Modern World Literature

The Stranger by Albert Camus Through the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach, Camus explored what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd." First published in 1946; now in a new translation by Matthew Ward.

No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe A classic story of moral struggle in an age of turbulent social change and the final book in Chinua Achebe's The African Trilogy When Obi Okonkwo, grandson of Okonkwo, the main character in Things Fall Apart returns to Nigeria from England in the 1950s, his foreign education separates him from his African roots. No Longer at Ease, the third and concluding novel in Chinua Achebe's The African Trilogy, depicts the uncertainties that beset the nation of Nigeria, as independence from colonial rule loomed near. In Obi Okonkwo's experiences, the ambiguities, pitfalls, and temptations of a rapidly evolving society are revealed. He is part of a ruling Nigerian elite whose corruption he finds repugnant. His fate, however, overtakes him as he finds himself trapped between the expectation of his family, his village--both representations of the traditional world of his ancestors--and the colonial world.  A story of a man lost in cultural limbo, and a nation entering a new age of disillusionment, No Longer at Ease is a powerful metaphor for his generation of young Nigerians.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe The most enduring account we have of the modern African experience as seen from within. Starting with the intricate pattern of duties and traditions, and the universal human conflicts of a tribal village in what is now Nigeria,Things Fall Apart encompasses the advent of European colonialism, the intrusion of Christianity, and the shattering effects of an entire historical era on the immemorial culture of Africa.

Selected Poems by Claude McKay In his 1918 autobiographical essay, "A Negro Poet Writes," Claude McKay (1889–1948), reveals much about the wellspring of his poetry. "I am a black man, born in Jamaica, B.W.I., and have been living in America for the last years. It was the first time I had ever come face to face with such manifest, implacable hate of my race, and my feelings were indescribable … Looking about me with bigger and clearer eyes I saw that this cruelty in different ways was going on all over the world. Whites were exploiting and oppressing whites even as they exploited and oppressed the yellows and blacks. And the oppressed, groaning under the leash, evinced the same despicable hate and harshness toward their weaker fellows. I ceased to think of people and things in the mass. [O]ne must seek for the noblest and best in the individual life only: each soul must save itself.

Selected Writings of César Vallejo by César Vallejo For the first time in English, readers can now evaluate the extraordinary breadth of César Vallejo's diverse oeuvre that, in addition to poetry, includes magazine and newspaper articles, chronicles, political reports, fictions, plays, letters, and notebooks. Edited by the translator Joseph Mulligan, Selected Writings follows Vallejo down his many winding roads, from Santiago de Chuco in highland Peru, to the coastal cities of Trujillo and Lima, on to Paris, Madrid, Moscow, and Leningrad. This repeated border-crossing also plays out on the textual level, as Vallejo wrote prolifically across genres and, in many cases, created poetic space in extra-literary modes. Informed by a vast body of scholarly research, this compendium synthesizes a restored literary corpus and--in bold translations that embrace the idiosyncratic spirit of the author's writing--puts forth a new representation of this essential figure of twentieth-century Latin American literature as an indispensable alternative to the European avant-garde. Compiling well known versions with over eighty percent of the text presented in English translation for the first time, Selected Writings is both a trove of and tribute to Vallejo's multifaceted work. Includes translations by the editor and Clayton Eshleman, Pierre Joris, Suzanne Jill Levine, Nicole Peyrafitte, Michael Lee Rattigan, William Rowe, Eliot Weinberger, and Jason Weiss.

Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence Widely regarded as D.H. Lawrence's masterpiece, Sons and Lovers is a sprawling, multi-generational look at family relationships, class dynamics, and the intimate ties with others that pull young adults toward independence. This largely autobiographical novel made Lawrence's reputation as a writer -- it's a must read for fans of classic literary fiction.

Fernando Pessoa and Co. by Fernando Pessoa Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) - a poet who lived most his life in Lisbon, Portugal, and who died in obscurity there - has in recent years gained international recognition as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Now Richard Zenith has collected in a single volume all the major poetry of "one of the most extraordinary poetic talents the century has produced" (Microsoft Network's Reading Forum). Fernando Pessoa was as much a creator of personas as he was of poetry, prose, and criticism. He wrote under numerous "heteronyms," literary alter egos with fully fleshed identities and writing styles, who supported and criticized each other's work in the margins of his drafts and in the literary journals of the time. From spare minimalism to a revolutionary exuberance that recalls Leaves of Grass, Pessoa's oeuvre was radically new and anticipated contemporary literary concerns to an unnerving degree. The first comprehensive edition of Pessoa's poetry in the English language, Fernando Pessoa & Co. is a work of extraordinary depth and poetic precision. "Zenith's selection of Pessoa is a beautiful one-volume course in the soul of the twentieth century." -- Booklist

The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka The Complete Stories brings together all of Kafka's stories, from the classic tales such as "The Metamorphosis," "In the Penal Colony," and "A Hunger Artist" to shorter pieces and fragments that Max Brod, Kafka's literary executor, released after Kafka's death. With the exception of his three novels, the whole of Kafka's narrative work is included in this volume.nbsp;

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka The Metamorphosis is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915. It has been cited as one of the seminal works of fiction of the 20th century and is studied in colleges and universities across the Western world. The story begins with a traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, waking to find himself transformed (metamorphosed) into a large, monstrous insect-like creature. The cause of Samsa's transformation is never revealed, and Kafka himself never gave an explanation. The rest of Kafka's novella deals with Gregor's attempts to adjust to his new condition as he deals with being burdensome to his parents and sister, who are repulsed by the horrible, verminous creature Gregor has become.

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka The Metamorphosis begins almost comically. A man wakes up to find he has turned into an insect. But the claustrophobic, dirty room and the increasingly distressed narrator soon turn this into a tale of slow horror. Most horrifying of all is his family's reaction to his metamorphosis and their final solution to the problem.

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez "A love story of astonishing power." - Newsweek  The International Bestseller and modern literary classic by Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs--yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami From the bestselling author ofKafka on the ShoreandThe Wind-up Bird Chroniclescomes this superb collection of twenty-four stories that generously expresses Murakami’s mastery of the form. From the surreal to the mundane, these stories exhibit his ability to transform the full range of human experience in ways that are instructive, surprising, and relentlessly entertaining. Here are animated crows, a criminal monkey, and an iceman, as well as the dreams that shape us and the things we might wish for. Whether during a chance reunion in Italy, a romantic exile in Greece, a holiday in Hawaii, or in the grip of everyday life, Murakami’s characters confront grievous loss, or sexuality, or the glow of a firefly, or the impossible distances between those who ought to be closest of all. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Dubliners : And Chamber Music by James Joyce Dubliners comprises fifteen short stories, which Joyce intended should accurately reflect the life of the Irish middle class. Each story centers around the moment of epiphany, when a character suddenly understands something about themselves or their life and surroundings that they didn't understand before. The protagonists of the stories progress as a life progresses: from children to adolescents, to adults and the elderly.

A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man by James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is semi-autobiographical, following Joyce's fictional alter-ego through his artistic awakening. The young artist Steven Dedelus begins to rebel against the Irish Catholic dogma of his childhood and discover the great philosophers and artists. He follows his artistic calling to the continent.

Ulysses by James Joyce James Joyce's novel Ulysses is said to be one of the most important works in Modernist literature. It details Leopold Bloom's passage through Dublin on an ordinary day: June 16, 1904. Causing controversy, obscenity trials and heated debates, Ulysses is a pioneering work that brims with puns, parodies, allusions, stream-of-consciousness writing and clever structuring. Modern Library ranked it as number one on its list of the twentieth century's 100 greatest English-language novels and Martin Amis called it one of the greatest novels ever written.

Ulysses by James Joyce Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time Considered the greatest 20th century novel written in English, in this edition Walter Gabler uncovers previously unseen text. It is a disillusioned study of estrangement, paralysis and the disintegration of society.

Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges "Borges’s composed, carefully wrought, gnarled style is at once the means of his art and its object--his way of ordering and giving meaning to the bizarre and terrifying world he creates: it is a brilliant, burnished instrument, and it is quite adequate to the extreme demands his baroque imagination makes of it . . . . Absolutely and most vividly original.”--Saturday Review The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the gargantuan powers of imagination, intelligence, and style of one of the greatest writers of this or any other century. Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal’s abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. More playful and approachable than the fictions themselves are Borges’s Prologues, brief elucidations that offer the uninitiated a passageway into the whirlwind of Borges’s genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing irony, his skepticism, and his obsession with fantasy. To enter the worlds in Ficciones is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lies Heaven, Hell, and everything in between.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness is Joseph Conrad's disturbing novella recounted by the itinerant captain Marlow sent to find and bring home the shadowy and inscrutable Captain Kurtz. Marlow and his men follow a river deep into a jungle, the "Heart of Darkness" of Africa looking for Kurtz, an unhinged leader of an isolated trading station. This highly symbolic psychological drama was the founding myth for Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 movie Apocalypse Now.

Nostromo by Joseph Conrad Nostromo is a classic anti-hero, who lives in a fictitious mining village on the coast of a fictitious South American country. Many regard the imagined setting of the novel to be some of Conrad's finest work. The characters in the novel are also more highly-developed than those of his other novels, and were inspired by a group of mental patients Conrad had met shortly before beginning the novel.

The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer Mehring is rich. He has all the privileges and possessions that South Africa has to offer, but his possessions refuse to remain objects. His wife, son, and mistress leave him; his foreman and workers become increasingly indifferent to his stewardship; even the land rises up, as drought, then flood, destroy his farm.

The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz nbsp; Naguib Mahfouz's magnificent epic trilogy of colonial Egypt appears here in one volume for the first time. The Nobel Prize--winning writer's masterwork is the engrossing story of a Muslim family in Cairo during Britain's occupation of Egypt in the early decades of the twentieth century. nbsp; The novels of The Cairo Trilogy trace three generations of the family of tyrannical patriarch Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, who rules his household with a strict hand while living a secret life of self-indulgence. Palace Walk introduces us to his gentle, oppressed wife, Amina, his cloistered daughters, Aisha and Khadija, and his three sons-the tragic and idealistic Fahmy, the dissolute hedonist Yasin, and the soul-searching intellectual Kamal. Al-Sayyid Ahmad's rebellious children struggle to move beyond his domination in Palace of Desire, as the world around them opens to the currents of modernity and political and domestic turmoil brought by the 1920s. Sugar Street brings Mahfouz's vivid tapestry of an evolving Egypt to a dramatic climax as the aging patriarch sees one grandson become a Communist, one a Muslim fundamentalist, and one the lover of a powerful politician. nbsp; Throughout the trilogy, the family's trials mirror those of their turbulent country during the years spanning the two World Wars, as change comes to a society that has resisted it for centuries. Filled with compelling drama, earthy humor, and remarkable insight, The Cairo Trilogy is the achievement of a master storyteller.

Sublime Blue by Pablo Neruda A translation of Pablo Neruda’s early collections of odes,nbsp;this book features poems that are addressed to hope and to gloom, to numbers and to the atom, to blue flowers and to artichokes. Reflecting the lucent, candid vitality driving Neruda’s charming accounts, these poems celebrate things big and the small: even lamentations become commemorations. Compassionately amused one moment then sobered by injustice and supportive of resistance the next, this bilingual compilation will appeal to fans of one of the 20th century’s most popular poets.

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie The iconic masterpiece of India that introduced the world to "a glittering novelist--one with startling imaginative and intellectual resources, a master of perpetual storytelling" (The New Yorker) WINNER OF THE BEST OF THE BOOKERS * SOON TO BE A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES   Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time * The twenty-fifth anniversary edition, featuring a new introduction by the author Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India's independence. Greeted by fireworks displays, cheering crowds, and Prime Minister Nehru himself, Saleem grows up to learn the ominous consequences of this coincidence. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course of national affairs; his health and well-being are inextricably bound to those of his nation; his life is inseparable, at times indistinguishable, from the history of his country. Perhaps most remarkable are the telepathic powers linking him with India's 1,000 other "midnight's children," all born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts. This novel is at once a fascinating family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people-a brilliant incarnation of the universal human comedy. Twenty-five years after its publication, Midnight' s Children stands apart as both an epochal work of fiction and a brilliant performance by one of the great literary voices of our time.

The Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett by Samuel Beckett Samuel Beckett, the great minimalist master and winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Literature, has produced some of his most widely praised work for the stage in the form of the shorter play.

The Complete Short Prose of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1989 by Samuel Beckett Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett was one of the most profoundly original writers of the 20th century. He gave expression to the anguish and isolation of the individual consciousness with a purity and minimalism that have altered the shape of world literature.

A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul In the "brilliant novel" (The New York Times) V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man--an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Naipaul gives us the most convincing and disturbing vision yet of what happens in a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past and traditions.

Monday or Tuesday : And Other Short Stories by Virginia Woolf Interested in diving into the works of brilliant modernist author Virginia Woolf, but don't know where to start? Try Monday or Tuesday, a collection of eight short stories originally published in 1921. Although the collected stories contain the same keen insight and bold experimentation that made Woolf's reputation, their easy-to-digest size make them a bit easier to tackle than one of Woolf's novels, especially for newcomers to this feminist icon's body of work.

The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf The first novel in what would be a remarkable but tragically curtailed creative career, Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out recounts the tale of Rachel Vinrace's literal and metaphorical journey. En route to South America on one of her father's ships, Rachel undertakes her own voyage of self-discovery as she interacts with a motley crew of passengers, through whom Woolf takes the opportunity to savagely satirize the bourgeois mores of Edwardian England.

Delphi Complete Works of Wilfred Owen by Wilfred Owen The Delphi Poets Series offers readers the works of literature's finest poets, with superior formatting. This volume presents the complete poetical works of the beloved war poet Wilfred Owen, with beautiful illustrations and the usual Delphi bonus material.

Africa39 by Wole Soyinka In 2014, UNESCO's World Book Capital is Port Harcourt, Nigeria-the first city in Africa to receive the designation by public bid. This makes it a special year for the Port Harcourt Book Festival, which will be in its seventh year, and bigger than ever. They are joining forces with the internationally renowned Hay Festival, which will bring to Port Harcourt its 39 Project-a competition to identify the thirty-nine most promising young talents under the age of forty in sub-Saharan Africa and the diaspora. It follows the success of Bogotá 39 in 2007 and Beirut 39 in 2010. Both recognized a number of authors who now have international profiles: in Bogotá, Adriana Lisboa, Alejandro Zambra, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Daniel Alarcón, and Junot Díaz; in Beirut, Randa Jarrar, Joumana Haddad, Abdellah Taia, Samar Yazbek, and Faiza Guene. In Nigeria this year, the esteemed judges include leading-edge publisher Margaret Busby; novelist and playwright Elechi Amadi,writer and scholar Osonye Tess Onwueme, and Caine Prize winner Binyavanga Wainaina. For the second time, Bloomsbury is honored to be a part of the festivities, publishing worldwideAfrica39-a collection of brand new work from these talented thirty-nine. With an introduction by Wole Soyinka,Africa39 is a must-read for anyone curious about Africa today and Africa tomorrow, as envisioned through the eyes of its brightest literary stars.

Women in Love Women in Love, the novel that D. H. Lawrence considered his best, is a powerful portrayal of two couples dynamically engaged in a struggle with themselves, with each other, and with life's intractable limitations.          The sisters Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, whom we first met in Lawrence's novel The Rainbow, here become involved with two close friends: Rupert, an intellectual school inspect∨ and Gerald, the wealthy heir to a mine owner. The turbulent relationships that result--chronicled with an emotional and sexual frankness that provoked controversy on the book's publication in 1920--take the characters from an English landscape of coal mines and sooty factories to the snowy heights of the Alps, where tragedy strikes. Women in Love was written during World War I, and while that conflict is never mentioned in the novel, a sense of background danger, of lurking catastrophe, continually informs its drama. Lawrence was a powerful, prophetic writer, but in addition he brought such delicacy to his treatment of the human and natural worlds that E. M. Forster's claim that he was the greatest imaginative novelist of his generation does him too little justice rather than too much.

Arabic Poems The Arabic poetic legacy is as vast as it is deep, spanning a period of fifteen centuries in regions from Morocco to Iraq. As a unifying principle, editor Marle Hammond has selected eighty poems reflecting desire and longing of various kinds- for the beloved, for the divine, for the homeland, and for change and renewal. Poets include the legendary pre-Islamic warrior 'Antara Ibn Shaddad, medieval Andalusian poet Ibn Zaydun, the wandering poet Al-A'sha, and the influential Egyptian Romantic Ahmad Zaki Abu Shadi. Here too are literary giants of the past century- Khalil Jibran, author of the bestselling The Prophet; popular Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani; Palestinian feminist Fadwa Tuqan; Mahmoud Darwish, bard of occupation and exile; acclaimed iconoclast Adonis, and more. In their evocations of heroism, nostalgia, mysticism, grief, and passion, the poems gathered here transcend the limitations of time and place.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe The most enduring account we have of the modern African experience as seen from within. Starting with the intricate pattern of duties and traditions, and the universal human conflicts of a tribal village in what is now Nigeria,Things Fall Apart encompasses the advent of European colonialism, the intrusion of Christianity, and the shattering effects of an entire historical era on the immemorial culture of Africa.

Baldwin, Early novels and stories by James Baldwin Here, in a Library of America volume edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, is the fiction that established James Baldwin's reputation as a writer who fused unblinking realism and rare verbal eloquence. His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), tells the story, rooted in Baldwin's own experience, of a preacher's son coming of age in 1930's Harlem. Ten years in the writing, its exploration of religious, sexual, and generational conflicts was described by Baldwin as "an attempt to exorcise something, to find out what happened to my father, what happened to all of us." Giovanni's Room (1956) is a searching, and in its day controversial, treatment of the tragic self-delusions of a young American expatriate at war with his own homosexuality. Another Country (1962), a wide-ranging exploration of America's racial and sexual boundaries, depicts the suicide of a gifted jazz musician and its ripple effect on those who knew him. Complex in structure and turbulent in mood, it is in many ways Baldwin's most ambitious novel. Going to Meet the Man (1965) collects Baldwin's short fiction, including the masterful "Sonny's Blues," the unforgettable portrait of a jazz musician struggling with drug addiction in which Baldwin came closest to defining his goal as a writer: "For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness." LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation's literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America's best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin A Modern Library edition of the renowned black author's classic first novel captures a vivid and provocative portrait of the African-American experience.

Ulysses by James Joyce Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time Considered the greatest 20th century novel written in English, in this edition Walter Gabler uncovers previously unseen text. It is a disillusioned study of estrangement, paralysis and the disintegration of society.

Nostromo : A Tale of the Seaboard by Joseph Conrad Joseph Conrad's foresight and his ability to distill human adventure from complex historical circumstances were so keen that his greatest novel, Nostromo--though more than a century old--says as much about Latin America as any recent account of that region's turbulent political life.

The Complete Short Prose of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1989 by Samuel Beckett

Lolita by Vladímir Nabokov nbsp; When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause célèbre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. But Vladimir Nabokov's wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as one of the twentieth century's novels of record not to the controversy its material aroused but to its author's use of that material to tell a love story almost shocking in its beauty and tenderness. nbsp; Awe and exhilaration-along with heartbreak and mordant wit-abound in this account of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America, but most of all, it is a meditation on love-love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation. With an introduction by Martin Amis. (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)