Special Collections

Inferno

Dante's immortal vision of Hell shines "as it never did before in English verse" (Edward Mendelson) in Clive James's new translation of Inferno.

The most captivating part of perhaps the greatest epic poem ever written, Dante's Inferno still holds the power to thrill and inspire.

The medieval equivalent of a thriller, Inferno follows Dante and his faithful guide, Virgil, as they traverse the complex geography of Hell, confronting its many threats, macabre punishments, and historical figures, before reaching the deep chamber where Satan himself resides.

Now, in this new translation, Clive James communicates not just the transcendent poetry of Dante's language but also the excitement and terror of his journey through the underworld.

Instead of Dante's original terza rima, a form which in English tends to show the strain of composition, James employs fluently linked quatrains, thereby conveying the seamless flow of Dante's poetry and the headlong momentum of the action.

As James writes in his introduction, Dante's great poem "can still astonish us, whether we believe in the supernatural or not. At the very least it will make us believe in poetry."

Date Added: 05/07/2018

The Iliad

Probably composed in the eighth century B.C. and based on an actual historical event of the thirteenth century B.C., Homer's Iliad is one of the great epics of the Western world.

The poem unfolds near the end of the ten-year-long Trojan War, detailing the quarrel between the great warrior-hero Achilles and King Agamemnon, the battle between Paris and Menelaus for Helen of Troy, the Greek assault on the city and the Trojan counterattacks, the intervention of the gods on the part of their favorites, and numerous other incidents and events.

Vast in scope, possessing extraordinary lyricism and poignancy, this time-honored masterpiece brilliantly conveys the inconsistencies of gods and men, the tumultuous intensity of conflict, and the devastation that results from war.

This inexpensive edition reproduces the celebrated Samuel Butler prose translation, admired for its simple, unadorned style, clarity, and readability.

Date Added: 05/07/2018

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

The story and characters in Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame have resonated with succeeding generations since its publication in 1831.

It has tempted filmmakers, and most recently animators, who have exploited its dramatic content to good effect but have inevitably lost some of the grays that make the original text so compelling.

From Victor Hugo's flamboyant imagination came Quasimodo, the grotesque bell ringer; La Esmeralda, the sensuous gypsy dancer; and the haunted archdeacon Claude Frollo. Hugo set his epic tale in the Paris of 1482 under Louis XI and meticulously re-created the day-to-day life of its highest and lowest inhabitants. Written at a time of perennial political upheaval in France, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame is the product of an emerging democratic sensibility and prefigures the teeming masterpiece Les Misérables, which Hugo would write thirty years later. He made the cathedral the centerpiece of the novel and called it Notre-Dame de Paris. (It received its popular English title at the time of its second translation in 1833.)

Hugo wrote that his inspiration came from a carving of the word "fatality" in Greek that he had found in the cathedral. The inscription had been eradicated by the time the book was published, and Hugo feared that Notre-Dame's Gothic splendor might soon be lost to the contemporary fad for tearing down old buildings. Notre-Dame has survived as one of the great monuments of Paris, and Hugo's novel is a fitting celebration of it, a popular classic that is proving to be just as enduring.

Date Added: 05/08/2018

The House of Mirth

An immensely popular bestseller upon its publication in 1905, The House of Mirth was Edith Wharton’s first great novel. Set among the elegant brownstones of New York City and opulent country houses like gracious Bellomont on the Hudson, the novel creates a satiric portrayal of what Wharton herself called “a society of irresponsible pleasure-seekers” with a precision comparable to that of Proust. And her brilliant and complex characterization of the doomed Lily Bart, whose stunning beauty and dependence on marriage for economic survival reduce her to a decorative object, becomes an incisive commentary on the nature and status of women in that society. From her tragic attraction to bachelor lawyer Lawrence Selden to her desperate relationship with social-climbing Rosedale, Lily is all too much a product of the world indicated by the title, a phrase taken from Ecclesiastes: “The heart of fools is in the house of mirth.” For it is Lily’s very specialness that threatens the elegance and fulfillment she seeks in life. Along with the author’s other masterpiece, The Age of Innocence, this novel claims a place among the finest American novels of manners.

Date Added: 05/08/2018

Heart of Darkness

This Norton Critical Edition includes:- A newly edited text based on the first English book edition (1902), the last version to which Conrad is known to have actively contributed.

"Textual History and Editing Principles" provides an overview of the textual controversies and ambiguities perpetually surrounding Heart of Darkness.
- Background and source materials on colonialism and the Congo, nineteenth-century attitudes toward race, Conrad in the Congo, and Conrad on art and literature.
- Fifteen illustrations. - Seven contemporary responses to the novella along with eighteen essays in criticism--ten of them new to the Fifth Edition,including an entirely new subsection on film adaptations of Heart of Darkness.
- A Chronology and an updated Selected Bibliography.

Date Added: 05/07/2018

Hamlet

In this quintessential Shakespeare tragedy, a young prince's halting pursuit of revenge for the murder of his father unfolds in a series of highly charged confrontations that have held audiences spellbound for nearly four centuries.

Those fateful exchanges, and the anguished soliloquies that precede and follow them, probe depths of human feeling rarely sounded in any art.

The title role of Hamlet, perhaps the most demanding in all of Western drama, has provided generations of leading actors their greatest challenge.

Yet all the roles in this towering drama are superbly delineated, and each of the key scenes offers actors a rare opportunity to create theatrical magic.

As if further evidence of Shakespeare's genius were needed, Hamlet is a unique pleasure to read as well as to see and hear performed.

The full text of this extraordinary drama is reprinted here from an authoritative British edition complete with illuminating footnotes.

A selection of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Date Added: 05/08/2018

Gulliver's Travels

Satirist Jonathan Swift's best known work is the prose satire, Gulliver's Travels, first published in 1726.

It is both a satire on human nature and the "travellers' tales" literary subgenre.

It tells the story of Lemuel Gulliver and his fantastic journeys.

A series of seafaring misadventures take Gulliver to a variety of imagined lands, where he meets the tiny Lilliputians, the enormous Brobdingnagians and many other curious peoples.

He is embroiled in political intrigue everywhere he goes, all of which is Swift's comic allegory for religious, political and social events of the day in Europe.

Never out of print since its first publication, Gulliver's Travels continues to delight readers today.

Swift himself claimed that he wrote Gulliver's Travels "to vex the world rather than divert it".

Date Added: 05/08/2018

The Great Gatsby

The exemplary novel of the Jazz Age, F. Scott Fitzgeralds' third book, The Great Gatsby (1925), stands as the supreme achievement of his career. T. S. Eliot read it three times and saw it as the "first step" American fiction had taken since Henry James; H. L. Mencken praised "the charm and beauty of the writing," as well as Fitzgerald's sharp social sense; and Thomas Wolfe hailed it as Fitzgerald's "best work" thus far.

The story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when, The New York Times remarked, "gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession," it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s that resonates with the power of myth.

A novel of lyrical beauty yet brutal realism, of magic, romance, and mysticism, The Great Gatsby is one of the great classics of twentieth-century literature.

[This text is listed as an example that meets Common Core Standards in English language arts in grades 11-12 at http://www.corestandards.org.]

Date Added: 05/07/2018

The Grapes of Wrath

The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, a book that galvanized--and sometimes outraged--millions of readers.

First published in 1939, Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads-driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity.

A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man's fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman's stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America.

The Grapes of Wrath summed up its era in the way that Uncle Tom's Cabin summed up the years of slavery before the Civil War. Sensitive to fascist and communist criticism, Steinbeck insisted that "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" be printed in its entirety in the first edition of the book--which takes its title from the first verse: "He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored." At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck's powerful landmark novel is perhaps the most American of American Classics.

This edition contains an introduction and notes by Steinbeck scholar Robert Demott.

Date Added: 05/08/2018

Go Tell It on the Mountain

"Mountain," Baldwin said, "is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else."

Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin's first major work, a novel that has established itself as an American classic.

With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935.

Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.

Date Added: 05/07/2018

The Good Soldier

Leonora and Edward Ashburnham were "good people" from England, as John Dowell, the narrator of this tale, explains: and Dowell and his wife, Florence -- leisured Americans of solid stock -- were, like their English friends, a "model couple."

For a dozen years, the foursome cultivated and maintained a friendship reinforced with yearly meetings at a fashionable German health resort, which Dowell visited with his "ailing" wife and the Asburnhams traveled to because of Edward's "heart problems."

Their marriages seemed exemplary studies of permanence, stability, and tranquility.

That is, until the day Dowell learned that for the previous nine years his wife had been the mistress of his friend Captain Ashburnham, the apparently honorable "good soldier."

A provocative study of deception and betrayal and of convention and desire, The Good Soldier was also formally innovative.

Along with Ford's Parade's End tetralogy, this powerful novel -- first published in 1915 -- has earned him a reputation as one of the major writers of the 20th century.

Date Added: 05/07/2018

A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

The collection that established O'Connor's reputation as one of the american masters of the short story.

The volume contains the celebrated title story, a tale of the murderous fugitive The Misfit, as well as "The Displaced Person" and eight other stories.

Date Added: 05/08/2018

The Glass Menagerie

No play in the modern theatre has so captured the imagination and heart of the American public as Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie.

Menagerie was Williams's first popular success and launched the brilliant, if somewhat controversial, career of our pre-eminent lyric playwright.

Since its premiere in Chicago in 1944, with the legendary Laurette Taylor in the role of Amanda, the play has been the bravura piece for great actresses from Jessica Tandy to Joanne Woodward, and is studied and performed in classrooms and theatres around the world.

The Glass Menagerie (in the reading text the author preferred) is now available only in its New Directions Paperbook edition.

A new introduction by prominent Williams scholar Robert Bray, editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review, reappraises the play more than half a century after it won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award: "More than fifty years after telling his story of a family whose lives form a triangle of quiet desperation, Williams's mellifluous voice still resonates deeply and universally."

This edition of The Glass Menagerie also includes Williams's essay on the impact of sudden fame on a struggling writer, "The Catastrophe of Success," as well as a short section of Williams's own "Production Notes."

The cover features the classic line drawing by Alvin Lustig, originally done for the 1949 New Directions edition.

Date Added: 05/08/2018

Frankenstein

For the bicentennial of its first publication, Mary Shelley’s original 1818 text, introduced by National Book Critics Circle award-winner Charlotte Gordon.

2018 marks the bicentennial of Mary Shelley’s seminal novel.

For the first time, Penguin Classics will publish the original 1818 text, which preserves the hard-hitting and politically-charged aspects of Shelley’s original writing, as well as her unflinching wit and strong female voice.

This edition also emphasizes Shelley’s relationship with her mother—trailblazing feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who penned A Vindication of the Rights of Woman—and demonstrates her commitment to carrying forward her mother’s ideals, placing her in the context of a feminist legacy rather than the sole female in the company of male poets, including Percy Shelley and Lord Byron.

This edition includes a new introduction and suggestions for further reading by National Book Critics Circle award-winner and Shelley expert Charlotte Gordon, literary excerpts and reviews selected by Gordon, and a chronology and essay by preeminent Shelley scholar Charles E. Robinson.

Date Added: 05/08/2018

Faust I & II, Volume 2

One of the great classics of European literature, Faust is Goethe's most complex and profound work. To tell the dramatic and tragic story of one man’s pact with the Devil in exchange for knowledge and power, Goethe drew from an immense variety of cultural and historical material, and a wealth of poetic and theatrical traditions. What results is a tour de force illustrating Goethe’s own moral and artistic development, and a symbolic, cautionary tale of Western humanity striving restlessly and ruthlessly for progress.Capturing the sense, poetic variety, and tonal range of the German original in present-day English, Stuart Atkins’s translation presents the formal and rhythmic dexterity of Faust in all its richness and beauty, without recourse to archaisms or interpretive elaborations.Featuring a new introduction by David Wellbery, this Princeton Classics edition of Faust is the definitive English version of a timeless masterpiece.

Date Added: 05/07/2018

Fathers and Sons

Considered one of Ivan Turgenev's finest works, Fathers and Sons was the first of the great nineteenth-century Russian novels to achieve international renown.

A stirring tale of generational conflict during a period of social revolution, it vividly depicts the friction between liberal and conservative thought and the rise of the radical new philosophy of nihilism. Set in Russia during the 1860s against the backdrop of the liberation of the serfs, the story concerns the clash of older aristocrats with the new democratic intelligentsia.

The impressionable young student Arkady Kirsanoff arrives home in the company of his friend Bazarov, a cynical biologist. Arkady's father and uncle, already distressed by the upheaval of the peasants, grow increasingly irritated at Bazarov's outspoken nihilism and his ridicule of the conventions of state, church, and home. The young friends, bored by the rustic life of the Kirsanoff estate, venture off to the provincial capital in search of amusement. There they encounter both romance and alienation.

Date Added: 05/08/2018

A Farewell to Arms

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.

Hemingway's frank portrayal of the love between Lieutenant Henry and Catherine Barkley, caught in the inexorable sweep of war, glows with an intensity unrivaled in modern literature, while his description of the German attack on Caporetto--of lines of fired men marching in the rain, hungry, weary, and demoralized--is one of the greatest moments in literary history.

A story of love and pain, of loyalty and desertion, A Farewell to Arms, written when he was thirty years old, represents a new romanticism for Hemingway.

[This text is listed as an example that meets Common Core Standards in English language arts in grades 11-12 at http://www.corestandards.org.]

Date Added: 05/07/2018

Don Quixote

Don Quixote has become so entranced reading tales of chivalry that he decides to turn knight errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, these exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways.

While Quixote's fancy often leads him astray--he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants--Sancho acquires cunning and a certain sagacity.

Sane madman and wise fool, they roam the world together-and together they have haunted readers' imaginations for nearly four hundred years.

With its experimental form and literary playfulness, Don Quixote has been generally recognized as the first modern novel.

This Penguin Classics edition, with its beautiful new cover design, includes John Rutherford's masterly translation, which does full justice to the energy and wit of Cervantes's prose, as well as a brilliant critical introduction by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarriá.

Date Added: 05/07/2018

A Doll's House

Nora Helmers has recently placed herself at considerable financial risk so that her husband, the overbearing Torvald, could recuperate from an illness.

Torvald thinks Nora careless and childlike—his doll—and proves unable to comprehend the depth of her affection and sacrifice.

Nora comes to see her marriage for what it is and will contemplate the unthinkable.

A Doll's House was first staged in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1879.

The play is important for its criticism of 19th century marriage norms—the first seeds of feminism.

Date Added: 05/08/2018

Doctor Zhivago

Boris Pasternak's widely acclaimed novel comes gloriously to life in a magnificent new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, the award-winning translators of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and to whom, The New York Review of Books declared, "the English-speaking world is indebted."

First published in Italy in 1957 amid international controversy--the novel was banned in the Soviet Union until 1988, and Pasternak declined the Nobel Prize a year later under intense pressure from Soviet authorities--Doctor Zhivago is the story of the life and loves of a poet-physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution.

Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago's love for the tender and beautiful Lara: pursued, found, and lost again, Lara is the very embodiment of the pain and chaos of those cataclysmic times.

Stunningly rendered in the spirit of Pasternak's original--resurrecting his style, rhythms, voicings, and tone--and including an introduction, textual annotations, and a translators' note, this edition of Doctor Zhivago is destined to become the definitive English translation of our time.From the Hardcover edition.

Date Added: 05/08/2018

A Death in the Family

Published in 1957, two years after its author's death at the age of forty-five, A Death in the Family remains a near-perfect work of art, an autobiographical novel that contains one of the most evocative depictions of loss and grief ever written.

As Jay Follet hurries back to his home in Knoxville, Tennessee, he is killed in a car accident-a tragedy that destroys not only a life, but also the domestic happiness and contentment of a young family.

A novel of great courage, lyric force, and powerful emotion, A Death in the Family is a masterpiece of American literature.

Pulitzer Prize Winner

Date Added: 05/07/2018

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Willa Cather's best known novel is an epic—almost mythic—story of a single human life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert. In 1851 Father Jean Marie Latour comes to serve as the Apostolic Vicar to New Mexico. What he finds is a vast territory of red hills and tortuous arroyos, American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. In the almost forty years that follow, Latour spreads his faith in the only way he knows--gently, all the while contending with an unforgiving landscape, derelict and sometimes openly rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. Out of these events, Cather gives us an indelible vision of life unfolding in a place where time itself seems suspended.BONUS: The edition includes an excerpt from The Selected Letters of Willa Cather.

Date Added: 05/07/2018

Cyrano de Bergerac

Widely considered the most popular modern French play, Cyrano de Bergerac has dazzled audiences with its wit and eloquence since it premiered in 1897.

Cyrano, a quarrelsome, hot-tempered swordsman, as famous for his dueling skills and pugnacity as for his inordinately long nose, is hopelessly enamored of the beautiful Roxane.

She, in turn, is in love with Christian, a handsome but inarticulate and slow-witted suitor.

Asked for help by Christian in wooing Roxane, Cyrano pours out his heart in romantic dialogues -- delivered under cover of night and dense foliage -- and through ardent love letters written in the name of Christian.

Presented here in a rich blank verse translation by poet Louis Untermeyer, this beloved romantic comedy will be warmly received by theater buffs as well as students and teachers of drama and literature.

Date Added: 05/08/2018

The Crying of Lot 49

The highly original satire about Oedipa Maas, a woman who finds herself enmeshed in a worldwide conspiracy, meets some extremely interesting characters and attains a not inconsiderable amount of self-knowledge.

Date Added: 05/08/2018

The Crucible

A haunting examination of groupthink and mass hysteria in a rural community

The place is Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, an enclave of rigid piety huddled on the edge of a wilderness. Its inhabitants believe unquestioningly in their own sanctity.

But in Arthur Miller's edgy masterpiece, that very belief will have poisonous consequences when a vengeful teenager accuses a rival of witchcraft--and then when those accusations multiply to consume the entire village.

First produced in 1953, at a time when America was convulsed by a new epidemic of witch-hunting, The Crucible brilliantly explores the threshold between individual guilt and mass hysteria, personal spite and collective evil.

It is a play that is not only relentlessly suspenseful and vastly moving but that compels readers to fathom their hearts and consciences in ways that only the greatest theater ever can.

Date Added: 05/08/2018