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.
Includes bibliographical references (p. xxvi-xxvii) and index.
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokovs were known for their high culture and commitment to public service, and the elder Nabokov was an outspoken opponent of antisemitism and one of the leaders of the opposition party, the Kadets. In 1919, following the Bolshevik revolution, he took his family into exile. Four years later he was shot and killed at a political rally in Berlin while trying to shield the speaker from right-wing assassins.
The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a child Nabokov was already reading Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, alongside the popular entertainments of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. As a young man, he studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he had one child, a son, Dmitri.
Having already fled Russia and Germany, Nabokov became a refugee once more in 1940, when he was forced to leave France for the United States. There he taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He also gave up writing in Russian and began composing fiction in English. In his afterword to Lolita he claimed: "My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses-the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions-which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way." [p. 317] Yet Nabokov's American period saw the creation of what are arguably his greatest works, Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962), as well as the translation of his earlier Russian novels into English. He also undertook English translations of works by Lermontov and Pushkin and wrote several books of criticism. Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.