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Description
Goodwill in the seventeenth century Polish Commonwealth has been stretched thin due to the nobility’s perceived and real oppression of the less well-off members. When the situation reaches its inevitable breaking point, it sparks the taking up of arms by the Cossacks against the Polish nobility and a spiral of violence that engulfs the entire state. This background provides the canvas for vividly painted narratives of heroism and heartbreak of both the knights and the hetmans swept up in the struggle.
Henryk Sienkiewicz had spent most of his adult life as a journalist and editor, but turned his attention back to historical fiction in an attempt to lift the spirits and imbue a sense of nationalism to the partitioned Poland of the nineteenth century. With Fire and Sword is the first of a trilogy of novels dealing with the events of the Khmelnytsky Uprising, and weaves fictional characters and events in among historical fact. While there is some contention about the fairness of the portrayal of Polish and Ukrainian belligerents, the novel certainly isn’t one-sided: all factions indulge in brutal violence in an attempt to sway the tide of war, and their grievances are clearly depicted.
The initial serialization and later publication of the novel proved hugely popular, and in Poland the Trilogy has remained so ever since. In 1999, the novel was the subject of Poland’s then most expensive film, following the previously filmed later books. This edition is based on the 1898 translation by Jeremiah Curtin, who also translated Sienkiewicz’s later (and perhaps more internationally recognized) Quo Vadis.
Description
In a small Mormon community in southern Utah, Jane Withersteen, a young, unmarried Mormon woman faces growing pressure to marry a local elder of her church. Elder Tull, a polygamist, already has two wives and seeks to marry Jane not just for her beauty, but to take control of the ranch her late father passed on to her.
Jane’s resistance to marriage only serves to increase the mounting resentment against “Gentiles” (non-Mormons) in the area. Bern Venters, one of Jane Withersteen’s ranch hands and potential suitor, becomes the focus of this resentment and is nearly killed by Elder Tull and his men before a mysterious rider interrupts the procedure. The rider, a man named Lassiter, is a gunslinger known for his exploits in other Mormon settlements further north.
Lassiter’s intercession on Venters’ behalf sets off a chain reaction of threats, violence, theft, and murder as Jane Withersteen fights to maintain both her ranch and her independence.
First published in 1912, Riders of the Purple Sage is considered to have played a prominent role in shaping the Western genre. It was Zane Grey’s best-selling book and has remained popular ever since.
Description
Soldiers’ Pay is William Faulkner’s first published novel. It begins with a train journey on which two American soldiers, Joe Gilligan and Julian Lowe, are returning from the First World War. They meet a scarred, lethargic, and withdrawn fighter pilot, Donald Mahon, who was presumed dead by his family. The novel continues to focus on Mahon and his slow deterioration, and the various romantic complications that arise upon his return home.
Faulkner drew inspiration for this novel from his own experience of the First World War. In the spring of 1918, he moved from his hometown, Oxford, Mississippi, to Yale and worked as an accountant until meeting a Canadian Royal Air Force pilot who encouraged him to join the R.A.F. He then traveled to Toronto, pretended to be British (he affected a British accent and forged letters from British officers and a made-up Reverend), and joined the R.A.F. in the hopes of becoming a hero. But the war ended before he was able to complete his flight training, and, like Julian Lowe, he never witnessed actual combat. Upon returning to Mississippi, he began fabricating various heroic stories about his time in the air force (like narrowly surviving a plane crash with broken legs and metal plates under the skin), and proudly strode around Oxford in his uniform.
Faulkner was encouraged to write Soldiers’ Pay by his close friend and fellow writer Sherwood Anderson, whom Faulkner met in New Orleans. Anderson wrote in his Memoirs that he went “personally to Horace Liveright”—Soldiers’ Pay was originally published by Boni & Liveright—“to plead for the book.”
Though the novel was a commercial failure at the time of its publication, Faulkner’s subsequent fame has ensured its long-term success.
Description
The Sun Also Rises was Ernest Hemingway’s first published novel, and the novel that introduced the term “Lost Generation” to describe the generation that came to adulthood during World War I.
The novel follows Jake Barnes, an American expat living in the Parisian café society of the roaring 20s. A wound sustained during the war has left him unable to have sex, and that drives a wedge between him and the woman he loves: Brett Ashley, a twice-divorcée who has embraced the sexual freedom and independence of the age. As they drift through their lives in postwar Paris, they find themselves on a trip with some friends to Spain to witness the Festival of San Fermin, a week-long bacchanal whose highlight is bullfighting.
Hemingway explores the aimless, heavy drinking, and dramatic lives of Jake, Brett, and their friends as a means to reflect the Lost Generation as a whole. Jake is a character of troubled masculinity: his war wound has fundamentally changed him as a man, and his behavior is often tentative, unsure, and placating. On the other hand, Brett is an enigmatic New Woman: free to drink and carouse with the men, she is seductive, but aching for the reassurance and love of a real relationship, and not just sex. The satellites of friends that orbit around them are equally troubled, drinking to excess and fighting with themselves and with others.
These complex characters are now mere spectators for the bullfight, a microcosm of war and death whose masters, the matadors, are the powerful and elegant emblems of masculinity that the Lost Generation finds it impossible to compete against.
Though initially met with mixed reviews, modern critics consider it to be Hemingway’s best novel. The characters and events are largely based on real-life people in Hemingway’s social circle and his time spent in Paris and Spain. Thus, the book sold very well in its first print run, as the expatriate community was eager to read about the coded scandals of their peers. Today it is recognized as a foundational work of the modernist style, and an American classic.
Description
A Man Could Stand Up— opens on Armistice Day, with Valentine Wannop learning that her love, Christopher Tietjens, has returned to London from the front. As she prepares to meet him, the narrative suddenly shifts time and place to earlier in the year, with Tietjens commanding a group of soldiers in a trench somewhere in the war zone. Tietjens leads his company bravely as they shelter from the constant German strafes, before the narrative again jumps to conclude with an actual Armistice Day celebration.
In this simple narrative Ford creates dense, complex character studies of Valentine and Tietjens. Tietjens, often called “the last Tory” for his staunch and unwavering approach to honor, duty, and fidelity, has changed greatly from the man he was in the previous installments in the series. Ford explores the psychological horror that the Great War inflicted on its combatants through the lens of Valentine’s gentle curiosity about Tietjen’s time on the front: men returned from battle injured not just in body, but in soul, too. The constant, unrelenting shelling, the endless strafes, the clouds of poison gas, the instant death of friends and comrades for no reason at all, the muddy and grim entrenchments where men lived and died—all of these permanently changed soldiers in ways that previous wars didn’t. Now the “last Tory” wants nothing more than to retreat from society and live a quiet life with the woman he loves—who is not his wife.
As we follow Valentine and Tietjens through the last day of the war, we see how the Great War was not just the destruction of men, but of an entire era.
Description
Ernest Hemingway is perhaps the most influential American writer of the twentieth century. Though known mostly for his longer works, he began his writing career with the publication of short stories which helped develop his often-imitated concise, simple, and straightforward style, which stood in stark contrast to the more elaborate prose of many of his contemporaries.
In 1947, during a University of Mississippi creative writing class, William Faulkner remarked that Hemingway “has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary to see if it is properly used.” Hemingway famously responded: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”
Besides his writing style, Hemingway’s most well-known contribution to the literary landscape was the iceberg theory of writing, developed while composing the short story “Out of Season.” Hemingway later said of the story: “I had omitted the real end of it which was that the old man hanged himself. This was omitted on my new theory that you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.”
This collection comprises all of the public domain stories published in Hemingway’s short story collections, some miscellaneous stories published in various magazines, and his novellas. With the exception of stories within collections with a thematic link, such as In Our Time, they are arranged in publication order.
Description
Winnie-the-Pooh is a bear that likes honey perhaps a little too much and lives in the Hundred Acre Wood with his animal friends Rabbit, Piglet, Owl, Eeyore, Kanga, and Roo, as well as his people friend Christopher Robin. Winnie-the-Pooh contains several stories of adventures involving Pooh and his friends, including a birthday party, looking for heffalumps, finding a missing tail, and playing a trick on one of their own. Most of them, of course, also involve honey in one way or another.
A. A. Milne wrote for Punch magazine, authored a detective novel (The Red House Mystery), and published several plays, but all of them were largely forgotten after he began writing children’s books about his son’s stuffed toys. Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends captured the public’s imagination, and though Milne was only to publish four books of their adventures, they have lived on in the imagination of children ever since.
Description
Antony and Cleopatra begins two years after Julius Ceasar. Mark Antony was supposed to be in Egypt to conduct government affairs on behalf of the Roman Empire. Instead, he fell in love with the beautiful Queen Cleopatra, became her lover, and abandoned his duties to his wife and country. A messenger arrives bearing news that Antony’s wife and brother are dead after attempting to kill Octavius Caesar, and one of Ceasar’s generals, Pompey, is gathering an army against the Roman leaders. Mark Antony has no choice but to return to Rome. When Antony returns to the capital, he argues with Ceasar over his loyalty to the empire and the other triumvirs. The only way that Antony can prove his fidelity to Caesar is to marry his sister, Octavia. The news of this marriage makes its way back to Egypt and its queen.
The play was published in 1606 after the great success of Macbeth. This Standard Ebooks production is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.
Description
In 1919, at the height of the anti-leftist Palmer Raids conducted by the Wilson administration, the anarchist activist and writer Emma Goldman was deported to the nascent Soviet Union. Despite initial plans to fight the deportation order in court, Goldman eventually acquiesced in order to take part in the new revolutionary Russia herself. While initially supportive of the Bolsheviks, with some reservations, Goldman’s firsthand experiences with Bolshevik oppression and corruption prompted her titular disillusionment and eventual emigration to Germany.
In My Disillusionment in Russia, Goldman records her travels throughout Russia as part of a revolutionary museum commission, and her interactions with a variety of political and literary figures like Vladimir Lenin, Maxim Gorky, John Reed, and Peter Kropotkin. Goldman concludes her account with a critique of the Bolshevik ideology in which she asserts that revolutionary change in institutions cannot take place without corresponding changes in values.
My Disillusionment in Russia had a troubled publication history, since the first American printing in 1923 omitted the last twelve chapters of what was supposed to be a thirty-three chapter book. (Somehow, the last chapters failed to reach the publisher, who did not suspect the book to be incomplete.) The situation was remedied with the publication of the remaining chapters in 1924 as part of a volume titled My Further Disillusionment in Russia. This Standard Ebooks production compiles both volumes into a single volume, like the original manuscript.
Description
Wet Magic was the last novel for children published by E. Nesbit. It was originally serialized in The Strand Magazine in 1912, with a book version published in 1913.
In the book, four brothers and sisters are on their way to a holiday at the beach. While traveling on a train, they’re excited to read about the purported sighting of a mermaid near the coastal town where they’ll be staying, and agree among themselves to join the hunt for this mythical creature. But when they arrive, they discover that the mermaid has been captured and put on show at a circus at the local fairground. After the older children encounter another mermaid in the sea, who implores them to help, they agree they must do what they can to free the captured one. This leads them on to strange adventures.
While Wet Magic has much of Nesbit’s characteristic charm and humor, it doesn’t appear to have been received as well as her other books, nor has it been as frequently reprinted.