Grand Sorcerer
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Join Date: Aug 2008
Location: TN, USA
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The Barnes & Noble Classics Series edition of Founding America: Documents from the Revolution to the Bill of Rights, by Jack N. Rakove, is free at B&N tonight. Their editions generally sell for $2-$4, but are occasionally offered as free downloads.
Biography
Jack N. Rakove is W. R. Coe Professor of History and American Studies and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, where he has taught since 1980. He is the author of four books on the American Revolutionary era, including The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress, James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic, and Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution, which received the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in History.
Book Description
Modern American politicians refer to “the founders” so often that they’re in danger of becoming clichés. But Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abigail and John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe, and the other authors included in this new collection were a wholly unique.
The Barnes & Noble Classics Series edition of This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sharon G. Carson, is free at B&N tonight. Their editions generally sell for $2-$4, but are occasionally offered as free downloads.
Biography
Inseparably associated with a point in history he claimed to despise, F. Scott Fitzgerald is both the quintessential Jazz-Age writer and perhaps the era s harshest critic. However, the complexity and sheer timelessness of classics such as The Great Gatsby has ensured that Fitzgerald s work will never be regarded as mere period pieces.
Book Description
This Side of Paradise, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
* New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars
* Biographies of the authors
* Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
* Footnotes and endnotes
* Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
* Comments by other famous authors
* Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations
* Bibliographies for further reading
* Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate
All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.
If the “Roaring Twenties” are remembered as the era of“flaming youth,” it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who lit the fire. His semi-autobiographical first novel, This Side of Paradise, became an instant best-seller and established an image of seemingly carefree, party-mad young men and women out to create a new morality for a new, post-war America. It traces the early life of Amory Blaine from the end of prep school through Princeton to the start of an uncertain career in New York City.
Alternately self-confident and self-effacing, torn between ambition and idleness, the self-absorbed, immature Amory yearns to run with Princeton’s rich, fast crowd and become one of the “gods” of the campus. Hopelessly romantic, he learns about love and sex from a series of beautiful young “flappers,” women who leave him both exhilarated and devastated. Fitzgerald describes it all in intensely lyrical prose that fills the novel with a heartbreaking sense of longing, as Amory comes to understand that the sweet-scented springtime of his life is fragile and fleeting, disappearing into memory even as he reaches for it.
Sharon G. Carson is Professor Emerita in the English Department at Kent State University, where she has taught for thirty-five years. She is the author of numerous articles and essays on modern and contemporary fiction.
The Barnes & Noble Classics Series edition of Bostonians, by Henry James and Siri Hustvedt, is free at B&N tonight. Their editions generally sell for $2-$4, but are occasionally offered as free downloads.
Biography
Henry James was a master at tracing the social boundaries of the Gilded Age -- between Old and New World, Europe and America, desire and convention, men and women. He brought an invaluably clear-eyed, and critical, sensibility to America's evolving cultural mores.
Book Description
The Bostonians, by Henry James, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:
* New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars
* Biographies of the authors
* Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
* Footnotes and endnotes
* Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
* Comments by other famous authors
* Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations
* Bibliographies for further reading
* Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate
All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.
Nearly a century before the birth of the contemporary feminist movement, Henry James dealt with its nineteenth-century forerunner in The Bostonians. Mixing acute social observation and psychological analysis with mordant humor, James hangs his story on a unique instance of the traditional romantic triangle. At its apex stands the vibrantly beautiful Verena Tarrant, an intense public speaker who arouses the passions of two very different people. Olive Chancellor, a Boston-bred suffragette, dreams of turning Verena into a fiery campaigner for women’s rights. Basil Ransom, a Mississippi-bred lawyer, dreams of turning her into his wife. As these two struggle for possession of Verena’s soul—and body—their confusions, crises, and conflicts begin almost preternaturally to prefigure today’s sexual politics. In fact, James’s complex portrait of Olive and her ideals, savagely satirical yet sympathetic and so controversial when it first appeared, continues to evoke both anger and admiration. But he treats Verena and Basil with equal complexity, climaxed by the novel’s quietly haunting final sentence.
Siri Hustvedt earned a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University in 1986 and is the author of a book of poetry, Reading to You; three novels: The Blindfold, The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, and What I Loved; and a book of essays, Yonder.
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