Books published by publisher J. M. Dent - Everyman's Librar

Lucie Manette had been separated from her father for eighteen years while he languished in Paris’s most feared prison, the Bastille. Finally reunited, the Manettes’s fortunes become inextricably intertwined with those of two men, the heroic aristocrat Darnay, and the dissolute lawyer, Carton. Their story, which encompasses violence, revenge, love and redemption, is grippingly played out against the backdrop of the terrifying brutality of the French Revolution.A Tale of Two Cities begins on a muddy English road in an atmosphere charged with mystery and drama, and it ends in the Paris of the French Revolution with one of the most famous acts of self-sacrifice in literature. In between lies one of Charles Dickens’s most exciting books– a historical novel that, generation after generation, has given readers access to the profound human dramas that lie behind cataclysmic social and political events.Famous for the character of Sydney Carton, who sacrifices himself upon the guillotine–“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done”–the novel is also a powerful study of crowd psychology and the dark emotions aroused by the Revolution, and is illuminated by Dickens’s lively comedy.This edition reprints the original Everyman introduction by G. K. Chesterton and includes sixteen illustrations by Phiz.

Much of The Adventures of Augie March takes place during the Great Depression, but far from being a chronicle of deprivation, the first of Saul Bellow’s string of masterpieces testifies to the explosive richness of life when it is lived at high risk and in tumultuous social circumstances. In a brawling Chicago of crooks, con artists, second-story men, extravagant dreamers, snappy dressers, and cold-eyed pragmatists, Augie March undergoes his sentimental education—an education that, though imbued with reality, will take him into realms progressively stranger, more marvelous, more filled with indecipherable meaning. The Adventures of Augie March is the product of an elegant and skeptical mind on which nothing is lost, and of an appetite for the look and feel of things that is both enormous and passionate. The result of these varying felicities is a novel that is immediate, strikingly unpredictable, authentic, and convincing.

Hugo's grand medieval melodrama tells the story of the beautiful Esmeralda, a gypsy girl loved by three men: Archdeacon Frollo, his adoptive son Quasimodo, bell-ringer of Notre-Dame cathedral, and Captain Phoebus. Falsely accused of trying to murder Phoebus, who attempts to rape her, Esmeralda is sentenced to death and rescued from the gallows by Quasimodo who defends her to the last.The subject of many adaptations for stage and screen, this remains perhaps one of the most romantic yet gripping stories ever told. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame is an epic of a whole people, with a cast of characters that ranges from the king of France to the beggars who inhabit the Parisian sewers, and at their center the massive figure--a character in itself--of the great Cathedral of Notre-Dame. Quasimodo, the deformed bell-ringer of the cathedral; his foster father, the tormented archdeacon Frollo; and the beautiful and doomed Gypsy Esmeralda are caught up in a tragedy that still speaks clearly to us of revolution and social strife, of destiny and free will, and of love and loss. The only widely available hardcover edition of Victor Hugo's masterful historical novel of medieval Paris--one of the most beloved of world classics.

That Machiavelli’s name has become synonymous with cold-eyed political calculation only heightens the intrinsic fascination of The Prince–the world’s preeminent how-to manual on the art of getting and keeping power, and one of the literary landmarks of the Italian Renaissance. Written in a vigorous, straightforward style that reflects its author’s realism, this treatise on states, statecraft, and the ideal ruler is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how human society actually works.

More than any other nineteenth-century writer, Stendhal was imbued with the spirit of the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath, and this spirit gives The Charterhouse of Parma, the masterpiece he published in 1839, a freshness and radical originality we normally associate with the great texts of the twentieth century. Remarkable for its detail, its political prescience, and the far-reaching psychological insight with which its characters and their passions are developed, this picture of the intricate intrigues at the court of a small Italian duchy illuminates, through its intense concentration on local events, a whole epoch of European history.(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

Widely hailed as Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul’s greatest work, A Bend in the River takes us deeply into the life of a young Indian man who moves to an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Salim is doubly an outsider in his new home—an unnamed country that resembles the Congo—by virtue of his origins in a community of Indian merchants on the coast of East Africa. Uncertain of his future, he has come to take possession of a local trading post he has naively purchased sight unseen. But what Salim discovers on his arrival is a ghost town, reduced to ruins in the wake of the recently departed European colonizers and in the process of being reclaimed by the surrounding forest. Salim struggles to build his business against a backdrop of growing chaos, conflict, ignorance, and poverty. His is a journey into the heart of Africa, into the same territory explored by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness nearly eighty years earlier—but witnessed this time from the other side of the tragedy of colonization. Salim discovers that the nation’s violent legacy persists, through the rise of a dictator who calls himself the people’s savior but whose regime is built on fear and lies. In this haunting masterpiece of postcolonial literature, short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1979, Naipaul gives us a convincing and disturbing vision of a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past.

These three groundbreaking works by Julio Cortázar—a major figure of world literature and one of the founders of the Latin American Boom—are published together in one volume for the first time, in honor of the centenary of his birth. With his influential “counternovel” HOPSCOTCH and his unforgettable short stories, Cortázar earned a place among the most innovative authors of the twentieth century. HOPSCOTCH is a nonlinear novel about an Argentinean writer living in Paris; it consists of 155 short chapters that the author advises the reader to read out of order. BLOW-UP and WE LOVE GLENDA SO MUCH bring together the most famous of Cortázar’s short fiction, including “Axolotl,” “End of the Game,” “The Night Face Up,” “Continuity of Parks,” “Bestiary,” and “Blow-Up”. These are stories in which invisible beasts stalk children in their homes, the reader of a mystery finds out that he is the murderer’s intended victim, an injured motorcyclist is pursued by Aztec warriors, and a man becomes a salamander in a Parisian zoo. In Cortázar’s work, laws of nature, physics, and narrative fall away, leaving us with an astonishing new view of the world.

The title of the novel comes from the Yorkshire manor on the moors of the story. The narrative centres on the all-encompassing, passionate, but ultimately doomed love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, and how this unresolved passion eventually destroys them and the people around them.Virginia Woolf said of Emily Brontë that her writing could "make the wind blow and the thunder roar," and so it does in Wuthering Heights. Catherine Earnshaw, Heathcliff, and the windswept moors that are the setting of their mythic love are as immediately stirring to the reader of today as they have been for every generation of readers since the novel was first published in 1847. With an introduction by Katherine Frank.

In this enchanting and comprehensive collection, the lullabies we all were rocked to sleep with, such as “Rock-a-Bye Baby” and “Hush Little Baby, Don’t You Cry,” mingle with traditional lullabies from around the world. Here are beautiful lyrics to sing or read to little ones, from Shakespeare’s lullaby for the fairy queen, Titania, to Brahms’s “Lullaby”; and from Gershwin’s “Summertime” to Langston Hughes’s lovely lullaby for a “night black baby.” Here, too, are poems for children that range from tender to nonsensical, from quiet to raucous–from Walter de la Mare to T. S. Eliot to Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and Ogden Nash. Whether the intent is to soothe or to amuse, there’s something here for every mood, every child, and the child in every adult. A delightful, gift-perfect collection.

Introduction by A. S. Byatt Willa Cather’s story of the missionary priest Father Jean Marie Latour and his work of faith in the wilderness of the Southwest is told with a spare but sensuous directness and profound artistry. When Latour arrives in 1851 in the territory of New Mexico, newly acquired by the United States, what he finds is a vast desert region of red hills and tortured arroyos that is American by law but Mexican and Indian in custom and belief. Over the next four decades, Latour works gently and tirelessly to spread his faith and to build a soaring cathedral out of the local golden rock—while contending with unforgiving terrain, derelict and sometimes rebellious priests, and his own loneliness. DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP shares a limitless, craggy beauty with the New Mexico landscape of desert, mountain, and canyon in which its central action takes place, and its evocations of that landscape and those who are drawn to it suggest why Cather is acknowledged without question as the most poetically exact chronicler of the American frontier.

Along with Blake and Dickens, Mark Twain was one of the nineteenth century’s greatest chroniclers of childhood. These two novels reveal different aspects of his genius: Tom Sawyer is a much-loved story about the sheer pleasure of being a boy; Huckleberry Finn, the book Hemingway said was the source of all the American fiction that followed it, is both a hilarious account of an incorrigible truant and a tremendous parable of innocence in conflict with the fallen adult world.