A woman's teenage son takes his own life. It is incomprehensible. The woman is a writer, and so she attempts to comprehend her grief in the space she knows best: on the page, as an imagined conversation with the child she has lost. He is as sharp and funny and serious in death as he was in life itself, and he will speak back to her, unable to offer explanation or solace, but not yet, not quite, gone.
Where Reasons End is an extraordinary portrait of parenthood, in all its painful contradictions of joy, humour and sorrow, and of what it is to lose a child.

The last major collection of Nabokov's published material, Think, Write, Speak brings together a treasure trove of previously uncollected texts from across the author's extraordinary career. Each phase of his wandering life is included, from a precocious essay written while still at Cambridge in 1921, through his fame in the aftermath of the publication of Lolita to the final, fascinating interviews given shortly before his death in 1977.
Introduced and edited by his biographer Brian Boyd, this is an essential work for anyone who has been drawn into Nabokov's literary orbit. Here he is at his most inspirational, curious, misleading and caustic. The seriousness of his aesthetic credo, his passion for great writing and his mix of delight and dismay at his own, sudden global fame in the 1950s are all brilliantly delineated here.

Refreshing, witty, and absolutely close to the heart, Core's nineteen stories, set in and around New York City, have an other-worldly quality along with a deep seriousness—even a moral seriousness. What we know of identity is smashed and in its place, true individuals emerge, each bristling with a unique sexuality, a belief-system all their own. Reminiscent of Jane Bowles, William Burroughs, and Colette, her writing glows with an authenticity that is intoxicating and rare.

This enduringly popular tale of love and revenge in the post-Napoleonic era follows Edmond Dantes as he prepares to captain his own ship and marry his beloved Mercedes. But on his wedding day, he is betrayed by spiteful enemies and arrested on trumped-up charges. Condemned to lifelong imprisonment, he befriends Faria, a priest and fellow inmate with an escape plan. When Faria dies, Edmond escapes alone. Free at last, and incredibly wealthy, Edmond enters society posing as the Count of Monte Cristo to reclaim his lost love and enact a terrible vengeance on his accusers.

The woods were gradually thinning. I was tormented by strange hallucinations. I gazed at the weird tree trunks, around some of which were coiled thick, flesh-coloured snakes; suddenly I thought I saw, between the trunks, as though through my fingers, the mirror of a half-open wardrobe'. These three stories of menace, magic and melancholy display Vladimir Nabokov's astonishing range and inventiveness. Whether describing an escape across a surreal tropical landscape, a fateful meeting or an unexpected - and threatening - return, each tale shows his dazzling sleight of hand, intellectual playfulness and fantastical imagination. This book includes "Terra Incognita", "Spring in Fialta" and "The Doorbell".

In his latest book, Burroughs pushes into new territory, once again committing the unspeakable crime of questioning the reality structure. Dreams, always a rich source of imagery in Burroughs' works, here become a direct and powerful force. My Education, direct, honest, humorous and subversive, is a truly original work.

A perennial favorite in the Norton Critical Editions series, Pride and Prejudice is based on the 1813 first edition text, which has been thoroughly annotated for undergraduate readers.
"Backgrounds and Sources" includes biographical portraits of Austen by members of her family and by acclaimed biographers Claire Tomalin and David Nokes. Seventeen of Austen's letters—eight of them new to the Third Edition—allow readers to glimpse the close-knit society that was Austen's world, both in life and in her writing. Samples of Austen's early writing—from the epistolary Love and FriendshipA Collection of Letters—allow readers to trace her growth as a writer as well as to read her fiction comparatively.
"Criticism" features eighteen assessments of the novel by nineteenth- and twentieth-century commentators, six of them new to the Third Edition. Among them is an interview with Colin Firth on the recent BBC television adaptation of the novel. Also included are pieces by Richard Whately, Margaret Oliphant, Richard Simpson, D. W. Harding, Dorothy Van Ghent, Alistair Duckworth, Stuart Tave, Marilyn Butler, Nina Auerbach, Susan Morgan, Claudia L. Johnson, Susan Fraiman, Deborah Kaplan, Tara Goshal Wallace, Cheryl L. Nixon, David Spring, Edward Ahearn, and Donald Gray.
Also included are a Note on Money, a Chronology of Austen's life and work—new to the Third Edition—and an updated Selected Bibliography.
About the Series: No other series of classic texts equals the caliber of the Norton Critical Editions. Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with the comprehenive pedagogical apparatus necessary to appreciate the work fully. Careful editing, first-rate translation, and thorough explanatory annotations allow each text to meet the highest literary standards while remaining accessible to students. Each edition is printed on acid-free paper and every text in the series remains in print. Norton Critical Editions are the choice for excellence in scholarship for students at more than 2,000 universities worldwide.

<i>On The Road</i> swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognized as a modern classic, Kerouac's American Dream is nearer that of Walt Whitman than F. Scott Fitzgerald's, and the narrative goes racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and passion.

A man of independent means oddly suited to survival amid the chaos of modern life, Inni Wintrop is a committed dabbler, content to casually wander the streets of Amsterdam, follow the dips and rises of the stock exchange and commodities market, speculate in art and love, and write a newspaper horoscope column. But his inconsistencies are interrupted when he meets two men who are the epitome of order and regulation.

<b>Celebrating the Arthur Miller centennial year, an eye-catching new Penguin Plays edition of the work that established him as a leading voice in the American theater</b><br />  <br /> In 1947, Arthur Miller exploded onto Broadway with his first major work, <i>All My Sons</i>, winning both the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best New Play and the Tony for Best Author. The play introduced themes that would preoccupy Miller throughout his career: the relationships between fathers and sons and the conflict between business and personal ethics. This striking new edition adds <i>All My Sons</i> to the elegant Penguin Plays series—now in beautifully redesigned covers.<br />  <br /> Joe Keller and Steve Deever, partners in a machine shop during World War II, turned out defective airplane parts, causing the deaths of many men. Deever was sent to prison while Keller escaped punishment and went back to business, making himself very wealthy in the ensuing years. A love affair between Keller’s son, Chris, and Ann Deever, Steve’s daughter; the bitterness of George Deever, who returns from the war to find his father in prison and his father’s partner free; and the reaction of Chris Keller to his father’s guilt escalate toward a climax of electrifying intensity.

<b>In Thomas Ligotti's first nonfiction outing, an examination of the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life through an insightful, unsparing argument that proves the greatest horrors are not the products of our imagination but instead are found in reality. </b><br /><br />"There is a signature motif discernible in both works of philosophical pessimism and supernatural horror. It may be stated thus: Behind the scenes of life lurks something pernicious that makes a nightmare of our world."<br /><br />His fiction is known to be some of the most terrifying in the genre of supernatural horror, but Thomas Ligotti's first nonfiction book may be even scarier. Drawing on philosophy, literature, neuroscience, and other fields of study, Ligotti takes the penetrating lens of his imagination and turns it on his audience, causing them to grapple with the brutal reality that they are living a meaningless nightmare, and anyone who feels otherwise is simply acting out an optimistic fallacy. At once a guidebook to pessimistic thought and a relentless critique of humanity's employment of self-deception to cope with the pervasive suffering of their existence, <i>The Conspiracy against the Human Race</i> may just convince readers that there is more than a measure of truth in the despairing yet unexpectedly liberating negativity that is widely considered a hallmark of Ligotti's work.

At Logos College in West Texas, huge young men, vacuum-packed into shoulder pads and shiny helmets, play football with intense passion. During an uncharacteristic winning season, the perplexed and distracted running back Gary Harkness has periodic fits of nuclear glee; he is fueled and shielded by his fear of and fascination with nuclear conflict. Among some of the players, the terminologies of football and nuclear war—the language of end zones—become interchangeable, and their meaning deteriorates as the collegiate year runs its course. In this triumphantly funny novel, Don DeLillo explores the the borders of organized violence.

<b>The magnificent second novel from the legendary author of <i>One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest...</i></b> <br /><br /> Following the astonishing success of his first novel, <i>One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest</i>, Ken Kesey wrote what Charles Bowden calls "one of the few essential books written by an American in the last half century." This wild-spirited tale tells of a bitter strike that rages through a small lumber town along the Oregon coast. Bucking that strike out of sheer cussedness are the Stampers. Out of the Stamper family's rivalries and betrayals Ken Kesey has crafted a novel with the mythic impact of Greek tragedy.

This work of art reflects life in Ireland at the turn of the last century, and by rejecting euphemism, reveals to the Irish their unromantic realities. Each of the 15 stories offers glimpses into the lives of ordinary Dubliners, and collectively they paint a portrait of a nation.<br /><br />Joyce's first major work, written when he was only twenty-five, brought his city to the world for the first time. His stories are rooted in the rich detail of Dublin life, portraying ordinary, often defeated lives with unflinching realism. He writes of social decline, sexual desire and exploitation, corruption and personal failure, yet creates a brilliantly compelling, unique vision of the world and of human experience.<br /><br />An alternate cover of this ISBN can be found <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35224089-dubliners">here</a>.

<i>Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780140449136</i><br /><br /><i>'Crime? What crime?...My killing a loathsome, harmful louse, a filthy old moneylender woman...and you call that a crime?'</i><br /><br />Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. Only Sonya, a downtrodden prostitute, can offer the chance of redemption.<br /><br />This vivid translation by David McDuff has been acclaimed as the most accessible version of Dostoyevsky's great novel, rendering its dialogue with a unique force and naturalism. This edition also includes a new chronology of Dostoyevsky's life and work.

Seventeen-year-old Ling-ling joins a revolutionary theater group carrying out reforms in the Chinese countryside in 1949 and amid tumultous events, she grows toward maturity.

Almost a decade in the making, this much-anticipated grand history of postwar Europe from one of the world's most esteemed historians and intellectuals is a singular achievement. <i>Postwar</i> is the first modern history that covers all of Europe, both east and west, drawing on research in six languages to sweep readers through thirty-four nations and sixty years of political and cultural change-all in one integrated, enthralling narrative. Both intellectually ambitious and compelling to read, thrilling in its scope and delightful in its small details, <i>Postwar</i> is a rare joy.<br /><br />Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize<br />Winner of the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Book Award<br />One of the <i>New York Times</i>'<i> </i>Ten Best Books of the Year.<br /><br /><i>Table of contents</i><br /><br />About the author<br />Copyright page<br />Dedication<br />Preface &amp; acknowledgement<br />Introduction<br /><br />PART ONE - Post-War: 1945-1953<br />1. The legacy of war<br />2. Retribution<br />3. The rehabilitation of Europe<br />4. The impossible settlement<br />5. The coming of the Cold War<br />6. Into the whirlwind<br />7. Culture wars<br />CODA The end of old Europe<br /><br />PART TWO - Prosperity and its discontents: 1953-1971<br />8. The politics of stability<br />9. Lost illusions<br />10. The age of affluence<br />POSTSCRIPT: A Tale of two economies<br />11. The Social Democrat moment<br />12. The spectre of revolution<br />13. The end of the affair<br /><br />PART THREE - Recessional: 1971-1989<br />14. Diminished expectations<br />15. Politics in a new key<br />16. A time of transition<br />17. The new realism<br />18. The power of the powerless<br />19. The end of the old order<br /><br />PART FOUR - After the Fall: 1989-2005<br />20. A fissile continent<br />21. The reckoning<br />22. The old Europe -and the new<br />23. The varieties of Europe<br />24. Europe as a way of life<br /><br />Photo crdits<br />Suggestions for further readings

In this intimate narrative journey, Hoffman returns to her Polish homeland and five other countries--Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and the two nations of the former Czechoslovakia--to vividly portray a landscape in the midst of change. "Alert and intuitive."--The Washington Post. Author readings.

If you reward your children for doing their homework, they will usually respond by getting it done. But is this the most effective method of motivation? No, says psychologist Edward L. Deci, who challenges traditional thinking and shows that this method actually works <i>against</i> performance. The best way to motivate people—at school, at work, or at home—is to support their sense of autonomy. Explaining the reasons why a task is important and then allowing as much personal freedom as possible in carrying out the task will stimulate interest and commitment, and is a much more effective approach than the standard system of reward and punishment. We are all inherently interested in the world, argues Deci, so why not nurture that interest in each other? Instead of asking, "How can I motivate people?" we should be asking, "How can I create the conditions within which people will motivate themselves?""An insightful and provocative meditation on how people can become more genuinely engaged and succesful in pursuing their goals." —<b>Publisher's Weekly</b>