Synopses & Reviews
From Chinua Achebe to Toni Morrison and Raymond Chandler to Joan Didion, the Everymans Library Contemporary Classics set is a collection of the finest literature of our time by award-winning and bestselling writers with new introductions and author chronologies.
This set includes one each of the following titles:
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Best of Wodehouse by P. G. Wodehouse
The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely; The High Window by Raymond Chandler
Black Mischief, Scoop, The Loved One, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh
The Bookshop, The Gate of Angels, The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
Carried Away by Alice Munro
The Castle by Franz Kafka
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Collected Stories by Franz Kafka
Collected Stories by Raymond Chandler
Collected Stories by Roald Dahl
Collected Stories by W. Somerset Maugham
The Collected Works by Kahlil Gibran
The Complete Henry Bech by John Updike
The Complete Short Stories by Evelyn Waugh
The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, and Selected Stories by Dashiell Hammett
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Dubliners by James Joyce
Essays by George Orwell
Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani
The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez
The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood
A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
The Human Factor by Graham Greene
If On a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann
The Lady in the Lake, The Little Sister, The Long Goodbye, Playback by Raymond Chandler
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Midnights Children by Salman Rushdie
Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
Mr. Sampath--The Printer of Malgudi, The Financial Expert, Waiting for the Mahatma by R. K. Narayan
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
My Ántonia by Willa Cather
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays by Albert Camus
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories by James M. Cain
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Girls of Slender Means, The Drivers Seat, The Only Problem by Muriel Spark
Rabbit Angstrom by John Updike
The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Swami and Friends, The Bachelor of Arts, The Dark Room, The English Teacher by R. K. Narayan
The Sword of Honour Trilogy by Evelyn Waugh
The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripleys Game by Patricia Highsmith
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Three Novels of Ancient Egypt: Khufus Wisdom, Rhadopis of Nubia, Thebes at War by Naguib Mahfouz
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
The Trial by Franz Kafka
Ulysses by James Joyce
Waugh Abroad: Collected Travel Writing by Evelyn Waugh
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live by Joan Didion
The Woman Warrior, China Men by Maxine Hong Kingston
Zenos Conscience by Italo Svevo
Everymans Library continues to maintain its original commitment to publishing the most significant world literature in editions that reflect a tradition of fine bookmaking. Everymans Library pursues the highest standards, utilizing modern prepress, printing, and binding technologies to produce classically designed books printed on acid-free natural-cream-colored text paper and including Smyth-sewn, signatures, full-cloth cases with two-color case stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, and European-style half-round spines.
Synopsis
Introduction by Anita Desai
Synopsis
A classic novel, in which the man who calls himself the bomb of Bombay chronicles the story of a child and a nation that both came into existence in 1947--and examines a whole people's capacity for carrying inherited myths and inventing new ones.
Synopsis
'BEST OF THE BOOKER' AWARD WINNER
- This towering classic of international literature is at once a riveting family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people.
"One of the most important books to come out of the English-speaking world in this generation." --The New York Review of Books
Saleem Sinai, the hero of Midnight's Children, is one of the thousand and one children born in India at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the dawn of its independence from British rule--the moment, in the words of its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, when India had her tryst with destiny. The twists and turns of this destiny form the springboard from which Salman Rushdie launches into his celebrated fantasia of our modernity.
At once a fairy tale, a furious political satire, and a meditation on the ways in which time and change both shape and are shaped by the life of a single individual, Midnight's Children announced the triumphant return of epic storytelling to our highly evolved literary tradition. With its central themes of displacement and indeterminacy, and its highly original use of a polyglot vocabulary absorbed form three distinct but overlapping cultures, this book anticipated and to a certain extent defined the multifarious, dislocated, ever-expanding world in which, increasingly, we all live.
Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize in 1981 and then in 2008 it was named The Best of the Booker, the best book to have won the prize in the forty years of its existence.
Synopsis
Seven books in one hardcover volume from the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking including the full texts of Slouching Towards Bethlehem; The White Album; Salvador; Miami; After Henry; Political Fictions; and Where I Was From.
As featured in the Netflix documentary Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold.
Joan Didion's incomparable and distinctive essays and journalism are admired for their acute, incisive observations and their spare, elegant style. Now the seven books of nonfiction that appeared between 1968 and 2003 have been brought together into one thrilling collection.
Slouching Towards Bethlehem captures the counterculture of the sixties, its mood and lifestyle, as symbolized by California, Joan Baez, Haight-Ashbury. The White Album covers the revolutionary politics and the "contemporary wasteland" of the late sixties and early seventies, in pieces on the Manson family, the Black Panthers, and Hollywood. Salvador is a riveting look at the social and political landscape of civil war. Miami exposes the secret role this largely Latin city played in the Cold War, from the Bay of Pigs through Watergate. In After Henry Didion reports on the Reagans, Patty Hearst, and the Central Park jogger case. The eight essays in Political Fictions-on censorship in the media, Gingrich, Clinton, Starr, and "compassionate conservatism," among others-show us how we got to the political scene of today. And in Where I Was From Didion shows that California was never the land of the golden dream."
Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.
Synopsis
Salman Rushdie was born in 1947 and has lived in England since 1961. He is the author of six novels: Grimus, Midnights Children, which won the Booker Prize in 1981 and the James Tait Black Prize, Shame, winner of the French Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, The Satanic Verses, which won the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which won the Writers Guild Award and The Moors Last Sigh which won the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award. He has also published a collection of short stories East, West, a book of reportage The Jaguar Smile, a volume of essays Imaginary Homelands and a work of film criticism The Wizard of Oz. His most recent novel is The Ground Beneath Her Feet, which was published in 1999. Salman Rushdie was awarded Germanys Author of the Year Award for his novel The Satanic Verses in 1989. In 1993, Midnights Children was voted the ‘Booker of Bookers, the best novel to have won the Booker Prize in its first 25 years. In the same year, he was awarded the Austrian State Prize for European Literature. He is also Honorary Professor in the Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His books have been published in more than two dozen languages.
Synopsis
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)A classic novel, in which the man who calls himself the "bomb of Bombay" chronicles the story of a child and a nation that both came into existence in 1947—and examines a whole people's capacity for carrying inherited myths and inventing new ones.
Synopsis
An extraordinary collection of renowned world literature including Nobel Prize winners and beloved fiction writers in beautiful, enduring hardcover editions with elegant cloth sewn bindings, gold stamped covers, and silk ribbon markers.
Titles included:
The African Trilogy by Chinua Achebe
The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul
The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
Midnights Children by Salman Rushdie
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
About the Author
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Reading Group Guide
Introduction by Anita Desai
1. Midnight's Children is clearly a work of fiction; yet, like many modern novels, it is presented as an autobiography. How can we tell it isn't? What literary devices are employed to make its fictional status clear? And, bearing in mind the background of very real historical events, can "truth" and "fiction" always be told apart?
2. To what extent has the legacy of the British Empire, as presented in this novel, contributed to the turbulent character of Indian life?
3. Saleem sees himself and his family as a microcosm of what is happening to India. His own life seems so bound up with the fate of the country that he seems to have no existence as an individual; yet, he is a distinct person. How would you characterise Saleem as a human being, set apart from the novel's grand scheme? Does he have a personality?
4. "To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?" (p. 109). Is it possible, within the limits of a novel, to "understand" a life?
5. At the very heart of Midnight's Children is an act of deception: Mary Pereira switches the birth-tags of the infants Saleem and Shiva. The ancestors of whom Saleem tells us at length are not his biological relations; and yet he continues to speak of them as his forebears. What effect does this have on you, the reader? How easy is it to absorb such a paradox?
6. "There is no escape from form" says Saleem (p. 226); and later, he speaks of his own "overpowering desire for form" (p. 317). Set against this is the chaos of Indian life which is described in such detail throughout the book. How is this coherence achieved? What role does mythology play in giving form to events in the novel?
7. "There is no magic on earth strong enough to wipe out the legacies of one's parents" (p. 402). Saleem is speaking here of an injury; but has he inherited anything more positive? Is there anything inherited which aids rather than hinders him?
8. Saleem's father says of Wee Willie Winkie, "That's a cheeky fellow; he goes too far." The Englishman Methwold disagrees: "The tradition of the fool, you know. Licensed to provoke and tease." (p. 102). The novel itself provokes and teases the reader a good deal. Did you feel yourself "provoked"? Does the above exchange shed any light on Rushdie's own plight since The Satanic Verses?
9. How much affection is there between fathers and sons in Midnight's Children? Why is Saleem so drawn to father-figures? What does he gain from his many adopted fathers?
10. "What is so precious to need all this writing-shiting?" asks Padma (p. 24). What is the value of it for Saleem?
11. "...is not Mother India, Bharat-Mata, commonly thought of as female?" asks Saleem; "And, as you know, there's no escape from her" (p. 404). Elsewhere he speaks of "...the long series of women who have bewitched and finally undone me good and proper" (p. 241). To what extent are women "held for blame" for Saleem's misfortunes?
12. Saleem often appears to be an unreliable narrator, mixing up dates and hazarding details of events he never witnessed. He also draws attention to his own telling of the story: "Like an incompetent puppeteer, I reveal the hands holding the strings..." (p. 65). How much faith do you put in his version of events?
13. Saleem pleads, "...believe that I am falling apart." (p. 37); he never arrives at a certain image of himself without being thrown into chaos again (e.g. p.164-165). But a child on an advertising hoarding is described as "flattened by certitude" (p. 153). Is there, then, value in uncertainty? What is it?
14. With the birth of Saleem's giant-eared son, history seems about to repeat itself; but Saleem senses that this time round, things will be different. How have circumstances changed?
15. Midnight's Children is a novel about India, and attempts to map the modern Indian mind, with all its contradictions. In your discussions, how much difficulty have you had in addressing the novel from a Western perspective? Is there an 'otherness' which makes it hard to assimilate, or are the novel's concerns universal and easily understood?