This was surprisingly lame, coming from no less a literary giant than Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote these stories as if they were intended for a second-rate boy's adventure magazine. The concept of a club for people who want to committ suicide is solid and reminiscient of something Hitchcock might have come up with, but Stevenson unfortunately does very little with it. The idea itself is ripe with potential moral conundrums and dramatic possibility, but Setevenson glazes over all of that, delivering instead a typical good guy vs. bad guy story every bit as one-dimensional as a battle between Dudley Do-right and Snidely Whiplash. The book is composed of three short stories, the second and third of which really have no good reason to exist. The characters are stiff and self-congratulatory, and even the good guys all go out of their way to find trouble, never even knowing what they're getting themselves into. The hero of the story is a prince who makes all kinds of bad decisions and is saved by his sidekick, though he remains the hero throughout due to his gentlemanly demeanor. I didn't know Stevenson was even capable of such shallow, unrealistic storytelling.

Kafka’nın Birinci Dünya Savaşı’nın karanlık günlerinde yazdığı Ceza Kolonisinde isimli öyküde, bilinmeyen bir adadaki koloniyi ziyarete giden bir gezgin, orada tüyler ürpertici bir sistemle karşılaşır. Kişinin suçlu olup olmadığına bakılmaksızın, ona kendini savunma hakkı bile verilmeden, acımasız bir zekânın ürünü olan tuhaf bir makineyle cezalandırıldığına tanık olur. Tüm gücü elinde tutan ve geçmişe körü körüne bağlı subayın anlattıklarıyla içinden çıkılması zor bir ikilemde kalır.Gözlem ise, Kafka’nın 1904-1912 yılları arasında yazdığı on sekiz kısa öyküyü topladığı ilk kitabıdır. Birbirinden kaotik anlara ışık tutan bu eser, yakından bakıldığında aslında herkes için bir yerlerde var olan umudu anlatır.İnsanın sıkıştığı cendereyi kendine has bir acımasızlıkla ele alarak Avrupa’nın içinde olduğu şiddet dolu atmosferi okurun iliklerine kadar işleten bu öyküleri, Ahmet Arpad’ın özenli çevirisiyle sunuyoruz.(Tanıtım Bülteninden)

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 0553213695 / 9780553213690"As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was laying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes." With it's startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first opening, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetle-like insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing—though absurdly comic—meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction. As W.H. Auden wrote, "Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man."

Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wilde’s story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the author’s most popular work. The tale of Dorian Gray’s moral disintegration caused a scandal when it ﬁrst appeared in 1890, but though Wilde was attacked for the novel’s corrupting inﬂuence, he responded that there is, in fact, “a terrible moral in Dorian Gray.” Just a few years later, the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde’s homosexual liaisons, which resulted in his imprisonment. Of Dorian Gray’s relationship to autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter, “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.

Scottish-born American naturalist and author (1838-1914)

alternate covers for this ISBN can be found here and hereThe story of THE HITCH-HIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY continues"Good Evening ladies and gentlemen, I am your host for tonight, Max Quordlepleen, and I have just come straight from the other end of time where I have been hosting a show at the Big Bang Burger Bar and I will be your host for this historic occasion - the End of History itself."If you've done six impossible things this morning why not round it off with breakfast, lunch or dinner at Milliway's, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe...--back coverCover illustration by Chris Moore

The terrifyingly prophetic novel of a post-literate future.Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to burn books, which are forbidden, being the source of all discord and unhappiness. Even so, Montag is unhappy; there is discord in his marriage. Are books hidden in his house? The Mechanical Hound of the Fire Department, armed with a lethal hypodermic, escorted by helicopters, is ready to track down those dissidents who defy society to preserve and read books.The classic dystopian novel of a post-literate future, Fahrenheit 451 stands alongside Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World as a prophetic account of Western civilization’s enslavement by the media, drugs and conformity.Bradbury’s powerful and poetic prose combines with uncanny insight into the potential of technology to create a novel which, decades on from first publication, still has the power to dazzle and shock.--back cover

Favourite.