Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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Dorothy, the heroine of this novel, performs good works, cultivates good thoughts, and pricks her arm with a pin when a bad thought arises. She then has a series of unexpected and degrading adventures after becoming a victim of amnesia. Though she regains her life as a clergyman's daughter, she has lost her faith.
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The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
- Houghton mifflin harcourt
- 28 December 2013
- 9780544363939
Both a thrilling page-turner and a moral allegory, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde depicts the struggle between good and evil, vying for the soul of one man. Robert Louis Stevenson's classic endures as one of the most engrossing and thought-provoking novels of all time. Included in this special edition is a sneak preview of Daniel Levine's reimagining, Hyde, in bookstores in March 2014. Told from the perspective of one of literature's most misunderstood villains, Hyde introduces new horrors and unsettling twists to this timeless tale - including the possibility that Hyde's rogue villain could actually be heroic.
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Darwin's Sacred Cause
Adrian Desmond James Moore
- Houghton mifflin harcourt
- 11 November 2014
- 9780547527758
An astonishing new portrait of a scientific iconIn this remarkable book, Adrian Desmond and James Moore restore the missing moral core of Darwins evolutionary universe, providing a completely new account of how he came to his shattering theories about human origins.There has always been a mystery surrounding Darwin: How did this quiet, respectable gentleman, a pillar of his parish, come to embrace one of the most radical ideas in the history of human thought? Its difficult to overstate just what Darwin was risking in publishing his theory of evolution. So it must have been something very powerful--a moral fire, as Desmond and Moore put it--that propelled him. And that moral fire, they argue, was a passionate hatred of slavery.To make their case, they draw on a wealth of fresh manuscripts, unpublished family correspondence, notebooks, diaries, and even ships logs. They show how Darwins abolitionism had deep roots in his mothers family and was reinforced by his voyage on the Beagle as well as by events in America--from the rise of scientific racism at Harvard through the dark days of the Civil War.Leading apologists for slavery in Darwins time argued that blacks and whites had originated as separate species, with whites created superior. Darwin abhorred such "arrogance." He believed that, far from being separate species, the races belonged to the same human family. Slavery was therefore a "sin," and abolishing it became Darwins "sacred cause." His theory of evolution gave all the races--blacks and whites, animals and plants--an ancient common ancestor and freed them from creationist shackles. Evolution meant emancipation.In this rich and illuminating work, Desmond and Moore recover Darwins lost humanitarianism. They argue that only by acknowledging Darwins Christian abolitionist heritage can we fully understand the development of his groundbreaking ideas. Compulsively readable and utterly persuasive, Darwins Sacred Cause will revolutionize our view of the great naturalist.
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In the 1930s Orwell was sent by a socialist book club to investigate the appalling mass unemployment in the industrial north of England. He went beyond his assignment to investigate the employed as well-"to see the most typical section of the English working class." Foreword by Victor Gollancz.
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With an imaginative audacity and lyrical brilliance that puts him in the company of David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon, Rana Dasgupta paints a portrait of a century though the story of a hundred-year-old blind Bulgarian man in a first novel that announces the arrival of an exhilarating new voice in fiction.
In the first movement of Solo we meet Ulrich, the son of a railroad engineer, who has two great passions: the violin and chemistry. Denied the first by his father, he leaves for the Berlin of Einstein and Fritz Haber to study the latter. His studies are cut short when his father's fortune evaporates, and he must return to Sofia to look after his parents. He never leaves Bulgaria again. Except in his daydreams--and it is those dreams we enter in the volatile second half of the book. In a radical leap from past to present, from life lived to life imagined, Dasgupta follows Ulrich's fantasy children, born of communism but making their way into a post-communist world of celebrity and violence.
Intertwining science and heartbreak, the old world and the new, the real and imagined, Solo is a virtuoso work.
"Utterly unforgettable in its humanity." --The Guardian
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New York Times Bestseller, With a New Afterword"Schlosser has a flair for dazzling scene-setting and an arsenal of startling facts . . . Fast Food Nation points the way but, to resurrect an old fast food slogan, the choice is yours."--Los Angeles TimesIn 2001, Fast Food Nation was published to critical acclaim and became an international bestseller. Eric Schlosser's exposé revealed how the fast food industry has altered the landscape of America, widened the gap between rich and poor, fueled an epidemic of obesity, and transformed food production throughout the world. The book changed the way millions of people think about what they eat and helped to launch today's food movement.In a new afterword for this edition, Schlosser discusses the growing interest in local and organic food, the continued exploitation of poor workers by the food industry, and the need to ensure that every American has access to good, healthy, affordable food. Fast Food Nation is as relevant today as it was a decade ago. The book inspires readers to look beneath the surface of our food system, consider its impact on society and, most of all, think for themselves."As disturbing as it is irresistible . . . Exhaustively researched, frighteningly convincing . . . channeling the spirits of Upton Sinclair and Rachel Carson."--San Francisco Chronicle"Schlosser shows how the fast food industry conquered both appetite and landscape."--The New YorkerEric Schlosser is a contributing editor for the Atlantic and the author of Fast Food Nation, Reefer Madness, and Chew on This (with Charles Wilson).
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We think of ambassadors as simply diplomats-but once they were adventurers who dared an uncertain fate in unknown lands, bringing gifts of greyhounds and elephants to powerful and unpredictable leaders. In vivid detail, The Ambassadors traces the remarkable journeys of these emissaries, taking us from the linguistically challenged Greek Megasthenes to the first Japanese embassies to China and Korea; from Mohammed's ambassadors to Egypt to the envoys of Byzantium, who had the unenviable task of convincing Attila the Hun to stop attacking them. We also witness the dialogue between Europe and Moorish Spain, and meet the ill-fated envoys sent in search of the mythical king Prester John.What Europe still thinks of Asia and what Asia still thinks of Africa were in no small part kindled in these long-ago first encounters. From the cuneiform civilizations of the ancient Near East to the clashing empires of the early modern age, Wright brings alive the men who introduced the great cultures of the world to each other.
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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Jonathan Safran Foer
- Houghton mifflin harcourt
- 3 September 2013
- 9780547416212
Jonathan Safran Foer follows his best-selling debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated, with an unexpectedly hilarious and affecting story about New York City in the period following September 11 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close recasts recent history through the eyes of Oskar Schell, an unusually intelligent nine-year-old on an urgent quest to find the lock that matches a mysterious key belonging to his father, who died in the World Trade Center. This unlikely adventure takes Oskar through every city borough and into contact with survivors of all sorts, and it's his irrepressible voice--one that few writers could conceive as imaginatively as Foer does--that transforms the tragedy of circumstance into an exhilarating tribute to love.
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In a future where death is embraced, a time-traveling doctor is the only one who can save a wounded resistance leader. When Dr. Jim Parsons wakes up from a car accident, he finds himself in a future populated almost entirely by the young. But to keep the world run by the young, death is fetishized, and those who survive to old age are put down. In such a world, Parsons--with his innate desire to save lives--is a criminal and outcast. But for one revolutionary group, he may be just the savior they need to heal and revive their cryogenically frozen leader. And when he and the group journey to 1500s California, what they find causes them to question what they know about history and the underpinnings of their society. With the jarring immediacy of a car crash, Philip K. Dick throws both the reader and protagonist of Dr. Futurity into a bizarre future where healing is a crime and youth rules.
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Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick
Philip K Dick
- Houghton mifflin harcourt
- 16 April 2013
- 9780544040601
Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick contains twenty-one of Dick's most dazzling and resonant stories, which span his entire career and show a world-class writer working at the peak of his powers.
In "The Days of Perky Pat," people spend their time playing with dolls who manage to live an idyllic life no longer available to the Earth's real inhabitants. "Adjustment Team" looks at the fate of a man who by mistake has stepped out of his own time. In "Autofac," one community must battle benign machines to take back control of their lives. And in "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon," we follow the story of one man whose very reality may be nothing more than a nightmare. The collection also includes such classic stories as "The Minority Report," the basis for the Steven Spielberg movie, and "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale," the basis for the film Total Recall. With an introduction by Jonathan Lethem, Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick is a magnificent distillation of one of American literature's most searching imaginations.
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Half a lifetime ago, Paul Theroux virtually invented the modern travel narrative by recounting his grand tour by train through Asia. In the three decades since, the world he recorded in that book has undergone phenomenal change.The Soviet Union has collapsed and China has risen; India booms while Burma smothers under dictatorship; Vietnam flourishes in the aftermath of the havoc America was unleashing on it the last time he passed through. In Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Theroux re-creates that earlier journey. His odyssey takes him from eastern Europe, still hung-over from communism, through tense but thriving Turkey into the Caucasus, where Georgia limps back toward feudalism while its neighbor Azerbaijan revels in oil-fueled capitalism.Theroux is firsthand witness to it all, encountering adventures only he could have: from the literary (sparring with the incisive Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk) to the dissolute (surviving a week-long bender on the Trans-Siberian Railroad).Wherever he goes, his omnivorous curiosity and unerring eye for detail never fail to inspire, enlighten, inform, and entertain.
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After eleven years as an American living in London, the renowned travel writer Paul Theroux set out to travel clockwise around the coast of Great Britain to find out what the British were really like. The result is this perceptive, hilarious record of the journey. Whether in Cornwall or Wales, Ulster or Scotland, the people he encountered along the way revealed far more of themselves than they perhaps intended to display to a stranger. Theroux captured their rich and varied conversational commentary with caustic wit and penetrating insight.
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The journeys of Paul Theroux take place not only in exotic, unexpected places of the world but in the thoughts, reading, and emotions of the writer himself. A gathering of people, places, and ideas in fifty glittering pieces of gold.
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In Anne Bartlett's engaging novel, a chance meeting sparks a friendship between two very different women who share a fascination with knitting. Sandra, a rigid academic, struggles to navigate the world without her husband, whom she has recently lost to cancer. Martha--a self-taught textile artist with her own secret store of grief--spends her days knitting elaborate projects charged with personal meaning. As the two women collaborate on a new project, surprising events will help heal them both.
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I had cousins at sea. One was in the Cadets. I was wanting to join. My maw did not want me to but my da said I could if I wanted, it was a good life and ye saved yer money, except if ye were daft and done silly things. He said it to me. I would just have
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Far off the coast of California looms a harsh rock known as the island of San Nicholas. Dolphins flash in the blue waters around it, sea otter play in the vast kep beds, and sea elephants loll on the stony beaches. Here, in the early 1800s, according to history, an Indian girl spent eighteen years alone, and this beautifully written novel is her story. It is a romantic adventure filled with drama and heartache, for not only was mere subsistence on so desolate a spot a near miracle, but Karana had to contend with the ferocious pack of wild dogs that had killed her younger brother, constantly guard against the Aleutian sea otter hunters, and maintain a precarious food supply. More than this, it is an adventure of the spirit that will haunt the reader long after the book has been put down. Karana's quiet courage, her Indian self-reliance and acceptance of fate, transform what to many would have been a devastating ordeal into an uplifting experience. From loneliness and terror come strength and serenity in this Newbery Medal-winning classic. In celebration of the book's 50th anniversary, this edition has a stunning new look, and an introduction by Lois Lowry, Newbery Medal-winning author of The Giver and Number the Stars.
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Walter Faber is an emotionally detached engineer forced by a string of coincidences to embark on a journey through his past. The basis for director Volker Schl¨ndorff's movie Voyager. Translated by Michael Bullock. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
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Chosen as one of the New York Times's ten best books in the year of its original publication, this collection immediately won a cherished place among lovers of the tale and vaulted Calvino into the ranks of the great folklorists. Introduction by the Author; illustrations. Translated by George Martin. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
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This bestseller covers a single momentous year during Nin's life in Paris, when she met Henry Miller and his wife, June. "Closer to what many sexually adventuresome women experience than almost anything I've ever read....I found it a very erotic book and profoundly liberating" (Alice Walker). The source of a major motion picture from Universal. Preface by Rupert Pole; Index.
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Army cop Erik Rider prefers to fight his war in the saloons and streets of Saigon. When he is sent to disrupt a Vietcong opium operation deep in the jungle, he could not be less interested. But when Rider lands in Cheo Reo, things get complicated. The American outpost is home to battle-hardened soldiers, intelligence operatives, and profiteers of all stripes. Meanwhile, Vietcong battalions are massing in the hills, and sixty thousand Montagnard tribespeople are advancing with the goal of reclaiming their mountain homeland. With a bounty on his head, Rider must hunt for the opium smugglers, avoid enemy patrols, and defend the undermanned U.S. base. As he closes in on the smuggling operation, he discovers that someone inside the base has a stake in it, and is willing to kill to protect that stake.
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Each year for ten years, a young woman's body was found in Edinburgh at Christmastime: naked, throat slit, body washed clean. The final victim, Kirsty Summers, was Detective Constable Tony McLean's fiancée. But the Christmas Killer made a mistake, and McLean put an end to the brutal killing spree.It's now twelve years later. A fellow prisoner has just murdered the incarcerated Christmas Killer. But with the arrival of the festive season comes a body. A young woman: naked, washed, her throat cut.
Is this a copycat killer? Was the wrong man behind bars all this time? Or is there a more frightening explanation?McLean must revisit the most disturbing case of his life and discover what he missed before the killer strikes again . . . -
A classic work that has charmed generations of readers, this collection assembles Carson McCullers's best stories, including her beloved novella "The Ballad of the Sad Café." A haunting tale of a human triangle that culminates in an astonishing brawl, the novella introduces readers to Miss Amelia, a formidable southern woman whose café serves as the town's gathering place. Among other fine works, the collection also includes "Wunderkind," McCullers's first published story written when she was only seventeen about a musical prodigy who suddenly realizes she will not go on to become a great pianist. Newly reset and available for the first time in a handsome trade paperback edition, The Ballad of the Sad Café is a brilliant study of love and longing from one of the South's finest writers.
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With the publication of her first novel, THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary sensation. With its profound sense of moral isolation and its compassionate glimpses into its characters' inner lives, the novel is considered McCullers' finest work, an enduring masterpiece first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940. At its center is the deaf-mute John Singer, who becomes the confidant for various types of misfits in a Georgia mill town during the 1930s. Each one yearns for escape from small town life. When Singer's mute companion goes insane, Singer moves into the Kelly house, where Mick Kelly, the book's heroine (and loosely based on McCullers), finds solace in her music. Wonderfully attuned to the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition, and with a deft sense for racial tensions in the South, McCullers spins a haunting, unforgettable story that gives voice to the rejected, the forgotten, and the mistreated -- and, through Mick Kelly, gives voice to the quiet, intensely personal search for beauty.
Richard Wright praised Carson McCullers for her ability "to rise above the pressures of her environment and embrace white and black humanity in one sweep of apprehension and tenderness." She writes "with a sweep and certainty that are overwhelming," said the NEW YORK TIMES. McCullers became an overnight literary sensation, but her novel has endured, just as timely and powerful today as when it was first published. THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER is Carson McCullers at her most compassionate, endearing best.
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"At a time when most 20th-century science fiction writers seem hopelessly dated, Dick gives us a vision of the future that captures the feel of our time."--WiredIn the future, most of humanity lives in massive underground bunkers, producing weapons for the nuclear war they've fled. Constantly bombarded by patriotic propaganda, the citizens of these industrial anthills believe they are waiting for the day when the war will be over and they can return aboveground. But when Nick St. James, president of one anthill, makes an unauthorized trip to the surface, what he finds is more shocking than anything he could imagine.
