The House of Mirth


Book Description

In late 19th-century New York, high society places great demands on a woman—she must be beautiful, wealthy, cultured, and above all, virtuous, at least on the surface. At 29, Lily Bart has had every opportunity to marry successfully within her social class, but her irresponsible lifestyle and high standards lead her further and further down the social ladder. Her gambling debts are catching up with her, and an arrangement with a friend's husband causes society to begin questioning her virtue. The House of Mirth is Edith Wharton’s sharp critique of an American upper class she viewed as morally corrupt and relentlessly materialistic. EDITH WHARTON [1862–1937], born in New York, made her debut at the age of forty but managed to write around twenty novels, nearly a hundred short stories, poetry, travelogues, and essays. Wharton was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature three times: 1927, 1928, and 1930. For The Age of Innocence [1920], she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1921.




The Ocean of Mirth


Book Description

The Ocean of Mirth brings together an English translation and an analytical interpretation of a singularly crucial, but obscure, Sanskrit medieval text, the Hāsyārṇava-Prahasanaṁ of Jagadēśvara Bhaṭṭāchārya. As a political satire, the volume finds significant resonances among contemporary questions of politics and society across the world, and examines the tension inherent in the clash of ideas such as freedom and order. In an unabashed celebration of disorder as the only way to fight violence, tyranny and autocratic impulses, Hāsyārṇava suggests no return to a Golden Age or to the rule of an iconic king; nor is there a promise of a saviour—a political farce that ends without any denouement in sight. One of the first authentic English translations of a neglected Sanskrit text from medieval India, this translation throws up interesting questions regarding values such as freedom, violence, order, chaos and disorder. This volume will be a major intervention in the discovery of a significant non-canonical text of classical literature and will be indispensable for students, scholars and researchers of politics, philosophy, sociology, Indian literatures, Indology, comparative literature and culture studies.




What Literature Teaches Us about Emotion


Book Description

Literature provides us with otherwise unavailable insights into the ways emotions are produced, experienced, and enacted in human social life. It is particularly valuable because it deepens our comprehension of the mutual relations between emotional response and ethical judgment. These are the central claims of Hogan's study, which carefully examines a range of highly esteemed literary works in the context of current neurobiological, psychological, sociological, and other empirical research. In this work, he explains the value of literary study for a cognitive science of emotion and outlines the emotional organization of the human mind. He explores the emotions of romantic love, grief, mirth, guilt, shame, jealousy, attachment, compassion, and pity - in each case drawing on one work by Shakespeare and one or more works by writers from different historical periods or different cultural backgrounds, such as the eleventh-century Chinese poet Li Ch'ing-Chao and the contemporary Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka.




The Touchstone


Book Description

This book contains Edith Wharton's first novella and the second book she ever wrote, 'The Touchstone'. This narrative follows Stephen Glennard, a young man whose destitution leads him into a dubious money-making scheme which he embarks on so that he can afford to marry the woman he loves. After seeing an advertisement seeking any papers or correspondences related to a recently deceased author that he had been in communication with, he snaps up the opportunity. A tale of how social strata, money, and self-deprecation can impact love, 'The Touchstone' is well worth a read and is not to be missed by fans and collectors of Wharton's prolific work. This classic text has been chosen for its immense literary value, and we are proud to republish it here, complete with a new introductory biography of the author. Edith Wharton was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer.




The Buccaneers


Book Description

Edith Wharton's spellbinding final novel tells a story of love in the gilded age that crosses the boundaries of society—soon to be an original series on AppleTV+! “Brave, lively, engaging...a fairy-tale novel, miraculouly returned to life.”—The New York Times Book Review Set in the 1870s, the same period as Wharton's The Age of Innocence, The Buccaneers is about five wealthy American girls denied entry into New York Society because their parents' money is too new. At the suggestion of their clever governess, the girls sail to London, where they marry lords, earls, and dukes who find their beauty charming—and their wealth extremely useful. After Wharton's death in 1937, The Christian Science Monitor said, "If it could have been completed, The Buccaneers would doubtless stand among the richest and most sophisticated of Wharton's novels." Now, with wit and imagination, Marion Mainwaring has finished the story, taking her cue from Wharton's own synopsis. It is a novel any Wharton fan will celebrate and any romantic reader will love. This is the richly engaging story of Nan St. George and Guy Thwarte, an American heiress and an English aristocrat, whose love breaks the rules of both their societies.




Uncivil Mirth


Book Description

How the philosophers and polemicists of eighteenth-century Britain used ridicule in the service of religious toleration, abolition, and political justice The relaxing of censorship in Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century led to an explosion of satires, caricatures, and comic hoaxes. This new vogue for ridicule unleashed moral panic and prompted warnings that it would corrupt public debate. But ridicule also had vocal defenders who saw it as a means to expose hypocrisy, unsettle the arrogant, and deflate the powerful. Uncivil Mirth examines how leading thinkers of the period searched for a humane form of ridicule, one that served the causes of religious toleration, the abolition of the slave trade, and the dismantling of patriarchal power. Ross Carroll brings to life a tumultuous age in which the place of ridicule in public life was subjected to unparalleled scrutiny. He shows how the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, far from accepting ridicule as an unfortunate byproduct of free public debate, refashioned it into a check on pretension and authority. Drawing on philosophical treatises, political pamphlets, and conduct manuals of the time, Carroll examines how David Hume, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others who came after Shaftesbury debated the value of ridicule in the fight against intolerance, fanaticism, and hubris. Casting Enlightenment Britain in an entirely new light, Uncivil Mirth demonstrates how the Age of Reason was also an Age of Ridicule, and speaks to our current anxieties about the lack of civility in public debate.




Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth


Book Description

'The House of Mirth' is perhaps Edith Wharton's best-known and most frequently read novel. This casebook collects critical essays addressing a broad spectrum of topics and utilizing a range of critical and theoretical approaches.




Owen Gwynne's Great Work


Book Description




The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis


Book Description

New York Times Critics’ Best of the Year A landmark event, the complete stories of Machado de Assis finally appear in English for the first time in this extraordinary new translation. Widely acclaimed as the progenitor of twentieth-century Latin American fiction, Machado de Assis (1839–1908)—the son of a mulatto father and a washerwoman, and the grandson of freed slaves—was hailed in his lifetime as Brazil’s greatest writer. His prodigious output of novels, plays, and stories rivaled contemporaries like Chekhov, Flaubert, and Maupassant, but, shockingly, he was barely translated into English until 1963 and still lacks proper recognition today. Drawn to the master’s psychologically probing tales of fin-de-siècle Rio de Janeiro, a world populated with dissolute plutocrats, grasping parvenus, and struggling spinsters, acclaimed translators Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson have now combined Machado’s seven short-story collections into one volume, featuring seventy-six stories, a dozen appearing in English for the first time. Born in the outskirts of Rio, Machado displayed a precocious interest in books and languages and, despite his impoverished background, miraculously became a well-known intellectual figure in Brazil’s capital by his early twenties. His daring narrative techniques and coolly ironic voice resemble those of Thomas Hardy and Henry James, but more than either of these writers, Machado engages in an open playfulness with his reader—as when his narrator toys with readers’ expectations of what makes a female heroine in “Miss Dollar,” or questions the sincerity of a slave’s concern for his dying master in “The Tale of the Cabriolet.” Predominantly set in the late nineteenth-century aspiring world of Rio de Janeiro—a city in the midst of an intense transformation from colonial backwater to imperial metropolis—the postcolonial realism of Machado’s stories anticipates a dominant theme of twentieth-century literature. Readers witness the bourgeoisie of Rio both at play, and, occasionally, attempting to be serious, as depicted by the chief character of “The Alienist,” who makes naively grandiose claims for his Brazilian hometown at the expense of the cultural capitals of Europe. Signifiers of new wealth and social status abound through the landmarks that populate Machado’s stories, enlivening a world in the throes of transformation: from the elegant gardens of Passeio Público and the vibrant Rua do Ouvidor—the long, narrow street of fashionable shops, theaters and cafés, “the Via Dolorosa of long-suffering husbands”—to the port areas of Saúde and Gamboa, and the former Valongo slave market. One of the greatest masters of the twentieth century, Machado reveals himself to be an obsessive collector of other people’s lives, who writes: “There are no mysteries for an author who can scrutinize every nook and cranny of the human heart.” Now, The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis brings together, for the first time in English, all of the stories contained in the seven collections published in his lifetime, from 1870 to 1906. A landmark literary event, this majestic translation reintroduces a literary giant who must finally be integrated into the world literary canon.




Pokko and the Drum


Book Description

Four starred reviews! A Today Show Best Book of the Year An NPR Favorite Book of 2019 From E.B. White Read Aloud honor artist Matthew Forsythe comes an “extraordinary” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) picture book about a magical drum, an emerald forest, and the little frog who dares to make her own music. The biggest mistake Pokko’s parents ever made was giving her the drum. When Pokko takes the drum deep into the forest it is so quiet, so very quiet that Pokko decides to play. And before she knows it she is joined by a band of animals —first the raccoon, then the rabbit, then the wolf—and soon the entire forest is following her. Will Pokko hear her father’s voice when he calls her home? Pokko and the Drum is a story about art, persistence, and a family of frogs living in a mushroom.




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