{"product_id":"secondhand-classic-literary-fiction-bargain-book-box-sp2936","title":"Secondhand Classic \u0026 Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2936","description":"\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\" dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSecondhand Classic \u0026amp; Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2936\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal\" dir=\"ltr\"\u003eTwenty-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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003col dir=\"ltr\" class=\"[li_\u0026amp;]:mb-0 [li_\u0026amp;]:mt-1 [li_\u0026amp;]:gap-1 [\u0026amp;:not(:last-child)_ul]:pb-1 [\u0026amp;:not(:last-child)_ol]:pb-1 list-decimal flex flex-col gap-1 pl-8 mb-3 print:block print:space-y-1\"\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eA 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.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eRemember 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.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eAnna 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.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eFlame 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.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eLady 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.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eSelected 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.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eA 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.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eErewhon — 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.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eBush 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.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eGargantua 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.\"\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eSelected 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.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eThree 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.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003ePenguin 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.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli class=\"font-claude-response-body whitespace-normal break-words pl-2\"\u003eThe 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.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ol\u003e","brand":"Secondhand Stock","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49060226334939,"sku":"SP2936","price":110.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/sp2936.jpg?v=1785807562","url":"https:\/\/bookgrocer.com\/products\/secondhand-classic-literary-fiction-bargain-book-box-sp2936","provider":"Book Grocer","version":"1.0","type":"link"}