NCW Libraries

"In 1872 the mistress of a neighbouring landowner threw herself under a train at a station near Tolstoy's home. This gave Tolstoy the starting point he needed for composing what many believe to be the greatest novel ever written. In writing Anna Karenina he moved away from the vast historical sweep of War and Peace to tell, with extraordinary understanding, the story of an aristocratic woman who brings ruin on herself. Anna's tragedy is interwoven...

In these acrid and poignant stories, Hughes depicted black people colliding--sometimes humorously, more often tragically--with whites in the 1920s and '30s.

"The ultimate book for both the dabbler and serious scholar. -- [Hughes] is sumptuous and sharp, playful and sparse, grounded in an earthy music -- This book is a glorious revelation."--Boston Globe Spanning five decades and comprising 868 poems (nearly 300 of which have never before appeared in book form), this magnificent volume is the definitive sampling of a writer who has been called the poet laureate of African America--and perhaps our greatest...

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 One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence.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...

Historical drama of the conflict between King Henry II of England and his wife Eleanor of Aquitaine over Henry's successor to the British throne.

This splendid and profoundly moving novel begins with a simple and seemingly senseless tragedy. "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." A traveling monk, Brother Juniper, witnesses the catastrophe and becomes obsessed with investigating the lives of the five victims in order to prove that their deaths had meaning. His mission is doomed to fail, but over the...

The two original short novels brought together here - in new translations by award-winning translators - were both literary gambles of a sort for Dostoevsky. The Double, written in Dostoevsky's youth, was a sharp turn away from the realism of his first novel, Poor Folk. The first real expression of his genius, The Double is a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare in which a minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelganger...

This vintage text contains a detailed treatise on growing vegetables in allotments. It also contains invaluable information on exhibiting vegetables, with complete instructions on the growing of leeks, shallots, onions, marrows, runner beans, tomato, French beans, asparagus, peas, and much more. Full of timeless knowledge, and containing detailed instructions and tips, this is a text that will be of considerable value to the modern grower, and makes...