once upon a time, in a far far away land… 🗝️📜📖🏰

A Room of One's Own

Virginia Woolf · 2024

Intermezzo

Sally Rooney

An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family, from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.<br/><br/>Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.<br/><br/>Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.<br/><br/>Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.<br/><br/>For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude—a period of desire, despair, and possibility; a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.

Small Things Like These

Claire Keegan · 2021

Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize<br/>"A hypnotic and electrifying Irish tale that transcends country, transcends time." —Lily King, New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers<br/><br/>Small Things Like These is award-winning author Claire Keegan's landmark new novel, a tale of one man's courage and a remarkable portrait of love and family<br/>It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.<br/>An international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.

More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop

Satoshi Yagisawa · 2024

My Brilliant Friend (Neapolitan Novels Book 1)

Elena Ferrante · 2012

Beginning in the 1950s in a poor but vibrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Elena Ferrante’s four-volume story spans almost sixty years, as its main characters, the fiery and unforgettable Lila and the bookish narrator, Elena, become women, wives, mothers, and leaders, all the while maintaining a complex and at times conflicted friendship. This first novel in the series follows Lila and Elena from their fateful meeting as ten-year-olds through their school years and adolescence. <br/> <br/>Through the lives of these two women, Ferrante tells the story of a neighborhood, a city, and a country as it is transformed in ways that, in turn, also transform the relationship between two women. <br/> <br/>--https://www.europaeditions.com/book/9781609458638/my-brilliant-friend

Before the Coffee Gets Cold

Toshikazu Kawaguchi · 2020

*NOW AN LA TIMES BESTSELLER*<br/><br/>*OVER ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD*<br/><br/>*AN INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER*<br/><br/>If you could go back in time, who would you want to meet?<br/><br/>In a small back alley of Tokyo, there is a café that has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. Local legend says that this shop offers something else besides coffee—the chance to travel back in time.<br/><br/>Over the course of one summer, four customers visit the café in the hopes of making that journey. But time travel isn’t so simple, and there are rules that must be followed. Most important, the trip can last only as long as it takes for the coffee to get cold.<br/><br/>Heartwarming, wistful, mysterious and delightfully quirky, Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s internationally bestselling novel explores the age-old question: What would you change if you could travel back in time?<br/><br/>Meet more wonderful characters in the next captivating novel in the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series, Before We Say Goodbye!<br/><br/>Read the rest of the Before the Coffee Gets Cold series:<br/>Tales from the Cafe Before Your Memory Fades

My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Ottessa Moshfegh · 2019

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Time, NPR, Vice, Bustle, The New York Times, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, Entertainment Weekly, The AV Club, & Audible A New York Times Bestseller • New York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century “One of the most compelling protagonists modern fiction has offered in years: a loopy, quietly furious pillhead whose Ambien ramblings and Xanaxed b*tcheries somehow wend their way through sad and funny and strange toward something genuinely profound.” — Entertainment Weekly “Darkly hilarious . . . [Moshfegh’s] the kind of provocateur who makes you laugh out loud while drawing blood.” —Vogue From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman's efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes. Our narrator should be happy, shouldn't she? She's young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn't just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It's the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong? My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.

Mr Salary (Faber Stories)

Sally Rooney · 2019

My love for him felt so total and so annihilating that it was often impossible for me to see him clearly at all.<br/><br/>Years ago, Sukie moved in with Nathan because her mother was dead and her father was difficult, and she had nowhere else to go. Now they are on the brink of the inevitable.<br/><br/>Sally Rooney is one of the most acclaimed young talents of recent years. With her minute attention to the power dynamics in everyday speech, she builds up sexual tension and throws a deceptively low-key glance at love and death.

Parables and Paradoxes

Franz Kafka · 1958

A bilingual collection of parables and paradoxes taken from Kafka's novels, short stories, and letters

Letters to Milena (The Schocken Kafka Library)

Franz Kafka · 2015

The passionate but doomed epistolary love affair between a Czech translator and one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial.<br/><br/>"Extraordinary…touching, horrifying, brilliant, sickly, [and] heartbreaking…. The most significant key we have for a reading of the author's novels and short stories." —The New York Times<br/><br/>In no other work does Franz Kafka reveal himself as in Letters to Milena, which begins as a business correspondence but soon develops into an epistolary love affair. Kafka's Czech translator, Milena Jesenská, was a gifted and charismatic twenty-three-year-old who was uniquely able to recognize Kafka's complex genius and his even more complex character. For thirty-six-year-old Kafka, she was "a living fire, such as I have never seen." It was to Milena that he revealed his most intimate self and, eventually, entrusted his diaries for safekeeping.

The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts With Epilogue

Fyodor Dostoevsky · 2002

<p><b>Winner of the Pen/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize<br></b><br><b>The award-winning translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's classic novel of psychological realism.</b><br><br><i>The Brothers Karamazov</i> is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving the “wicked and sentimental” Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his three sons—the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational Ivan; and the healthy, red-cheeked young novice Alyosha. Through the gripping events of their story, Dostoevsky portrays the whole of Russian life, is social and spiritual striving, in what was both the golden age and a tragic turning point in Russian culture. <br><br>This award-winning translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky remains true to the verbal<br>inventiveness of Dostoevsky’s prose, preserving the multiple voices, the humor, and the surprising modernity of the original. It is an achievement worthy of Dostoevsky’s last and greatest novel.</p>

The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Leo Tolstoy · 2008

Here are some of Tolstoy's extraordinary short stories, from "The Death of Ivan Ilyich." in a masterly new translation, to "The Raid," "The Wood-felling," "Three Deaths," "Polikushka," "After the Ball," and "The Forged Coupon," all gripping and eloquent lessons on two of Tolstoy's most persistent themes: life and death. More experimental than his novels, Tolstoy's stories are essential reading for anyone interested in his development as one of the major writers and thinkers of his time.<br/><br/>For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Book of Disquiet

Fernando Pessoa · 2002

The prizewinning, complete and unabridged translation—“the best English-language version we are likely to see for a long time, if ever” (The Guardian)—of a work of unclassifiable genius: the crowning achievement of Portugal’s modern master<br/><br/>Edited, Translated, and with an Introduction by Richard Zenith, the author of the Pulitzer Prize finalist Pessoa: A Biography<br/><br/>Winner of the Calouste Gulbenkian Translation Prize for Portuguese Translation<br/><br/>A Penguin Classic<br/><br/>Fernando Pessoa was many writers in one. He attributed his prolific writings to a wide range of alternate selves, each of which had a distinct biography, ideology, and horoscope. When he died in 1935, Pessoa left behind a trunk filled with unfinished and unpublished writings, among which were the remarkable pages that make up his posthumous masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet, an astonishing work that, in George Steiner's words, "gives to Lisbon the haunting spell of Joyce's Dublin or Kafka's Prague."<br/><br/>Published for the first time some fifty years after his death, this unique collection of short, aphoristic paragraphs comprises the "autobiography" of Bernardo Soares, one of Pessoa's alternate selves. Part intimate diary, part prose poetry, part descriptive narrative, captivatingly translated by Richard Zenith, The Book of Disquiet is one of the greatest works of the twentieth century.<br/><br/>“Pessoa is a genius.” —André Aciman

The Wisdom of the Sufi Sages

Timothy Freke · 1998

Of Human Freedom

Epictetus · 2010

The Idiot

Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1869

Everything I Know About Love

Dolly Alderton · 2020

<p>New York Times Bestseller</p><p>Like Bridget Jones’ Diary but all true— a wildly funny, occasionally heartbreaking memoir from the funny, sharp British journalist and podcast host, who Elizabeth Gilbert calls “a sparkling Roman candle of talent.”</p><p>“The older you get, the more baggage you carry. When you date at twenty-five, everyone walks into the bar with a very neat, light carry-on. When you date from thirty onwards, get ready to meet someone absolutely brimming with history, complications and demands.”</p><p>When it comes to the trials and triumphs of becoming an adult, writer Dolly Alderton has seen and tried it all. In her memoir, she vividly recounts falling in love, finding a job, getting drunk, getting dumped, and that absolutely no one can ever compare to her best girlfriends. Everything I Know About Love is about bad dates, good friends and—above all else— realizing that you are enough.</p><p>Glittering with wit and insight, heart and humor, Dolly Alderton’s unforgettable debut weaves together personal stories, satirical observations, a series of lists, recipes, and other vignettes that will strike a chord of recognition with women of every age.</p>

White Nights

Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 2016

'My God! A whole minute of bliss! Is that really so little for the whole of a man's life?' A poignant tale of love and loneliness from Russia's foremost writer. One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

Romeo and Juliet (Folger Shakespeare Library)

William Shakespeare · 2004

In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare creates a violent world, in which two young people fall in love. It is not simply that their families disapprove; the Montagues and the Capulets are engaged in a blood feud.<br/><br/>In this death-filled setting, the movement from love at first sight to the lovers’ final union in death seems almost inevitable. And yet, this play set in an extraordinary world has become the quintessential story of young love. In part because of its exquisite language, it is easy to respond as if it were about all young lovers.<br/><br/>The authoritative edition of Romeo and Juliet from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers, includes:<br/><br/>-Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play<br/>-Newly revised explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play<br/>-Scene-by-scene plot summaries<br/>-A key to the play’s famous lines and phrases<br/>-An introduction to reading Shakespeare’s language<br/>-An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the play<br/>-Fresh images from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s vast holdings of rare books<br/>-An up-to-date annotated guide to further reading<br/><br/>Essay by Gail Kern Paster<br/><br/>The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, is home to the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare’s printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from around the globe. In addition to exhibitions open to the public throughout the year, the Folger offers a full calendar of performances and programs. For more information, visit Folger.edu.

The Odyssey

Homer

Frankenstein

Mary Shelley · 2003

The world’s most famous work of horror fiction: a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity. Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read<br/><br/>Mary Shelley's timeless gothic novel presents the epic battle between man and monster at its greatest literary pitch. In trying to create life, the young student Victor Frankenstein unleashes forces beyond his control, setting into motion a long and tragic chain of events that brings Victor to the very brink of madness. How he tries to destroy his creation, as it destroys everything Victor loves, is a powerful story of love, friendship, scientific hubris, and horror. Based on the third edition of 1831, this Penguin Classics edition, with an introduction and notes by Maurice Hindle, contains all the revisions Mary Shelley made to her story, as well as her 1831 introduction and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s preface to the first edition. It also includes as appendices a select collation of the texts of 1818 and 1831 together with "A Fragment" by Lord Byron and Dr John Polidori’s "The Vampyre: A Tale."<br/><br/>For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy · 1997

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina is one of the most loved and memorable heroines of literature. Her overwhelming charm dominates a novel of unparalleled richness and density. Tolstoy considered this book to be his first real attempt at a novel form, and it addresses the very nature of society at all levels,- of destiny, death, human relationships and the irreconcilable contradictions of existence. It ends tragically, and there is much that evokes despair, yet set beside this is an abounding joy in life's many ephemeral pleasures, and a profusion of comic relief.

Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1993

<b>Hailed by <i>Washington Post Book World</i> as “the best [translation] currently available" when it was first published, this second edition of <i>Crime and Punishment </i>has been updated in honor of the 200th anniversary of Dostoevsky’s birth. • <b>ONE OF <i>TIME MAGAZINE</i>'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME</b></b><br><br>With the same suppleness, energy, and range of voices that won their translation of <i>The Brothers Karamazov</i> the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky offer a brilliant translation of <i>Crime and Punishment, </i>Dostoevsky's astounding pyschological thriller, newly revised for his bicentenniel. <br><br>In <i>Crime and Punishment</i>, when Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the tsars, commits an act of murder and theft, he sets into motion a story that is almost unequalled in world literature for its excruciating suspense, its atmospheric vividness, and its depth of characterization and vision. Dostoevsky’s drama of sin, guilt, and redemption transforms the sordid story of an old woman’s murder into the nineteenth century’s profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel.

The Odyssey

Homer • 2018

A New York Times Notable Book of 2018<br/><br/>"Wilson’s language is fresh, unpretentious and lean…It is rare to find a translation that is at once so effortlessly easy to read and so rigorously considered." ―Madeline Miller, author of Circe<br/>Composed at the rosy-fingered dawn of world literature almost three millennia ago, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty and power; about marriage and family; about travelers, hospitality, and the yearning for home.<br/>This fresh, authoritative translation captures the beauty of this ancient poem as well as the drama of its narrative. Its characters are unforgettable, none more so than the “complicated” hero himself, a man of many disguises, many tricks, and many moods, who emerges in this version as a more fully rounded human being than ever before.<br/>Written in iambic pentameter verse and a vivid, contemporary idiom, Emily Wilson’s Odyssey sings with a voice that echoes Homer’s music; matching the number of lines in the Greek original, the poem sails along at Homer’s swift, smooth pace.<br/>A fascinating, informative introduction explores the Bronze Age milieu that produced the epic, the poem’s major themes, the controversies about its origins, and the unparalleled scope of its impact and influence. Maps drawn especially for this volume, a pronunciation glossary, and extensive notes and summaries of each book make this is an Odyssey that will be treasured by a new generation of readers. 3 maps

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen · 2009

Jane Austen’s timeless classic that explores the intricate complexities of love, societal expectations, and the power of overcoming prejudice—now in a beautiful clothbound hardcover edition designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith.<br/><br/>When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever. In the sparkling comedy of manners that follows, Jane Austen shows the folly of judging by first impressions and superbly evokes the friendships, gossip, and snobberies of provincial middle-class life.<br/><br/>Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world, representing a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Jane Eyre

Charlotte Brontë · 2003

Charlotte Brontë characterized the eponymous heroine of her 1847 novel as being &quot;as poor and plain as myself.&quot; Presenting a heroine with neither great beauty nor entrancing charm was an unprecendented maneuver, but Brontë's instincts proved correct, for readers of her era and ever after have taken Jane Eyre into their hearts. The author drew upon her own experience to depict Jane's struggles at Lowood, an oppressive boarding school, and her troubled career as a governess. Unlike Jane, Brontë had the advantage of a warm family circle that shared and encouraged her literary pursuits. She found immediate success with this saga of an orphan girl forced to make her way alone in the world, from Lowood School to Thornfield, the estate of the majestically moody Mr. Rochester, and beyond. A selection of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë, Pauline Nestor · 2002

<b>Coming soon to the big screen is Emerald Fennell’s feature film “<i>Wuthering Heights</i>,” which captures the spirit of this epic love story and stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as Catherine and Heathcliff.<br></b><br>Emily Brontë's only novel endures as a work of tremendous and far-reaching influence. The Penguin Classics edition is the definitive version of the text, edited with an introduction by Pauline Nestor.<br><br>Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange, situated on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place years before. What unfolds is the tale of the intense love between the gypsy foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. Catherine, forced to choose between passionate, tortured Heathcliff and gentle, well-bred Edgar Linton, surrendered to the expectations of her class. As Heathcliff's bitterness and vengeance at his betrayal is visited upon the next generation, their innocent heirs must struggle to escape the legacy of the past. <br><br>In this edition, a new preface by Lucasta Miller, author of <i>The Brontë Myth</i>, looks at the ways in which the novel has been interpreted, from Charlotte Brontë onwards. This complements Pauline Nestor's introduction, which discusses changing critical receptions of the novel, as well as Emily Brontë's influences and background.

As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow

Zoulfa Katouh · 2022

Salama Kassab was a pharmacy student when the cries for freedom broke out in Syria. She still had her parents and her big brother; she still had her home. She had a normal teenager’s life. <br/> <br/>Now Salama volunteers at a hospital in Homs, helping the wounded who flood through the doors daily. Secretly, though, she is desperate to find a way out of her beloved country before her sister-in-law, Layla, gives birth. So desperate, that she has manifested a physical embodiment of her fear in the form of her imagined companion, Khawf, who haunts her every move in an effort to keep her safe. <br/> <br/>But even with Khawf pressing her to leave, Salama is torn between her loyalty to her country and her conviction to survive. Salama must contend with bullets and bombs, military assaults, and her shifting sense of morality before she might finally breathe free. And when she crosses paths with the boy she was supposed to meet one fateful day, she starts to doubt her resolve in leaving home at all. <br/> <br/>Soon, Salama must learn to see the events around her for what they truly are—not a war, but a revolution—and decide how she, too, will cry for Syria’s freedom.