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Все книги издательства IngramBrothers Karamazov, The The
His final and greatest work, Dostoyevsky spent nearly two years writing The Brothers Karamazov, which was published serially in The Russian Messenger from January 1879 to November 1880. Set against a modernizing 19th-century Russia, the characters experience moral struggles of faith, judgment, and reason amid a patricidal murder which forms the center of the plot. The novel is full of ethical debates of God, free will, and morality. Dostoyevsky composed much of the novel in Staraya Russa, a spa town celebrated for its mineral springs and which inspired the main setting. Since its publication, it has been acclaimed as one of the supreme achievements in world literature.
Omoo
Based on Melville's travels in the Society Islands of the South Pacific, Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas is told by an unnamed narrator who boards a whaling vessel bound for Tahiti. The narrator becomes involved in a mutiny and afterward is imprisoned on the island of Tahiti. His observations of the island, its way of life and the customs of the natives follow. Omoo” is the sequel to Melville's hugely successful Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life, and was adapted into the 1949 exploitation film Omoo-Omoo, The Shark God.
Typee
Based on Melville's real-life experiences after having jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands, his first novel was extremely popular, provoking public skepticism until the events within were corroborated by a fellow castaway. Typee is properly considered a work of fiction, as the three week stay on which the author based his story is here extended to four months, and the book is supplemented with imaginative reconstruction and adaptation of material from other Pacific exploration books of the time. The title refers to the province of Tai Pi Vai. Typee was Melville's most popular work during his lifetime; making him notorious as the man who lived among the cannibals.
Bell-Tower, The The
Considered to be the least characteristic of Melville's stories, somewhat resembling the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, “The Bell-Tower” is a dark literary work that explores, though never fully reveals, its central mystery. An eccentric artist and architect dreams up plans for a magnificent bell tower. After receiving approval from the city, he happily begins construction. When city residents begin to notice strange occurrences associated with the project, their complaints eventually force the city magistrates to investigate. Showing the magistrates around the tower, the artist proudly shows off his work and answers their questions, but one curiosity remains unanswered—what lies beneath the shroud in the bell-tower?
Benito Cereno
A fictionalized account about the revolt on a 19th-century Spanish slavery ship, Benito Cereno was first published in three installments in 1855. Melville scholar Merton M. Sealts, Jr. called the story “an oblique comment on those prevailing attitudes toward blacks and slavery in the United States that would ultimately precipitate civil war between North and South.” The famous question of what had cast such a shadow upon Cereno was used by American author Ralph Ellison as an epitaph to his 1952 novel Invisible Man, excluding Cereno's answer, The negro. Over time, Melville's story has been increasingly recognized as among his greatest achievements.
Bartleby the Scrivener
In Manhattan, an elderly lawyer's business is growing. Having two scriveners in his employ, the lawyer advertises for a third to meet demand. Enter Bartleby, a glum albeit quality scrivener. However, the lawyer quickly discovers that something is off with his new employee. When asked to perform any duties outside of copying, Bartleby responds with a canned I would prefer not to. Soon Bartleby is living at the office and performing less and less at work. Finally fed up with his strange new scrivener, the lawyer asks Bartleby to leave, only to find himself on the receiving end of yet another I would prefer not to.
Republic, The The
Plato's best-known work, The Republic was written around 380 BC. Largely a Socratic dialogue concerning justice, the order and character of the just city-state and the just man, it serves as the forerunner for such other classics of political thought as Cicero's De Republica, St. Augustine's City of God, and Thomas More's Utopia. Among the ideas put forth are the eternal conflict between the world of the senses (the cave) and the world of ideas (the world outside the cave), and the philosopher's role as mediator between the two. Also: Kallipolis, a hypothetical city-state ruled by a philosopher king, and the theory of forms, the immortality of the soul, and the role of the philosopher and poetry in society.
Tale of Two Cities, A A
Two photographers from very different cultures swap cities. Chinese photographer Yu Haibo travels to Canberra to capture the young Australian capital, and Canberra photographer Lee Grant travels to Beijing to capture images of the ancient Chinese city. As the two of them photograph the sister cities, they discover new perspectives and come to realize that these two national capitals with their different types of government and their contrasting populations have much in common.
Great Expectations
Pip's life was striken with tragedy as a small boy, being orphaned with the loss of his mother, father and siblings. Pip forms a relationship with the odd Miss Havisham and her lovely adopted daughter Estella. An anonymous benefactor whisks Pip away from the life he once knew and the people he cared for to one of class and high society. When his beloved Estella enters his life once more, after many years apart, she denies him the affections he longs for. Pip has life-altering experiences throughout this story that will keep the listeners intrigued until the end.
Anna Karenina
Considered by some to be the greatest novel ever written, Anna Karenina is Tolstoy's classic tale of love and adultery set against the backdrop of high society in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. A rich and complex masterpiece, the novel charts the disastrous course of a love affair between Anna, a beautiful married woman, and Count Vronsky, a wealthy army officer. Tolstoy seamlessly weaves together the lives of dozens of characters, and in doing so captures a breathtaking tapestry of late-nineteenth-century Russian society. As Matthew Arnold wrote in his celebrated essay on Tolstoy, We are not to take Anna Karenina as a work of art; we are to take it as a piece of life.