Henry Carter Hull

In this laugh-out-loud travelogue, an average American man journeys to a country unlike any other: 1980s Japan Early one morning, Mike Halsey leaves his sleeping girlfriend and his house deep in the woods to go out and buy the morning paper. His favorite deli is closed, so he keeps driving and winds up on an unfamiliar lakeside road. Then it hits him: the old wanderlust. The last time it struck, he ended up on the coast of Finland. This...

Satan comes to Soviet Moscow in this critically acclaimed translation of one of the most important and best-loved modern classics in world literature. The Master and Margarita has been captivating readers around the world ever since its first publication in 1967. Written during Stalin's time in power but suppressed in the Soviet Union for decades, Bulgakov's masterpiece is an ironic parable on power and its corruption, on good and evil, and on...

"The originality, concentrated power and "fierce indignation" of his satirical writing have earned Jonathan Swift (1667 -- 1745) a reputation as the greatest prose satirist in English language. Gulliver's Travels is, of course, his world-renowned masterpiece in the genre; however, Swift wrote other, shorter works that also offer excellent evidence of his inspired lampoonery. Perhaps the most famous of these is "A Modest Proposal," in which he straight-facedly...

The time: an entire night in Montreal. The place: a narrow alley where two stubborn drivers come to a preposterous impasse. The cast: a marvelous blend of misfitsPelzic, the immigrant cabdriver whose ambition is to pull a retzic (bonanza) by throwing himself against moving vehicles and thereby milking some insurance company; Levin, the real estate fat cat whose tenants are pinpricking him mad with inane complaints; a tipsy millionaire; and a girl...

A Hollywood novel of a very different kind by the author of The Player : A timely and "darkly satirical" dystopian thriller ( The San Francisco Chronicle ). Michael Tolkin is known as a master chronicler of show business culture. Now, in his new novel, the H LYW OD sign presides over a city devastated by a weaponized microbe that's been accidentally spread around the globe, deleting human identity. In post-NK3 Los Angeles, a sixty-foot fence surrounds...

"A dark, fantastical satire of Communist utopianism by the author of The Master and Margarita. Lauded Russian author and playwright Mikhail Bulgakov's A Dog's Heart (sometimes translated as The Heart of a Dog ) is a zany, violent, and whimsical satire of the failures inherent in the dream of a Communist utopia, following dog-turned-human Sharik as he tries and fails utterly to live a life of goodness and virtue-but goodness and virtue as defined by...

The immigrant tenants of a building in Rome offer skewed accounts of a murder in this prize-winning satire by the Algerian-born Italian author ( Publishers Weekly ). Piazza Vittorio is home to a polyglot community of immigrants who have come to Rome from all over the world. But when a tenant is murdered in the building's elevator, the delicate balance is thrown into disarray. As each of the victim's neighbors is questioned by the police, readers are...

When a bumbling holy man mistakenly baptizes a colony of penguins, God endows the animals with souls and their formerly peaceful community declines into a maelstrom of violence and sin. This witty allegory lampoons French history from ancient to modern times, taking satirical swipes at socialists, royalists, industrialists, militarists, and even the Dreyfus affair, and concluding with a remarkably prescient view of the future. Indeed, more than a...

"From the author of the international bestseller The 100-Year-Old-Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared , a brilliant satirical novel set in modern Sweden--a story of idealism and fanaticism, gangsters and entrepreneurs, sensationalism and spirituality, that explores the values that matter in contemporary life. In a former brothel turned low-rent hotel, the lives of three unusual strangers--a former female priest, recently fired from her...

Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray, 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 todays top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors • Chronologies...