Literature

Lorna Doone, a Romance of Exmoor is an historical novel of high adventure set in the South West of England during the turbulent time of Monmouth's rebellion (1685). It is also a moving love story told through the life of the young farmer John Ridd, as he grows to manhood determined to right the wrongs in his land, and to win the heart and hand of the beautiful Lorna Doone.

In 1937, courageous and independent Martha Gellhorn travels to Madrid to report on the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War, and finds herself drawn to the stories of ordinary people caught in devastating conflict. She also finds herself unexpectedly - and uncontrollably - falling in love with Ernest Hemingway, a man already on his way to being a legend. In the shadow of the impending Second World War, and set against the tumultuous backdrops of Madrid, Finland, China, and especially Cuba, where Martha and Hemingway made their home, their relationship and professional careers ignite.

But when Hemingway publishes the biggest literary success of his career, they are no longer equals, and Martha must make a choice: surrender to the suffocating demands of a domestic lifestyle, or risk losing her husband by forging her way as her own woman and writer. It is a dilemma that will force her to break his heart, and her own. Based on a true storyMartha Gellhorn was one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th centuryFOR WHOM THE BELLS TOLLS was dedicated to Martha, and inspired by the time they were together in Spain.

It was Hemingway's most successful book to date, it sold half a million copies within months, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and triumphantly reestablished his literary reputation

Love in the Snow', written in 1896, is one of Papadiamandis's most poignant tales. Zissimos Lorenzatos writes in his introductory note to this monograph: 'The snow which covers the hero in 'Love in the Snow', set on the island of Skiathos, birthplace of Alexandros Papadiamandis (1851–1911), runs parallel, one could say, with the snow falling 'all over Ireland' in Joyce's 'The Dead', or indeed the snow which in distant Russia whitens Chekhov's coachman of the short story 'Heartache', who, inconsolable over the recent loss of his son, was unable, among so many people that day, to unburden his grief to anyone but his own horse while unharnessing it the same evening in the stable after the day's work. All three short stories — tragedies of man's loneliness — constitute, each in its own way, three characteristic landmarks in world literature.'

A poignant meditation on the nature of desire, and the enduring power of love, Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera is translated from the Spanish by Edith Grossman in Penguin Modern Classics. Florentino Ariza is a hopeless romantic who falls passionately for the beautiful Fermina Daza, but finds his love tragically rejected. Instead Fermina marriesdistinguished doctor Juvenal Urbino, while Florentino can only wait silently for her.

He can never forget his first and only true love. Then, fifty-one years, nine months and four days later, Fermina's husband dies unexpectedly. At last Florentino has another chance to declare his feelings and discover if a passion that has endured for half a century will remain unrequited, in a rich, fantastical and humane celebration of love in all its many forms.

Gabriel García Márquez (b. 1928) was born in Aracataca, Colombia. He is the author of several novels, including Leaf Storm (1955), One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981) and The General in His Labyrinth (1989).

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982. If you enjoyed Love in the Time of Cholera, you might like Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'The nearest thing to sensual pleasure prose can offer'Daily Telegraph'An amazing celebration of the many kinds of love between men and women...

among Márquez's best fiction'The Times'The greatest luxury ... is the eerie, entirely convincing suspension of the laws of reality ... the agelessness of the human story as told by one of this century's most evocative writers' Anne Tyler, author of The Accidental Tourist

"Loxandra" is the story of a Greek family living in Constantinople (Istanbul) from the mid-18th century up to the beginning of the First World War. It is not biographical as such, and many of the characters are fictional. Others, including the main character of Loxandra, are real. Constantinople was the author's home during the first years of her life and in her book she conveys the historical events, the customs, the spirit of those times when life for the Greeks of Constantinople was relatively untroubled. The real Loxandra was brought up in the Anatolian tradition of love of good food; culinary delights flowed from her hands and her kitchen as from the horn of plenty, and her generosity and enthusiasm for life and food was not confined to her family but spilled over to whomsoever she had contact with. The Greek edition of Loxandra , first published in 1963, has been perhaps the most acclaimed and best-selling popular publication in Greece of the 20th century and remains continuously in print.

Important poems by the late New York poet published in The New American Poetry, Evergreen Review, Floating Bear and stranger places. Often this poet, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened ware- or firehouse to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, coexistence, and depth, while never forgetting to eat lunch, his favorite meal. "O'Hara speaks directly across the decades to our hopes and fears and especially our delights; his lines are as intimate as a telephone call.

Few books of his era show less age." --Dwight Garner, New York Times "As collections go, none brings...quality to the fore more than the thirty-seven Lunch Poems, published in 1964 by City Lights." --Nicole Rudick, The Paris Review "What O'Hara is getting at is a sense of the evanescence, and the power, of great art, that inextricable contradiction -- that what makes it moving and transcendent is precisely our knowledge that it will pass away. This is the ethos at the center of "Lunch Poems": not the informal or the conversational for their own sake but rather in the service of something more intentional, more connective, more engaged." --David L. Ulin, Los Angeles TImes "The collection broadcasts snark, exuberance, lonely earnestness, and minute-by-minute autobiography to a wide, vague audience--much like today's Twitter and Facebook feeds." --Micah Mattix, The Atlantic Among the most significant post-war American poets, Frank O'Hara grew up in Grafton, MA, graduating from Harvard in 1950.

After earning an MA at Michigan in 1951, O'Hara moved to New York, where he began working for the Museum of Modern Art and writing for Art News. By 1960, he was named Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture Exhibitions at MOMA. Along with John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Barbara Guest, he is considered an original member of the New York School.

Though he died in a tragic accident in 1966, recent references to O'Hara on TV shows like Mad Men or Thurston Moore's new single evidence our culture's continuing fascination with this innovative poet.

n 1938, two rival expeditions set off for a lost Mayan temple in the jungles of Honduras, one intending to shoot a screwball comedy on location there, the other intending to disassemble it and ship it back to New York. A seemingly endless stalemate ensues, and twenty years later, when a rogue CIA agent learns that both expeditions are still out in the wilderness, he embarks on a mission to exploit the temple as a geopolitical pawn. But the mission hurtles towards disaster when he discovers that the temple is the locus of grander conspiracies than anyone could have guessed

Shaw began writing MAN AND SUPERMAN in 1901 and determined to write a play that would encapsulate the new century's intellectual inheritance. Shaw drew not only on Byron's verse satire, but also on Shakespeare, the Victorian comedy fashionable in his early life, and from authors from Conan Doyle to Kipling. In this powerful drama of ideas, Shaw explores the role of the artist, the function of women in society, and his theory of Creative Evolution. As Stanley Weintraub says in his new introduction, this is "the first great twentieth-century English play" and remains a classic expose of the eternal struggle between the sexes."

Shanghai, 1927, and revolution is in the air. As the city becomes caught up in violence and bloodshed, four people's lives are altered inexorably: idealist and intellectual Kyo Gisors, one of the leaders of the Communist insurrection, who is also trying to deal with his own marital strife; Ch'en Ta Erh, an assassin and terrorist brutalized by killing; Baron de Clappique, a French gambler, opium dealer and gun runner; and Russian revolutionary Katov, who calmly watches events unfold, until he has to make the ultimate sacrifice. Each of these men must try to resolve their personal conflicts amid political turmoil, conspiracy and betrayal. Man's Fate, first published in 1933 and now reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic, is a gripping story of conflict, free will and our power to shape our destiny.