Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP4077

Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP4077

An eclectic, beautifully stocked box of twentieth-century literary fiction and classic prose. Orwell, Vonnegut, Camus, Hemingway, Burroughs, Hardy, Isherwood, Huxley, Kerouac and more — each one a distinct voice, together making something close to a curriculum in modern literature.

1. A Clergyman's Daughter — George Orwell — Dorothy Hare, a vicar's daughter, loses her memory and finds herself living rough in London. Lesser-known Orwell, full of sharp social observation.
2. The Great Modern Poets — ed. Michael Schmidt — An anthology of essential English-language poetry since 1900, from the Imagists to the present. A superb introduction to the modern canon.
3. The Heart of a Dog — Mikhail Bulgakov — A Moscow street dog is given the brain of a human criminal in a darkly funny satirical novella. Bulgakov at his most subversive.
4. Antic Hay — Aldous Huxley — A biting satire of London bohemian life in the 1920s, full of clever, dissatisfied people doing each other harm.
5. Moby Dick — Herman Melville — Ishmael ships out with the obsessed Captain Ahab in pursuit of the great white whale. One of the supreme novels in the English language.
6. A Gift of Love — Martin Luther King Jr. — Sermons and reflections from King, revealing the depth and humanity behind the famous speeches.
7. A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings — Charles Dickens — Scrooge, the three Ghosts and the definitive Christmas redemption story. The complete Dickens text.
8. Queer — William S. Burroughs — Semi-autobiographical and raw, Burroughs's account of a writer's obsession in 1950s Mexico City. One of his most personal works.
9. His Last Bow: Sherlock Holmes — Arthur Conan Doyle — The final collection of Holmes stories, including the famous wartime tale in which the great detective comes out of retirement.
10. A Single Man — Christopher Isherwood — A day in the life of George, a gay British professor in 1960s Los Angeles, grieving the loss of his partner. Quietly devastating.
11. To Have and Have Not — Ernest Hemingway — Harry Morgan runs contraband between Cuba and Florida to survive. Hemingway's most politically engaged novel.
12. Under the Greenwood Tree — Thomas Hardy — Hardy's warmest and most pastoral novel, a gentle love story set among the musicians of a Wessex village.
13. Father and Son — Edmund Gosse — A memoir of growing up with a deeply religious Plymouth Brethren father. One of the finest English autobiographies.
14. The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald — Jay Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan and the green light at the end of the dock. The American Dream and its unravelling, told in Fitzgerald's incomparable prose.
15. Mother Night — Kurt Vonnegut — An American spy poses as a Nazi propagandist during WWII — and comes to wonder which part of himself was real.
16. The Myth of Sisyphus — Albert Camus — Camus's landmark essay on the absurd: why do we go on in a world without inherent meaning? Philosophy at its most readable.
17. In Patagonia — Bruce Chatwin — Chatwin walks through the extreme south of South America in this classic of travel writing, mixing adventure with history and myth.
18. Brave New World Revisited — Aldous Huxley — Huxley returns to the themes of his great novel twenty years later, measuring how close reality has come to dystopia.
19. On the Road — Jack Kerouac — Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty tear across America in the book that defined a generation and launched the Beat movement.
20. The Prince — Niccolò Machiavelli — The ruthlessly pragmatic Renaissance guide to political power. Still provocative, still essential.
21. We — Yevgeny Zamyatin — The dystopian novel that preceded and influenced both Brave New World and 1984. A citizen of the One State begins to feel something dangerous: individuality.