Florentino Ariza has never forgotten his first love. He has waited nearly a lifetime in silence since his beloved Fermina married another man. No woman can replace her in his heart. But now her husband is dead. Finally - after fifty-one years, nine months and four days - Florentino has another chance to declare his eternal passion and win her back. Will love that has survived half a century remain unrequited?
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Written when Mishima was only twentysix, Forbidden Colors is a depiction of a male homosexual relationship, in which a rich older man buys the love of a young man who is stunningly handsome but who lacks the ability to love. As in Mann''s Death in Venice, the older man''s longing for the beauty of youth is associated with aestheticism and death.
 

First published in 1938, this volume of stories collected with the encouragement of his longtime editor Pascal Covici serves as a wonderful introduction to the work of Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. Set in the beautiful Salinas Valley of California, where simple people farm the land and struggle to find a place for themselves in the world, these stories reflect Steinbeck’s characteristic interests: the tensions between town and country, laborers and ...

Set in the volatile Paris summer of 1938, The Age of Reason follows two days in the life of Mathieu Delarue, a philosophy teacher, and his circle in the cafes and bars of Montparnasse. Mathieu has so far managed to contain sex and personal freedom in conveniently separate compartments. But now he is in trouble, urgently trying to raise 4,000 francs to procure a safe abortion for his mistress, Marcelle. Beyond all this, filtering an uneasy light on his predicament, ...

Published when she was only eighteen, Françoise Sagan''s astonishing first novel Bonjour Tristesse became an instant bestseller. It tells the story of Cécile, who leads a carefree life with her widowed father and his young mistresses until, one hot summer on the Riviera, he decides to remarry - with devastating consequences. In A Certain Smile Dominique, a young woman bored with her lover, begins an encounter with an older man that ...

Orwell''s brilliant 1946 satire, chronicling a revolution staged by the animals on Mr. Jones''s farm.

They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of lonelinss and alienation.
Laborers in California''s dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own. When they land ...

Guy Crouchback, determined to get into the war, takes a commission in the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. His spirits high, he sees all the trimmings but none of the action. And his first campaign, an abortive affair on the West African coastline, ends with an escapade which seriously blots his Halberdier copybook.
Men at Arms is the first book in Waugh’s brilliant trilogy, Sword of Honour, which chronicles the fortunes of Guy Crouchback. The ...

The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh''s novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder''s infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social ...

Guy Crouchback is now attached to a commando unit undergoing training on the Hebridean isle of Mugg, where the whisky flows freely and HM forces have to show respect for the laird. But the comedy of Mugg is followed by the bitterness of Crete.
 

Waugh’s own unhappy experience of being a soldier is superbly re-enacted in this story of Guy Crouchback, a Catholic and a gentleman, commissioned into the Royal Corps of Halberdiers during the war years 1939–45. High comedy – in the company of Brigadier Ritchie-Hook or the denizens of Bellamy’s Club – is only part of the shambles of Crouchback’s war. When action comes in Crete and in Yugoslavia, he discovers not heroism, but ...

To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionist depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on a marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. Its use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence and shifting perspectives, give the novel an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values. Virginia Woolf saw the novel as an elegy to her own parents, ...

The Waves, more than any of Virginia Woolf''s novels, conveys the complexities of human experience. Tracing the lives of a group of friends, The Waves follows their development from childhood to youth and middle age. While social events, individual achievements and disappointments form its narrative, the novel is most remarkable for the rich poetic language that conveys the inner life of its characters: their aspirations, their triumphs and ...

When the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945, killing 100,000 men, women and children, it was the beginning of a terrifying new episode in human history. Written only a year after the disaster, John Hersey brought the event vividly alive with this heart-rending account of six men and women who survived despite all the odds. He added a further chapter when, forty years later, he returned to Hiroshima to discover how the same six people had struggled to ...

In his final years, Freud devoted most of his energies to a series of highly ambitious works on the broadest issues of religion and society. Here, he argues that civilized values – and the impossible ideals of Christianity - inevitably distort our natural aggression and impose a terrible burden of guilt.

Written in Paris in the early 1950s, this book created instant controversy in its analysis of modern society that had allowed itself to be hypnotized by socio-political doctrines, and to accept totalitarian terror on the strength of a hypothetical future.
 

Spain''s greatest and most well-loved modern poet, Lorca has long been admired for the emotional intensity and dark brilliance of his work, which drew on music, drama, mythology and the songs of his Andulucian childhood. From the playful Suites and stylized Gypsy Ballads, to his own dark vision of urban life, Poet in New York, and his elegaic meditation on death, Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías; his range was remarkable. This bilingual edition provides ...

Freud''s religious unbeliefs are too easily dismissed as the standard scientific rationalism of the twentieth-century intellectual, yet he scorned the high-minded humanism of his contemporaries. In Mass Psychology and Analysis of the ''I'' he explores the notion of ''mass-psychology'' - his findings would prove all too prophetic in the years that followed. Writings such as A Religious Experience and The Future of an Illusion continue earlier work on the essential ...

Why do we laugh? The answer, argued Freud in this groundbreaking study of humor, is that jokes, like dreams, satisfy our unconscious desires. The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious explains how jokes provide immense pleasure by releasing us from our inhibitions and allowing us to express sexual, aggressive, playful, or cynical instincts that would otherwise remain hidden. In elaborating this theory, Freud brings together a rich collection of puns, ...

By a detailed investigation of the universal phenomenon of dreaming, Freud discovered a radical new way of exploring the unconscious and recognized that dreams are a conflict and compromise between conscious and unconscious impulses. Through his insights about dreams, Freud was able to revise his methods of treatment for neurotic patients and develop, largely through this remarkable work, his revolutionary theories of the Oedipus Complex and of the profound ...