Зарубежная литература - Страница 278

Description

In the Italian city of Padua, a young gentleman named Lucentio comes to study at one of the city’s colleges. As is often the fate of men in Shakespeare’s plays, Lucentio falls in love at first sight. The object of his affection, Bianca, is the beautiful and docile daughter of a rich merchant. Her father, Baptista Minola, has declared that no one can marry Bianca until her older sister Katharina has been married first.

Katharina is the polar opposite of her sister: vicious, foul-tempered, sharp-tongued, and stubborn. Any man in her vicinity is at risk of receiving her brutal insults and physical attacks. It’s no surprise that no man wants to marry her—or that’s what she believes, until an equally difficult man named Petruchio arrives in Padua.

This Standard Ebooks production is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Description

Antony and Cleopatra begins two years after Julius Ceasar. Mark Antony was supposed to be in Egypt to conduct government affairs on behalf of the Roman Empire. Instead, he fell in love with the beautiful Queen Cleopatra, became her lover, and abandoned his duties to his wife and country. A messenger arrives bearing news that Antony’s wife and brother are dead after attempting to kill Octavius Caesar, and one of Ceasar’s generals, Pompey, is gathering an army against the Roman leaders. Mark Antony has no choice but to return to Rome. When Antony returns to the capital, he argues with Ceasar over his loyalty to the empire and the other triumvirs. The only way that Antony can prove his fidelity to Caesar is to marry his sister, Octavia. The news of this marriage makes its way back to Egypt and its queen.

The play was published in 1606 after the great success of Macbeth. This Standard Ebooks production is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright’s 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.

Description

In 1919, at the height of the anti-leftist Palmer Raids conducted by the Wilson administration, the anarchist activist and writer Emma Goldman was deported to the nascent Soviet Union. Despite initial plans to fight the deportation order in court, Goldman eventually acquiesced in order to take part in the new revolutionary Russia herself. While initially supportive of the Bolsheviks, with some reservations, Goldman’s firsthand experiences with Bolshevik oppression and corruption prompted her titular disillusionment and eventual emigration to Germany.

In My Disillusionment in Russia, Goldman records her travels throughout Russia as part of a revolutionary museum commission, and her interactions with a variety of political and literary figures like Vladimir Lenin, Maxim Gorky, John Reed, and Peter Kropotkin. Goldman concludes her account with a critique of the Bolshevik ideology in which she asserts that revolutionary change in institutions cannot take place without corresponding changes in values.

My Disillusionment in Russia had a troubled publication history, since the first American printing in 1923 omitted the last twelve chapters of what was supposed to be a thirty-three chapter book. (Somehow, the last chapters failed to reach the publisher, who did not suspect the book to be incomplete.) The situation was remedied with the publication of the remaining chapters in 1924 as part of a volume titled My Further Disillusionment in Russia. This Standard Ebooks production compiles both volumes into a single volume, like the original manuscript.

Description

Wet Magic was the last novel for children published by E. Nesbit. It was originally serialized in The Strand Magazine in 1912, with a book version published in 1913.

In the book, four brothers and sisters are on their way to a holiday at the beach. While traveling on a train, they’re excited to read about the purported sighting of a mermaid near the coastal town where they’ll be staying, and agree among themselves to join the hunt for this mythical creature. But when they arrive, they discover that the mermaid has been captured and put on show at a circus at the local fairground. After the older children encounter another mermaid in the sea, who implores them to help, they agree they must do what they can to free the captured one. This leads them on to strange adventures.

While Wet Magic has much of Nesbit’s characteristic charm and humor, it doesn’t appear to have been received as well as her other books, nor has it been as frequently reprinted.

Description

Selina Peake moves from Chicago to a rural Dutch farming area just outside the city to teach in a one room school. As she attempts to fit into the community, she learns about her own strength in adapting to rural life. She marries an uneducated but sweet Dutch farmer named Pervus DeJong and has a son, Dirk, nicknamed “So Big.” She wishes her son to have the same appreciation for the arts and education she has, and although he becomes an architect, his disillusionment with the architectural apprentice system leads him to a career as a successful bond salesman. He later regrets eschewing his architecture career when he meets a beautiful and eccentric artist.

Ferber was not confident in the book’s prospects when it was first published. Nevertheless, it became very popular, won her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1925, and was later made into three different motion pictures.

Description

Hercule Poirot has retired to the English village of King’s Abbot, determined to use his little grey cells in the growing of vegetable marrows. But when Roger Ackroyd, a local businessman and former acquaintance of Poirot’s, is murdered, the man’s niece begs Poirot to investigate in order to clear her fiancé. With Hastings having married and moved to Argentina, Poirot enlists the local doctor to be his assistant and scribe, and the two of them sift through clues to try to discern the ones that will lead them to the killer.

Agatha Christie’s two previous Poirot novels had been generally well-received, but The Murder of Roger Ackroyd made her a household name. Consistently ranked among Christie’s best works, in 2013 it was voted as the best crime novel ever written by the 600-member Crime Writers’ Association of the United Kingdom.

Description

Indiscretions of Archie is a comic novel adapted from a set of short stories serialized in the Strand magazine between March 1920 and February 1921 in the United Kingdom and between May 1920 and February 1921 in Cosmopolitan in the United States. The novel was first published in the United Kingdom on February 14, 1921 by Herbert Jenkins and in the United States on July 15, 1921 by George H. Doran.

The eponymous Archie is Archibald Moffam, a gaffe-prone but affable Englishman who has found himself living in New York City after the end of the First World War, in which he had served with distinction. After a whirlwind romance Archie marries Lucille, the daughter of wealthy hotel owner and art collector Daniel Brewster. Many of the ensuing events revolve around Archie’s attempts to win favor with his new father-in-law.

Description

In this, his first novel, P. G. Wodehouse offers a glimpse into the insular world of an English public school scandalized by a recent burglary of its prized sports trophies (“pots”) from its cricket pavilion. At first an overzealous master unjustly accuses one of the schoolboys, who happens to be in need of cash to pay a gambling debt owed to his brother. But, thanks to a Scotland Yard inspector brought in especially for the case, the boy is cleared and his promising career among the elite is left intact.

Along the way, Wodehouse gives snapshots of the everyday lives of various boys: from dealing with the idiosyncrasies of fellow students, to collecting birds’ eggs and sneaking a smoke in the nearby woods while avoiding capture by gamekeepers, to cranking out an underground magazine to raise needed funds. Through it all, the boys, along with their headmaster, handle things with wit and aplomb. Consistent with a worldview in which a man “should be before anything else a sportsman,” sporting contests figure prominently: a boy rises from the canvas to score an unexpected knockout, and another graciously accepts his last-second defeat at the finish line.

Description

The Skylark of Space is said to be the seminal space opera. Dr. Seaton accidentally discovers a source of energy which could be used to travel to other star systems, but when he tries to show others, it fails to work. Most of his colleagues ridicule him, and he quits his career to focus on trying to refine the process. Meanwhile Dr. DuQuesne realizes the truth, and is willing to do anything to have that power.

Both scientists refine the process well enough to build a spaceship and visit other planets, but who will these new civilizations side with?

This version of The Skylark of Space was originally published in three parts during 1928 Amazing Stories. The novelization, which was published later, differs significantly.

Description

The McLaughlins are prominent members of a settlement of Scottish immigrants who emigrated to the still-wild prairies of Iowa. As the story begins, their eldest son, Wully, returns to the family farm after serving in the Union Army during the Civil War. But much has changed in his absence: the girl who once returned his love, Chirstie, now appears cold, fearful, and traumatized, and won’t meet his eye. Wully seeks to discover what happened to her during his absence, and what he can do to set things right, without having Chirstie lose her standing in their tight-knit and very religious Presbyterian community.

Margaret Wilson grew up on a farm in the small town of Traer, and her understanding of the land and its people infuses this, her first novel. The Able McLaughlins won the Harper Novel Prize on publication and then the Pulitzer Prize in 1924.