Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965--thirty years after its original publication--Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of... Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime--his own murder.

"A towering landmark of postwar Realism. . . . A sustained work of prose so lucid and fine it seems less written than carved." — David Foster... WallaceOtto and Sophie Bentwood live childless in a renovated Brooklyn brownstone. The complete works of Goethe line their bookshelf, their stainless-steel kitchen is newly installed, and their Mercedes is parked curbside. But after Sophie is bitten on the hand while trying to feed a half-starved neighborhood cat, a series of small and ominous disasters begin to plague their lives. The fault lines of their marriage are revealed — echoing the fractures of society around them, slowly wrenching itself apart. First published in 1970 to wide acclaim, Desperate Characters stands as one of the most dazzling and rigorous examples of the storyteller's craft in postwar American literature — a novel that, according to Irving Howe, ranks with "Billy Budd, The Great Gatsby, Miss Lonelyhearts, and Seize the Day." "Desperate Characters is, simply, a perfect short novel. A few characters, a small stretch of time; setting and action tightly confined — and yet, as in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, everything crucial within our souls bared." — Andrea Barrett "This perfect novel about pain is as clear, and as wholly believable, and as healing, as a fever dream." — Frederick Busch "Brilliant. . . . [Fox] is one of the most attractive writers to come our way in a long, long time." — The New Yorker   Introduced by Jonathan Franzen, one of Granta's Twenty Best Young American Novelists

Irreverent, provocative, and engaging, Desperately Seeking Certainty attacks the current legal vogue for grand unified theories of constitutional... interpretation. On both the Right and the Left, prominent legal scholars are attempting to build all of constitutional law from a single foundational idea. Dan Farber and Suzanna Sherry find that in the end no single, all-encompassing theory can successfully guide judges or provide definitive or even sensible answers to every constitutional question. Their book brilliantly reveals how problematic foundationalism is and shows how the pragmatic, multifaceted common law methods already used by the Court provide a far better means of reaching sound decisions and controlling judicial discretion than do any of the grand theories.

Raised in Pakistan, Ziauddin Sardar learned the Koran at his mother’s knee. As a young student in London, he embarked on a quest to grasp the meaning... and contemporary relevance of his religion and, hopefully, to find “paradise.” After experimenting with the mystical branch of Islam, Sufism, and with classical Islam, he set off on extensive travels through the Muslim world. Along the way, he came to accept that he might never reach paradise, realizing that it’s the journey that’s important. At a time when the Western view of Islam is so often distorted and over-simplified, Desperately Seeking Paradise is essential reading.

What is the human heart like? Theologians and philosophers have attempted to address this question, not just in the abstract, but concretely in... personal, as well as social and political, dimensions. Patrick Downey explores the biblical writings of Genesis and the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, the Greek tragedies, Plato, Aristotle, and political philosophers--such as Rousseau, Hobbes, Nietzsche and René Girard--to seek answers to this profound question. Recognizing our resistance to know the truth about our own hearts, Downey calls his readers to join with these thinkers in the search for truth and serious self-reflection. Not for the faint of heart, this book courageously addresses the most foundational question of our existence as individuals in community. What is the nature of the human heart and can we, will we, know it?

In late October 1846, the last wagon train of that year's westward migration stopped overnight before resuming its arduous climb over the Sierra Nevada... Mountains, unaware that a fearsome storm was gathering force. After months of grueling travel, the 81 men, women and children would be trapped for a brutal winter with little food and only primitive shelter. The conclusion is known: by spring of the next year, the Donner Party was synonymous with the most harrowing extremes of human survival. But until now, the full story of what happened--and what it tells us about human nature and about America's westward expansion--remained shrouded in myth. Drawing on fresh archeological evidence, recent research on topics ranging from survival rates to snowfall totals, and heartbreaking letters and diaries made public by descendants a century-and-a-half after the tragedy, Ethan Rarick offers an intimate portrait of the Donner party and their unimaginable ordeal: a mother who must divide her family, a little girl who shines with courage, a devoted wife who refuses to abandon her husband, a man who risks his life merely to keep his word. Rarick resists both the gruesomely sensationalist accounts of the Donner party as well as later attempts to turn the survivors into archetypal pioneer heroes. "The Donner Party," Rarick writes, "is a story of hard decisions that were neither heroic nor villainous. Often, the emigrants displayed a more realistic and typically human mixture of generosity and selfishness, an alloy born of necessity." A fast-paced, heart-wrenching, clear-eyed narrative history, Desperate Passage casts new light on one of America's most horrific encounters between the dream of a better life and the harsh realities such dreams so often must confront.

Hardy's first published work, Desperate Remedies moves the sensation novel into new territory. The anti-hero, Aeneas Manston, as physically alluring as... he is evil, even fascinates the innocent Cytherea, though she is in love with another man. When he cannot seduce her, Manston resorts to deception, blackmail, bigamy, murder, and rape. Yet this compelling story also raises the great questions underlying Hardy's major novels, which relate to the injustice of the class system, the treatment of women, probability and causality. This edition shows for the first time that the sensation novel was always Hardy's natural genre. It is based on the first edition text, and includes later prefaces and the Wessex Poems "dissolved" into prose.About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

There's a place alone Interstate 50 that some call the loneliest place on Earth. It's not a very nice place to live. It's an even worse place to die.... It's known as Desperation, Nevada...

L'année même de l'indépendance de l'Algérie, en 1962, naît à Montpellier la petite Kenza. Sa mère décide de regagner avec l'enfant Oran qu'elle... avait fui pour échapper à un mari boucher, obsédé sexuel, qui la battait. Elle se dit que l'indépendance va changer la société et les hommes... Espoir vain. Elle repart, définitivement cette fois, mais sans sa fille, que le père lui a dérobée. Puis se passent l'enfance et l'adolescence de Kenza, sa réussite universitaire à force d'un travail acharné, son ascension sociale. Reste que la victoire d'un seul ne change pas le sort du monde, reste que le FIS met en danger l'Algérie. Menacée comme tant de femmes qui revendiquent leur liberté, Kenza refait le voyage de sa mère à Montpellier où elle tentera, à travers la communauté algérienne, de savoir quels furent sa vie, ses derniers jours, et pourquoi elle n'essaya jamais de la revoir. La vérité découverte, belle et douloureuse, Kenza s'enfuit - une fois encore - au Canada ; sans doute parce que la France est trop près de l'Algérie, sans doute parce que Kenza veut perdre la mémoire.

L'année même de l'indépendance de l'Algérie, en 1962, naît à Montpellier la petite Kenza. Sa mère décide de regagner avec l'enfant Oran qu'elle... avait fui pour échapper à un mari boucher, obsédé sexuel, qui la battait. Elle se dit que l'indépendance va changer la société et les hommes... Espoir vain. Elle repart, définitivement cette fois, mais sans sa fille, que le père lui a dérobée. Puis se passent l'enfance et l'adolescence de Kenza, sa réussite universitaire à force d'un travail acharné, son ascension sociale. Reste que la victoire d'un seul ne change pas le sort du monde, reste que le FIS met en danger l'Algérie. Menacée comme tant de femmes qui revendiquent leur liberté, Kenza refait le voyage de sa mère à Montpellier où elle tentera, à travers la communauté algérienne, de savoir quels furent sa vie, ses derniers jours, et pourquoi elle n'essaya jamais de la revoir. La vérité découverte, belle et douloureuse, Kenza s'enfuit - une fois encore - au Canada ; sans doute parce que la France est trop près de l'Algérie, sans doute parce que Kenza veut perdre la mémoire.

This acclaimed historical novel is based on two actual incidents: In 1829 in Kentucky, a pregnant black woman helped lead an uprising of a group of... slaves headed to the market for sale. She was sentenced to death, but her hanging was delayed until after the birth of her baby. In North Carolina in 1830, a white woman living on an isolated farm was reported to have given sanctuary to runaway slaves. In Dessa Rose, the author asks the question: "What if these two women met?"From there the story unfolds: two strong women, one black, one white, form a forbidden and ambivalent alliance; a bold scheme is hatched to win freedom; trust is slowly extended and cautiously accepted as the two women unite and discover greater strength together than alone. United by fate but divided by prejudice, these two women are locked in a thrilling battle for freedom, sisterhood, friendship, and love.

In 1829 in Kentucky, a pregnant black woman helped lead an uprising of a group of slaves headed to the market for sale. She was sentenced to death, but... her hanging was delayed until after the birth of her baby. In North Carolina in 1830, a white woman living on an isolated farm was reported to have given sanctuary to runaway slaves. In this classic novel of courage and redemption, acclaimed author Sherley Anne Williams asks the question: "What if these two women had met?" These two strong women, one black, one white, form a forbidden and ambivalent alliance as a bold scheme is hatched to win freedom. Trust is slowly extended and cautiously accepted as the women unite and discover greater strength together than alone. Bound by fate but divided by prejudice, they explore and defy racial barriers in a moving story of courage, freedom, friendship, and love.

A masterful new novel from the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize, hailed for depicting the "landscape of the dispossessed" with "the concentration of... poetry and the frankness of prose" (Nobel Prize Committee)It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a camp in the Soviet Union. Leo would spend the next five years in a coke processing plant, shoveling coal, lugging bricks, mixing mortar, and battling the relentless calculus of hunger that governed the labor colony: one shovel load of coal is worth one gram of bread.In her new novel, Nobel laureate Herta Müller calls upon her unique combination of poetic intensity and dispassionate precision to conjure the distorted world of the labor camp in all its physical and moral absurdity. She has given Leo the language to express the inexpressible, as hunger sharpens his senses into an acuity that is both hallucinatory and profound. In scene after disorienting scene, the most ordinary objects accrue tender poignancy as they acquire new purpose—a gramophone box serves as a suitcase, a handkerchief becomes a talisman, an enormous piece of casing pipe functions as a lovers' trysting place. The heart is reduced to a pump, the breath mechanized to the rhythm of a swinging shovel, and coal, sand, and snow have a will of their own. Hunger becomes an insatiable angel who haunts the camp, but also a bare-knuckled sparring partner, delivering blows that keep Leo feeling the rawest connection to life.Müller has distilled Leo's struggle into words of breathtaking intensity that take us on a journey far beyond the Gulag and into the depths of one man's soul.

The name De Stijl, title of a magazine founded in the Netherlands in 1917, is now used to identify the abstract art and functional architecture of its... major contributors: Mondrian, Van Doesburg, Van der Leck, Oud, Wils and Rietveld. De Stijl achieved international acclaim by the end of the 1920s and its paintings, buildings and furniture made fundamental contributions to the modern movement. This book is the first to emphasize the local context of De Stijl and explore its relationship to the distinctive character of Dutch modernism. It examines how the debates concerning abstraction in painting and spatiality in architecture were intimately connected to contemporary developments in the fields of urban planning, advertising, interior design and exhibition design. The book describes the interaction between the world of mass culture and the fine arts.