Książki obcojęzyczne

Powieść Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus z podręcznym słownikiem angielsko-polskim (Frankentein), uznana jako prekursor gatunku Science Fiction, została opublikowana w 1818 roku w Anglii przez niespełna 21 letnią wówczas Mary Shelley. Akcja powieści, która doczekała się wielu adaptacji filmowych, rozgrywa się pod koniec XVIII w. w Europie oraz na Oceanie Arktycznym. Statek angielskiego żeglarza Roberta Waltona zostaje uwięziony pośród arktycznych lodów. Pewnego dnia zau...

Drogi czytelniku, książka, którą właśnie trzymasz w dłoniach, zawiera pełną wersję zbioru opowiadań „Wspomnienia Sherlocka Holmesa”. Dzięki niej zapoznasz się z jedenastoma ciekawymi i zaskakującymi historiami widzianymi oczami Johna Watsona, przyjaciela i wiernego druha głównego bohatera. Książka polecana jest zarówno dla fanów słynnego detektywa, jak i dla entuzjastów języka angielskiego. Dzięki obszernemu słownikowi towarzyszącemu opowiadaniom, czytanie stanie się przyjemn...

The Time Machine z podręcznym słownikiem angielsko-polskim (Wehikuł czasu) jest powieścią science fiction, napisaną przez H. G. Wells’a, w 1895 roku. Książka przedstawia wizję odległej o tysiące lat przyszłości. Cywilizacja zmierza ku zagładzie, a rasa ludzka uległa degeneracji. Książka opowiada historię młodego naukowca, którego marzeniem jest podróżowanie w czasie. Niestety gdy jego marzenie się spełnia nie trafia wcale do raju, tylko do świata niszczejącego i zmierzająceg...

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz z podręcznym słownikiem angielsko-polskim (Czarnoksiężnik z Krainy Oz) to powieść zaliczana do klasyki światowej literatury dla dzieci, napisana przez L. Franka Bauma a wydana w Chicago w roku 1900. Powieść, w amerykańskiej literaturze dziecięcej, jako pierwsza została zaliczona do kategorii fantasy. Główną bohaterką książki jest 12-letnia Dorotka. Dziewczynka jest sierotą mieszkającą na farmie w Kansas wraz z ciotką, wujem i swoim najbliższym przy...

Sigmund Freud’s controversial ideas have penetrated Western culture more deeply than those of any other psychologist. The ‘Freudian slip’, the ‘Oedipus complex’, ‘childhood sexuality’, ‘libido’, ‘narcissism’ ‘penis envy’, the ‘castration complex’, the ‘id’, the ‘ego’ and the ‘superego’, ‘denial’, ‘repression’, ‘identification’, ‘projection’, ‘acting out’, the ‘pleasure principle’, the ‘reality principle’, ‘defence-mechanism’ – are all taken for granted in our everyday vocabul...

Finnegans Wake is the book of Here Comes Everybody and Anna Livia Plurabelle and their family - their book, but in a curious way the book of us all as well as all our books. Joyce's last great work, it is not comprised of many borrowed styles, like Ulysses, but, rather, formulated as one dense, tongue-twisting soundscape. This 'language' is based on English vocabulary and syntax but, at the same time, self-consciously designed to function as a pun machine with an ...

Selected and Introduced by M J Elliott. ‘They were removing the stones quietly, one by one, from the centuried wall. And then, as the breach became large enough, they came out into the laboratory in single file; led by a stalking thing with a beautiful head made of wax.’ From the dark, mind-expanding imagination of H P Lovecraft, Wordsworth presents a third volume of tales penned by the greatest horror writer of the 20th Century. Here are some of Lovecraft’s weirdest fl...

With an Introduction by Anthony Briggs. Translated by Isabel F. Hapgood. Russia in the 1840s. There is a stranger in town, and he is behaving oddly. The unctuous Pavel Chichikov goes around the local estates buying up 'dead souls'. These are the papers relating to serfs who have died since the last census, but who remain on the record and still attract a tax demand. Chichikov is willing to relieve their owners of the tax burden by buying the titles for a song. What...

Translated by Constance Garnett with an introduction by Anthony Briggs. Dostoevsky's fascination for mental breakdown and violence (20 murders in his four main novels) was based on his own life, and these two unmistakably autobiographical works bear this out. The House of the Dead is fiction, but based on his four years in a Siberian prison. An educated upper-class man is condemned to live among criminals and brutal guards, with arbitrary punishments, lousy food, di...

Translated by Constance Garnett with an Introduction by A.D.P. Briggs. In 1869 a young Russian was strangled, shot through the head and thrown into a pond. His crime? A wish to leave a small group of violent revolutionaries, from which he had become alienated. Dostoevsky takes this real-life catastrophe as the subject and culmination of Devils, a title that refers the young radicals themselves and also to the materialistic ideas that possessed the minds of many thinking pe...

Translated by Constance Garnett, with an Introduction by A. D. P. Briggs. As Fyodor Karamazov awaits an amorous encounter, he is violently done to death. The three sons of the old debauchee are forced to confront their own guilt or complicity. Who will own to parricide? The reckless and passionate Dmitri? The corrosive intellectual Ivan? Surely not the chaste novice monk Alyosha? The search reveals the divisions which rack the brothers, yet paradoxically unite them. Around...

Dracula: Introduction and Notes by Dr David Rogers, Kingston University. 'There he lay looking as if youth had been half-renewed, for the white hair and moustache were changed to dark iron-grey, the cheeks were fuller, and the white skin seemed ruby-red underneath; the mouth was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran over the chin and neck. Even the deep, burning eyes seemed set amongst the swol...

Translated by Constance Garnett with an Introduction and Notes by Dr Keith Carabine, University of Kent at Canterbury. Crime and Punishment is one of the greatest and most readable novels ever written. From the beginning we are locked into the frenzied consciousness of Raskolnikov who, against his better instincts, is inexorably drawn to commit a brutal double murder. From that moment on, we share his conflicting feelings of self-loathing and pride, of contempt for and ...

Selected, Edited and Introduced by David Stuart Davies. The Best of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of twenty of the very best tales from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fifty-six short stories featuring the arch sleuth. Basing his selection around the author's own twelve personal favourites, David Stuart Davies has added a further eight sparkling stories to Conan Doyle's ‘Baker Street Dozen’, creating a unique volume which distils the pure essence of the world's ...

Translated by Yuan Shibing and J.J.L.Duyvendak. With introductions by Robert Wilkinson. The two political classics in this book are the product of a time of intense turmoil in Chinese history. Dating from the Period of the Warring States (403-221BC), they anticipate Machiavelli's The Prince by nearly 2000 years. The Art of War is the best known of a considerable body of Chinese works on the subject. It analyses the nature of war, and reveals how victory may be ensur...

Translated by Constance Garnett, with an Introduction and Notes by Agnes Cardinal, Honorary Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from an asylum in Switzerland. As he becomes embroiled in the frantic amatory and financial intrigues which centre around a cast of brilliantly realised characters and which ultimately lead to tragedy, he emerges as a unique combination of the Christian ideal of perfection and Dosto...

Introduction and Notes by Gene M. Moore, Universiteit van Amsterdam. Generally regarded as the pre-eminent work of Conrad's shorter fiction, Heart of Darkness is a chilling tale of horror which, as the author intended, is capable of many interpretations. Set in the Congo during the period of rapid colonial expansion in the 19th century, the story deals with the highly disturbing effects of economic, social and political exploitation of European and African societies an...