Books published by publisher Everyman's Library 4/30/

rom one of the most brilliant and widely read of all American poets, a generous selection of lyrics, dramatic monologues, and narrative poems--all of them steeped in the wayward and isolated beauty of Frost's native New England. Includes his classics "Mending Wall, " "Birches, " and "The Road Not Taken, " as well as poems less famous but equally great.

A new Everyman's Library hardcover edition of The Ambassadors--one of the great masterpieces of Henry James’s late period, and the author’s own favorite among his works.First published in 1903, the novel follows middle-aged Lambert Strether as he is dispatched from Massachusetts to Paris by his wealthy fiancée to rescue her son, Chad Newsome, from the corrupting influences of Europe and its wicked women. Once the mild-mannered and inexperienced Strether arrives in Paris, however, Chad introduces him to a world that he finds refined and sophisticated, rather than debauched and base. Mrs. Newsome, waiting in Massachusetts, grows impatient and sends more ambassadors to retrieve her wayward men. But Strether has become especially enchanted by Chad’s female friends Madame de Vionnet and her daughter, Jeanne, and he begins to wonder if, all his life, he has missed out on what the wider world has to offer. “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to,” he tells a friend in one of the most memorable scenes in this darkly comic, masterfully written story of liberation, self-discovery, and the meaning of living well.

Dostoevsky’s most revolutionary novel, Notes from Underground marks the dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and between the visions of self each century embodied. One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In full retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of man’s essentially irrational nature.Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose Dostoevsky translations have become the standard, give us a brilliantly faithful edition of this classic novel, conveying all the tragedy and tormented comedy of the original.

From the publication of his first book in 1926, Langston Hughes was hailed as the poet laureate of black America, the first to commemorate the experience of African Americans in a voice that no reader, black or white, could fail to hear. Lyrical and pungent, passionate and polemical, this volume is a treasure-an essential collection of the work of a poet whose words have entered our common language.

In this celebrated novel, Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison created a new way of rendering the contradictory nuances of black life in America. Its earthy poetic language and striking use of folklore and myth established Morrison as a major voice in contemporary fiction. Song of Solomon begins with one of the most arresting scenes in our century's literature: a dreamlike tableau depicting a man poised on a roof, about to fly into the air, while cloth rose petals swirl above the snow-covered ground and, in the astonished crowd below, one woman sings as another enters premature labor. The child born of that labor, Macon (Milkman) Dead, will eventually come to discover, through his complicated progress to maturity, the meaning of the drama that marked his birth. Toni Morrison's novel is at once a romance of self-discovery, a retelling of the black experience in America that uncovers the inalienable poetry of that experience, and a family saga luminous in its depth, imaginative generosity, and universality. It is also a tribute to the ways in which, in the hands of a master, the ancient art of storytelling can be used to make the mysterious and invisible aspects of human life apparent, real, and firm to the touch.

E. M. Forster’s beloved Italian novels, now in a single hardcover volume.Forster’s most memorably romantic exploration of the liberating effects of Italy on the English, A Room with a View follows the carefully chaperoned Lucy Honeychurch to Florence. There she meets the unconventional George Emerson and finds herself inspired by his refreshingly free spirit— which puts her in mind of “a room with a view”—to escape the claustrophobic snobbery of her guardians back in England. The wicked tragicomedy Where Angels Fear to Tread chronicles a young English widow’s trip to Italy and its messy aftermath. When Lilia Herriton impulsively marries a penniless Italian and then dies in childbirth, her first husband’s family sets out to rescue the child from his “uncivilized” surroundings. But in ways that they can’t possibly imagine, their narrow preconceptions will be upended by the rich and varied charms of Forster’s cherished Italy.

The story of the mysterious indictment, trial, and reckoning forced upon Joseph K. in Franz Kafka’s The Trial is one of the twentieth century’s master parables, reflecting the central spiritual crises of modern life. Kafka’s method–one that has influenced, in some way, almost every writer of substance who followed him–was to render the absurd and the terrifying convincing by a scrupulous, hyperreal matter-of-factness of tone and treatment. He thereby imparted to his work a level of seriousness normally associated with civilization’s most cherished poems and religious texts. Translated by Willa and Edwin Muir

Our ceaseless human quest for something larger than ourselves has never been represented with more insight and love than in this story of Don Quixote–pursuing his vision of glory in a mercantile age–and his shrewd, skeptical manservant, Sancho Panza. As they set out to right the world’s wrongs in knightly combat, the narrative moves from philosophical speculation to broad comedy, taking in pastoral, farce, and fantasy on the way. The first and still the greatest of all European novels, Don Quixote has been as important for the modern world as the poems of Homer were for the ancients.Translated by P. A. Motteux

For the first time in one hardcover volume—three classic novels by the author of Nineteen Eighty- Four and Animal Farm.The lushly descriptive and tragic Burmese Days, a devastating indictment of British colonial rule, is based on Orwell’s own experience while serving in the Indian Imperial Police. His beloved satirical classic, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, features a young idealist whose attempt to rebel against middle-class respectability—by working in a bookshop and trying to be a writer—goes terribly and comically awry. The hero of Coming Up for Air tries to escape the bleakness of suburbia by returning to the idyllic rural village of his childhood—only to find that the simpler England he remembers so nostalgically is gone forever.These three novels share Orwell’s unsparing vision of the dark side of modern capitalist society in combination with his comic brilliance and his unerring compassion for humanity.

The precise, unerring, delicately emphatic characterizations for which The Canterbury Tales is so famous are no more extraordinary than Chaucer’s utter mastery of English rhythms and his effortless versification. Ranging from animal fables to miniature epics of courtly love and savagely hilarious comedies of sexual comeuppance, these stories told by pilgrims on the way to the shrine of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury reveal a teeming, vital fourteenth-century English society on the verge of its Renaissance.These tales bring together a band of pilgrims who represented most of the occupations and social groups of the time. The diversity of the narrators in turn made possible a varied collection of tales including chivalric romance, spiritual allegory, courtly lay, beast fable and literary satire.

No-one in the grip of Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, with its mythic-minded hero and its highly sympathetic monster who reads Goethe and longs to be at peace with himself, can fail to notice how much more excellent the original is than all the adaptations, imitations and outright plagiarisms which have followed in its ample wake. In her first novel, written at the instigation of Lord Byron and published in 1818 (and revised in 1831), Mary Shelley produced English Romanticism's finest prose fiction.