Two minor characters from Hamlet offer a novel view of the melancholy Dane.

The Trial is a novel written by Franz Kafka in 1914 and 1915 and published posthumously on 26 April 1925. One of his best-known works, it tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor to the reader. Heavily influenced by Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Kafka even went so far as to call Dostoevsky a blood relative. Like Kafka's two other novels, The Castle and Amerika, The Trial was never completed, although it does include a chapter that appears to bring the story to an intentionally abrupt ending. After Kafka's death in 1924, his friend and literary executor Max Brod edited the text for publication by Verlag Die Schmiede. The original manuscript is held at the Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach am Neckar, Germany. The first English-language translation, by Willa and Edwin Muir, was published in 1937. In 1999, the book was listed in Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century and as No. 2 of the Best German Novels of the Twentieth Century.

It is one of the curiosities of history that the most remarkable novel about Jews and Judaism, predicting the establishment of the Jewish state, should have been written in 1876 by a non-Jew - a Victorian woman and a formidable intellectual, who is generally regarded as one of the greatest of English novelists. And it is still more curious that Daniel Deronda , George Eliot's last novel, should have been dismissed, by many of her admirers at the time and by some critics since, as something of an anomaly, an inexplicable and unfortunate turn in her life and work. Yet Eliot herself was passionately committed to that novel, having prepared herself for it by an extraordinary feat of scholarly research in five languages (including Hebrew), exploring the ancient, medieval, and modern sources of Jewish history. Three years later, to reenforce that commitment, she wrote an essay, the very last of her writing, reaffirming the heritage of the Jewish "nation" and the desirability of a Jewish state - this well before the founders of Zionism had conceived of that mission. Why did this Victorian novelist, born a Christian and an early convert to agnosticism, write a book so respectful of Judaism and so prescient about Zionism? And why at a time when there were no pogroms or persecutions to provoke her? What was the general conception of the "Jewish question," and how did Eliot reinterpret that "question," for her time as well as ours? Gertrude Himmelfarb, a leading Victorian scholar, has undertaken to unravel the mysteries of Daniel Deronda . And the mysteries of Eliot herself: a novelist who deliberately wrote a book she knew would bewilder many of her readers, a distinguished woman who opposed the enfranchisement of women, a moralist who flouted the most venerable of marital conventions - above all, the author of a novel that is still an inspiration or provocation to readers and critics alike.

"The modern novel in its most cogent and permanent form"--this has been the achievement of E. M. Forster; his masterpiece, A Passage to India, belongs with perhaps three or four other works in English at the pinnacle of literary craftsmanship in this century. Yet for many years Forster's genius was virtually unrecognized in America. Not until 1943, when Lionel Trilling's authoritative and discerning study was first published, did Forster find his way to a broad American audience. In this 1964 revision of the first paperbook edition, Mr. Trilling added a preface and brought the bibliography up to date. His book performs two services: it is a critical-biographical introduction to the master novelist and his works; it is in itself a primary document in the development of, contemporary American criticism. Here is criticism functioning at its best, deftly, surely, wittily, within a framework of the ideas which are basic to literary thought today.

The letters Kafka addressed to the woman to whom he was twice engaged make up a collection of some of the most startling "love letters" of our time. They form a revealing record of five crucial years in his life and of his relationship to the one woman who decisively influenced his writing. These letters will take their place alongside Kafka's major novels and stories.

An examination of how eighteenth century novels described and defined the feminine and feminine life during the rise of the modern novel. Novels discussed include Moll Flanders, La Vie de Marianne, Pamela, Fanny Hill, Manon Lescaut, Clarissa, La Nouvelle Heloise, and Les Laisons Dangereuses.

This updated Agatha Christie compendium offers synopses of all Christie's novels, plays and short stories, without revealing whodunit. It also features: a portrait of Agatha Christie by Julian Symons; Christie's own comments on her work; articles on themes in her work such as a guide to Agatha's toxic agents, gossip and intuition as detective tools and the subtleties of the all-encompassing dress codes that governed her characters; articles on films, plus an updated filmography and new-video listing; a behind-the-scenes look at "Agatha" the movie; a mystery map showing locations of stories; a Christie crossword; and coverage of her romantic writing under the pen name Mary Westmacott.--From publisher description.

'Perec is serious fun' The Guardian Both an affectionate portrait of mid-century Paris and a daring memoir, Georges Perec's I Remember is now available in English to UK readers for the first time, with an introduction by David Bellos. In 480 numbered statements, all beginning identically with 'I remember', Perec records a stream of individual memories of a childhood in post-war France, while posing wider questions about memory and nostalgia. As playful and puzzling as the best of his novels, I Remember is an ode to life: the ordinary, the extraordinary, and the sometimes trivial, as seen through the eyes of the irreplaceable Georges Perec.

Through an examination of the English novel in the mid-eighteenth to mid-nineteenth century, this book argues that the emerging pattern of male friendship, mentorship, entitlement, rivalry and hetero- and homosexuality was in an intimate and shifting relation to class and that no element of that pattern can be understood outside of its relation to women and the gender system as a whole.

David Fishelson has transformed Dostoyevsky's The Idiot into a spellbinding drama that illuminates the titanic novel. In The Idiot, meet the kindly, childlike Prince Myshkin, as he returns to the decadent social whirl of 1860s St. Petersburg. The two most beautiful, sought-after women in the town compete for his affections, in a duel that grows increasingly dangerous.

A groundbreaking cultural history of the most influential, most frequently translated, and most imitated novel in the world. The year 2015 marks the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of the complete Don Quixote of La Mancha —an ageless masterpiece that has proven unusually fertile and endlessly adaptable. Flaubert was inspired to turn Emma Bovary into “a knight in skirts.” Freud studied Quixote’s psyche. Mark Twain was fascinated by it, as were Kafka, Picasso, Nabokov, Borges, and Orson Welles. The novel has spawned ballets and operas, poems and plays, movies and video games, and even shapes the identities of entire nations. Spain uses it as a sort of constitution and travel guide; and the Americas were conquered, then sought their independence, with the knight as a role model. In Quixote , Ilan Stavans, one of today’s preeminent cultural commentators, explores these many manifestations. Training his eye on the tumultuous struggle between logic and dreams, he reveals the ways in which a work of literature is a living thing that influences and is influenced by the world around it.

In this engrossing biography, acclaimed novelist Muriel Spark recreates Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's turbulent life and career and persuasively defends the enigmatic writer's place among the giants of literary history.

With trenchant realism and profound understanding, Matthew Josephson presents in VICTOR HUGO the realistic biography of a great romantic who wrote Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Name, among others. Of tremendous sweep and scope, it is a penetrating analysis of a literary titan, who as a political pamphleteer, playwright, novelist, and romantic lover, dominated his time, influenced his peers, and moved the hearts of men. Matthew Josephson, whose Stendhal, Zola, The Robber Barons, and Rousseau defined him as a master of the art of biography, has given us in VICTOR HUGO a highly readable account of this vigorous, zestful, and fruitful career. VICTOR HUGO is the final and definitive work on "France's prince of poets and lord of language." EARLIER BOOK REVIEWS "Matthew Joseph's third full-blown biography of a great French writer.is the best. There is more color and drive in it .because the materials are so rich." New York Times Book Review (1942) "Victor Hugo's varied and colorful career offered Josephson a perfect opportunity to display again his gift for spirited narrative and keen characterization. He skillfully traces Hugo's conversion from literary great to political hero. Along the way he adds texture to his portrait by interweaving the fascinating components of Hugo's personal life -his marriage to Adèle Foucher, his fifty-year liaison with Juliette Drouet, and his friendship and betrayal by Sainte-Beuve.Victor Hugo's life was a success story without parallel, and it provided an apotheosis of Josephson's point about the duty of writers in times of social and political crisis. The critics again praised Josephson's talents as a biographer." - David E. Shi, Matthew Josephson: Bourgeois Bohemian, Yale University Press, 1981

D. H. Lawrence is recognized as one of the greatest novelists of this century. His work is taught in schools and universities all over the world. Yet, more than thirty years after the failure to ban Lady Chatterley's Lover in England fundamentally changed the moral climate of that country and of America, Lawrence remains a controversial figure. Regarded by many women during his lifetime as a sexual prophet, in recent years his supposed misogyny has drawn fierce condemnation from feminist critics. In this new biography of Lawrence, Elaine Feinstein explores his relationships with the women in his own life, many of whom have their counterparts in his novels. She traces the obsessive nature of his love for his mother, Lydia; his difficult relationship with his first sweetheart, Jessie Chambers; his pursuit of the bisexual Helen Corke; and the failure of his youthful engagement to Louisa Burrows. She gives a fascinating account of his long, battling marriage to Frieda von Richthofen; his friendships with women writers like Katherine Mansfield and Catherine Carswell; and the attachment to Lawrence of patronesses such as Lady Ottoline Morrell, Lady Cynthia Asquith and Mabel Dodge Luhan. Lawrence and the Women investigates the paradoxes of Lawrence's personality. He was considered to have a rare understanding of women's sexuality, yet his own sexual relationships were unusually difficult. He put all his faith in the energies of the body, yet his own was frail and sickly. He argued that women needed to submit to men, but he never succeeded in dominating his own wife, Frieda. With a novelist's eye for detail and uncanny intuition about character, Elaine Feinstein probes the sources of Lawrence's attitudes toward women with candor and compassion. Always responsive to the poetry and power of his writing, she offers a fresh and surprising portrait of one of the most misunderstood literary figures of our time.

The acclaimed biographer offers a fresh, insightful view of Balzac’s life, time, and works through the lens of food. “Tell me where you eat, what you eat, and at what time you eat, and I will tell you who you are.” This is the motto of Anka Muhlstein’s erudite and witty book about the ways food and the art of the table feature in Honoré de Balzac’s The Human Comedy . Balzac uses them as a connecting thread in his novels, showing how food can evoke character, atmosphere, class, and social climbing more suggestively than money, appearances, and other more conventional trappings. Full of surprises and insights, Balzac’s Omelette invites you to taste anew Balzac’s genius as a writer and his deep understanding of the human condition, its ambitions, its flaws, and its cravings.

The nineteen stories contained herein, all beautifully translated for the first time into English by Sue Boswell, combine work published by Marcel Schwob (1867-1905) in newspapers together with manuscripts never published in his lifetime. From historical pieces, such as "Poupa", an early unfinished novel which takes place in ancient Rome, to horrific tales, such as "The Hand of Glory" and "The Maison Close", and others, such as "On Umbrellas", which are completely unclassifiable, the present collection displays the diversity and genius of one of France's greatest yet largely forgotten writers.

The romance of Charles Dickens's novels.

The Wrong Door is the first English-language translation of the complete plays of Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991). Bringing together the eleven plays Ginzburg wrote between 1965 and the months before her death, this volume directs attention to Ginzburg's unique talent as a dramatist. Ginzburg's plays, like her novels and short stories, are incisive, finely tuned studies of family drama, of the breakdown of relations between the sexes, and of the tribulations of Italian domestic life. The plays showcase Ginzburg's fearless social commentary, her stark and darkly comic observations of Italian life, and her prescient analyses of the socio-economic changes that have transformed modern Italy. Along the way, Ginzburg creates memorable female characters in a series of fascinating roles. In this fluent and faithful translation, Wendell Ricketts highlights Ginzburg's scalpel-sharp dialogue and lays bare the existential absurdities that lie at the heart of her plays. Including an introduction by the translator and two essays by Ginzburg on her approach to the theatre, The Wrong Door adds a new dimension to the literary portrait of one of Italy's most significant modernist writers.

"The bestselling and award-winning German author Jenny Erpenbeck has gained international praise for her novels including Visitation, Kairos, and Go, Went, Gone. Things That Disappear is an exciting collection of interlinked miniature prose pieces that grapple with the phenomenon of disappearance on scales both large and small. The things that disappear in these pages range from everyday objects such as socks and cheese to close friends and the social norms of common courtesy, to sites and objects resonant with East German history, such as the Palace of the Republic or the lines of sight now blocked by new construction in Berlin. Erpenbeck asks: "Is there a perpetrator who makes things that I know and cherish disappear?" These things disap- pear, and yet do they really? Do they remain in our memories more fully than if they continued to exist? Translated beautifully by Kurt Beals, Things That Disappear follows on the heels of Erpenbeck's Booker Prize-winning novel Kairos and offers a window into a renowned writer's sense of the past, and of her own self as a writer"-- Provided by publisher.

In this detailed study giving more depth and breadth to Moravia’s work than has hitherto been done in English, the authors explore his background and assess his accomplishment as a twentieth-century artist. Students of the modern novel will be interested in the explication given here of the influences of Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus, and Martin Buber on Moravia’s work.