poverty. In 1902, following his graduation from University College, Dublin, he went to Paris, where he devoted himself to writing poems and prose sketches, and to formulating an ‘aesthetic system’. recalled to Dublin in April 1903 because of the fatal illness of his mother, he met a young woman from Galway, Nora Barnacle, and persuaded her to go with him to the Continent, where they finally settled, in trieste, in 1905. They had two children, a son, Giorgio, and a daughter,Lucia. Joyce’s first book, the poems of Chamber Music, was published in London in 1907, followed by Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and Exiles, a play (1918). In 1920, Joyce moved to fame, in 1922. His final book, Finnegans Wake, was published in 1939. After the outbreak of World War II, Joyce moved back to Zurich, where he lived during World War I. He died there on January 13, 1941.
Karl Ove Knausgaard is the author of the New York Times bestselling six volume autobiographical novel My Struggle, a global literary phenomenon that has won numerous international literary awards and has been translated into more than twenty five languages. He was born in 1968 in Oslo, Norway, and now lives in Sweden.
Seamus Deane, professor of English and the Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Royal Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame, is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and the general editor of the works of James Joyce for Penguin Classics.
A Sentimental Journey and Other Writings (Oxford World’s Classics) New Edition
$15.90‘Love is nothing without feeling. And feeling is still less without love.’ Celebrated in its own day as the progenitor of ‘a school of sentimental writers’, A Sentimental Journey (1768) has outlasted its many imitators because of the humour and mischievous eroticism that inform Mr Yorick’s travels. Setting out to journey to France and Italy he gets little further than Lyons but finds much to appreciate, in contrast to contemporary travel writers whom Sterne satirizes in the figures of Smelfungus and Mundungus. A master of ambiguity and double entendre, Sterne is nevertheless as concerned as his peers with exploring the nature of virtue; unlike other writers of sentimental fiction Sterne insists on the inseparability of desire and feeling. This new edition includes a selection from The Sermons of Mr Yorick, which shed light on the concerns of the Journey, The Journal to Eliza, which records Sterne’s feelings as he languishes for the company of Eliza Draper, and A Political Romance, the satire on a local ecclesiastical squabble that was the catalyst for Sterne’s literary career. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
Introduces a collection of stories about China. This work brings us a modern China facing up to a complex history of repression and guilt. In Immortality, a young man bears a striking resemblance to the dictator, and so finds a strange kind of calling. In Extra, a Chinese woman, alone in middle age, befriends a young boy.
A Wizard of Earthsea
Originally published in 1968, Ursula K. Le Guin s A Wizard of Earthsea marks the first of the six now beloved Earthsea titles. Ged was the greatest sorcerer in Earthsea, but in his youth he was the reckless Sparrowhawk. In his hunger for power and knowledge, he tampered with long-held secrets and loosed a terrible shadow upon the world. This is the tumultuous tale of his testing, how he mastered the mighty words of power, tamed an ancient dragon, and crossed death’s threshold to restore the balance.”
About the Author
URSULA K. LE GUIN is the author of more than three dozen books. She was awarded a Newbery Honor for the second volume of the Earthsea Cycle, “The Tombs of Atuan,” and among her other distinctions are the Margaret A. Edwards Award, a National Book Award, and six Nebula Awards. She lives in Portland, Oregon.www.ursulakleguin.com
Abraham’s Promise
$12.00Abraham Isaac, teacher of Latin, philosopher and father, has, after many years, a young pupil. Teaching pulls him back into his memories: of Rose, his first love; Mercy, his stubborn sister; and most of all of Rani, his beloved wife. Of days of youth and promise, when he threw himself into the politics of Singapore in the 50s and 60s. Days when temperance and restraint gave way to action and desire. Days when the culture and society of Singapore were defined and moulded. Days when he believed he had a valuable role to play as a proud citizen of a new country. But now he is old, and the burden of his years weighs on him heavily. Distanced from a present devoid of idealism and obsessed with power and money, Abraham is estranged from his strong, successful son. Descending into the past, Abraham is led from the promise of youth, through cynicism born of experience, to an understanding and reconciliation of his life and times hard-won in maturity.
Acknowledged Legislator: Critical Essays on the Poetry of Martín Espada
Acknowledged Legislator: Critical Essays on the Poetry of Martin Espada is the first-ever edited collection on poet and activist Martin Espada. With the aid of contributions by established scholars who have a specialized interest in the poet’s life and work, its principal aim is to argue for a long overdue critical awareness of and cultural appreciation for Espada and his body of writing.
About the Author
Edward J. Carvalho is associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and Health Sciences at DeVry University (Philadelphia Metro).