REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “A shocking story, made all the more stunning by the fact that it has its roots in true history.”—Jodi Picoult, author of By Any Other Name “A new generation of survival story . . . an extraordinary book that reads like a thriller, written with the care of the most delicate psychological and historical fiction.”— Vogue (Best of 2025 Preview) A young woman and her lover are marooned on an island in this “lushly painted” ( People ) historical epic of love, faith, and defiance from the bestselling author of Sam . FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE • LONGLISTED FOR THE AMERICAN LIBRARY IN PARIS BOOK AWARD Heir to a fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned, and her guardian—an enigmatic and volatile man—spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France. That journey takes a unexpected turn when Marguerite, accused of betrayal, is brutally punished and abandoned on a small island. Once a child of privilege who dressed in gowns and laced pearls in her hair, Marguerite finds herself at the mercy of nature. As the weather turns, blanketing the island in ice, she discovers a faith she’d never before needed. Inspired by the real life of a sixteenth-century heroine, Isola is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival.

METAMORPHOSIS by FRANZ KAFKA is one of the most haunting and iconic novellas of the twentieth century. First published in 1915, this unsettling story follows Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman who awakens one morning to discover he has inexplicably transformed into a giant insect. As his body mutates, so does his relationship with his family and the world around him—exposing themes of isolation, guilt, and existential dread. This literary classic has captivated generations of readers and continues to influence writers and artists across the globe. With its surreal premise and razor-sharp social commentary, Metamorphosis has inspired great minds like George Orwell, Albert Camus, Jorge Luis Borges, and Ray Bradbury. THIS DEFINITIVE EDITION FEATURES: A CLEAN, MODERN LAYOUT designed for readability A BOLD TYPOGRAPHIC COVER that reflects the story’s psychological tension THE UNABRIDGED AND UNALTERED TEXT of Kafka’s original masterpiece Perfect for fans of dystopian fiction, psychological horror, and philosophical literature, Metamorphosis remains as relevant and disturbing today as it was over a century ago. Rediscover one of the most important works of modern fiction—and enter the surreal world of FRANZ KAFKA, where transformation reveals the deepest corners of the human soul.

Blending memories and family myths, Mary McCarthy takes us back to the twenties, when she was orphaned in a world of relations as colourful, potent and mysterious as the Catholic religion. There were her grandmothers: one was a blood-curdling Catholic who combined piousness and pugnacity; the other was Jewish and wore a veil to hide the disastrous effects of a face-lift. There was wicked Uncle Myers who beat her for the good of her soul and Aunt Margaret who laced her orange juice with castor oil and taped her lips at night to prevent unhealthy 'mouth-breathing'. 'Many a time in the course of doing these memoirs,' Mary McCarthy says, 'I have wished that I were writing fiction.' But these were the people, along with the ladies of the Sacred Heart convent school, who helped to inspire her devastating sense of the sublime and ridiculous and her witty, novelist's imagination.

A "lively" memoir by the Hollywood legend about the making of Spartacus , with a foreword by George Clooney ( Los Angeles Times ). One of the world's most iconic movie stars, Kirk Douglas has distinguished himself as a producer, philanthropist, and author of ten works of fiction and memoir. Now, more than fifty years after the release of his enduring epic Spartacus , Douglas reveals the riveting drama behind the making of the legendary gladiator film. Douglas began producing the movie in the midst of the politically charged era when Hollywood's moguls refused to hire anyone accused of Communist sympathies. In a risky move, Douglas chose Dalton Trumbo, a blacklisted screenwriter, to write Spartacus . Trumbo was one of the "Unfriendly Ten," men who had gone to prison rather than testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee about their political affiliations. Douglas's source material was already a hot property, as the novel Spartacus was written by Howard Fast while he was in jail for defying HUAC. With the financial future of his young family at stake, Douglas plunged into a tumultuous production both on- and off-screen. As both producer and star of the film, he faced explosive moments with young director Stanley Kubrick, struggles with a leading lady, and negotiations with giant personalities, including Sir Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov, and Lew Wasserman. Writing from his heart and from his own meticulously researched archives, Kirk Douglas, at ninety-five, looks back at his audacious decisions. He made the most expensive film of its era--but more importantly, his moral courage in giving public credit to Trumbo effectively ended the notorious Hollywood blacklist. A master storyteller, Douglas paints a vivid and often humorous portrait in I Am Spartacus! The book is enhanced by newly discovered period photography of the stars and filmmakers both on and off the set.

The Optical Unconscious is a pointed protest against the official story of modernism and against the critical tradition that attempted to define modern art according to certain sacred commandments and self-fulfilling truths. The account of modernism presented here challenges the vaunted principle of "vision itself." And it is a very different story than we have ever read, not only because its insurgent plot and characters rise from below the calm surface of the known and law-like field of modernist painting, but because the voice is unlike anything we have heard before. Just as the artists of the optical unconscious assaulted the idea of autonomy and visual mastery, Rosalind Krauss abandons the historian's voice of objective detachment and forges a new style of writing in this book: art history that insinuates diary and art theory, and that has the gait and tone of fiction. The Optical Unconscious will be deeply vexing to modernism's standard-bearers, and to readers who have accepted the foundational principles on which their aesthetic is based. Krauss also gives us the story that Alfred Barr, Meyer Shapiro, and Clement Greenberg repressed, the story of a small, disparate group of artists who defied modernism's most cherished self-descriptions, giving rise to an unruly, disruptive force that persistently haunted the field of modernism from the 1920s to the 1950s and continues to disrupt it today. In order to understand why modernism had to repress the optical unconscious, Krauss eavesdrops on Roger Fry in the salons of Bloomsbury, and spies on the toddler John Ruskin as he amuses himself with the patterns of a rug; we find her in the living room of Clement Greenberg as he complains about "smart Jewish girls with their typewriters" in the 1960s, and in colloquy with Michael Fried about Frank Stella's love of baseball. Along the way, there are also narrative encounters with Freud, Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. To embody this optical unconscious, Krauss turns to the pages of Max Ernst's collage novels, to Marcel Duchamp's hypnotic Rotoreliefs, to Eva Hesse's luminous sculptures, and to Cy Twombly's, Andy Warhol's, and Robert Morris's scandalous decoding of Jackson Pollock's drip pictures as "Anti-Form." These artists introduced a new set of values into the field of twentieth-century art, offering ready-made images of obsessional fantasy in place of modernism's intentionality and unexamined compulsions. Rosalind Krauss is Professor of Art History at Columbia University and an editor of the journal October.

Admirers and detractors of Vladimir Nabokov have viewed him as an ingenious contriver of literary games, teasing and even outsmarting his readers through his self-reflexive artifice and the many codes and puzzles he devises in his fiction. Nabokov himself spoke a number of times about reality as a term that always has to be put in scare quotes. Consequently, many critics and readers have thought of him as a writer uninterested in the world outside literature. Robert Alter shows how Nabokov was passionately concerned with the real world and its complexities, from love and loss to exile, freedom, and the impact of contemporary politics on our lives. In these essays, Alter spans the breadth of Nabokov's writings, from his memoir, lectures, and short stories to major novels such as Lolita. He demonstrates how the self-reflexivity of Nabokov's fiction becomes a vehicle for expressing very real concerns. What emerges is a portrait of a brilliant stylist who is at once serious and playful, who cared deeply about human relationships and the burden of loss, and who was acutely sensitive to the ways political ideologies can distort human values.

Book by Alter, Robert

More than most novelists, Virginia Woolf benefits by an introducer. She is never, either by intention or equipment, the expected novelist. She chose the novel to adapt it deliberately and progressively to be the vehicle of her own subtle perception. Behind this study of the novels is an intense interest in the person revealed in the novelist. The criticism is warm as well as acute and the whole study is felt to be a tribute reasoned and justified - to a woman sensitive, compassionate, passionately honest and eager only for truth; to an artist quite unsparing of her own labour, finely gifted, self-effacing, serious and humourous. Mrs Bennett added two chapters on A Writer's Diary and on Virginia Woolf's critical essays for the second edition. Both can help our understanding of Virginia Woolf the novelist; the Diary by the insight it gives into her creative process and the fuller understanding we can gain of technical problems, the essays because they are about novels and novelists.

As the title Jar Jar Binks Must Die indicates, Daniel M. Kimmel is not only a film critic with strong opinions, he's also a fan. In this collection of essays, he covers movies from Metropolis (1927), answering the absurd claim that the restoration of this silent classic negated its status as a science fiction film, to how Star Trek, Avatar, Moon, and District 9 may have made 2009 a "miracle year" for the genre. Along the way he looks at neglected works like Things to Come (1936), explains why remakes aren't always bad, and how seeing E.T. in an empty screening room changed his mind about Steven Spielberg. Whether to rediscover old favorites or add new titles to your Netflix queue, this is a must-have for lovers of SF movies. Author Bio Daniel M. Kimmel is a past president of the Boston Society of Film Critics. When it was discovered he is also a science fiction fan he started getting invitations to participate at a number of SF conventions, which he continues to do. He reviewed for the Worcester Telegram and Gazette and now writes for Northshoremovies.net. He is a correspondent for Variety, the "Movie Maven" for the Jewish Advocate and teaches film--including a course on SF and horror--at Suffolk University. His essays on classic science films have appeared in several publications including Clarkesworld, Space and Time, and the Internet Review of Science Fiction. He is the author of a history of FOX TV, The Fourth Network (2004) which received the Cable Center Book Award. His other books include a history of DreamWorks, The Dream Team (2006) and I'll Have What She's Having: Behind the Scenes of the Great Romantic Comedies (2008). He is also the author of three novels: Shh! It's a Secret: a novel about Aliens, Hollywood, and the Bartender's Guide (2013) Time On My Hands: My Misadventures In Time Travel (2017), and Father of the Bride of Frankenstein (2019).

Hermann Broch (1886-1951) is remembered among English-speaking readers for his novels The Sleepwalkers and The Death of Virgil , and among German-speaking readers for his novels as well as his works on moral and political philosophy, his aesthetic theory, and his varied criticism. This study reveals Broch as a major historian as well, one who believes that true historical understanding requires the faculties of both poet and philosopher. Through an analysis of the changing thought and career of the Austrian poet, librettist, and essaist Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929), Broch attempts to define and analyze the major intellectual issues of the European fin de siècle, a period that he characterizes according to the Nietzschean concepts of the breakdown of rationality and the loss of a central value system. The result is a major examination of European thought as well as a comparative study of political systems and artistic styles.

Straw Sandals is a collection of 23 stories, a play, and a poem by 16 Chinese writers selected to represent the radical literature produced in China between 1918 and 1933. It was assembled in Peking in 1934 by Harold R. Isaacs with the advice and guidance of Lu Hsün, China's foremost literary figure of this century, and Mao Tun, leading novelist of the younger group that had gathered around Lu Hsün in those tumultuous years. The first half of the collection, including several of Lu Hsün's most famous stories, typifies work that appeared in the first years of China's modern cultural renaissance—short stories written in vernacular Chinese that rejected surviving Chinese traditionalism with its philosophic and social outlooks, its rules of behavior for family life and relationships between men and women. The second group of stories represents the growing ideological and political turbulence of the 1920s and 1930s. Straw Sandals is introduced by Professor Isaacs, who describes the historical setting in which this short-lived and violence-ridden literary movement tried to make its way. He vividly presents the Shanghai of that period, where many of these writers struggled to pursue their craft and were caught between the pressures of Kuomintang repression (many were imprisoned and executed) and the demands for total conformity inside the Communist movement. His account adds an ironic perspective to the collection in light of all that has happened since that time—for the writers who survived Kuomintang repression and the war against Japan to see the Communist victory they had fought so hard and so long to bring about ultimately fell in their turn in the repeated purges that marked the Communist regime's imposition of total control over all art and literature. The English translations of a number of these stories first appeared in the China Forum, a journal that Professor Isaacs edited and published in Shanghai from 1932 to 1934. They were made by a distinguished Chinese language scholar, the late George A. Kennedy, while he was teaching in a Shanghai school. The rest of the collection was translated by several Chinese collaborators and then edited by Isaacs. The book includes updated biographical notes on the writers, many of which were originally supplied by the writers themselves, and an appendix, Mao Tun's "Notes on Chinese Left-wing Literary Magazines."

Explores medieval French and English romances in their relation to the literary aesthetic of that vanished age as well as to the evolution of narrative. The framework of this investigation is chronological, beginning in the twelfth century with the work of Chrétien de Troyes and following through to the great Arhurian Prose Cycle and its remodelling by Sir Thomas Malory, whose mind and art the author strives constantly to elucidate. As it seeks out the meaning and design of the early masterpieces, the study transcends its chronological framework: major problems of style and technique arise that are of fundamental importance to the contemporary novel as well. Related phenomena in medieval painting, sculpture and manuscript ilumination are drawn upon to illustrate and reinforce the significance of the author's discoveries.

In 1959, at the age of 22, Joanna Russ published her first science fiction story, “Nor Custom Stale,” in The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy. In the forty-five years since, Russ has continued to write some of the most popular, creative, and important novels and stories in science fiction. She was a central figure, along with contemporaries Ursula K. Le Guin and James Tiptree, in revolutionizing science fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, and her 1970 novel The Female Man is widely regarded as one of the most successful and influential depictions of a feminist utopia in the entire genre. The Country You Have Never Seen gathers Joanna Russ’s most important essays and reviews, revealing the vital part she played over the years in the never-ending conversation among writers and fans about the roles, boundaries, and potential of science fiction. Spanning her entire career, the collection shines a light on Russ’s role in the development of new wave science fiction and feminist science fiction, while at the same time providing fascinating insight into her own development as a writer.

The literature on Nathanael West by this time is larger, no doubt, than his entire output—less than 450pages in the one-volume complete edition. Yet West’s four short novels, all written in the 1930s and surrounded by his reputation as a Hollywood script writer, continue to fascinate readers, who still look for sign and symbol of the books’ importance. Irving Malin, a frequent contributor to this series, has taken a new approach to West’s novels. Rather than an examination of sources, his new book provides, for the first time, a chronological, chapter-by-chapter examination of the novels. This detailed textual explication shows the novels’ designs, which create their powerful effects by the accumulation of significant recurring details.

Explore the life and legacy of one of France's most celebrated women writers with "Famous Women: George Sand," a biography by Bertha Thomas. This meticulously prepared edition offers a window into the 19th century and the extraordinary life of Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, known to the world as George Sand. Delve into the story of a woman who defied societal expectations and carved her own path as a novelist, challenging conventions and captivating readers with her passionate prose. This biography examines Sand's literary contributions and her significant role in French literature. Discover the key moments and influences that shaped Sand's life and work, solidifying her place as a prominent figure and enduring symbol of female authorship. "Famous Women: George Sand" is a valuable resource for those interested in biography, women's studies, and the rich tapestry of 19th-century literary history. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

"Amy Levy's The Romance of a Shop (1888) follows the four Lorimer sisters in the wake of their father's death. Penniless and reliant on each other, they decide to open a photography studio at 20B Baker Street, offering the citizens of London quality portraits. It's the 1880s and photography is not only growing in popularity and accessibility, but those with a critical eye are elevating the medium associated with quick and steady cash into a true art form. With more women entering the workforce out of necessity and rebellion, the Lorimer sisters take advantage of newfound independence as they work to survive poverty, the grind and smoke of London, fraught courtships, and melodramatic twists of fate. A novel of sisterhood, love, the female gaze and postmortem photography Levy deftly balances along the thin lines of romance and realism, art and commerce"--

Recounts the main events and relationships of Maugham's long life and analyzes most of the important plays, stories, novels, and essay collections, with a glance at film scripts and miscellanea