Secondhand Classic & Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2936

Secondhand Classic & Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2936

Twenty-four volumes drawn from across the canon — four Thomas Hardy novels, both middle volumes of Dante's Divine Comedy, Tolstoy's Anna Karenin, Camus's The Plague, Rabelais, Aeschylus, Malamud, and a Penguin Modern Poets. Essentially a well-curated shelf from a university English department circa 1970, complete with the orange and white spines.

1. A Laodicean — Thomas Hardy — One of Hardy's more overlooked novels: a young architect, an heiress who cannot quite commit to the modern world, and a villain who arrives to destabilise everything she has decided.
2. Remember Me — Fay Weldon — A dead woman refuses to stay quietly dead, and her ghost begins making itself felt in the lives of those who are quietly relieved she's gone. Dark, witty, and distinctly Weldon.
3. The Divine Comedy 2: Purgatory — Dante — The second canticle: Dante and Virgil ascending the mountain of purgatory, terrace by terrace, souls working through the residue of sin on their way to the earthly paradise at the summit.
4. The Divine Comedy 3: Paradise — Dante — The third and final canticle: Beatrice guides Dante through the celestial spheres to the Empyrean. What many readers consider the most technically ambitious sustained vision in all of Western literature.
5. The Other Side — Alfred Kubin — The only novel by the Austrian artist Alfred Kubin: a journey to the "Dream Kingdom," an autocratic state built on decay, madness, and impending apocalypse. Surrealism before the movement had a name.
6. The Mayor of Casterbridge — Thomas Hardy — Michael Henchard sells his wife at a fair while drunk and spends the rest of his life paying for it. Hardy's most relentless study of a man destroyed by his own pride.
7. The Trumpet-Major — Thomas Hardy — Hardy's most good-natured novel: a Dorset village during the Napoleonic Wars, two brothers in love with the same woman, and the shadow of a possible French invasion over everything.
8. The Black Girl in Search of God and Some Lesser Tales — Bernard Shaw — Shaw's 1932 satirical fable in which a young African woman sets out to find the God of the Christian missionaries and interrogates every answer she receives.
9. Anna Karenin — Leo Tolstoy — Tolstoy's great novel of an adulterous passion that destroys one life, set against the contrasting story of Levin — a landowner searching for meaning through work, land, and love.
10. Flame in the Snow — Julia de Beausobre — A biography of the Russian mystic Serafim of Sarov, and a meditation on suffering and spiritual life, by a woman who had herself survived Soviet imprisonment.
11. Lady Chatterley's Lover — D.H. Lawrence — The novel that triggered the 1960 obscenity trial: Constance Chatterley, her paralysed aristocratic husband, and the gamekeeper who awakens her. Now as readable as a class novel as an erotic one.
12. Selected Poems — Robert Graves — A Penguin selection spanning Graves's career from the First World War to his later mythological and love poetry — the compressed, unsettling lyric voice at its best.
13. A Summer Bird-Cage — Margaret Drabble — Drabble's first novel: two sisters — one marrying for money, one watching the whole arrangement with the sharp eye of the Oxford-educated younger sibling. Sharp, funny, and brilliantly entertaining.
14. The Woodlanders — Thomas Hardy — In a Dorset woodland community, a father's social ambitions pull his daughter away from the man she loves. Hardy at his most quietly devastating.
15. The Plague — Albert Camus — A bubonic plague descends on the Algerian city of Oran, and Camus uses the siege to explore how humans respond to collective catastrophe — with heroism, indifference, or the quiet refusal to give up.
16. Erewhon — Samuel Butler — Butler's satirical utopia, in which illness is treated as a crime and machines have been banned for fear they will surpass their makers. Wickedly funny, and surprisingly prescient about where technology leads.
17. Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes — Adam Lindsay Gordon — The colonial poet who wrote about horses, the Australian bush, and the life of the frontier with a vigour that earned him the only memorial to an Australian in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey.
18. Gargantua and Pantagruel — Rabelais (trans. J.M. Cohen) — Rabelais's comic epic of giants, feasts, wars, and philosophical digression — language let off its leash. The book that gave the language the word "Rabelaisian."
19. Selected Short Stories — William Sansom — Twenty-one stories specially chosen by Sansom himself for this Penguin collection: the postwar British master of unease and the uncanny in compressed form.
20. The World in the Evening — Christopher Isherwood — A troubled American examines his two marriages and his relationship to his own past. Isherwood's most autobiographical novel, and his most emotionally direct.
21. The Seven Against Thebes — Aeschylus (trans. Gilbert Murray) — The third play of Aeschylus's Oedipus cycle: seven warlords march on Thebes, and the last of Oedipus's sons must choose between his city and his brother.
22. Three Tales — Gustave Flaubert — The three stories Flaubert published in 1877: "A Simple Heart," "The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller," and "Herodias." Flaubert's most concentrated and most varied prose; each story a complete world.
23. Penguin Modern Poets 9: Denise Levertov, Kenneth Rexroth, William Carlos Williams — Three American modernists in the Penguin format: Levertov's precision, Rexroth's breadth, and Williams — whose red wheelbarrow changed what a poem was allowed to be.
24. The Magic Barrel — Bernard Malamud — Malamud's first story collection, winner of the National Book Award: thirteen stories of Jewish-American life suffused with folklore, failure, and moments of unexpected grace.