The story tells of Charles Marlow, an Englishman who took a foreign assignment from a Belgian trading company as a ferry-boat captain in Africa. Although Conrad does not give the name of the river, at the time, Congo Free State, the location of the large and important Congo River was a private colony of Belgium's King Leopold II. Marlow is employed to transport ivory downriver. However, his more pressing assignment is to return Kurtz, another ivory trader, to civilization, in a cover-up. Kurtz has a reputation throughout the region.This symbolic story is a story within a story or frame narrative. It follows Marlow as he recounts from dusk through to late night, to a group of men aboard a ship anchored in the Thames Estuary his Congolese adventure. The passage of time and the darkening sky during the fictitious narrative-within-the-narrative parallel the atmosphere of the story. Wikipedia

Vagrant deckhand, socialist, gold-digger and alcoholic, Jack London died, burntout, at the age of forty. "The Sea-Wolf" is based on his own brutal experiences on a sea-hunting voyage in a world where 'might is right and weakness is wrong.'

My Antonia is presented here in a high quality paperback edition. This popular classic work by Willa Sibert Cather is in the English language, and may not include graphics or images from the original edition. If you enjoy the works of Willa Sibert Cather then we highly recommend this publication for your book collection.

One of the most original American writers, Edgar Allen Poe shaped the development of both the detectvie story and the science-fiction story. Some of his poems—"The Raven," "The Bells," "Annabel Lee"—remain among the most popular in American literature. Poe's tales of the mmacabre still thrill readers of all ages. Here are familiar favorites like "The Purloined Letter," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," together with less-known masterpieces like "The Imp of the Perverse," "The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym," and "Ligeia," which is now recognised as one of the first science-fiction stories, a total of seventy-three tales in all, plus fifty-three poems and a generous sampling of Poe's essays, criticism and journalistic writings.

From William S. Burroughs to David Foster Wallace, Postmodern American Fiction offers up witty, risky, exhilarating, groundbreaking fiction from five decades of postwar American life.It includes works by sixty-eight authors: short fiction, novels, cartoons, graphics, hypertexts, creative nonfiction, and theoretical writings. This is the first anthology to do full justice to the vast range of American innovation in fiction writing since 1945.

Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers.

 

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.

This long, complex poem, modeled on the Watts Tower, a Los Angeles folk architecture masterpiece, is the first Living Batch Press drive, he said book—a series honoring Robert Creeley's "I Know a Man." The title alludes to Noah's ark; to the rainbow (arc-en-ciel in French); and by extension to Arkansas and hence to Kansas, where the poet was born.

"A work of singular beauty and resolution. It takes its legitimate place with the great works of the century of like kind, Ezra Pound's Cantos, Louis Zukofsky's A, Charles Olson's Maximus, and Robert Duncan's Passages. Its own specific character is, however, brilliantly singular."—Robert Creeley

"A late harvest of seeds sown by Blake, L. Frank Baum, the Bible, and Zukofsky, all in a new architecture, a wholly new voice, and even a new chemistry of words and images. It is for those who can see visions, and for those who know how to look well and be taught that they can see them."—Guy Davenport

Vampire literature is an amazingly varied genre of writing, providing elements of everything from the penny dreadful horrors to powerful doses of myth and eroticism. Because it contains its own mythology and its own set of rules, it has also proved a psychologically attractive genre for many writers from its Romantic inception to the present day. This anthology includes Bram Stoker's detailed research notes for "Dracula", the culmination point of vampire literature. The author has written a full introduction, exploring the historical and imaginative implications of vampire mythology in the arts from the medieval Count Vlad to President Ceaucescu.

Written in 1864, this novel is the first and strangest of Dostoevsky's masterpieces—and the source of those that followed. Violating literary conventions in ways never before attempted, this classic tells of a mid-19th-century Russian official's breakaway from society and descent "underground".

Big men. Big money. Big games. Big libidos. Big trouble.

A decade ago, The Bonfire of the Vanities defined an era—and established Tom Wolfe as our prime fictional chronicler of America at its most outrageous and alive. This time the setting is Atlanta, Georgia—a racially mixed late-century boomtown full of fresh wealth, avid speculators, and worldly-wise politicians. The protagonist is Charles Croker, once a college football star, now a late-middle-aged Atlanta real-estate entrepreneur turned conglomerate king, whose expansionist ambitions and outsize ego have at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 28,000-acre quail-shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife—and a half-empty office tower with a staggering load of debt. When star running back Fareek Fanon—the pride of one of Atlanta's grimmest slums—is accused of raping an Atlanta blueblood's daughter, the city's delicate racial balance is shattered overnight. Networks of illegal Asian immigrants crisscrossing the continent, daily life behind bars, shady real-estate syndicates, cast-off first wives of the corporate elite, the racially charged politics of college sports—Wolfe shows us the disparate worlds of contemporary America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made him our most phenomenal, most admired contemporary novelist.

A Man in Full is a 1998 National Book Award Finalist for Fiction.

A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the pursuit of happiness in America. Set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.

Equal parts philosophical quest and screwball comedy, Infinite Jest bends every rule of fiction without sacrificing for a moment its own entertainment value. It is an exuberant, uniquely American exploration of the passions that make us human - and one of those rare books that renew the idea of what a novel can do.

In December, 1999, a multinational team journeys out to the stars, to the most awesome encounter in human history. Who — or what — is out there?
In Cosmos, Carl Sagan explained the universe. In Contact, he predicts its future — and our own.

Tito is in his early twenties. Born in Cuba, he speaks fluent Russian, lives in one room in a NoLita warehouse, and does delicate jobs involving information transfer.

Hollis Henry is an investigative journalist, on assignment from a magazine called Node. Node doesn't exist yet, which is fine; she's used to that. But it seems to be actively blocking the kind of buzz that magazines normally cultivate before they start up. Really actively blocking it. It's odd, even a little scary, if Hollis lets herself think about it much. Which she doesn't; she can't afford to.

Milgrim is a junkie. A high-end junkie, hooked on prescription antianxiety drugs. Milgrim figures he wouldn't survive twenty-four hours if Brown, the mystery man who saved him from a misunderstanding with his dealer, ever stopped supplying those little bubble packs. What exactly Brown is up to Milgrim can't say, but it seems to be military in nature. At least, Milgrim's very nuanced Russian would seem to be a big part of it, as would breaking into locked rooms.

Bobby Chombo is a "producer," and an enigma. In his day job, Bobby is a troubleshooter for manufacturers of military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one. Hollis Henry has been told to find him.

Pattern Recognition was a bestseller on every list of every major newspaper in the country, reaching #4 on the New York Times list. It was also a BookSense top ten pick, a WordStock bestseller, a best book of the year for Publishers Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, and the Economist, and a Washington Post "rave."

Spook Country is the perfect follow-up to Pattern Recognition, which was called by The Washington Post (among many glowing reviews), "One of the first authentic and vital novels of the twenty-first century."

One night in October when he was ten years old, Tyler Dupree stood in his back yard and watched the stars go out. They all flared into brilliance at once, then disappeared, replaced by a flat, empty black barrier. He and his best friends, Jason and Diane Lawton, had seen what became known as the Big Blackout. It would shape their lives.

The effect is worldwide. The sun is now a featureless disk—a heat source, rather than an astronomical object. The moon is gone, but tides remain. Not only have the world's artificial satellites fallen out of orbit, their recovered remains are pitted and aged, as though they'd been in space far longer than their known lifespans. As Tyler, Jason, and Diane grow up, space probe reveals a bizarre truth: The barrier is artificial, generated by huge alien artifacts. Time is passing faster outside the barrier than inside—more than a hundred million years per day on Earth. At this rate, the death throes of the sun are only about forty years in our future.

Jason, now a promising young scientist, devotes his life to working against this slow-moving apocalypse. Diane throws herself into hedonism, marrying a sinister cult leader who's forged a new religion out of the fears of the masses.

Earth sends terraforming machines to Mars to let the onrush of time do its work, turning the planet green. Next they send humans...and immediately get back an emissary with thousands of years of stories to tell about the settling of Mars. Then Earth's probes reveal that an identical barrier has appeared around Mars. Jason, desperate, seeds near space with self-replicating machines that will scatter copies of themselves outward from the sun—and report back on what they find.

Life on Earth is about to get much, much stranger.