Books in The Everyman Library series

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.

Emma, a passionate dreamer raised in the French countryside, is ready for her life to take off when she marries the decent, dull Dr. Charles Bovary. Marriage, however, fails to live up to her expectations, which are fueled by sentimental novels, and she turns disastrously to love affairs. The story of Emma’s adultery scandalized France when Madame Bovary was first published. Today, the heartbreaking story of Emma’s financial ruin remains just as compelling.In Madame Bovary, his story of a shallow, deluded, unfaithful, but consistently compelling woman living in the provinces of nineteenth-century France, Gustave Flaubert invented not only the modern novel but also a modern attitude toward human character and human experience that remains with us to this day. One of the rare works of art that it would be fair to call perfect, Madame Bovary has had an incalculable influence on the literary culture that followed it. This translation, by Francis Steegmuller, is acknowledged by common consensus as the definitive English rendition of Flaubert’s text.

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)

Erec and Enide; Cliges; Lancelot; Yvain; PercevalAn idyllically happy marriage in which a husband is so involved that he neglects his duties as a knight; love endangered by a husband who is more interested in athletic chivalry than his wife; timorous young love; and adulterous passion — together these stories offer the most complete expression of French chivalry and of courtly love.Chretien de Troyes did not invent the Arthurian legend: he gave it sophisticated literary form, establishing it as major branch of European literature. Without chretien we might today scarcely have heard of King Arthur and his brave company.The most comprehensive paperback edition available, with introduction , notes and glossary

In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton depicts the glittering salons of Gilded Age New York with precision and wit, even as she movingly portrays the obstacles that impeded women's choices at the turn of the century. The beautiful, much-desired Lily Bart has been raised to be one of the perfect wives of the wealthy upper class, but her spark of character and independent drive prevents her from becoming one of the many women who will succeed in those circles. Though her desire for a comfortable life means that she cannot marry for love without money, her resistance to the rules of the social elite endangers her many marriage proposals. As Lily spirals down into debt and dishonor, her story takes on the resonance of classic tragedy. One of Wharton's most bracing and nuanced portraits of the life of women in a hostile, highly ordered world, The House of Mirth exposes the truths about American high society that its denizens most wished to deny. With an introduction by Pamela Knights.

Initially published under the pseudonym Currer Bell in 1847, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre erupted onto the English literary scene, immediately winning the devotion of many of the world's most renowned writers, including William Makepeace Thackeray, who declared it a work "of great genius." Widely regarded as a revolutionary novel, Brontë's masterpiece introduced the world to a radical new type of heroine, one whose defiant virtue and moral courage departed sharply from the more acquiescent and malleable female characters of the day. Passionate, dramatic, and surprisingly modern, Jane Eyre endures as one of the world's most beloved novels. This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition includes newly written explanatory notes.(Cover features a removable movie tie-in bellyband.)

Horror stories, science fiction, detective stories and satirical sketches –the variety of Poe will chill and delightLocked doors, sealed cavities, bricked-up alcoves and premature burial close in on Poe's narrators as they , like their victims, are cut off from light, air and human society. Partly, Poe's stories resonate as the disordered chambers' of the narrators' minds but also they suggest archetypal, if extreme psychological states.yet Poe was an incurable hoaxer, and in telling some wonderful short stories he also told some excessively tall tales.The most comprehensive paperback edition available, introduction, selected criticism chronology of Poe's life and times.

Barchester Towers (1857) is the second of the six Chronicles of Barsetshire, the work in which, after a ten years' apprenticeship, Trollope finally found his distinctive voice. In this his most popular novel, the chronicler continues the story of Mr. Harding and his daughter Eleanor, begun in The Warden, adding to his cast of characters that oily symbol of 'progress' Mr. Slope, the hen-pecked Dr. Proudie, and the amiable and breezy Stanhope family. Love, mammon, clerical in-fighting and promotion again figure prominently and comically, all centred on the magnificently imagined cathedral city of Barchester. The central questions of this moral comedy - Who will be warden? Who will be dean? Who will marry Eleanor? - are skilfully handled with the subtlety of ironic observation that has won Trollope such a wide and appreciative readership over the last 140 years. For this new edition, John Sutherland has contributed an introduction and extensive notes, as well as a chronology of the novel's composition and current events, and a note on Trollopian names.

Mary Barton is the pretty daughter of a factory worker who finds herself dreaming of a better life when the mill-owner’s charming son, Henry, starts to court her. She rejects her childhood friend Jem’s affections in the hope of marrying Henry and escaping from the hard and bitter life that is the fate of the workers. But when Henry is shot dead in the street Jem becomes the prime suspect and Mary finds her loyalties tested to the limit.(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)