Lit 2012: Honors-Hendry: Books and eBooks

The premier monster story of English literature--a tale of science pursued to horrifying extremes An origin story nearly as famous as the book itself: One dreary summer on the shores of Lake Geneva, amid discussions of galvanism and the occult and fireside readings from a collection of German ghost stories, Lord Byron proposed a game. Each of his guests--eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin and her future husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, among them--would try their hand at writing a tale of the supernatural. Unable at first to think of a plot, Mary was visited one sleepless night by the terrible vision of a corpse, a "hideous phantasm of a man," lurching to life with the application of some unknown, powerful force. The man responsible, a "pale student of unhallowed arts," fled in horror from his creation, leaving it to return to the dead matter from which it had been born. But the monster did not die. It followed the man to his bedside, where it stood watching him with "yellow, watery, but speculative eyes"--eyes of one who thought, and felt.  The novel that Mary Shelley would go on to publish, the legend of Victor Frankenstein and his unholy creation, and their obsessive, murderous pursuit of each other from Switzerland to the North Pole, has been the stuff of nightmares for nearly two centuries. A masterpiece of Romantic literature, it is also one of the most enduring horror stories ever written. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices. 

Set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris, this groundbreaking novel about love and the fear of love is "a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction" (The Atlantic). In the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence, a young man finds himself caught between desire and conventional morality.  David is a young American expatriate who has just proposed marriage to his girlfriend, Hella. While she is away on a trip, David meets a bartender named Giovanni to whom he is drawn in spite of himself. Soon the two are spending the night in Giovanni's curtainless room, which he keeps dark to protect their privacy. But Hella's return to Paris brings the affair to a crisis, one that rapidly spirals into tragedy. David struggles for self-knowledge during one long, dark night--"the night which is leading me to the most terrible morning of my life."  With a sharp, probing imagination, James Baldwin's now-classic narrative delves into the mystery of loving and creates a deeply moving story of death and passion that reveals the unspoken complexities of the human heart.

From the world's greatest satirist, the classic adventures of the intrepid Gulliver Broken into four parts, Gulliver's Travels marks the progress of a gallant explorer as he sails into the unknown, visiting surreal worlds like Brobdingnag, a realm filled with gigantic men; Lilliput, a diminutive land filled with pint-size people; Laputa, a floating island in the sky; and even the fabled land known as Japan. Along the way, Gulliver solves problems, starts and ends wars, and gets into--and back out of--one hot pot after another.   Just beneath the surface of Jonathan Swift's dashing novel is a devastating satire of the world in the early eighteenth century, and few institutions escape critique. Swift calls into question the worthiness of human society, where the greedy and the wicked thrive. In the end, however, Gulliver's Travels remains, at its heart, a dramatic adventure filled with the curiosities and feats of daring that have thrilled readers for centuries. Seldom have audiences enjoyed such a balanced mixture of humor, satire, thrills, and philosophy.   This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

Begun as a "joke," Orlando is Virginia Woolf's fantastical biography of a poet who first appears as a sixteen-year-old boy at the court of Elizabeth I, and is left at the novel's end a married woman in the year 1928. Part love letter to Vita Sackville-West, part exploration of the art of biography, Orlando is one of Woolf's most popular and entertaining works. This new annotated edition will deepen readers' understanding of Woolf's brilliant creation. Annotated and with an introduction by Maria DiBattista

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * "Prepare to be entranced by this addictively readable oral history of the great war between humans and zombies."--Entertainment Weekly   We survived the zombie apocalypse, but how many of us are still haunted by that terrible time? We have (temporarily?) defeated the living dead, but at what cost? Told in the haunting and riveting voices of the men and women who witnessed the horror firsthand, World War Z is the only record of the pandemic.   The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years. THE INSPIRATION FOR THE MAJOR MOTION PICTURE "Will spook you for real."--The New York Times Book Review   "Possesses more creativity and zip than entire crates of other new fiction titles. Think Mad Max meets The Hot Zone. . . . It's Apocalypse Now, pandemic-style. Creepy but fascinating."--USA Today   "Will grab you as tightly as a dead man's fist. A."--Entertainment Weekly, EW Pick    "Probably the most topical and literate scare since Orson Welles's War of the Worlds radio broadcast . . . This is action-packed social-political satire with a global view."--Dallas Morning News