{"product_id":"secondhand-literary-fiction-bargain-book-box-sp4193","title":"Secondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP4193","description":"\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eSecondhand Literary Fiction Bargain Book Box SP4193\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003eTwenty-four titles from the Penguin Modern Classics canon — Patrick White’s Voss, three Doris Lessing novels, three Iris Murdoch novels, three W. Somerset Maugham titles, two Fitzgerald volumes, Saul Bellow, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse, Katherine Mansfield, Christina Stead, Jean-Paul Sartre, Voltaire, and James Thurber. Please note these are secondhand copies and may show light signs of wear.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003col dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eVoss — Patrick White — White’s 1957 masterpiece, following a German explorer’s doomed attempt to cross the Australian continent and the telepathic connection he forms with a woman in Sydney. Nobel Prize in Literature, 1973. One of the greatest Australian novels.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe Summer Before the Dark — Doris Lessing — A middle-aged woman spends a summer outside the structures of her domestic life and finds she cannot return to it unchanged; Lessing at her most direct and discomfiting.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eBriefing for a Descent into Hell — Doris Lessing — A man is found wandering London with no memory of who he is; his inner world, as he recovers, proves more real and more instructive than the outer world trying to reclaim him. Nobel Prize winner.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald Vol. 2: The Crack-Up — F. Scott Fitzgerald — Fitzgerald’s personal essays alongside stories written during his years of decline; a devastating self-examination by one of American literature’s great stylists.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe Sacred and Profane Love Machine — Iris Murdoch — A man maintaining two incompatible lives finds the collision between them to be both violent and illuminating; Murdoch’s Booker Prize winner of 1974.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eSteppenwolf — Hermann Hesse — A bourgeois intellectual discovers the “magic theatre” of the unconscious in Hesse’s most celebrated novel; a defining text of the 1960s counterculture and one of the most searching novels of the twentieth century.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe Thurber Carnival — James Thurber — The essential Thurber collection, gathering his essays, stories, and cartoons from his New Yorker years; witty, melancholic, and one of the great documents of American comic writing.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHumboldt’s Gift — Saul Bellow — Bellow’s Pulitzer Prize winner, in which a successful writer is haunted by the ghost of his mentor Charlie Citrine; a novel about art, money, ambition, and what we owe the dead.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe Man Who Loved Children — Christina Stead — One of the most powerful and most underread novels of the twentieth century, following a catastrophically dysfunctional American family through the eyes of the daughter who must survive it. Praised by Randall Jarrell as a masterpiece.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe Garden Party and Other Stories — Katherine Mansfield — The collection that contains Mansfield’s most celebrated work, including the title story and “The Daughters of the Late Colonel.” Modernist short fiction at its finest.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe Salzburg Tales — Christina Stead — Stead’s first book, structured as a Decameron-style set of tales told by visitors at the Salzburg Festival; underrated but brilliantly assembled.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe Summing Up — W. Somerset Maugham — Maugham’s autobiography and aesthetic creed combined; a frank self-examination by one of the twentieth century’s most commercially successful and critically undervalued writers.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eW. Somerset Maugham Collected Short Stories Vol. 1 — W. Somerset Maugham — The first volume of Maugham’s short fiction gathered across his career; the colonial settings, the sardonic observer, and the suddenly devastating endings that made him the most widely read English short story writer of his generation.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eBolt — Christine de Rivoyre — A French novel in translation, exploring the sudden disruption of an ordered life by an unpredictable passion. De Rivoyre’s psychological precision is exceptional.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe Penguin Book of English Short Stories — ed. Christopher Dolley — The essential anthology, gathering English short fiction from Kipling to the mid-twentieth century; stories by Maugham, Lawrence, Woolf, Saki, Waugh, and many others.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe Magic Mountain — Thomas Mann — Mann’s Nobel Prize-winning novel, set in a Swiss sanatorium before the First World War; the most sustained meditation on European culture at the edge of catastrophe in the language.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories — Doris Lessing — A collection of Lessing’s short fiction ranging across her many modes; the title story is characteristic of her gift for the quietly annihilating observation.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eD.H. Lawrence Selected Essays — D.H. Lawrence — A selection of Lawrence’s non-fiction, gathering his arguments about sex, society, art, and the damage civilisation does to the instinctual life. Essential for understanding the fiction.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThis Side of Paradise — F. Scott Fitzgerald — Fitzgerald’s debut novel, based closely on his Princeton years; formally uneven but possessed of a brilliance and beauty that made his reputation overnight.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eHenry and Cato — Iris Murdoch — Two men — one inheriting an estate, one losing his faith — circle each other in a novel about freedom, responsibility, and the difficulty of renouncing what we think we want.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe Sandcastle — Iris Murdoch — A schoolteacher falls in love with a portrait painter and must decide what he is willing to sacrifice; one of Murdoch’s most accessible novels and one of her most emotionally direct.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eThe Razor’s Edge — W. Somerset Maugham — A young American returns from the First World War unable to resume the comfortable life that awaits him and sets out to find something more; one of Maugham’s most admired novels and his most serious engagement with ideas of the transcendent.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eIntimacy — Jean-Paul Sartre — Sartre’s only story collection, gathering five nouvelles that demonstrate his existentialist philosophy in action rather than argument; the title story is among the most brutal psychological studies in twentieth-century fiction.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003cli\u003eCandide — Voltaire — The Penguin Classics edition of Voltaire’s essential satirical novella, in which the optimist Candide is subjected to every catastrophe the eighteenth century can offer in order to test the proposition that this is the best of all possible worlds.\u003c\/li\u003e\n\u003c\/ol\u003e","brand":"Secondhand Stock","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50595591422171,"sku":"SP4193","price":110.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0523\/7646\/9701\/files\/sp4193.jpg?v=1791418494","url":"https:\/\/bookgrocer.com\/products\/secondhand-literary-fiction-bargain-book-box-sp4193","provider":"Book Grocer","version":"1.0","type":"link"}