Seven Gothic Tales (58 page)

THE REMAINS OF THE DAY
by Kazuo Ishiguro

A profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world in postwar England.

“One of the best books of the year.”

—The New York Times Book Review

0-679-73172-5

THE WOMAN WARRIOR
by Maxine Hong Kingston

“A remarkable book … As an account of growing up female and Chinese-American in California, in a laundry of course, it is anti-nostalgic; it burns the fat right out of the mind. As a dream—of the ‘female avenger’—it is dizzying, elemental, a poem turned into a sword.”

—The New York Times

0-679-72188-6

MY TRAITOR’S HEART
by Rian Malan

Rian Malan, a former crime reporter who fled his country after witnessing unimaginable atrocities, returns in search of the truth behind apartheid.

“Here is truth-telling at its most exemplary and courageous. The remorseless exercise of a reporter’s anguished conscience gives us a South Africa we thought we knew all about: but we knew nothing.”

—John le Carré

0-679-73215-2

DEATH IN VENICE AND SEVEN
OTHER STORIES
by Thomas Mann

In addition to
Death in Venice
(“A story,” Mann said, “of death … of the voluptuousness of doom”), this volume includes “Mario the Magician,” “Disorder and Early Sorrow,” “A Man and His Dog,” “Felix Krull,” “The Blood of the Walsungs,” “Tristan,” and “Tonio Kröger.”

0-679-72206-8

LOLITA
by Vladimir Nabokov

The controversial novel that tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert’s obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze.

“The only convincing love story of our century.”

—Vanity Fair

0-679-72316-1

NO EXIT AND THREE OTHER PLAYS
by Jean-Paul Sartre

No Exit
is an unforgettable portrayal of hell.
The Flies
is a modern reworking of the Electra-Orestes story.
Dirty Hands
is about a young intellectual torn between theory and praxis.
The Respectful Prostitute
is a scathing attack on American racism.

0-679-72516-4

THE PASSION
by Jeanette Winterson

Intertwining the destinies of two remarkable people—the soldier Henri, for eight years Napoleon’s faithful cook, and Villanelle, the red-haired daughter of a Venetian boatman—
The Passion
is “a deeply imagined and beautiful book, often arrestingly so”
(The New York Times Book Review)
.

0-679-72437-0

Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:
1-800-733-3000 (credit cards only). Prices subject to change.

ANECDOTES OF DESTINY AND EHRENGARD

In the classic “Babette’s Feast,” a mysterious French woman prepares a sumptuous feast for a gathering of religious ascetics and, in doing so, introduces them to the true essence of grace. In “The Immortal Story,” a miserly old tea-trader living in Canton wishes for power and finds redemption as he turns an oft-told sailors’ tale into reality for a young man and woman. And in the magnificent novella
Ehrengard
, Dinesen tells of the powerful yet restrained rapport between a noble Wagnerian beauty and a rakish artist. Hauntingly evoked and sensuously realized, the five stories and novella collected here have the hold of “fairy stories read in childhood … of dreams … and of our life as dreams” (
The New York Times
).

LAST TALES

Last Tales
is a collection of twelve of the last tales that Isak Dinesen wrote before her death in 1962. They include seven tales from
Albondocani
, a projected novel that was never completed; “The Caryatids,” an unfinished Gothic tale of a couple bedeviled by an old letter and a gypsy’s spell; and three tales of winter, including “Converse at Night in Copenhagen,” a drunken, all-night conversation between a boy-king, a prostitute, and a poor young poet.

OUT OF AFRICA AND SHADOWS ON THE GRASS

At the age of twenty-seven; Isak Dinesen (née Karen Blixen) left Denmark and sailed for East Africa to marry her Swedish cousin, Baron Bror Blixen. Together they bought a four-thousand-acre coffee plantation in Kenya. From 1914 to 1931 she managed the plantation, even after she and her husband separated. Her account of those years is transformed by the magic of her prose and her supreme gift as a storyteller into a vibrant re-creation of Africa, filled with her affection for and understanding of the land and its people

SEVEN GOTHIC TALES

Originally published in 1934,
Seven Gothic Tales
, the first book by “one of the finest and most singular artists of our time” (
The At
lantic)
, is a modern classic. Here are seven exquisite tales combining the keen psychological insight characteristic of the modern short story with the haunting mystery of the nineteenth-century Gothic tale, in the tradition of writers such as Goethe, Hoffmann, and Poe.

WINTER’S TALES

In Isak Dinesen’s universe, the magical enchantment of the fairy tale and the moral resonance of myth coexist with an unflinching grasp of the most obscure human strengths and weaknesses. A despairing author abandons his wife, but in the course of a long night’s wandering, he learns love’s true value and returns to her, only to find her a different woman from the one he left. A landowner, seeking to prove a principle, inadvertently exposes the ferocity of mother love. A wealthy young traveler melts the hauteur of a lovely woman by masquerading as her aged and loyal servant. Shimmering and haunting, Dinesen’s
Winter’s Tales
transport us, through their author’s deft guidance of our desire to imagine, to the mysterious place where all stories are born.