Secondhand Classic & Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2948

Secondhand Classic & Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP2948

Nineteen classics from the Penguin, Vintage, and Wordsworth stables — Conrad, Fitzgerald, Dickens, Tolstoy, Golding, Calvino, Waugh, and more. A box for readers who want the canon in paperback, from the fog of Victorian London to the collapse of the American dream.

1. Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad — Marlow's river journey into the Belgian Congo becomes a descent into colonial brutality. Conrad's spare, hallucinatory novella has never been out of print.
2. The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald — Gatsby's impossible dream, Daisy's green light, and the brutal reality beneath the Jazz Age glamour.
3. The Art of War — Sun Tzu — The ancient Chinese military treatise applied to everything from battlefields to boardrooms for two thousand years.
4. Hard Times — Charles Dickens — Dickens's darkest novel: an industrial town grinding its citizens down under the heel of fact, profit, and utilitarian philosophy.
5. Tender is the Night — F. Scott Fitzgerald — The slow disintegration of Dick Diver — a psychiatrist who marries his patient — on the Riviera of the 1920s. Fitzgerald's most autobiographical novel.
6. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest — Ken Kesey — McMurphy's battle against Nurse Ratched in an Oregon psychiatric ward remains one of the most electrifying portraits of institutional power ever written.
7. Rob Roy — Sir Walter Scott — Scott's swashbuckling historical novel set against the Jacobite risings — the outlaw Rob Roy MacGregor transformed into a romantic hero.
8. Washington Square — Henry James — A quiet, devastating novel: a plain heiress, a charming suitor, and a cold, clever father who controls the whole game.
9. Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man — Thomas Mann — Mann's unfinished comic masterpiece: a charming, amoral young con artist making his way through European society on wit, beauty, and bare-faced cheek.
10. Invisible Cities — Italo Calvino — Marco Polo describes fifty-five impossible cities to Kublai Khan, each one a meditation on memory, desire, and the imagination of place.
11. The Inheritors — William Golding — Told from the perspective of a Neanderthal tribe encountering Homo sapiens for the first time. Stranger and more unsettling than Lord of the Flies.
12. The Woman in White — Wilkie Collins — Mysterious women, a sinister baronet, and a conspiracy to rob an heiress of her identity. The original page-turner.
13. The Man from Snowy River — Banjo Paterson — The verse that defined an image of Australia: the bush, the brumbies, and the young rider who brought them down.
14. The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories — Leo Tolstoy — Tolstoy's devastating short masterpiece about a successful man who only discovers what matters when he is dying.
15. Jonah and Co. — Dornford Yates — Light, witty adventures in pre-war Europe — a perfect counterweight to the weightier titles in this box.
16. The Secret Agent — Joseph Conrad — A seedy double agent, a terrorist plot, and a Greenwich bombing in Victorian London. Conrad's darkest and most ironic novel.
17. England, My England — D.H. Lawrence — Lawrence's stories of English life and character — class, passion, and the weight of tradition.
18. The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold — Evelyn Waugh — A writer aboard a ship becomes convinced that voices are plotting against him. Semi-autobiographical, and deeply strange.
19. Helena — Evelyn Waugh — Waugh's historical novel about Helena, mother of Constantine, and her search for the True Cross.