Best French Literary Criticism

"On what slender threads do life and fortune hang" Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of If. Robin Buss (1939–2006) was a writer and translator who worked for the Independent on Sunday and as television critic for the Times Educational Supplement .

A beautiful new clothbound edition of Alexandre Dumas' classic novel of wrongful imprisonment, adventure and revenge. Dumas died in 1870.

"On what slender threads do life and fortune hang" Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of If. Robin Buss (1939–2006) was a writer and translator who worked for the Independent on Sunday and as television critic for the Times Educational Supplement .

"On what slender threads do life and fortune hang" Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of If. "Dumas was... a summit of art.

a great story in the hands of a master storyteller.”— The Wall Street Journal The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Peter the Great, Nicholas and Alexandra, and The Romanovs returns with another masterpiece of narrative biography, the extraordinary story of an obscure German princess who became one of the most remarkable, powerful, and captivating women in history. “[A] compelling portrait not just of a Russian titan, but also of a flesh-and-blood woman.”— Newsweek “An absorbing, satisfying biography.”— Los Angeles Times “Juicy and suspenseful.”— The New York Times Book Review “A great life, indeed, and irresistibly told.”—Salon NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times • The Washington Post • USA Today • The Boston Globe • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • Newsweek/ The Daily Beast. • Salon • Vogue • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Providence Journal • Washington Examiner • South Florida Sun-Sentinel • BookPage • Bookreporter • Publishers Weekly BONUS: This edition contains a Catherine the Great reader's guide. In 1744, at the age of 14, she was taken by her ambitious mother--removed from her family, her religion, and her country--to a foreign land with a single goal: marry a prince and bear him an heir. Massie, a former president of the Authors Guild, is a seasoned biographer of the 400-year Romanov dynasty, most notably with Peter the Great: His Life and World , which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 and remains one of the most arresting biographies I've even encountered. Married to an incompetent man-child who was unwilling or unable to help her fulfill her primary role--giving birth to a son--she ultimately grew to become a trailblazer among monarchs: friend of philosophical giants, incomparable patron of the arts, prosecutor of multiple wars, pioneer of public health, maker of kings, and prodigious serial lover. Indeed, her accomplishments and shortcomings as an autocrat and a woman make for a remarkable saga, but that's not to say that just any author could do justice to Catherine's lasting legacy. Massie situates Catherine's early life and three-decade reign as empress amidst the tumult of the European Enlightenment, enriching his own narrative with telling excerpts of her letters and rich discussions of her political environment and personal motivations. ” —The Wall Street Journal “Dense and detailed, enriched by pages of full-color illustrations, Massie’s latest will transport history lovers .” —People. He understands plot—fate—as a function of character, and the narrative perspective he establishes and maintains, a vision tightly aligned with that of his subject, convinces a reader he’s not so much looking at Catherine the Great as he is out of her eyes.

The characteristics, behavior, habits, and habitats of gnomes are pictured and described in a complete survey of gnome life, gnome history, and gnome lore. Text: English, Dutch (translation).

This is the first volume of a new prose translation of Dante's epic - the first in twenty-five years. 'This new edition of Inferno is distinctly user-friendly....Serious students-in or out of the classroom-who...examine the original poem alongside a readable and reliable prose translation will find this edition excellently suited to their needs.'. 'Like the Inferno edition that preceded it, the Durling-Martinez Purgatorio, with its beautiful translation and superb apparatus of notes, is simply the best edition of Dante's second canticle in English. --David Young, translator of The Poetry of Petrarch "Durling and Martinez deliver Paradiso in elegant English prose faithful to Dante's Italian. --Michael Wyatt, author of The Italian Encounter with Tudor England "At the end of his poem Dante claims that his 'high imagining failed of power,' but Durling and Martinez have suffered no such fate in completing their translation of the Divine Comedy .

Authentic and updated -- nearly one third of the maps are new, and the text is fully revised -- the atlas illuminates the enchanted world created in THE SILMARILLION, THE HOBBIT, and THE LORD OF THE RINGS. Karen Wynn Fonstad is a qualified geographer and cartographer who first mapped Middle-Earth in 1981 and has since added much new detail based on those endless volumes of drafts, abandoned passages, alternative versions, and laundry lists published since Tolkien's death.

A #1 international bestseller in the vein of Fredrik Bachman's A Man Called Ove. : an irresistible, funny, charming, and tender-hearted tale about friendship, love, and an old man who is young at heart. A bestselling phenomenon that has captured imaginations around the world, The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen is inspiring, charming, and laugh-out-loud funny with a deep and poignant core: a page-turning delight for readers of any age.

Included are a detailed map of nineteenth-century St. Petersburg, selections from Dostoevsky’s notebooks and letters, and a crucial passage from an early draft of his novel. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and many other novels.

Unfurling like a medieval book of days, each page of Eduardo Galeano's Children of the Days has an illuminating story that takes inspiration from that date of the calendar year, resurrecting the heroes and heroines who have fallen off the historical map, but whose lives remind us of our darkest hours and sweetest victories. His writing is full of candour, empathy, humane concern and also predictable convictions Herein lies Galeano's central appeal: he evokes the marvels of a remarkable world that is not so bad after all.” Financial Times “The stories themselves, broken into pieces, present both Galeano's aesthetic and his view of history. The impact of this literary approach to the history of violent disappearances is a lasting and universal one.” The Independent (UK). Good and evil, beauty and ugliness, generosity and greed-all are juxtaposed to great effect.... [T]his is a heady portrait of the human story rendered in broad, though no less incisive and affecting, strokes." Children of the Days , his Calendar of Human History, is an immensely varied gathering of facts and oddments and truths and stories of every kind. He keeps me morally awake, while also lifting my spirits with his ability to reveal in story-form the deep, sweet humanity which rebounds even after the cruelest moments of history. Reading Galeano, I'm often reminded of Joseph Conrad's claims for what writing should do: 'art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.'. "It's May, but this is a Christmas kind of a book: giftable, covetable, hefty, handsome, a veritable plum pudding of a thing, its lovely midnight-blue cover designed to look as though dotted with stars, or perhaps dusted with sugar, and slathered all over with generous custardy recommendations from both Philip Pullman and John Berger... Galeano chronicles events and anniversaries from the history of oppressed nations, adding the odd dash of fictional fun and philosophical musing... "Galeano's genre is his own - a mixture of fiction, journalism and history that, as always, is conveyed in orderly fragments of various sizes and is best understood as an outgrowth of his first midteen self-expressions as a socialist cartoonist. If you think of every short individual Galeano piece in the mammoth collection of them that comprises his life's work as a kind of verbal cartoon - or a set of variations on a verbal cartoon - then you understand both the striking singularity of his work and its innovation...Galeano's fire is unquenched.