Emo Nemo

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Vastralaya

Evan Shively (Perseus271)

Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fiction, by Joseph Conrad, is part of the Barnes &amp; Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes &amp; Noble Classics: * New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars * Biographies of the authors * Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events * Footnotes and endnotes * Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work * Comments by other famous authors * Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations * Bibliographies for further reading * Indices &amp; Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes &amp; Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.One of the most haunting stories ever written, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness follows Marlow, a riverboat captain, on a voyage into the African Congo at the height of European colonialism. Astounded by the brutal depravity he witnesses, Marlow becomes obsessed with meeting Kurtz, a famously idealistic and able man stationed farther along the river. What he finally discovers, however, is a horror beyond imagining. Heart of Darkness is widely regarded as a masterpiece for its vivid study of human nature and the greed and ruthlessness of imperialism. This collection also includes three of Conrad’s finest short stories: “Youth,” the author’s largely autobiographical tale of a young man’s ill-fated sea voyage, in which Marlow makes his first appearance, “The Secret Sharer,” and “Amy Forster.” Features a map of the Congo Free State.A. Michael Matin is a professor in the English Department of Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. He has published articles on various twentieth-century British and postcolonial writers.

The serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and the conflict between men and women.As time winds its way through their lives, the Ramsays face, alone and simultaneously, the greatest of human challenges and its greatest triumph—the human capacity for change.

The unfinished manuscript of The First Man was discovered in the wreckage of a car accident in which Camus died in 1960. Although it was not published for over thirty years, it was an instant bestseller when it finally appeared in 1994. The 'first man' is Jacques Cormery, whose poverty-stricken childhood in Algiers is made bearable by his love for his silent and illiterate mother, and by the teacher who transforms his view of the world. The most autobiographical of Camus's novels, it gives profound insights into his life, and the powerful themes underlying his work.

The Complete Stories brings together all of Kafka’s stories, from the classic tales such as “The Metamorphosis,” “In the Penal Colony,” and “A Hunger Artist” to shorter pieces and fragments that Max Brod, Kafka’s literary executor, released after Kafka’s death. With the exception of his three novels, the whole of Kafka’s narrative work is included in this volume. --penguinrandomhouse.comTwo Introductory parables: Before the law --Imperial message --Longer stories: Description of a struggle --Wedding preparations in the country --Judgment --Metamorphosis --In the penal colony --Village schoolmaster (The giant mole) --Blumfeld, and elderly bachelor --Warden of the tomb --Country doctor --Hunter Gracchus --Hunter Gracchus: A fragment --Great Wall of China --News of the building of the wall: A fragment --Report to an academy --Report to an academy: Two fragments --Refusal --Hunger artist --Investigations of a dog --Little woman --The burrow --Josephine the singer, or the mouse folk --Children on a country road --The trees --Clothes --Excursion into the mountains --Rejection --The street window --The tradesman --Absent-minded window-gazing --The way home --Passers-by --On the tram --Reflections for gentlemen-jockeys --The wish to be a red Indian --Unhappiness --Bachelor's ill luck --Unmasking a confidence trickster --The sudden walk --Resolutions --A dream --Up in the gallery --A fratricide --The next village --A visit to a mine --Jackals and Arabs --The bridge --The bucket rider --The new advocate --An old manuscript --The knock at the manor gate --Eleven sons --My neighbor --A crossbreed (A sport) --The cares of a family man --A common confusion --The truth about Sancho Panza --The silence of the sirens --Prometheus --The city coat of arms --Poseidon --Fellowship --At night --The problem of our laws --The conscripton of troops --The test --The vulture --The helmsman --The top --A little fable --Home-coming --First sorrow --The departure --Advocates --The married couple --Give it up! --On parables.

Thomas Mann's last great novel, first published in 1947 and now rendered into English by acclaimed translator John E. Woods, is a modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which Germany sells its soul to the Devil. Mann's protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, is the flower of German culture, a brilliant, isolated, overreaching figure, his radical new music a breakneck game played by art at the very edge of impossibility. In return for twenty-four years of unparalleled musical accomplishment, he bargains away his soul - and the ability to love his fellow man.Leverkühn's life story is a brilliant allegory of the rise of the Third Reich, of Germany's renunciation of its own humanity and its embrace of ambition and its nihilism. It is also Mann's most profound meditation on the German genius - both national and individual - and the terrible responsibilities of the truly great artist.

A gripping tale of human unrelieved horror, of survival and resilience, and of the ways in which humankind confronts death, The Plague is at once a masterfully crafted novel, eloquently understated and epic in scope, and a parable of ageless moral resonance, profoundly relevant to our times. In Oran, a coastal town in North Africa, the plague begins as a series of portents, unheeded by the people. It gradually becomes an omnipresent reality, obliterating all traces of the past and driving its victims to almost unearthly extremes of suffering, madness, and compassion.

'Murphy', Samuel Beckett's first published novel, was written in English and published in London in 1938; Beckett himself subsequently translated the book into French, and it was published in France in 1947. The novel recounts the hilarious but tragic life of Murphy in London as he attempts to establish a home and to amass sufficient fortune for his intended bride to join him.

Molloy, the first of the three masterpieces which constitute Samuel Beckett’s famous trilogy, appeared in French in 1951, followed seven months later by Malone Dies (Malone meurt), and two years later by The Unnamable (L’Innommable). Few works of contemporary literature have been so universally acclaimed as central to their time and to our understanding of the human experience.

Life is full of missed opportunities and hard decisions. Sometimes it’s difficult to know what to actually do.  Dubliners  creates an image of an ever movie city, of an ever moving exchange of people who experience the reality of life. And that’s the whole point: realism. Not everything goes well, not everything is perfectly constructed. Life is random and unpredictable. If we’re not careful it may escape from us entirely. There are two types of stories in  Dubliners. The first, and by far the most effective, are those associated with despair, nihilism and death. The second type deals with more ordinary aspects of modern life, the representation of the city and social exchanges. As a collection they provide an image of dark, murky city struggling to cope with the problems associated with rapid urbanisation. The stories do not intertwine, but you are left with the impression that they are not that far from each other: their proximity feels close as you read further into each one. The true mastery of Joyce’s writing reveals itself in what he doesn’t say, the subtle suggestions, the lingering questions, as each story closes without any sense of full resolution. And, again, is this not true of real life? In narrative tradition there is a structured beginning, middle and end, but in the reality of existence it doesn’t quite work this way. Life carries on. It doesn’t have a form of narrative closure, a convenient wrapping up of plot, after each wound we take in life. It carries on. We carry on. And for the Dubliners isolation carries on. \
  “He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor hear her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone.” \


American writer and journalist (1925-2009)

The world-famous masterpiece by Nobel laureate Thomas Mann -- here in a new translation by Michael Henry Heim.Published on the eve of World War I, a decade after Buddenbrooks had established Thomas Mann as a literary celebrity, Death in Venice tells the story of Gustav von Aschenbach, a successful but aging writer who follows his wanderlust to Venice in search of spiritual fulfillment that instead leads to his erotic doom.In the decaying city, besieged by an unnamed epidemic, he becomes obsessed with an exquisite Polish boy, Tadzio. "It is a story of the voluptuousness of doom," Mann wrote. "But the problem I had especially in mind was that of the artist's dignity."

Finn's Hotel is a posthumously-published collection of ten short narrative pieces written by Irish author James Joyce. Written in 1923, the works were not published until 2013 by Ithys Press, who claimed the work to be a precursor to Joyce's Finnegans Wake.Ithys Press published their fine arts edition of Finn's Hotel in June 2013. The edition was arranged with a preface by Danis Rose, an introduction by Seamus Deane, featuring eleven illustrations by Casey Sorrow, and design and letterpress printed by Michael Caine.The publication attracted controversy as some Joyce scholars labeled the works as drafts, not meant for publication.In the spring of 2014, James O'Sullivan wrote an article for Genetic Joyce Studies, “Finn’s Hotel and the Joycean Canon”, which uses computational stylistics to analyze the text of Finn's Hotel to determine whether the text is merely early drafts or should be part of Joyce's canon. O'Sullivan concluded that "the fragments within Finn’s Hotel are most likely drafts for what became Finnegans Wake" and that statistically "the criticisms of Ithys Press are seemingly upheld."

In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, a community devoted exclusively to sickness, as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.

Jim, a young British seaman, becomes first mate on the Patna, a ship full of pilgrims travelling to Mecca for the hajj. When the ship starts rapidly taking on water and disaster seems imminent, Jim joins his captain and other crew members in abandoning the ship and its passengers. A few days later, they are picked up by a British ship. However, the Patna and its passengers are later also saved, and the reprehensible actions of the crew are exposed. The other participants evade the judicial court of inquiry, leaving Jim to the court alone. He is publicly censured for this action and the novel follows his later attempts at coming to terms with his past. The novel is counted as one of 100 best books of the 20th century.Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), was a Polish author who wrote in English after settling in England. Conrad is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties. He wrote stories and novels, often with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an indifferent world. He was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature.Contents: Lord JimMemoirs &amp; Letters:A Personal Record; or Some ReminiscencesThe Mirror of the SeaNotes on Life &amp; LettersBiography &amp; Critical Essays:Joseph Conrad (A Biography) by Hugh WalpoleJoseph Conrad by John Albert MacyA Conrad Miscellany by John Albert MacyJoseph Conrad by Virginia Woolf

Translated and with a preface by Mark HarmanLeft unfinished by Kafka in 1922 and not published until 1926, two years after his death, The Castle is the haunting tale of K.’s relentless, unavailing struggle with an inscrutable authority in order to gain access to the Castle. Scrupulously following the fluidity and breathlessness of the sparsely punctuated original manuscript, Mark Harman’s new translation reveals levels of comedy, energy, and visual power, previously unknown to English language readers.

'Nature only knows one thing, and that’s the present. Present, present, eternal present, like a big, huge, giant wave – colossal, bright and beautiful, full of life and death, climbing into the sky, standing in the seas. You must go along with the actual, the Here-and-Now, the glory -’Following the success of his lengthy, 1953 National Book Award Winning novel The Adventures of Augie March, Nobel laureate Saul Bellow returned in 1956 with the very slender Seize the Day. Called ‘the most Russian novella written in America’ by critic James Wood ¹, one of Seize ‘s greatest successes is the enormous accumulation of ideas, social, spiritual and psychological commentary, and pure literary vitamins packed into this snack of a novel that rivals the depth of novels three to four times it’s length, not to mention the enrapturing prose that pulls this story along. Much like the Russian literary giants of whom Bellow highly regarded, Seize is intensely psychological as Bellow takes a page from Wilhelm Reich  (whose first name is also that of Seize’s protagonist) with regards to character analysis and social commentary. This novel is ripe for classroom discussion and analysis, with carefully crafted metaphors and motifs that seem effortlessly blended into the narrative, similar to the way Dr. Tamkin builds his character mask through ‘hints, made dully as asides, grew by repetition into sensational claims.’ Bursting with insight and frosted in delicious prose, Bellow breaks down the socio-economic conditions of the 50’s,and their implications of the common man through an ostensive examination of Wilhelm Reich’s psychoanalytic theories.Much like Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses, Seize the Day follows a Jewish protagonist, through the course of one day while simultaneously painting the larger portrait of the character’s life history. However, Seize the Day stands on it’s own taking the reader through an entirely different approach and resolution as a psychoanalysis of Tommy Wilhelm (formerly Wilhelm ‘Wilky’ Adler before adopting his stage name²). A bit of background on Wilhelm Reich, an Austrian psychoanalyst and contemporary of Sigmund Freud, is extremely beneficial towards understanding Bellow’s novel, as Reich’s theories and practices constitute the framework for the novel. \
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  Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957)\
In short, Reich’s psychoanalysis - beyond the standard Freudian constructs of figurative castration, Oedipal complex, etc. centered on a belief that ‘ neurosis is rooted in physical, sexual, and socio-economic conditions, and in particular in a lack of what he called "orgastic potency”’. The ‘orgastic potency’ refers to a theory that an orgasm is a healthy release of libido and creative powers fueled through love, which can become blocked by social conditions and other outside forces, thus creating an ‘orgastic impotency’ which directly causes neurosis and heath disorders (Reich believed Freud’s jaw cancer was unrelated to his tobacco use and was instead attributed to Freud ‘biting down’ of his [Freud’s] problems). This was the primary focus for character analysis, and lead to his practice of Vegetotherapy. Vegeotherapy was a form of psychotherapy consisting of the patient removing their ‘body armor’ – both figuratively and literally as the patient would conduct the therapy nude, and simulate extreme stress and emotions with the aim of responding to them and releasing all the built up emotional blockage (to achieve an emotional orgasm) ³.Following the ideas of Reich, Bellow probes the ‘neurosis’ of Wilhelm by setting him in financial ruin (socio-economic conditions), an estranged marriage brought on by his love affairs and belief that his wife is attempting to choke him off (castration), and at odds with his father (Oedipal complex – the more awkward aspects of this complex are only lightly touched upon, as when Wilhelm reflects upon his mothers death he feels a ‘great pull at the very center of his soul,’ yet ‘never identified what struck within him’). Wilhelm looks back on his past as a laundry list of failures, but shows hope for recovery by always believing that he can get a new start. This ‘new start’, in this case putting the last of his money into commodities with Dr. Tamkin on Tamkin’s ‘can’t fail’ get-rich-quick promises, seem less and less possible now that he is graying and in his 40s, and Bellow does not hesitate from depicting Wilhelm in a rather unflattering light as a slob, sloucher, pill-popper in denial, and rather whiney. Wilhelm does look at his past as a series of event leading him to his sad state, yet he does in part own up to his mistakes and does not shy away from accepting that it was his choices that brought him to those events. This ownership of his faults may be the only glimmer of potential recovery that Wilhelm displays from the start.The financial ruin of Wilhelm is a major focus of the novel, and should be addressed before proceeding into a discussion of the metaphorical vegeotherapy that Bellow conducts upon his protagonist. Reich was a outspoken Marxist and many of these anti-capitalistic beliefs take shape through both Tamkin and Wilhelm. ‘A man like you,’ Tamkin addresses Wilhelm in one of his many speeches, ‘humble for life, who wants to feel and live, has trouble – not wanting to exchange an ounce of soul for a pound of social power – he’ll never make it without help in a world like this.’ Both men see money as a vicious tool for keeping others down. It is the driving force of New York, according to them, and the world, and is always used as a weapon. Wilhelm feels castrated by his wife’s refusal to grant him a divorce and by her still living off his money, which she demands in increasing quantities. Wilhelm believes his own suffering is inflated due to the downward spiral of poverty and having others always riding on his back dragging him down. ‘A rich man may be free on an income of a million net. A poor man may be free because nobody cares what he does. But a fellow in my position has to sweat it out until he drops dead.’ He views the whole system as utterly threatening and damning. It is even discussed as a method for enslavement and cruelty throughout history in one of the many instances of evoking the Jewish plight and consciousness (It is clear why Roth cites Bellow as an important influence. Bellow manages to weave a religious motif through biblical imagery and brief touches on the Jewish culture that occasionally give a parable-like vibe to the novel). ‘People come to the market to kill,’ says Tamkin, ‘They say, ‘I’m going to make a killing.’ It’s not accidental. Only they haven’t got the genuine courage to kill, and they erect a symbol of it.’ Money is seen as an extension of the animalistic urges in man, seeing money as a force of destruction that blocks the creative forces of love. These animal instincts, an important aspect of Reich’s psychoanalysis, are described by Tamkin when he discusses that a man whom ‘marries sorrow’ will figuratively ‘howl’ from his window at night to express his pain of the world. Wilhelm briefly thinks upon his grandfather calling him by his Yiddish name, Velvel, a name meaning wolf, in another excellent example of Bellow tying the Jewish consciousness into this piece. Wilhelm’s vegeotherapy is essentially the entire days events. Every waking moment is either the pains of an old wound or a new stressor that builds and builds on him. The systematically recalls all his failures, all his fears, and dwells on all his faults as the day progresses until he is balled up in a knot of anxiety. Then, one by one, he sheds his bodily armor, casting off everyone he knows in a fit of emotional outpouring and indignant anger. Bellow plays with his water motif in a very interesting way here. Throughout the book are frequent allusions to water, many of them directed at Wilhelm’s apparent aversion to it (he uses an electric razor that doesn’t require him wetting his face, he doesn’t wash his hands, etc.). Wilhelm is often described as drowning in his problems. Tamkin is ridiculed by Dr. Adler for having a supposed invention of a underwater suit that would allow people to be protected underwater in case of nuclear attack, which makes for a wonderful metaphor for Wilhelm’s seeking shelter in Tamkin’s stock-market schemes to saving him from drowning in his financial woes. Despite the fears of water, Wilhelm’s orgasm is a flood of tears, and violent output of water as the curtain falls upon the novel. This watery orgasm poses an interesting analysis on the novel. Perhaps it is what we fear most, that which is the hardest, that we should actually take stock in. In other words, taking the easy way out to avoid the hard way is what causes problems. Wilhelm always ran to the next-big-thing, off to Hollywood or to the bed of a new woman, which brought him to his knees in life. Tamkin offered an easy way out, but should he really be trusted. Bellow creates an incredible trickster figure in Tamkin, ironically having him be a psychologist in a novel focusing on psychoanalysis. Tamkin is often described as speaking ‘hypnotically’, and Wilhelm often wonders if this is some sort of spell he is under from the flow of his words. ’Bringing people into the Here-and-Now. The real universe. That’s the present moment. The past is no good to us. The future is full of anxiety. Only the present is real – the here-and-now. Seize the day.’The short, punctuated pattern of speech creates a trancelike rhythm. He is like the snake in Eden tempting with an apple of knowledge promising better things. Bellow keeps the temptation sweeter by having Tamkin also express truth and Bellows ultimate message and moral – to love one another. The truth is tangled with the lies and deceit, just like real life where we must sort through all the messages we receive and decode the thread we should follow to salvation, personal success and stability, and which glimmering threads really lead us to damnation and ruin.For such a thin book, Bellow fills it chock full of literary glory. Seize the Day is like a quick left jab, but when it catches you on the chin you realize it is like a full forced right hook of a fist from any lesser writer. There is simply so much occurring on various levels in this novel and it is truly astonishing. Bellow leaves the reader with an empowering look at life, to seize the moments when they come and make the best of them, and to take ownership of our failures because ‘you can spend the entire second half of your life recovering from the mistakes of the first half.’ Seize the day, and seize this book.3.75/5‘all of a sudden, unsought, a general love for all these imperfect and lurid-looking people burst out in Wilhelm’s breast. He loved them. One and all, he passionately loved them. They were his brothers and sisters. He was imperfect and disfigured himself, but what difference did that make if he was united with them by this blaze of love?’¹ Besides often raving about Bellow (see sub), in Wood’s How Fiction Works, he speaks at length about a tiny paragraph and opens a sea of meaning from a small aside thrown in by Bellow. As the passage from Wood inspired me to read the novel, I’d like to include it here in full:Another example of the novelist writing over his character occurs (briefly) in Saul Bellow's Seize the Day. Tommy Wilhelm, the out-of-work salesman down on his luck, neither much of an aesthete nor an intellectual, is anxiously watching the board at a Manhattan commodity exchange. Next to him, an old hand named Mr. Rappaport is smoking a cigar. "A long perfect ash formed on the end of the cigar, the white ghost of the leaf with all its veins and its fainter pungency. It was ignored, in its beauty, by the old man. For it was beautiful. Wilhelm he ignored as well." It is a gorgeous, musical phrase, and characteristic of both Bellow and modern fictional narrative. The fiction slows down to draw our attention to a potentially neglected surface or texture—an example of a "descriptive pause," familiar to us when a novel halts its action and the author says, in effect, "Now I am going to tell you about the town of N., which was nestled in the Carpathian foothills," or "Jerome's house was a large dark castle, set in fifty thousand acres of rich grazing land." But at the same time it is a detail apparently seen not by the author—or not only by the author—but by a character. And this is what Bellow wobbles on; he admits an anxiety endemic to modern narrative, and which modern narrative tends to elide. The ash is noticed, and then Bellow comments: "It was ignored, in its beauty, by the old man. For it was beautiful. Wilhelm he ignored as well."Seize the pay is written in a very close third-person narration, a free indirect style that sees most of the action from Tommy's viewpoint. Bellow seems here to imply that Tommy notices the ash, because it was beautiful, and that Tommy, also ignored by the old man, is also in some way beautiful. But the fact that Bellow tells us this is surely a concession to our implied objection: How and why would Tommy notice this ash, and notice it so well, inthese fine words? To which Bellow replies, anxiously, in effect: "Well, you might have thought Tommy incapable of such finery, but he really did notice this fact of beauty; and that is because he is somewhat beautiful himself."a. Wood’s considered Bellow to be ‘ one, to my mind the greatest of American prose stylists in the 20th century - and thus one of the greatest in American fiction’. Wood also insisted that the novel be included in Bellow’s own syllabus for his [Bellow’s] literature course at Boston University so the students could ‘get a sense of the stature of the man who was their professor. Bellow modestly absented himself for that particular class, so that the students could freely concentrate on the writing.’ (Excerpt from Wood’s articleThe High-Minded Joker, a reflection on the life of Saul Bellow published by The Guardian, on April 8, 2005, three days after Bellow’s death.)² The adoption of his stage name plays beautifully into Bellow’s depiction of the Oedipal complex, as well as exposing the dualities inherent in his protagonist with regards to his ‘body armor’ and true self. ‘He had cast off his father’s name, and with it his father’s opinion of him. It was, and he knew it was, his bid for liberty. Adler being in his mind the title of his species, Tommy the freedom of the person. But Wilky was his inescapable self.’ This also allows for the naming of Dr. Tamkin to represent a surrogate father for Tommy Wilhelm, a false, faulty father for a false faulty self. The use of names in the novel is textbook Lit101 analysis and used to it’s full potential.³ Reich was declared schizophrenic by Sandor Rado, thought to be bipolar by his own daughter and was a staunch believer that Earth was secretly at war with UFOs. Despite his apparent open insanity, Reich’s ‘orgone accumulators’ – a device built to achieve the emotional orgasm of vegeotherapy, was popularly used by many big-name people, such as Sean Connery, J.D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac.‘Everyone on this side of the grave is the same distance from death’

Loosely based on the Odyssey, this landmark of modern literature follows ordinary Dubliners in 1904. Capturing a single day in the life of Dubliner Leopold Bloom, his friends Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus, his wife Molly, and a scintillating cast of supporting characters, Joyce pushes Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. Captivating experimental techniques range from interior monologues to exuberant wordplay and earthy humor. A major achievement in 20th century literature.

Written in Greek by the only Roman emperor who was also a philosopher, without any intention of publication, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius offer a remarkable series of challenging spiritual reflections and exercises developed as the emperor struggled to understand himself and make sense of the universe. While the Meditations were composed to provide personal consolation and encouragement, Marcus Aurelius also created one of the greatest of all works of philosophy: a timeless collection that has been consulted and admired by statesmen, thinkers and readers throughout the centuries.

Dear Henri Alain-Fournier,Some people claim you had great talent as a novelist. Many more would claim I don't. Is it fair that you died in World War I while I live, free to write this review and feeling like I'm having a bad morning because I didn't have all the usual ingredients for my breakfast shake? Your remains weren't identified until 1991, true, but do you know that without yogurt, steel cut oatmeal, goji berries and banana congeal like pond scum when blended with almond milk? I guess in a way translated works of fiction are like that, lacking an ingredient. Not really fair of me to judge you then, is it? And on top of that, I read somewhere that the Robin Buss translation I have isn't the best.I don't know. Maybe I've been prejudiced against anything French because there's been a creepy mime wandering around the farmers' market on Saturdays. With the summer heat, its face make-up starts to melt and peel and it scares my kid and me. Or maybe, having discovered Woody Allen before James Dean, it's because I'm sentimental for my own sort of coming-of-age story. But the truth is, I found your novel sappy. Sappy to the nth degree. "And that evening, sobbing, he asked Mademoiselle de Galais for her hand in marriage."Barf.Some folks describe it as dream-like. Well, I'll meet them halfway and say that it is conducive to a dream-like state, in as much as I found myself wanting to fall asleep as I read it. God! Germany probably invaded France so often to keep from nodding off. Can you blame them? They had all those big philosophical treatises to write, but then kept getting distracted by the latest Twilight prequel. And they would've even read it in the original French because all you Continentals speak five languages! I tried to make excuses for you, thinking, "Look at it this way: it's a parable for post-colonial France. They were just coming off that Napoleonic high and had to simultaneously deal with the onset of modernity. It's a simple case of British/penis envy." But even my credulity can only stretch so far. Goodbye, Alain-Fournier. Sorry your life was cut short by one of history's celebrated mistakes. Maybe this book will mean something to somebody else. It's going to have the opportunity, because I'm donating it to my library.

Graham Greene and E.M. Forster marvelled at it, but F.R. Leavis considered it to be 'not only not one of his great books, but to be a bad one.' As for the author, he held The Ambassadors as the favorite among all his novels.Sent from Massachusetts by the formidable Mrs. Newsome to recall her son, Chad, from what she assumes to be a corrupt life in Paris, Strether finds his intentions subtly and profoundly transformed as he falls under the spell of the city and of his charge. He is quick to perceive that Chad has been not so much corrupted as refined, and over the course of the hot summer months in Paris he gradually realizes that this discovery and acceptance of Chad's unconventional new lifestyle alter his own ideals and ambitions.One of Henry James's three final novels, all of which have sharply divided modern critics, The Ambassadors is the finely drawn portrait of a man's late awakening to the importance of morality that is founded not on the dictates of convention but on its value per se.

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all timeSet amid the splendor of London drawing rooms and gilded Venetian palazzos, The Wings of the Dove is the story of Milly Theale, a naïve, doomed American heiress, and a pair of lovers, Kate Croy and Merton Densher, who conspire to obtain her fortune. In this witty tragedy of treachery, self-deception, and betrayal, Henry James weaves together three ill-fated and wholly human destinies unexpectedly linked by desire, greed, and salvation. As Amy Bloom writes in her Introduction, “The Wings of the Dove is a novel of intimacy. . . . [James] gives us passion, he gives us love in its terrible and enchanting forms.”

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