"The first great adventure story in the Western canon, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty, and power; about marriage and family; about travelers, hospitality, and the yearning for home. In this fresh, authoritative version--the first English translation of The Odyssey by a woman--this stirring tale of shipwrecks, monsters, and magic comes alive in an entirely new way. Written in iambic pentameter verse...

"Although the Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb is not a household name in the United States, he is well known throughout the Islamic World as a seminal thinker in the Islamist movement, influential as far away as Pakistan and Malaysia. A member of the Islamic Brotherhood, he was jailed by Gamal Abdul Nasser's government as early as 1954. He became one of the most uncompromising voices of the movement we now call Islamism and is best known perhaps for his...

Narrates the experiences and reactions of a respectable bank functionary after his abrupt arrest on an undisclosed charge. Kafka's final work was left unfinished at the time of his 1924 death, and the original 1925 and subsequent editions were edited according to the standards of the day. This edition endeavors to restore the text as closely as possible to the original manuscript. In addition to the text, this volume includes a bibliography and a...

"This new translation brings Virgil's masterpiece newly to life for English-language readers. It's the first in centuries crafted by a translator who is first and foremost a poet, and it is a glorious thing. David Ferry has long been known as perhaps our greatest contemporary translator of Latin poetry, his translations of Virgil's Eclogues and Georgics having established themselves as much-admired standards. He brings to the Aeneid the same genius,...

It was the indifferent shrug and callous inertia that this 'optimism' concealed which so angered Voltaire, who found the 'all for the best' approach a patently inadequate response to suffering, to natural disasters - such as the recent earthquakes in Lima and Lisbon - not to mention the questions of illness and man-made war. Moreover, as the rebel whose satiric genius had earned him not only international acclaim, but two stays in the Bastille, flogging...

The murder of a farming couple in Sweden unleashes a wave of xenophobia when it is learned that the woman's dying words were "foreigner." The case is given to Inspector Kurt Wallender, a lover of opera and booze. Part crime story, part look at the attitude of Swedes to immigrants. One frozen January Morning at 5 am, Inspector Wallander responds to what he expects is a routine call out. When he reaches the isolated farmhouse he discovers a bloodbath....