All the King`s Men 國王人馬
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZEThe fully restored original text of the classic, ever-relevant story of a backcountry lawyer whose idealism is overcome by his lust for power in a story of moral complexity--American literature's definitive political novel. All the King's Men traces the rise and fall of demagogue Willie Stark, a fictional Southern politician who resembles the real-life Huey Long of Louisiana. Stark begins his career as an idealistic man of the people, but he soon becomes corrupted by success and the lust for power, a gripping tale of political corruption.Now Warren's masterpiece has been fully restored and reintroduced by literary scholar Noel Polk, textual editor of the works of William Faulkner. Polk presents the novel as it was originally written, revealing even greater energy, excitement, and complexity.
Animal Farm
75th Anniversary Edition--Includes a New Introduction by T矇a Obreht George Orwell's timeless and timely allegorical novel--a scathing satire of a downtrodden society's blind march towards totalitarianism. "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned--a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible. When Animal Farm was first published, Stalinist Russia was seen as its target. Today it is devastatingly clear that wherever and whenever freedom is attacked, under whatever banner, the cutting clarity and savage comedy of George Orwell's masterpiece have a meaning and message still ferociously fresh.
Democracy
From the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean--a gorgeously written, bitterly funny look at the relationship between politics and personal life. Moving deftly between romance, farce, and tragedy, from 1970s America to Vietnam to Jakarta, Democracy is a tour de force from a writer who can dissect an entire society with a single phrase.Inez Victor knows that the major casualty of the political life is memory. But the people around Inez have made careers out of losing track. Her senator husband wants to forget the failure of his last bid for the presidency. Her husband's handler would like the press to forget that Inez's father is a murderer. And, in 1975, America is doing its best to lose track of its one-time client, the lethally hemorrhaging republic of South Vietnam. As conceived by Joan Didion, these personages and events constitute the terminal fallout of democracy, a fallout that also includes fact-finding junkets, senatorial groupies, the international arms market, and the Orwellian newspeak of the political class.
The Voice at the Back Door
In the mid-1950s, the town of Lacey in the Mississippi hill country is a place where the lives of blacks and whites, though seemingly separate, are in fact historically and inevitably intertwined. When Lacey's fair-haired boy, Duncan Harper, is appointed interim sheriff, he makes public his private convictions about the equality of blacks before the law, and the combined threat and promise he represents to the understood order of things in Lacey affects almost every member of the community. In the end, Harper succeeds in pointing the way for individuals, both black and white, to find a more harmonious coexistence, but at a sacrifice all must come to regret.In The Voice at the Back Door, Mississippi native Elizabeth Spencer gives form to the many voices that shaped her view of race relations while growing up, and at the same time discovers her own voice -- one of hope. Employing her extraordinary literary powers -- finely honed narrative techniques, insight into a rich, diverse cast of characters, and an unerring ear for dialect -- Spencer makes palpable the psychological milieu of a small southern town hobbled by tradition but lurching toward the dawn of the civil rights movement. First published in 1956, The Voice at the Back Door is Spencer's most highly praised novel yet, and her last to treat small-town life in Mississippi.
Refuge
In the surprising world that Sami Michael reveals, Shula, an Ashkenazic Jew, is the center of a web of brilliantly drawn characters: Israeli Arabs, Palestinian refugees, "black Jews," and "white Jews." Swirling in and out of Shula's story are poignantly drawn minor players - an Arab/Israeli couple, their ever-more-militant son, a seductive Arab poet, and political outsiders in a fragile society at war. Sami Michael was born in Baghdad in 1926, fled to Iran during WWII, and eventually made his way to Israel. His first novel, Equal and More Equal was published to critical acclaim. Refuge was his second major work, written originally in Hebrew but, he adds, "with the emotional baggage of the Third World."
Riotous Assembly
Tom Sharpe's savagely funny first novel is set in South Africa, where the author was imprisoned and later deported. When Miss Hazelstone of Jacaranda Park kills her Zulu cook in a sensational crime passionnel, the hasty, rude members of the South African police force are soon upon the scene: Kommandant van Heerden, whose secret longing for the heart of an English gentleman leads to the most memorable transplant operation yet recorded; Luitenant Verkramp of the Security Branch, ever active in his search for Communist cells; Konstabel Els, with his propensity for shooting first and not thinking later--and also for forcing himself upon African women in a manner legally reserved for male members of their own race. In the course of the bizarre events that follow, we encounter some very esoteric perversions when the Kommandant is held captive in Miss Hazelstone's remarkable rubber room; and some even more amazing perversions of justice when Miss Hazelstone's brother, the Bishop of Barotseland, is sentenced to be hanged from the ancient gallows of the local prison. Not a "political" novel in any previously imagined sense, Riotous Assembly provides a completely fresh approach to the horror of South Africa--an approach at once outrageous and startling in its deadpan savagery. Along with Indecent Exposure, this does for South Africa what Swift's A Modest Proposal did for Ireland.
