The story of the English folk hero and medieval outlaw Robin Hood who as legend would have it lived in the days of Richard the Lionheart and Prince John and, with his band of merry men, fought injustice and tyranny. This retelling of the stories, first published in 1956, has become an acknowledged classic: a literary mosaic in which Roger Lancelyn Green has brought together material from the old ballads, romances and plays, as well as retellings of Noyes, Tennyson, Peacock and Scott. “For Robin Hood’s is a story that can never die,” he wrote, “nor cease to fire the imagination. Like the old fairy tales it must be told and told again — for like them it is touched with enchantment...”
Ford Madox Ford's acclaimed masterpiece is widely considered one of the best novels of the twentieth century.Parade's End was originally published in four parts (Some Do Not . . ., No More Parades, A
(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)The sly, subversive side of the nineteenth-century Russian literary character -- the one which represents such a contrast to the titanic exertions of Tolstoy and Dost
In his timeless story of two pairs of mismatched lovers, The Return of the Native sets romantic idealism as a destructive counterpoint to reality and disillusionment.
(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)The first novel of Samuel Beckett's mordant and exhilarating midcentury trilogy introduces us to Molloy, who has been mysteriously incarcerated, and who subsequently
(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)Of the complex, richly rewarding masterworks he wrote in the last decade of his life, Little Dorrit is the book in which Charles Dickens most fully unleashed his indi
George Eliot had no peer when it came to finding the drama at the heart of normal lives, lived out in tandem with the slow, gigantic rhythms of nature itself. The Mill On The Floss (1860), a story of
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Toward the end of the astonishing period of Athenian creativity that furnished Western civilization with the greater part of its intellectual, artistic, and political wea
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)By virtue of its casual, off-handedly brilliant wisdom and the easy splendor of its nature writing, Thoreau’s account of his adventure in self-reliance on the shores of a pond in Massachusetts is one of the signposts by which the modern mind has located itself in an increasingly bewildering world. Deeply sane, invigorating in its awareness of humanity’s place in the moral and natural order, Walden represents the progressive spirit of nineteenth-century America at its eloquent best.
First published in 1885, Stevenson's verses so truly reflect the feelings of young children--about being small, the bliss of going up in a swing so high, discovering one's shadow, happiness and sorrow
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)The story of Hester Prynne–found out in adultery, pilloried by her Puritan community, and abandoned, in different ways, by both her partner in sin and her vengeance-seeki
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Arriving in a village to take up the position of land surveyor for the mysterious lord of a castle, the character known as K. finds himself in a bitter and baffling struggle to contact his new employer and go about his duties. As the villagers and the Castle officials block his efforts at every turn, K.’s consuming quest–quite possibly a self-imposed one–to penetrate the inaccessible heart of the Castle and take its measure is repeatedly frustrated. Kafka once suggested that the would-be surveyor in The Castle is driven by a wish “to get clear about ultimate things,” an unrealizable desire that provided the driving force behind all of Kafka’s dazzlingly uncanny fictions. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Two works in one volumeJean-Jacques Rousseau was the first, and the most eloquent and versatile, of that extraordinary line of radical modern thinkers who aimed their dis
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Jorge Luis Borges was one of those very rare creators who changed the face of an art form—in his case, the short story. His work has been paid the ultimate honor of being
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Introduction by Peter Washington; Translation by William WeaverItalo Calvino’s masterpiece combines a love story and a detective story into an exhilarating allegory of reading, in which the reader of the book becomes the book’s central character.Based on a witty analogy between the reader’s desire to finish the story and the lover’s desire to consummate his or her passion, IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELER is the tale of two bemused readers whose attempts to reach the end of the same book—IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELER, by Italo Calvino, of course—are constantly and comically frustrated. In between chasing missing chapters of the book, the hapless readers tangle with an international conspiracy, a rogue translator, an elusive novelist, a disintegrating publishing house, and several oppressive governments. The result is a literary labyrinth of storylines that interrupt one another—an Arabian Nights of the postmodern age.
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)By one of the most distinguished Austrian writers of our century, a portrait of three generations set against the panoramic background of the declining Austro-Hungarian E
