Published in 1916, James Joyce's semiautobiographical tale of his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, is a coming-of-age story like no other. A bold, innovative experiment with both language and structure, the work has exerted a lasting influence on the contemporary novel. 'Joyce dissolved mechanism in literature as effectively as Einstein destroyed it in physics,' wrote Alfred Kazin. 'He showed that the material of fiction could rest upon as tense a distribution and as delicate a balance of its parts as any poem. Joyce's passion for form, in fact, is the secret of his progress as a novelist. He sought to bring the largest possible quantity of human life under the discipline of the observing mind, and the mark of his success is that he gave an epic form to what remains invisible to most novelists.... Joyce means many things to different people; for me his importance has always been primarily a moral one. He was, perhaps, the last man in Europe who wrote as if art were worth a human life.... By living for his art he may yet have given others a belief in art worth living for.'

A divorced, middle-aged English professor finds himself increasingly unable to resist affairs with his female students. When discovered by the college authorities, he is expected to apologise and repent in an effort to save his job, but he refuses to become a scapegoat in what he see as as a show trial designed to reinforce a stringent political correctness. He preempts the authorities and leaves his job, and the city, to spend time with his grown-up lesbian daughter on her remote farm. Things between them are strained - there is much from the past they need to reconcile - and the situation becomes critical when they are the victims of a brutal and horrifying attack. In spectacularly powerful and lucid prose, Coetzee uses all his formidable skills to engage with a post-apartheid culture in unexpected and revealing ways. This examination into the sexual and poliitcal lawlines of modern South Africa as it tries desperately to start a fresh page in its history is chilling, uncompromising and unforgettable.

I Capture the Castle tells the story of seventeen-year-old Cassandra and her family, who live in not-so-genteel poverty in a ramshackle old English castle. Here she strives, over six turbulent months, to hone her writing skills. She fills three notebooks with sharply funny yet poignant entries. Her journals candidly chronicle the great changes that take place within the castle's walls, and her own first descent into love. By the time she pens her final entry, she has "captured the castle"-- and the heart of the reader-- in one of literature's most enchanting entertainments. Bonus: Reading Group Discussion Guide included in this edition

《若你不弃此生不离》内容简介：人一生会遇到约2920万人，而两个人相爱的概率只有0.000049。曾唯一与纪齐宣订婚，是为了让另一个男人林穆森难堪。六年之后，她嫁给纪齐宣，是为了给儿子优越的生活，也让自己重新回到上流社会。只是，被她抛弃过的纪齐宣，再也不是当年那个默默爱着她的沉静少年。生子、结婚、也许有爱情，曾唯一的经历与别人的完全相反，这个骄傲不懂爱的女人会收获她的幸福吗？

The Fourth Edition is again based on Robert Kimbrough's meticulously re-edited text. Missing words have been restored and the entire novel has been repunctuated in accordance with Conrad's style. The result is the first published version of Heart of Darkness that allows readers to hear Marlow's voice as Conrad heard it when he wrote the story. " Backgrounds and Contexts " provides readers with a generous collection of maps and photographs that bring the Belgian Congo to life. Textual materials, topically arranged, address nineteenth-century views of imperialism and racism and include autobiographical writings by Conrad on his life in the Congo. New to the Fourth Edition is an excerpt from Adam Hochschild's recent book, King Leopold's Ghost , as well as writings on race by Hegel, Darwin, and Galton. " Criticism " includes a wealth of new materials, including nine contemporary reviews and assessments of Conrad and Heart of Darkness and twelve recent essays by Chinua Achebe, Peter Brooks, Daphne Erdinast-Vulcan, Edward Said, and Paul B. Armstrong, among others. Also new to this edition is a section of writings on the connections between Heart of Darkness and the film Apocalypse Now by Louis K. Greiff, Margot Norris, and Lynda J. Dryden. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included. About the Series : No other series of classic texts equals the caliber of the Norton Critical Editions . Each volume combines the most authoritative text available with the comprehensive pedagogical apparatus necessary to appreciate the work fully. Careful editing, first-rate translation, and thorough explanatory annotations allow each text to meet the highest literary standards while remaining accessible to students. Each edition is printed on acid-free paper and every text in the series remains in print. Norton Critical Editions are the choice for excellence in scholarship for students at more than 2,000 universities worldwide.

A novel that explores the darkest depths and brightest hopes in the souls of men, Moby-Dick is an impassioned drama of the ultimate human struggle that the Atlantic Monthly called "the greatest of American novels."

When her father leaves the Church in a crisis of conscience, Margaret Hale is uprooted from her comfortable home in Hampshire to move with her family to the north of England. Initially repulsed by the ugliness of her new surroundings in the industrial town of Milton, Margaret becomes aware of the poverty and suffering of the local mill workers and develops a passionate sense of social justice. This is intensified by her tempestuous relationship with the mill-owner and self-made man, John Thornton, as their fierce opposition over his treatment of his employees masks a deeper attraction. In North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell skillfully fused individual feeling with social concern, and in Margaret Hale created one of the most original heroines of Victorian literature.

Imaginary conversations between Marco Polo and his host, the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan, conjure up cities of magical times. “Of all tasks, describing the contents of a book is the most difficult and in the case of a marvelous invention like Invisible Cities, perfectly irrelevant” (Gore Vidal). Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book One of the world's best storytellers, Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities) pinpoints for future generations the universal values for literature. Here are his works, methods, intentions, and hopes.

Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep South -- and the heroism of one man in the face of blind and violent hatred One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than thirty million copies worldwide, served as the basis of an enormously popular motion picture, and was voted one of the best novels of the twentieth century by librarians across the country. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poisoned by virulent prejudice, it views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of a young girl, as her father -- a crusading local lawyer -- risks everything to defend a black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.

An unforgettable novel about finding a lost piece of yourself in someone else. Khaled Hosseini, the #1 New York Timesbestselling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, has written a new novel about how we love, how we take care of one another, and how the choices we make resonate through generations. In this tale revolving around not just parents and children but brothers and sisters, cousins and caretakers, Hosseini explores the many ways in which families nurture, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for one another; and how often we are surprised by the actions of those closest to us, at the times that matter most. Following its characters and the ramifications of their lives and choices and loves around the globe—from Kabul to Paris to San Francisco to the Greek island of Tinos—the story expands gradually outward, becoming more emotionally complex and powerful with each turning page. Editorial Reviews From Barnes & Noble After his triumphant novels The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini gifts us with a poignant story of love, loss, and recovery across several families and over several generations. Like an intricately woven tapestry, And the Mountains Echoed pulls us into the lives of disparate children, men, and women in Afghanistan, France, Greece, and California, showing us how the choices they and other make resonate over decades. A masterpiece; superlative early reviews. The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani …his most assured and emotionally gripping story yet, more fluent and ambitious than The Kite Runner, more narratively complex than A Thousand Splendid Suns…Mr. Hosseini's narrative gifts have deepened over the years, enabling him to anchor firmly the more maudlin aspects of his tale in genuine emotion and fine-grained details. And so we finish this novel with an intimate understanding of who his characters are and how they've defined themselves over the years through the choices they have made between duty and freedom, familial responsibilities and independence, loyalty to home and exile abroad. The Washington Post - Marcela Valdes Nuance is rare on the bestseller list. In most cases, ambiguity is stripped away to appeal to the greatest number and lowest common denominator. So it always renews my faith when a popular novelist shows a decided preference for moral complexity. It suggests that readers crave more than simplistic escape. Or perhaps it just means that some writers, like Khaled Hosseini, know how to whisk rough moral fiber into something exquisite…Over and over again, he takes complicated characters and roasts them slowly, forcing us to revise our judgments about them and to recognize the good in the bad and vice versa. Publishers Weekly Hosseini’s third novel (after A Thousand Splendid Suns) follows a close-knit but oft-separated Afghan family through love, wars, and losses more painful than death. The story opens in 1952 in the village of Shadbagh, outside of Kabul, as a laborer, Kaboor, relates a haunting parable of triumph and loss to his son, Abdullah. The novel’s core, however, is the sale for adoption of the Kaboor’s three-year-old daughter, Pari, to the wealthy poet Nila Wahdati and her husband, Suleiman, by Pari’s step-uncle Nabi. The split is particularly difficult for Abdullah, who took care of his sister after their mother’s death. Once Suleiman has a stroke, Nila leaves him to Nabi’s care and takes Pari to live in Paris. Much later, during the U.S. occupation, the dying Nabi makes Markos, a Greek plastic surgeon now renting the Wahdati house, promise to find Pari and give her a letter containing the truth. The beautiful writing, full of universal truths of loss and identity, makes each section a jewel, even if the bigger picture, which eventually expands to include Pari’s life in France, sometimes feels disjointed. Still, Hosseini’s eye for detail and emotional geography makes this a haunting read. Agent: Robert Barnett, Williams & Connolly. (May) Daily Beast Wrought with mastery, And the Mountains Echoed is not just a well spun tale, but an accomplishment of the most elusive of literary challenges—the humanization of a war ravaged population in the eyes of the very people complicit in their ruin. San Francisco Chronicle There is an assured, charismatic new maturity to Hosseini's voice. When he hits his stride, the results are electrifying. Boston Globe Hosseini delves into the joys, sorrows, and betrayals that alternately bind and fracture families. Once again, Hosseini's lovingly rendered Afghanistan takes center stage, but in this book he extends his examination to encompass how the Afghan identity affects his characters' decisions and lives in unfamiliar environments. Los Angles Times [Hosseini's] beautifully written, masterfully crafted new book, And the Mountains Echoed, spans nearly 60 years of Afghan history as it investigates the consequences of a desperate act that scars two young lives and resonates through many others. . . . And the Mountains Echoed is painfully sad but also radiant with love. The Miami Herald Compulsively readable, in large part because [Hosseini] probes his characters' psyches in a nuanced and poetic manner . . . And the Mountains Echoed attains a greater level of complexity than its two predecessors . . . and signals the ongoing maturation of a gifted storyteller. Austin Chronicle Readers' tears may fall by first chapter's end. Introspective and perfectly paced, Hosseini's microcosmic plot spares no expense with sensory details...Hosseini skillfully weaves the tapestry with universal elements: human fallibility, innate goodness, perseverance, forgiveness, sexuality, jealousy, companionship, and joy.... And the Mountains Echoed resonates to the core. Kirkus Reviews After two stellar novels set (mostly) in Kabul, Afghanistan, Hosseini's third tacks among Afghanistan, California, France and Greece to explore the effect of the Afghan diaspora on identity. It begins powerfully in 1952. Saboor is a dirt-poor day laborer in a village two days walk from Kabul. His first wife died giving birth to their daughter Pari, who's now 4 and has been raised lovingly by her brother, 10-year-old Abdullah; two peas in a pod, but "leftovers" in the eyes of Parwana, Saboor's second wife. Saboor's brother-in-law Nabi is a cook/chauffeur for a wealthy, childless couple in Kabul; he helps arrange the sale of Pari to the couple, breaking Abdullah's heart. The drama does nothing to prepare us for the coming leaps in time and place. Nabi's own story comes next in a posthumous tell-all letter (creaky device) to Markos, the Greek plastic surgeon who occupies the Kabul house from 2002 onwards. Nabi confesses his guilt in facilitating the sale of Pari and describes the adoptive couple: his boss Suleiman, a gay man secretly in love with him, and his wife, Nila, a half-French poet who high-tails it to France with Pari after Suleiman has a stroke. There follow the stories of mother and daughter in Paris, Markos' childhood in Greece (an irrelevance), the return to Kabul of expat cousins from California and the Afghan warlord who stole the old village. Missing is the viselike tension of the earlier novels. It's true that betrayal is a constant theme, as it was in The Kite Runner, but it doesn't work as a glue. And identity? Hosseini struggles to convince us that Pari becomes a well-integrated Frenchwoman. The stories spill from Hosseini's bountiful imagination, but they compete against each other, denying the novel a catalyst; the result is a bloated, unwieldy work. Library Journal This bittersweet family saga spans six decades and transports readers from Afghanistan to France, Greece, and the United States. Hosseini (The Kite Runner; A Thousand Splendid Suns) weaves a gorgeous tapestry of disparate characters joined by threads of blood and fate. Siblings Pari and Abdullah are cruelly separated at childhood. A disfigured young woman, Thalia is abandoned by her mother and learns to love herself under the tutelage of a surrogate. Markos, a doctor who travels the world healing strangers, avoids his sick mother back home. A feminist poet, Nila Wahdatire, reinvents herself through an artful magazine interview, and Nabi, who is burdened by a past deed, leaves a letter of explanation. Each character tells his or her version of the same story of selfishness and selflessness, acceptance and forgiveness, but most important, of love in all its complex iterations. VERDICT In this uplifting and deeply satisfying book, Hosseini displays an optimism not so obvious in his previous works. Readers will be clamoring for it. [See Prepub Alert, 11/04/12.]—Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Estero, FL The Barnes & Noble Review Each of Khaled Hosseini's three novels — The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and now And the Mountains Echoed — begins with a betrayal and then gradually finds its way toward an unexpected redemption. Each includes within its cast of characters at least one orphaned or abandoned child. In all three books, the author exhibits an unabashed didacticism, using plainspoken family dramas to convey the complex recent history and culture of Afghanistan to multitudes of readers in America and around the world. (To date, more than 10 million copies of Hosseini's books have been sold in the U.S. alone.) Yet in each of the books the author's allegiance is above all to the story, from which he has stripped away most stylistic enhancements, reducing his tale to its emotional essence. To Hosseini's detractors, his narrative purity comes off as trite earnestness. To his legions of fans it's a virtue, a hallmark of credibility and consistency. For all these similarities among Hosseini's novels, it's their differences that are more interesting and instructive. By paying attention to those differences, which are chiefly structural, one can follow the evolution of Hosseini's refinement as a storyteller. The Kite Runner traced a more or less straightforward line from the narrator's childhood in 1960s–'70s Kabul to his adult life in Northern California around the turn of the millennium. In A Thousand Splendid Suns, instead of telling a single story from a single point of view, Hosseini abruptly switched characters partway through the novel and started again, ultimately weaving both halves of the narrative together. It was a risk, but it worked: the fracturing of the story mirrored the fracturing of Afghanistan's social structure during three decades of violent instability, from the Soviet invasion beginning in December 1979 through a prolonged civil war, the rise of the Taliban, and American military involvement after September 11, 2001. Hosseini's third book is even more structurally sophisticated. "You want a story and I will tell you one," it begins, but in fact And the Mountains Echoed contains many stories, starting over not just once but many times, as it ranges capriciously through varying points of view and time periods and far-flung locations. Once again Hosseini begins, classically, with a simple family tale. In 1952, in a remote Afghan village called Shadbagh, a penniless day laborer is compelled to sell his three-year-old daughter to a wealthy childless couple in Kabul in order to sustain his wife and remaining children. The little daughter, named Pari, has a deep mutual bond with her ten-year-old brother, Abdullah, who until now has been her main caregiver. The grief and guilt that this forced separation inflicts on all the family members will flare up periodically throughout their lives. It will spread over continents, too, since Pari will eventually spend most of her life in France, and Abdullah will emigrate to America as an adult, in 1982. Hosseini's intention is to show how stubbornly a homeland manages to cling to a person, in strange and diluted ways, even after years of dispersion and assimilation. Thus we note that Pari, who has lived in Paris since her adoptive mother moved her there from Kabul when she was six, has twinges of recovered memory of Shadbagh and her unmentioned birth family, "like a message sent across shadowy byways and vast distances, a weak signal on a radio dial, remote, warbled." And we see Abdullah, transplanted to the San Francisco Bay Area, educating his American daughter with lessons in Farsi and the Koran and slaving away in his restaurant, Abe's Kabob House, with its tourist-friendly menu of "Caravan Kabob, Khyber Pass Pilaf, Silk Route Chicken," and - - notes his sharp-eyed daughter — "the badly framed poster of the Afghan girl from National Geographic, the one with the eyes — like they had passed an ordinance that every single Afghan restaurant had to have her eyes staring back from the wall." It's not only these central characters who feel the presence of their origins as if they were gingerly touching an old wound. There is Idris Bashiri, Abdullah's Bay Area doctor, who wrestles with his guilt as a privileged Westernized Afghan when he travels to his hometown of Kabul and sees the suffering of a population ravaged by ongoing privation and war. There is Markos Varvaris, a plastic surgeon and relief worker in Kabul who grew up on the Greek island of Tinos, attempting to bury the pain of his difficult childhood by aiding the disadvantaged in hotspots around the world. And there is Gholam, a thirteen-year-old Afghan boy made cynical by years of displacement in a refugee camp in Pakistan, who returns to his village with his family to find that their land has been stolen by a drug warlord. These are all separate stories, yet Hosseini takes care to connect each of them, in roundabout ways, to the central narrative of Pari and Abdullah's ruptured family. By tracing the paths of many characters from their birthplaces to various diasporas, he has expanded his familiar themes of betrayal and redemption into a narrative edifice that is much grander than the plainer architecture of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. And he has accomplished this without losing the homespun emotional forcefulness that distinguished those earlier novels. An author with a less urgent calling might be willing merely to manage the brand of his or her success, recycling the same magic formulas that initially captivated audiences. Not so for Hosseini, a popular-fiction writer of the highest caliber whose talent is as agile and wide-ranging as his new novel itself. Donna Rifkind's reviews appear frequently in The Washington Post Book World and the Los Angeles Times. She has also been a contributor to The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, The American Scholar, and other publications. In 2006, she was a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. Reviewer: Donna Rifkind

With 274 authors, the Eighth Edition deepens its representation of essential works in all genres, ranging from Seamas Heaney's award-winning translation of Beowulf, Milton's Paradise Lost, and More's Utopia to the great poets and prose writers of the nineteenth century—Blake and Austen, Wordsworth and Byron, Tennyson and Barrett Browning—to twentieth-century classics of a truly global English literature—Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Woolf's A Room of One's Own, Achebe's Things Fall Apart, and Friel's Translations, to name but a few. Color plates—over 75 in all—and thematic clusters of brief and historically significant texts bring to life the cultural concerns of each period. Concise glosses and annotations, period introductions, biographical headnotes, timelines, and selected bibliographies help readers understand and enjoy the rich diversity of English literature.

在线阅读本书 In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs--yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.

In 1922, F Scott Fitzgerald announced his decision to write "something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple, intricately patterned". That extraordinary, beautiful, intricately patterned and, above all, simple novel became The Great Gatsby, arguably Fitzgerald's finest work and certainly the book for which he is best known. A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess, Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned itself a permanent place in American mythology. Self-made, self-invented millionaire Jay Gatsby embodies some of Fitzgerald's--and his country's--most abiding obsessions: money, ambition, greed and the promise of new beginnings. "Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... And one fine morning--" Gatsby's rise to glory and eventual fall from grace be comes a kind of cautionary tale about the American Dream. It's also a love story, of sorts, the narrative of Gatsby's quixotic passion for Daisy Buchanan. The pair meet five years before the novel begins, when Daisy is a legendary young Louisville beauty and Gatsby an impoverished officer. They fall in love, but while Gatsby serves overseas, Daisy marries the brutal, bullying but extremely rich Tom Buchanan. After the war, Gatsby devotes himself blindly to the pursuit of wealth by whatever means--and to the pursuit of Daisy, which amounts to the same thing. "Her voice is full of money," Gatsby says admiringly, in one of the novel's more famous descriptions. His millions made, Gatsby buys a mansion across Long Island Sound from Daisy's patrician East Egg address, throws lavish parties and waits for her to appear. When s he does, events unfold with all the tragic inevitability of a Greek drama, with detached, cynical neighbour Nick Carraway acting as chorus throughout. Spare, elegantly plotted and written in crystalline prose, The Great Gatsby is as perfectly satisfying as the best kind of poem. Perry Freeman, Amazon.com

A vulnerable young girl wins a dream assignment on a big-time New York fashion magazine and finds herself plunged into a nightmare. An autobiographical account of Sylvia Plath's own mental breakdown and suicide attempt, The Bell Jar is more than a confessional novel, it is a comic but painful statement of what happens to a woman's aspirations in a society that refuses to take them seriously... a society that expects electroshock to cure the despair of a sensitive, questioning young artist whose search for identity becomes a terrifying descent toward madness.

在线阅读本书 De Profundis is Wilde's eloquent and bitter reproach from prison to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. He contrasts his behaviour with that of his close friend Robert Ross who became Wilde's literary executor. The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a deeply moving and characteristically generous poem on the horrors of prison life, which was published anonymously in 1898. This collection also includes the essay The Soul of Man under Socialism and two of his Platonic dialogues, The Decay of Lying and The Critic as Artist.

Book Description Harper Lee's classic novel of a lawyer in the Deep South defending a black man charged with the rape of a white girl. One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has earned many distinctions since its original publication in 1960. It won the Pulitzer Prize, has been translated into more than forty languages, sold more than thirty million copies worldwide, and been made into an enormously popular movie. Most recently, librarians across the country gave the book the highest of honors by voting it the best novel of the twentieth century. Amazon.com "When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.... When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out." Set in the small Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Depression, To Kill a Mockingbird follows three years in the life of 8-year-old Scout Finch, her brother, Jem, and their father, Atticus--three years punctuated by the arrest and eventual trial of a young black man accused of raping a white woman. Though her story explores big themes, Harper Lee chooses to tell it through the eyes of a child. The result is a tough and tender novel of race, class, justice, and the pain of growing up. Like the slow-moving occupants of her fictional town, Lee takes her time getting to the heart of her tale; we first meet the Finches the summer before Scout's first year at school. She, her brother, and Dill Harris, a boy who spends the summers with his aunt in Maycomb, while away the hours reenacting scenes from Dracula and plotting ways to get a peek at the town bogeyman, Boo Radley. At first the circumstances surrounding the alleged rape of Mayella Ewell, the daughter of a drunk and violent white farmer, barely penetrate the children's consciousness. Then Atticus is called on to defend the accused, Tom Robinson, and soon Scout and Jem find themselves caught up in events beyond their understanding. During the trial, the town exhibits its ugly side, but Lee offers plenty of counterbalance as well--in the struggle of an elderly woman to overcome her morphine habit before she dies; in the heroism of Atticus Finch, standing up for what he knows is right; and finally in Scout's hard-won understanding that most people are essentially kind "when you really see them." By turns funny, wise, and heartbreaking, To Kill a Mockingbird is one classic that continues to speak to new generations, and deserves to be reread often. 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　--Alix Wilber From 500 Great Books by Women In 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer prize; thirty years later shopping malls may have replaced the main street of Maycomb, Alabama, but not even thirty years of Civil Rights laws or the gentrification of ante-bellum estates render this book an anachronism. Harper Lee combines two of the most common themes of Southern writing - a child's recollection of life among eccentrics in a small town seemingly untouched by the twentieth century and the glaring injustice of racial prejudice - to create a contemporary American classic. To Kill a Mockingbird has two main threads which carry the plot. The first involves the role of Atticus Finch, who is appointed to defend a shy black man accused of raping the oldest daughter of the town's least respected citizen. The second is the mythology arising out of the reclusive Boo Radley, about whom it was said "when people's azaleas froze in a cold snap, it was because he had breathed on them." But what saves the novel from cliche are the irreverent perceptions of the story's narrator, Atticus Finch's nine-year-old daughter Scout, who depicts mean racist aspects of Southern life as well as humorous and quite often satirical vignettes. To Kill a Mockingbird only gets better with rereading; each time the streets of Maycomb become more real and alive, each time Scout is more insightful, Atticus more heroic, and Boo Radley more tragically human. From Library Journal Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning first (and last) novel of racial injustice in a small Southern town ranks among just about everyone's favorite books. This 35th-anniversary edition contains a brief new foreword by the elusive Lee. (LJ From AudioFile Roses Prichard's masterful narration of Lee's classic novel, originally produced for Books on Tape in 1991, has been repackaged by Audio Partners for the consumer market. Prichard's skill and talents are evident; all the characters sound true and absolutely real. Listeners hear Scout's developing wisdom and maturity as the story progresses. Prichard achieves the monumental task of creating--and maintaining--authentic voices for a diverse group of characters while infusing the story with emotional resonance. This stunning production captures the listener and doesn't let go. M.A.M. An AUDIOFILE Earphones Award winner Book Dimension length: (cm)19.7 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)12.8