"Nothing Like the Sun" is a magnificent, bawdy telling of Shakespeare's love life. Starting with the young Will, the novel is a romp that follows Will's maturation into sex and writing. It is at the same time a serious look at the forces that midwife art, the effects of time and place, and the ordinariness that is found side by side with the extraordinariness of genius.

In Monterey, on the California coast, Sweet Thursday is what they call the day after Lousy Wednesday, which is one of those days that is just naturally bad. Returning to the scene of "Cannery Row," the weedy lots and junk heaps and flophouses of Monterey, John Steinbeck once more brings to life the denizens of a netherworld of laughter and tears - from Fauna, new headmistress of the local brothel, to Hazel, a bum whose mother must have wanted a daughter.

This sprawling and often brutal novel, set in the rich farmlands of California's Salinas Valley, follows the intertwined destinies of two families--the Trasks and the Hamiltons--whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr T.C.B.Cook

Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) is best known for War and Peace and Anna Karenina, commonly regarded as amongst the greatest novels ever written. He also, however, wrote many masterly short stories, and this volume contains four of the longest and best in distinguished translations that have stood the test of time. In the early story 'Family Happiness', Tolstoy explores courtship and marriage from the point of view of a young wife. In 'The Kreutzer Sonata' he gives us a terrifying study of marital breakdown, in 'The Devil' a powerful depiction of the power of sexual temptation, and, in perhaps the finest of all, 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich', he portrays the long agony of a man gradually coming to terms with his own mortality.

Librarian's note: See alternate cover edition of ISBN 1840224533 here.

An enlightening and entertaining collection of the most esteemed love poems in the English canon, retold in contemporary language everyone can understand
 
James Anthony has long enjoyed poetry with a strict adherence to beat, rhythm, and rhyming patterns, which he likens to the very best pop songs. This drew him to the rewarding 14-line structure of Shakespeare’s sonnets, yet he often found their abstract language frustratingly unintelligible. One day, out of curiosity, he rewrote Sonnet 18—Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day—line-by-line, in the strict five-beat iambic pentameter and rhyming patterns of the original, but in a contemporary language a modern reader could easily understand. The meaning and sentiment—difficult to spot, initially—came to life, revealing new intricacies in the workings of Shakespeare's heart.
 
And so, James embarked on a full-time, year-long project to rewrite all 154 of the Bard's eternal verses creating SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS, RETOLD. This collection of masterful reinterpretations brilliantly demystifies and breathes new life into Shakespeare's work, demonstrating the continued resonance of a playwright whose popularity remains over 400 years after his death. Now, the passion, heartbreak, deception, reconciliation, and mortality of Shakespeare’s originals can be understood by all, without the need to cross reference to an enjoyment-sapping study-guide. Coming with a foreword by Stephen Fry, this is a stunning collection of beautiful love poems made new.

Tragic tale of a retarded man and the friend who loves and tries to protect him. With illustrations from the movie starring John Malkovich and Gary Sinise.

Edith Grossman's definitive English translation of the Spanish masterpiece. Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, "Don Quixote" chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. Unless you read Spanish, you've never read "Don Quixote." "Though there have been many valuable English translations of "Don Quixote, " I would commend Edith Grossman's version for the extraordinarily high quality of her prose. The Knight and Sancho are so eloquently rendered by Grossman that the vitality of their characterization is more clearly conveyed than ever before. There is also an astonishing contextualization of Don Quixote and Sancho in Grossman's translation that I believe has not been achieved before. The spiritual atmosphere of a Spain already in steep decline can be felt throughout, thanks to her heightened quality of diction. Grossman might be called the Glenn Gould of translators, because she, too, articulates every note. Reading her amazing mode of finding equivalents in English for Cervantes's darkening vision is an entrance into a further understanding of why this great book contains within itself all the novels that have followed in its sublime wake." From the Introduction by Harold Bloom Miguel de Cervantes was born on September 29, 1547, in Alcala de Henares, Spain. At twenty-three he enlisted in the Spanish militia and in 1571 fought against the Turks in the battle of Lepanto, where a gunshot wound permanently crippled his left hand. He spent four more years at sea and then another five as a slave after being captured by Barbary pirates. Ransomed by his family, he returned to Madrid but his disability hampered him; it was in debtor's prison that he began to write "Don Quixote." Cervantes wrote many other works, including poems and plays, but he remains best known as the author of "Don Quixote." He died on April 23, 1616.

狐狸不属于野兽，不属于我们人类，也不属于神灵。

她是一个永恒的偷渡者，一个在世界之间穿梭自如的移民，被抓到逃票时，就会用尾巴玩球，表演她廉价的小把戏，目光极为短浅地将观众转瞬即逝的赞叹当成了爱。那是她的荣耀时刻。

其他的一切都是恐惧的历史：逃避猎人的子弹、不停狂吠的猎犬 、迫害、殴 打、舔舐伤口、羞辱、孤独和廉价的安慰——一串鸡骨头做的手摇铃。

狐狸是作家的图腾。

2009年诺贝尔文学奖得主赫塔·米勒
罗马尼亚三部曲第二部
克莱斯特奖、都柏林文学奖获奖之作
一个女孩逃出权力阴影的冒险和悲剧
♝内容简介
来自贫困农村的大学生萝拉，为了去大城市上大学，不惜出卖肉体，却突然被发现在宿舍自杀。主人公和她的几位同学试图弄清萝拉死亡的真相，不料在齐奥塞斯库极权的阴影笼罩之下，寻找的道路扑朔迷离，暴力却如影随形。“心兽”充满寓意，即“内心的野兽”，是爱唱歌的祖母讲给主人公的，始终贯穿全书。
♝编辑推荐
◎ 赫塔·米勒，2009年诺贝尔文学奖得主，生于罗马尼亚德语村庄，以诗的凝炼，散文的率直，描绘流离失所者的处境，通过写作这种沉默的行动，赋予弱小者以尊严。
◎ 《心兽》出版于1994年，获得当年的克莱斯特奖，德语文学的重要奖项。1998年，击败玛格丽特·阿特伍德的《别名格蕾丝》，荣获国际都柏林文学奖。
◎ 年轻女孩萝拉从小村庄到城市上大学，但是灰暗的现实击溃了她。一个女性从满怀憧憬到逐渐失去希望的过程。
♝媒体推荐
米勒丰富、锐利、迷人的意象捕捉到了齐奥塞斯库时代罗马尼亚的超现实之美和困境。
——《波士顿书评》
赫塔·米勒胜在她的坦诚，《心兽》就是她的证词。……准确刻画了罗马尼亚生活的细节。
——《波士顿邮报》
作者的风格简朴又雄健，小说中的各个人物形象都很有力。这本不动声色叙述的书，既冷峻又美丽，既幽默又苦涩。
——都柏林文学奖颁奖词
♝2009年诺贝尔文学奖
“她专注于诗歌的凝练与散文的直率，描绘了无依之地居民的生活景观。”
——诺贝尔文学奖授奖理由
但为了确保我们自身的存在，我们仍然需要这些物体，这些姿态，这些词语。毕竟，我们能去掌握越多的词语，我们就越自由。即使我们的口被封住，我们还能试着通过姿态甚至物体来坚持我们自己的权利。对审查者而言，它们更加难以解读，要花费不少时间才会引起他们的警觉。而通过引起警觉前的大量时间，它们把我们受到的羞辱转化为另一种形式的尊严。
——诺贝尔文学奖获奖演说

Today, nearly forty years after his death, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures. We have begun publishing his many works for the first time as blackspine Penguin Classics featuring eye-catching, newly commissioned art. This season we continue with the seven spectacular and influential books East of Eden, Cannery Row, In Dubious Battle, The Long Valley, The Moon Is Down, The Pastures of Heaven, and Tortilla Flat. Penguin Classics is proud to present these seminal works to a new generation of readers—and to the many who revisit them again and again.

On vacation from school, Denis goes to stay at Crome, an English country house inhabitated by several of Huxley's most outlandish characters--from Mr. Barbecue-Smith, who writes 1,500 publishable words an hour by "getting in touch" with his "subconscious," to Henry Wimbush, who is obsessed with writing the definitive HISTORY OF CROME. Denis's stay proves to be a disaster amid his weak attempts to attract the girl of his dreams and the ridicule he endures regarding his plan to write a novel about love and art. Lambasting the post-Victorian standards of morality, CROME YELLOW is a witty masterpiece that, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's words, "is too irnonic to be called satire and too scornful to be called irony."

An extraordinary new novel from the author of Never Let Me Go and the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day.
"You've long set your heart against it, Axl, I know. But it's time now to think on it anew. There's a journey we must go on, and no more delay . . ."
The Buried Giant begins as a couple set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen in years.
Sometimes savage, often intensely moving, Kazuo Ishiguro's first novel in nearly a decade is about lost memories, love, revenge, and war.

The definitive edition of Virginia Woolf's last and most lyrical work containing the original text she was working on at the time of her death. The story takes place at Pointz Hall, the country home of the Oliver family for 120 years, and revolves around the village pageant which aspires to present the entire history of England from the Middle Ages to the summer of 1939. The comic events on stage, the reactions of the villagers in the audience, the blend of past and present all affirm Virginia Woolf's belief in art as the unifying principle of life.

Written in 1937, this was the most popular of Virginia Woolf's novels during her lifetime. It explores a rich variety of themes such as sex, feminism, family life, education and politics in English society from 1800 to the 1930s, as they affect one large middle-class London family.
As the Pargiters, a middle-class English family, move from the oppressive confines of the Victorian home of the 1880s to the `present day' of the 1930s, they are weighed down by the pressures of war, the social strictures of patriarchy, capitalism and Empire, and the rise of Fascism. Engaging with a painful struggle between utopian hopefulness and crippled with despair, the novel is a savage indictment of Virginia Woolf's society, but its bitter sadness is relieved by the longing for some better way of life, where `freedom and justice' might really be possible.
This is Virginia Woolf's longest novel, and the one she found the most difficult to write. The most popular of all her writings during her lifetime, it can now be re-read as the most challengingly political, even revolutionary, of all her books. This text refers to the Paperback edition.
The story of the Pargiter family - their intimacies and estrangements, anxieties and triumphs - mapped out amongst the bustling rhythms of London's streets during the first decade of the 20th century. The Pargiter children must learn to find their footing in a world of rapidly changing rules.

Waugh tells the story of the Marchmain family. Aristocratic, beautiful and charming, the Marchmains are indeed a symbol of England and her decline in this novel of the upper class of the 1920s and the abdication of responsibility in the 1930s.

Since its publication in 1946, George Orwell's fable of a workers' revolution gone wrong has rivaled Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea as the Shortest Serious Novel It's OK to Write a Book Report About. (The latter is three pages longer and less fun to read.) Fueled by Orwell's intense disillusionment with Soviet Communism, Animal Farm is a nearly perfect piece of writing, both an engaging story and an allegory that actually works. When the downtrodden beasts of Manor Farm oust their drunken human master and take over management of the land, all are awash in collectivist zeal. Everyone willingly works overtime, productivity soars, and for one brief, glorious season, every belly is full. The animals' Seven Commandment credo is painted in big white letters on the barn. All animals are equal. No animal shall drink alcohol, wear clothes, sleep in a bed, or kill a fellow four-footed creature. Those that go upon four legs or wings are friends and the two-legged are, by definition, the enemy. Too soon, however, the pigs, who have styled themselves leaders by virtue of their intelligence, succumb to the temptations of privilege and power. "We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of the farm depend on us. Day and night, we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples." While this swinish brotherhood sells out the revolution, cynically editing the Seven Commandments to excuse their violence and greed, the common animals are once again left hungry and exhausted, no better off than in the days when humans ran the farm. Satire Animal Farm may be, but it's a stony reader who remains unmoved when the stalwart workhorse, Boxer, having given his all to his comrades, is sold to the glue factory to buy booze for the pigs. Orwell's view of Communism is bleak indeed, but given the history of the Russian people since 1917, his pessimism has an air of prophecy. --Joyce Thompson --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

In this vivid portrait of one day in a woman's life, Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of a party she is to give that evening. As she readies her house she is flooded with memories and re-examines the choices she has made over the course of her life.

Emil Sinclair is a young boy raised in a bourgeois home, amidst what is described as a Scheinwelt, a play on words that means "world of light" as well as "world of illusion". Emil's entire existence can be summarized as a struggle between two worlds: the show world of illusion (related to the Hindu concept of maya) and the real world, the world of spiritual truth. In the course of the novel, accompanied and prompted by his mysterious classmate 'Max Demian', he detaches from and revolts against the superficial ideals of the world of appearances and eventually awakens into a realization of self.

See alternate cover edition with same ISBN here .

“韩国八零后天才女作家”金爱烂累积五年的八段人生
《你的夏天还好吗？》是金爱烂的第三部短篇小说集，共收入八篇作品。书中形形色色的人物大多面临绝境，赤裸裸地暴露在现实之中，却试图寻找渺茫的希望。尤其值得一提的是，其中五篇作品聚焦于三十岁左右的年轻女性，细腻地描摹了她们在爱情、友情、婚姻、工作等方面的心理状态，或许会激起中国女性读者的共鸣。作为韩国文坛*有代表性的女作家，金爱烂赢得了大量读者的喜爱，很大程度上归功于作品主人公的力量。