The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
In 1922, F. Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple + intricately patterned." That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned, and above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed, and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace becomes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream.It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying, but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties, and waits for her to appear. When she does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbor Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted, and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
James Dickey Now we have an American masterpiece in its final form: the original crystal has shaped itself into the true diamond. This is the novel as Fitzgerald wished it to be, and so it is what we have dreamed of, sleeping and waking
124 of 141 people found the following review helpful:
Decades later, still great but on different terms., August 24, 2001
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Great Gatsby (Paperback)
Having reread this book for the first time in 20 years, I can confirm that there's a reason that it's considered one of the very best American novels. However, my reaction to the story was different than when I first read it in high school. I recall that back then I was hoping that Daisy and Gatsby's love story would ultimately yield a happy ending. Now, I found them both to be such shallow creatures that they inspired no pity. While I considered the characters to be emotionally stunted, that dooesn't mean I was not impressed with Fitzergerald's skillful rendering. As in most forms of art, in literature it is more difficult to accurately and interestingly portray nothingness than to describe a richly endowed subject. At this more cynical age, I found Daisy to be a remarkable emotional void, and Gatsby's quest to pour all of his hopes and dreams into such a shallow cauldron only confirmed his own vapidity. One thing that hasn't changed in all these years is my amazement at Fitzgerald's ability to set a scene. His descriptive passages are truly poetic, and his command of word choice in unparalleled. All this made for a stimulating and delightful read.Product Details
| List Price: | $15.00 |
| Price: | $7.74 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25 |
- Paperback: 180 pages
- Publisher: Scribner; Reissue edition (September 30, 1999)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0743273567
- ISBN-13: 978-0743273565
- Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.5 inches
- Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
About the Author
The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., is home to the world's largest collection of Shakespeare's printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from around the globe. In addition to exhibitions open to the public throughout the year, the Folger offers a full calendar of performances and programs. For more information, visit www.folger.edu.Barbara A. Mowat is Director of Academic Programs at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, Chair of the Folger Institute, and author of The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare's Romances and of essays on Shakespeare's plays and on the editing of the plays.
Paul Werstine is Professor of English at King's College and the Graduate School of the University of Western Ontario, Canada. He is the author of many papers and articles on the printing and editing of Shakespeare's plays and was Associate Editor of the annual Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England from 1980 to 1989.
The story is legend - even speaking literally - apparently the story of Hamlet hearkens back to even older legends that predate Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Shakespeare is so quotable, and Hamlet is no different - you often find yourself saying "Oh, that's where that comes from!" and its like finding an old friend in a new story. "To be or not to be, that is the question" is one; so is "Neither a borrower nor a lender be" and so is "To thine own self be true". The book even comes with an appendix listing commonly quoted portions of the story and their source.
However, my favorite quote (but not well-known) from the play comes from Hamlet himself, and sums the character up well:
"O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!"
Get this book, and have a good read! Then get more Shakespeare from the same series: you won't be sorry.
Paul Werstine is Professor of English at King's College and the Graduate School of the University of Western Ontario, Canada. He is the author of many papers and articles on the printing and editing of Shakespeare's plays and was Associate Editor of the annual Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England from 1980 to 1989.
47 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
Fantastic story, and excellent for new reader of Hamlet, March 9, 2005
By
This review is from: Hamlet (The New Folger Library Shakespeare) (Mass Market Paperback)
The book has an interesting layout, with definitions of words on the left, with the text of the story on the right. The book layout is the best layout I've seen of any Shakespeare book, and the size is right (you can take it with you!).The story is legend - even speaking literally - apparently the story of Hamlet hearkens back to even older legends that predate Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Shakespeare is so quotable, and Hamlet is no different - you often find yourself saying "Oh, that's where that comes from!" and its like finding an old friend in a new story. "To be or not to be, that is the question" is one; so is "Neither a borrower nor a lender be" and so is "To thine own self be true". The book even comes with an appendix listing commonly quoted portions of the story and their source.
However, my favorite quote (but not well-known) from the play comes from Hamlet himself, and sums the character up well:
"O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!"
Get this book, and have a good read! Then get more Shakespeare from the same series: you won't be sorry.
Product Details
| Price: | $5.99 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. |
- Mass Market Paperback: 400 pages
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster; New Folger Edition edition (July 1, 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 9780743477123
- ISBN-13: 978-0743477123
- ASIN: 074347712X
- Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4 x 1.3 inches
- Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of À la recherche du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).
Among the first things that struck me about this novel is its paradoxical nature: It is both intimate and epic at the same time. It is limited in its milieu and vast in its treatment of that milieu. It is minute, delicate brain-surgery done on a Tolstoyan scale.
At the centre is the narrator Marcel (though, in all the 4000 pages, he is named only once or twice). He wants to be a writer, but finds that he cannot sit down and write because he is unable to recapture the Time-Memory of his life. His writer's block lasts through seven volumes. His tenacity in trying to pin down his sensations has much to do with his artistic ambitions. but all his efforts are in vain. At one point he decides to give up altogether. When in the end he does regain "his time", it is only because of memories and sensations coming back to him quite accidentally, despite himself. He is finally able to write. The delight here, however, is ambivalent and bittersweet, for, as he says in a memorable line: "The true paradises are those that we have lost." Literature has its limits. In calling his magnum opus itself into question, Proust is thoroughly a modern writer.
The book has pleasures aplenty, the most surprising of which being its humour. Proust has created a vast portrait gallery of characters, each one vividly imagined, and it is the interactions amongst them that provide the work's funniest moments. Proust's world is a world of fading dukes and duchesses, counts and barons, princesses and kings. It is a sort of caste system, ameliorated by an imperceptible upward or downward social mobility. Whichever way they go, none of them can abandon their pretensions of noblesse oblige, the most ironic example of which is the denigration of the aristocracy wherein they are firmly ensconced, and the pleasures and privileges of which they would not want to eschew for anything in the world.
Proust's frank treatment of male homosexuality and lesbianism is something I have not encountered in any other great writer. One entire volume is titled SODOM AND GOMORRAH. Here these "inverts" behave like regular couples: they love, they get jealous, they break up. But they are not treated kindly. They seem another reflection of the decadence of the upper classes. Is this self-chastisement by Proust, who was himself a homosexual ? The characters who are later discovered to be homosexuals are portrayed as descending to death or degradation.
Great books seem somehow to attract great translators. This translation (Scott Moncrief, Terence Kilmartin) renders Proust's French into delightfully quaint, slightly archaic English. Proust's sentences are very long indeed, interlaced with subordinate clauses within clauses, which contributes to the breathless earnestness of the narrative. But it's all perfectly readable, once you get used to it, and positively addictive once you're well into it.
Need the novel have been this long ? Proust's mission is not so much to examine Time, but to look at how human beings change in relation to their past, how memory, reality, sensations all play upon human consciuosness. The reader, to appreciate Proust's super-sensibilities, ought to traverse the whole vast canvas that he has laid out. In this sense the novel's length is an invitation to us to invest a considerable part of our own Time to participate in this great Proustian odyssey, and in his quest to "regain" his own Time. The very act of reading, then, is part of the "story". There is only one other book that has given me a similar sensation: Thomas Mann's THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, which, interestingly enough, also deals with time. Time was great theme of the early 20th century (Einstein, Bergson), and so was the human consciousness(Freud, Jung). But it is best to appreciate Proust without the intrusions of any "isms", to love IN SEARCH for all its luminous qualities.
Review
“Twice amended to bring it to documentary decorum and the kind of textual completion Proust himself could never achieve, the C. K. Scott Moncrieff translation of the Search, buffed, rebuffed, lightened, tightened, and in the abstergent sense, brightened, constitutes a monument which is also a medium—the medium by which to gain access to the book, the books, even the apocrypha of modern scripture. A triumph of tone, of a single (and singular) vision, this ultimate revision of the primary version affords the surest sled over the ice fields as well as the most sinuous surfboard over the breakers of Proustian prose, an invaluable and inescapable text.” —Richard Howard
359 of 370 people found the following review helpful:
Don't Be Intimidated by the 3000 pages., November 25, 2005
By
Sugunan (Singapore) - See all my reviews
This review is from: In Search of Lost Time: Proust 6-pack (Proust Complete) (Paperback)
Depending on how you look at it, this seven-volume masterpiece is the most beautiful work on human consciousness, or the most overstated piece on time and memory. Jorge Luis Borges might have had Proust in mind when, horrified at the time and effort required to write long novels, he instead decided to write short reviews of imagined long novels. Whatever the energy expended in the production, the reading is strangely without ardous labor. One does not "plough" through Proust; I would never have ploughed through anything for 12 long months. Instead, I found myself pleasurably swept along by Proust's meandering stream. Of all great novelists, Proust to me was the easiest to read, easy in the sense that, for most of the year, I was unconscious of the effort of reading. When pressing matters intruded into my life, I would leave Proust aside for many weeks at a time, but only to return to him as one returns to wearing one's favourite shirt. Perhaps this weird sense of effortlessness and, at the same time, finding it absolutely indispensible, is a function of its main concern, which is Time and Memory. There are no plot devices to push the reader forward. Instead the Time-Narrative is filled with the inanities of the quotidian. A shaft of sunlight falling into the bedroom can take up many pages. A smell, a taste, can open up enormous floodgates of memory. Of Proust it may be said that he could turn an egg upside down and write a book about it. His persistance with a certain image or an object is astonishing. It reminds me of one those famous Impressionist paintings of haystacks seen under different lights.Among the first things that struck me about this novel is its paradoxical nature: It is both intimate and epic at the same time. It is limited in its milieu and vast in its treatment of that milieu. It is minute, delicate brain-surgery done on a Tolstoyan scale.
At the centre is the narrator Marcel (though, in all the 4000 pages, he is named only once or twice). He wants to be a writer, but finds that he cannot sit down and write because he is unable to recapture the Time-Memory of his life. His writer's block lasts through seven volumes. His tenacity in trying to pin down his sensations has much to do with his artistic ambitions. but all his efforts are in vain. At one point he decides to give up altogether. When in the end he does regain "his time", it is only because of memories and sensations coming back to him quite accidentally, despite himself. He is finally able to write. The delight here, however, is ambivalent and bittersweet, for, as he says in a memorable line: "The true paradises are those that we have lost." Literature has its limits. In calling his magnum opus itself into question, Proust is thoroughly a modern writer.
The book has pleasures aplenty, the most surprising of which being its humour. Proust has created a vast portrait gallery of characters, each one vividly imagined, and it is the interactions amongst them that provide the work's funniest moments. Proust's world is a world of fading dukes and duchesses, counts and barons, princesses and kings. It is a sort of caste system, ameliorated by an imperceptible upward or downward social mobility. Whichever way they go, none of them can abandon their pretensions of noblesse oblige, the most ironic example of which is the denigration of the aristocracy wherein they are firmly ensconced, and the pleasures and privileges of which they would not want to eschew for anything in the world.
Proust's frank treatment of male homosexuality and lesbianism is something I have not encountered in any other great writer. One entire volume is titled SODOM AND GOMORRAH. Here these "inverts" behave like regular couples: they love, they get jealous, they break up. But they are not treated kindly. They seem another reflection of the decadence of the upper classes. Is this self-chastisement by Proust, who was himself a homosexual ? The characters who are later discovered to be homosexuals are portrayed as descending to death or degradation.
Great books seem somehow to attract great translators. This translation (Scott Moncrief, Terence Kilmartin) renders Proust's French into delightfully quaint, slightly archaic English. Proust's sentences are very long indeed, interlaced with subordinate clauses within clauses, which contributes to the breathless earnestness of the narrative. But it's all perfectly readable, once you get used to it, and positively addictive once you're well into it.
Need the novel have been this long ? Proust's mission is not so much to examine Time, but to look at how human beings change in relation to their past, how memory, reality, sensations all play upon human consciuosness. The reader, to appreciate Proust's super-sensibilities, ought to traverse the whole vast canvas that he has laid out. In this sense the novel's length is an invitation to us to invest a considerable part of our own Time to participate in this great Proustian odyssey, and in his quest to "regain" his own Time. The very act of reading, then, is part of the "story". There is only one other book that has given me a similar sensation: Thomas Mann's THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, which, interestingly enough, also deals with time. Time was great theme of the early 20th century (Einstein, Bergson), and so was the human consciousness(Freud, Jung). But it is best to appreciate Proust without the intrusions of any "isms", to love IN SEARCH for all its luminous qualities.
Product Details
| List Price: | $95.90 |
| Price: | $60.42 & this item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. |
- Paperback: 4211 pages
- Publisher: Modern Library (June 3, 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0812969642
- ISBN-13: 978-0812969641
- Product Dimensions: 9 x 9 x 6.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 8.4 pounds
Called the greatest of short story writer, Anton Chekhov changed the genre itself with his spare, impressionistic depictions of Russian life and the human condition. Now, thirty of his best tales from the major periods of his creative life are available in this outstanding one volume edition. Included are Chekhov's characteristically brief, evocative early pieces such as "The Huntsman" from 1885, which brilliantly conveys the complex texture of two lives during a meeting on a summer's day. Four years later, Chekhov produced the tour de force "A Boring Story" (1889), the penetrating and caustic self-analysis of a dying professor of medicine. Dark irony, social commentary, and symbolism mark the stories that follow, particularly "Ward No. 6" (1892), where the tables turn on the director of a mental hospital and make him an inmate. Here, too, is one of Chekhov's best -known stories. "The Lady with the Little Dog" (1899), a look at illicit love, as well as his own favorite among his stories, "The Student," a moving piece about the importance of religious tradition.
Atmospheric, compassionate, and uncannily wise, Chekhov's short fiction possesses the transcendent power of art to awe and change the reader. This monumental edition, expertly translated, is especially faithful to the meaning of Chekhov's prose and the unique rhythms of his writing, giving readers an authentic sense of his style-and, in doing so, a true understanding of his greatness.
Atmospheric, compassionate, and uncannily wise, Chekhov's short fiction possesses the transcendent power of art to awe and change the reader. This monumental edition, expertly translated, is especially faithful to the meaning of Chekhov's prose and the unique rhythms of his writing, giving readers an authentic sense of his style-and, in doing so, a true understanding of his greatness.
178 of 179 people found the following review helpful:
Good selection, great translations, December 14, 2000
By
This review is from: Stories of Anton Chekhov (Paperback)
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have established themselves as the preeminent living translators of Russian into English. Their translations of Dostoyevsky and Gogol are simply unparalleled, and now they have finally gotten around to Chekhov.It's not so bad that they've taken their time with Chekhov, for he has had numerous distinguished translators. Indeed, Constance Garnett is much-maligned (perhaps unfairly) for her many translations at the beginning of the 20th century of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but even her detractors tend to agree that she did good work with Chekhov. (Indeed, until now the best all-around collection of Chekhov stories was The Chekhov Omnibus, edited by Donald Rayfield, who used the Garnett translations, though he did revise them.)But now we have the best. It's not perfect, but if you can have only one collection of Chekhov stories, this is the one to have. The selection covers Chekhov's entire career, and includes such masterpieces as "Ward No. 6", "The Lady with the Little Dog", "Gusev", "The House with the Mezzanine", "In the Ravine", and many others (30 stories total).
It is a delight to read Chekhov in these translations, because the translators have stuck close to many of the idiosyncracies of Chekhov's style which most other translators ignore or smooth over. Chekhov's world -- a land of moping aristocrats and disenchanted peasants, of former serfs seeking dignity and everyday workers searching for the meaning of life, of lovers and painters and doctors and thieves -- is unique and haunting, and all of its dry absurdities and bleak terrains are rendered here with care and skill and sensitivity. Reading Chekhov is not easy, for he always wanted his readers to work as hard as he did, but it is endlessly, endlessly rewarding.
Of course, Chekhov wrote hundreds and hundreds of stories, so this book provides only a tiny sampling, and any Chekhovian will find favorites missing here (the biggest omission from my point of view is "Dreams" or "Daydreams", which is most readily available in The Portable Chekhov), but the only truly odd omission is of the story "About Love", which is part of a trilogy of stories with "The Man in the Case" and "Gooseberries", both of which are included here.
The novellas (over 50 pages) are also omitted, so there is no "Steppe", no "My Life", no "Three Years" or "The Duel". In a note, the translators suggest that they may do a second book of these.
The stories are arranged chronologically, and a useful introduction and endnotes are also provided. No better introduction to Chekhov's stories is available. (If you're looking for good translations of the plays, check out those of Carol Rocamora and Paul Schmidt.)
In his notebook, Chekhov wrote, "I hope that in the next world I shall be able to look back upon this life and say, 'Those were beautiful dreams.'" Thankfully, we all have the beautiful dreams of his stories.
Product Details
| List Price: | $15.00 |
| Price: | $10.20 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. |
- Paperback: 496 pages
- Publisher: Bantam (October 31, 2000)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0553381008
- ISBN-13: 978-0553381009
- Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 1.1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
Middlemarch by George Eliot
This panoramic work--considered the finest novel in English by many critics--offers a complex look at English provincial life at a crucial historical moment, and, at the same time, dramatizes and explores some of the most potent myths of Victorian literature. The text of this edition comes from the Clarendon Middlemarch, the first critical edition of the novel.
Review
"Excellent text--one of the best editions of any 19th century novel available in paper."--Alexander S. Gourlay, University of Nebraska
"Like the other World's Classics, this is a good text in a well-designed format, with adequate but unobtrusive editorial aids and introductions, biographical information, notes--at a fair price."--Robert D. Beckett, Southwest Missouri State University
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
Just about perfect...a classic story with a lot to think about..., January 31, 2011
By
This review is from: Middlemarch (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)
I have been wanting to read this classic for a long time, and I've finally done it. Why did I wait so long?Middlemarch is primarily the story of Dorothea Brooke - a woman who wants to make the world a better place at a time when women were not encouraged to have ideas outside of their own homes. This ardent desire leads her to make some poor choices, and some admirable ones.
This book is also a story about marriage. We see how Dorothea's marriage turns out - her sister Celia's marriage (Celia is the typical woman of her day), Rosamund's (the spoiled town beauty) marriage, and the marriage prospects of Mary Garth, a poor working girl.
The author helps us to get inside the minds of her characters, which helps us to decide if we like them or not, or if we've made similar choices too. Often I found myself sympathizing with a character I initially disliked, because I was helped to see their emotions.
It's very much a grown up book. If I had read this in my teens I would not have gained as much from the reading. There's no "and they lived happily ever after" here - Eliot keeps the story grounded.
If I had to sum up Middlemarch, I'd say Eliot gives us an inside view of the lives of women in her day. There's also quite a bit of political talk, helping us see what it must have been like to live in England while so much was starting to change.
For me, this book was just about perfect. One day I'd like to re-read it because I know there are some things I missed this time around.
Recommended for those who like classic literature with a lot of depth. Some have called this book "Jane Austen for grown-ups" and while I love Jane Austen very much, I think I have to agree with that.
Product Details
| List Price: | $10.95 |
| Price: | $8.76 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. |
- Paperback: 904 pages
- Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; Reissue edition (September 1, 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0199536759
- ISBN-13: 978-0199536757
- Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5 x 1.7 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
No comments:
Post a Comment