Synopses & Reviews
Two of Conrad’s BEST-KNOWN works—in a single volume In this pair of literary voyages into the inner self, Joseph Conrad has written two of the most chilling, disturbing, and noteworthy pieces of fiction of the twentieth century.
@JungleFever Heading down to Africa on a boat. Too hot! I get the creeping sense this job isn’t going to be as cushy as they made it sound.
The natives seem unhappy. Some are even violent! Why don’t they appreciate how much we’ve done for them? Ungrateful welfare leeches, I say!
From Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less
Synopsis
In the only novel Conrad set in London, The Secret Agent communicates a profoundly ironic view of human affairs. The story is woven around an attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1894 masterminded by Verlac, a Russian spy working for the police, and ostensibly a member of an anarchist group
in Soho. His masters instruct him to discredit the anarchists in a humiliating fashion, and when his evil plan goes horribly awry, Verlac must deal with the repercussions of his actions.
Synopsis
One of the great detective novels of all time, "The Secret Agent", written in 1903, is a magisterial thriller of terrorists and police in London in the early years of the 20th century.
Synopsis
Inspired by an actual attempt in 1894 to blow up London's Greenwich Observatory, here is a chillingly prophetic examination of contemporary terrorism-and the literary precursor to today's espionage thriller.
Synopsis
Two of Conrad’s BEST-KNOWN works—in a single volume In this pair of literary voyages into the inner self, Joseph Conrad has written two of the most chilling, disturbing, and noteworthy pieces of fiction of the twentieth century.
@JungleFever Heading down to Africa on a boat. Too hot! I get the creeping sense this job isn’t going to be as cushy as they made it sound.
The natives seem unhappy. Some are even violent! Why don’t they appreciate how much we’ve done for them? Ungrateful welfare leeches, I say!
From Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less
Synopsis
This chillingly prophetic examination of terrorism by the author of Heart of Darkness is the literary precursor to the espionage thrillers of Graham Greene and John Le Carré.
Inspired by an actual attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, The Secret Agent portrays the world of late-nineteenth-century London, with its fatuous civil servants, corrupt police, and squalid underworld characters like Verloc, a pornographer acting as a government informant. Verlocs assignment is to provoke the radicals whose group he has penetrated into committing an act of such violence that they will be discredited and their appeal to the masses destroyed. With its questionable characters and amoral caricatures, the novel is as much a black satire of English society as a frightening mirror of the present day.
With an Introduction by E. L. Doctorow and a New Afterword