Bøger udgivet af EVERYMANS LIB

Lucie Manette had been separated from her father for eighteen years while he languished in Paris's most feared prison, the Bastille. Finally reunited, the Manettes's fortunes become inextricably intertwined with those of two men, the heroic aristocrat Darnay, and the dissolute lawyer, Carton. Their story, which encompasses violence, revenge, love and redemption, is grippingly played out against the backdrop of the terrifying brutality of the French Revolution.A Tale of Two Cities begins on a muddy English road in an atmosphere charged with mystery and drama, and it ends in the Paris of the French Revolution with one of the most famous acts of self-sacrifice in literature. In between lies one of Charles Dickens's most exciting books- a historical novel that, generation after generation, has given readers access to the profound human dramas that lie behind cataclysmic social and political events.Famous for the character of Sydney Carton, who sacrifices himself upon the guillotine-"It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done"-the novel is also a powerful study of crowd psychology and the dark emotions aroused by the Revolution, and is illuminated by Dickens's lively comedy.This edition reprints the original Everyman introduction by G. K. Chesterton and includes sixteen illustrations by Phiz.

'Animal Farm' is the most famous by far of all twentieth-century political allegories, and its account of a group of barnyard animals who revolt against their vicious human master and the submit to a tyranny erected by their own kind can fairly be said to have become a universal drama for our time.

Since its first publication in 1908, generations of adults and children have cherished Kenneth Grahame's classic, The Wind in the Willows. In this entrancing, lyrical world of gurgling rivers and whispering reeds live four of the wisest, wittiest, noblest, and most lovable creatures in all literature-Rat, Mole, Badger, and Toad of Toad Hall. Like true adventurers, they glory in life's simplest pleasures and natural wonders. But it is Toad, cocky and irrepressible in his goggles and overcoat, whose passion for motorcars represents the free and fearless spirit in all of us; just as it's Toad's downfall that inspires the others to test Grahame's most precious theme-the miracle of loyalty and friendship.

The two Alice books--Lewis Carroll's masterpieces--are ranked by many as peers of the great adult works of English literature. And despite their riches of "untranslatable" puns, nonsense, and parody, they have been happily translated around the world. The matchless original illustrations by Tenniel share with Carroll's text the glory of making Alice immortal.

Peter, Wendy, Captain Hook, the lost boys, and Tinker Bell have filled the hearts of children ever since Barrie's play first opened in London in 1904 and became an immediate sensation. Now this funny, haunting modern myth is presented with Bedford's wonderful illustrations, which first appeared in the author's own day, have long been out of print, and have never been equaled.

In the early eleventh century Murasaki Shikibu, a lady in the Heian court of Japan, wrote what many consider to be the world's first novel, more than three centuries before Chaucer. The Heian era (794-1185) is recognized as one of the very greatest periods in Japanese literature, and The Tale of Genji is not only the unquestioned prose masterpiece of that period but also the most lively and absorbing account we have of the intricate, exquisite, highly ordered court culture that made such a masterpiece possible. Genji is the favorite son of the emperor but also a man of dangerously passionate impulses. In his highly refined world, where every dalliance is an act of political consequence, his shifting alliances and secret love affairs create great turmoil and very nearly destroy him. Edward Seidensticker's translation of Lady Murasaki's splendid romance has been honored throughout the English-speaking world for its fluency, scholarly depth, and deep literary tact and sensitivity.

Introduction by Irving Howe; Translation by Willa and Edwin Muir

Hester Prynne is a beautiful young woman. She is also an outcast. In the eyes of her neighbours she has committed an unforgivable sin. Everyone knows that her little daughter Pearl is the product of an illicit affair but no one knows the identity of Pearl's father. Hester's refusal to name him brings more condemnation upon her. But she stands strong in the face of public scorn, even when she is forced to wear the sign of her shame sewn onto her clothes: the scarlet letter "A" for "Adulteress."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-seeking husband-possesses a reality heightened by Hawthorne's pure human sympathy and his unmixed devotion to his supposedly fallen but fundamentally innocent heroine. In its moral force and the beauty of its conciliations, The Scarlet Letter rightly deserves its stature as the first great novel written by an American, the novel that announced an American literature equal to any in the world.

Northanger Abbey is a perfectly aimed literary parody that is also a withering satire of the commercial aspects of marriage among the English gentry at the turn of the nineteenth century. But most of all, it is the story of the initiation into life of its naïve but sweetly appealing heroine, Catherine Morland, a willing victim of the contemporary craze for Gothic literature who is determined to see herself as the heroine of a dark and thrilling romance. When she is invited to Northanger Abbey, the grand though forbidding ancestral seat of her suitor, Henry Tilney, she finds herself embroiled in a real drama of misapprehension, mistreatment, and mortification, until common sense and humor-and a crucial clarification of Catherine's financial status-resolve her problems and win her the approval of Henry's formidable father.Written in 1798 but not published until after Austen's death in 1817, Northanger Abbey is characteristically clearheaded and strong, and infinitely subtle in its comedy.

In its adventurous happenings-its abductions, duels, and sexual intrigues-A Hero of Our Time looks backward to the tales of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron, so beloved by Russian society in the 1820s and '30s. In the character of its protagonist, Pechorin-the archetypal Russian antihero-Lermontov's novel looks forward to the subsequent glories of a Russian literature that it helped, in great measure, to make possible.This edition includes a Translator's Foreword by Vladimir Nabokov, who translated the novel in collaboration with his son, Dmitri Nabokov.

Introduction by A. S. Byatt Willa Cather's story of the missionary priest Father Jean Marie Latour and his work of faith in the wilderness of the Southwest is told with a spare but sensuous directness and profound artistry. When Latour arrives in 1851 in the territory of New Mexico, newly acquired by the United States, what he finds is a vast desert region of red hills and tortured arroyos that is American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. Over the next four decades, Latour works gently and tirelessly to spread his faith and to build a soaring cathedral out of the local golden rock-while contending with unforgiving terrain, derelict and sometimes rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP shares a limitless, craggy beauty with the New Mexico landscape of desert, mountain, and canyon in which its central action takes place, and its evocations of that landscape and those who are drawn to it suggest why Cather is acknowledged without question as the most poetically exact chronicler of the American frontier.

'In Robert Fagles' beautifully rendered text, the Iliad overwhelms us afresh. The huge themes--godlike, yet utterly human--of savagery and calculation, of destiny defied, of triumph and grief compel our own humanity. Time after time, one pauses and re-reads before continuing. Fagles' voice is always that of a poet and scholar of our own age as he conveys the power of Homer. Robert Fagles and Bernard Knox are to be congratulated and praised on this admirable work.

One of the supreme masterpieces of world literature, the Homeric saga of the shipwrecks, wanderings, and homecoming of the master tactician Odysseus encompasses a virtual inventory of the themes and attitudes that have shaped Western culture. The tale of Odysseus's encounters with such obstacles as Calypso, Circe, Scylla and Charybdis, the Sirens, and the lotus-eaters, and his dramatic return to Ithaca and his patient wife, Penelope, forms a prototype for all subsequent Western epics.Robert Fitzgerald's much-acclaimed translation, fully possessing as it does the body and spirit of the original, has helped to assure the continuing vitality of Europe's most influential work of poetry. This edition includes twenty-five new line drawings by Barnaby Fitzgerald.

The devil, disguised as a magician, descends upon Moscow in the 1930s with his riotous band, which includes a talking cat and an expert assassin. Together they succeed in comically befuddling a population which denies the devil's existence, even as it is confronted with the diabolic results of a magic act gone wrong. This visit to the capital of world atheism has several aims, one of which concerns the fate of the Master, a writer who has written a novel about Pontius Pilate, and is now in a mental hospital. Margarita, the despairing and daring heroine, becomes a witch in an effort to save the Master, and agrees to become the devil's hostess at his annual spring ball. By turns acidly satiric, fantastic, and ironically philosophical, this work constantly surprises and entertains, as the action switches back and forth between the Moscow of the 1930s and first-century Jerusalem.

Joseph Conrad's foresight and his ability to distill human adventure from complex historical circumstances were so keen that his greatest novel, Nostromo-though more than a century old-says as much about Latin America as any recent account of that region's turbulent political life. Conrad's story is set in the fictional Costaguana, a South American republic with a troubled history of tyranny and revolution. When wealthy businessman Charles Gould decides to use his valuable silver mine to support the current dictator in hopes of achieving stability, he instead sets off a new round of chaos and warfare. Fearful that his silver will fall into the hands of invading revolutionaries, Gould entrusts Nostromo-a man of the people considered by all to be incorruptible-with the task of escaping with and hiding a boatload of ingots from the mine. Nostromo's heroic actions save his city from revolution, but the fate of the silver becomes his dark secret, one that will destroy him. Insistently dramatic in its storytelling, spectacular in its re-creation of the subtropical landscape, this picture of an insurrectionary society and the opportunities it provides for moral corruption gleams on every page with its author's impeccable intelligence.(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed).

In the grand tradition of the epic novel, Boris Pasternak's masterpiece brings to life the drama and immensity of the Russian Revolution through the story of the gifted physician-poet, Zhivago; the revolutionary, Strelnikov; and Lara, the passionate woman they both love. Caught up in the great events of politics and war that eventually destroy him and millions of others, Zhivago clings to the private world of family life and love, embodied especially in the magical Lara. First published in Italy in 1957, Doctor Zhivago was not allowed to appear in the Soviet Union until 1987, twenty-seven years after the author's death. Translated by Manya Harari and Max Hayward

The Sicilian prince, Don Fabrizio, hero of Lampedusa's great and only novel, is described as enormous in size, in intellect, and in sensuality. The book he inhabits shares his dimensions in its evocation of an aristocracy confronting democratic upheaval and the new force of nationalism. In the decades since its publication shortly after the author's death in 1957, The Leopard has come to be regarded as the twentieth century's greatest historical fiction.Introduction by David Gilmour; Translation by Archibald Colquhoun(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)

In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton depicts the glittering salons of Gilded Age New York with precision and wit, even as she movingly portrays the obstacles that impeded women's choices at the turn of the century. The beautiful, much-desired Lily Bart has been raised to be one of the perfect wives of the wealthy upper class, but her spark of character and independent drive prevents her from becoming one of the many women who will succeed in those circles. Though her desire for a comfortable life means that she cannot marry for love without money, her resistance to the rules of the social elite endangers her many marriage proposals. As Lily spirals down into debt and dishonor, her story takes on the resonance of classic tragedy. One of Wharton's most bracing and nuanced portraits of the life of women in a hostile, highly ordered world, The House of Mirth exposes the truths about American high society that its denizens most wished to deny. With an introduction by Pamela Knights.

Jane Eyre, a penniless orphan, is engaged as governess at Thornfield Hall by the mysterious Mr Rochester. Her integrity and independence are tested to the limit as their love for each other grows, and the secrets of Mr Rochester's past are revealed. Charlotte Brontë's novel about the passionate love between Jane Eyre, a young girl alone in the world, and the rich, brilliant, domineering Rochester has, ever since its publication in 1847, enthralled every kind of reader, from the most critical and cultivated to the youngest and most unabashedly romantic. It lives as one of the great triumphs of storytelling and as a moving affirmation of the prerogatives of the heart in the face of disappointment and misfortune. Jane Eyre has enjoyed huge popularity since first publication, and its success owes much to its exceptional emotional power.