When, at the urging of her dying mother, eighteen-year-old farm worker Mary Evans sails for England in 1886 she has no idea that she has inherited her grandmother’s heraldic title of Countess. Unused to the way of the British aristocracy, and much to the consternation of her peers, she adjusts in her own way to deal with the authority, privileges and wealth that have been bestowed upon her.
The complete New York Times–bestselling trilogy of historical fiction set in China, from an award-winning novelist and Pulitzer Prize finalist in journalism. Spanning over three centuries of Chinese history, New York Times–bestselling and Edgar Award–winning author Robert Elegant takes readers from the opulent courts and complex intrigue of the emperors to the bloody battlefields, and vividly recreates a richly detailed world where the quest for power and pleasure drives men and women to extremes of both loyalty and betrayal. In this special single-volume edition, the novels are presented in chronological historical order. Manchu: In this New York Times bestseller, soldier of fortune Francis Arrowsmith joins a Portuguese expedition to aid the decadent and corrupt Ming dynasty in its fight against the Manchu invaders. He embarks on an epic adventure that will merge his destiny with the fate of China itself. “Does for seventeenth-century China what James Clavell’s Shogun did for sixteenth-century Japan.” —The Christian Science Monitor Mandarin: In nineteenth-century China, imperial rule is crumbling as the Opium Wars and Taiping Rebellion rage. On the streets of Shanghai, a Jewish silk merchant tries to save his Chinese partner from a false accusation and corrupt penal system, while in the imperial palace the “Virtuous Concubine” Yehenala contrives to bear the opium-eating, syphilitic emperor’s only son, thus laying the foundation for her elevation to the pinnacle of power in China as the formidable empress dowager. “Exciting, historically accurate, a good read.” —The New York Times Dynasty: A New York Times bestseller, this epic of love and adultery, money and power, set amid the revolutionary turbulence of twentieth-century China, from the fall of the last emperor to the rise of Mao Tse-tung, follows the Sekloong dynasty of Hong Kong, a trading empire founded by Sir Jonathan, the illegitimate offspring of an Irish adventurer and his Chinese mistress, in all its triumphs, tragedies, betrayals, and bloodshed. “An action-packed novel . . . conjured up with perception and vigor.” —The New York Times Book Review
French novels such as "Madame Bovary" and "The Stranger" are staples of high school and college literature courses. This work provides coverage of the French novel since its origins in the 16th century, with an emphasis on novels most commonly studied in high school and college courses in world literature and in French culture and civilization.
**Washington Post Best Books of 2013** The celebrated TRANSYLVANIAN TRILOGY by Count Miklós Bánffy is a stunning historical epic set in the lost world of the Hungarian aristocracy just before World War I. Written in the 1930s and first discovered by the English-speaking world after the fall of communism in Hungary, Bánffy’s novels were translated in the late 1990s to critical acclaim and appear here for the first time in hardcover. They Were Found Wanting and They Were Divided, the second and third novels in the trilogy, continue the story of the two aristocratic cousins introduced in They Were Counted as they navigate a dissolute society teetering on the brink of catastrophe. Count Balint Abády, a liberal politician who defends his homeland’s downtrodden Romanian peasants, loses his beautiful lover, Adrienne, who is married to a sinister and dangerously insane man, while his cousin László loses himself in reckless and self-destructive addictions. Meanwhile, no one seems to notice the gathering clouds that are threatening the Austro-Hungarian Empire and that will soon lead to the brutal dismemberment of their country. Set amid magnificent scenery of wild forests, snowcapped mountains, and ancient castles, THE TRANSYLVANIAN TRILOGY combines a Proustian nostalgia for a lost world, insight into a collapsing empire reminiscent of the work of Joseph Roth, and the drama and epic sweep of Tolstoy.
The year is 1905 and King Edward VII has invited himself and his mistress to a shooting weekend with the Dilbernes. Now Isobel, the Countess, must turn a run-down mansion into a palace fit for a king. Just as well the family fortunes have been restored, but money can't solve everything... not even a kidnapping. The servants refuse to condone the King's morals; Isobel's daughter, Lady Rosina – now widowed and wealthy – insists on publishing a scandalous book, and the mis-spent pasts of Viscount Arthur and his Irish-American wife Minnie rear up to blacken the family name. When fate deals a hand in the middle of the shooting party, Isobel must consider not only her leading position in Society, but her entire future. Fay Weldon brings an aristocratic Edwardian household to fabulous, vibrant life in this gorgeously witty tale of manners and morals, commoners and countesses, from one of Britain's best loved authors.
The future of fiction is neither global nor national. Instead, Matthew Hart argues, it is trending extraterritorial. Extraterritorial spaces fall outside of national borders but enhance state power. They cut across geography and history but do not point the way to a borderless new world. They range from the United Nations headquarters and international waters to CIA black sites and the departure zones at international airports. The political geography of the present, Hart shows, has come to resemble a patchwork of such spaces. Hart reveals extraterritoriality’s centrality to twenty-first-century art and fiction. He shows how extraterritorial fictions expose the way states construct “global” space in their own interests. Extraterritorial novels teach us not to mistake cracks or gradations in political geography for a crisis of the state. Hart demonstrates how the unstable character of many twenty-first-century aesthetic forms can be traced to the increasingly extraterritorial nature of contemporary political geography. Discussing writers such as Margaret Atwood, J. G. Ballard, Amitav Ghosh, Chang-rae Lee, Hilary Mantel, and China Miéville, as well as artists like Hito Steyerl and Mark Wallinger, Hart combines lively critical readings of contemporary novels with historical and theoretical discussions about sovereignty, globalization, cosmopolitanism, and postcolonialism. Extraterritorial presents a new theory of literature that explains what happens when dreams of an open, connected world confront the reality of mobile, elastic, and tenacious borders.
