Ocean State Libraries

Anna Karenina is the tragic story of a married aristocrat/socialite and her affair with the affluent Count Vronsky. The story starts when she arrives in the midst of a family broken up by her brother's unbridled womanizing -- something that prefigures her own later situation, though she would experience less tolerance by others. A bachelor, Vronsky is eager to marry her if she will agree to leave her husband Karenin, a senior government official,...

A captivating 17th-century drama of peasants defending their honor against oppression by a feudal lord. This edition features an informative introduction with background on Spanish theater of the era as well as on the dramatist's career and on the play itself. Features an excellent English-prose version on the pages facing the original Spanish.

Introduces renderings of, and commentary on, Kabbalistic verse that emerged directly from Jewish mysticism and that reveals the foundations of both language and existence itself. A collection that presents a body of poetry from the world of Jewish mysticism. Taking up Gershom Scholem's call to plumb the "tremendous poetic potential concealed" in the Kabbalistic tradition, it provides English renderings of works composed on three continents over a...

"If death is a postman then I am one of those who receive his letters every day. I am the one who takes them out carefully from their bloodied and torn envelopes. I am the one who washes them, who removes the stamps of death and dries and perfumes them, mumbling what I don't really believe in. Then I wrap them carefully in white so they may reach their last reader: the grave," writes Jawad, the narrator and protagonist of The Corpse Washer. Born to...

A trio of intertwined novellas from the 2014 Nobel laureate for literature
In this essential trilogy of novellas by the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, French author Patrick Modiano reaches back in time, opening the corridors of memory and exploring the mysteries to be encountered there. Each novella in the volume—Afterimage, Suspended Sentences, and Flowers of Ruin—represents a sterling

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"This uneasy, compelling novel begins with a nighttime accident on the streets of Paris. The unnamed narrator, a teenage boy, is hit by a car whose driver he vaguely recalls having met before. The mysterious ensuing events, involving a police van, a dose of ether, awakening in a strange hospital, and the disappearance of the woman driver, culminate in a packet being pressed into the boy's hand. It is an envelope stuffed full of bank notes. The confusion...

This grand novel encompasses nearly all of Yugoslavia's tumultuous twentieth century, from the decline of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires through two world wars, the rise and fall of communism, the breakup of the nation, and the terror of the shelling of Dubrovnik. Tackling universal themes on a human scale, master storyteller Miljenko Jergovic traces one Yugoslavian family's tale as history irresistibly casts the fates of five generations....

"One day in the corridors of the metro, nineteen-year-old Thérèse glimpses a woman in a yellow coat. Could this be the mother who long ago abandoned her? Is she still alive? Desperate for answers to questions that have tormented her since childhood, Thérèse pursues the mysterious figure on a quest through the streets of Paris. In classic Modiano style, this book explores the elusive nature of memory, the unyielding power of the past, and the deep...

"As a boarding school student in the early 1960s, Patrick Modiano lived among the troubled teenage sons of wealthy but self-involved parents. In this mesmerizing novel, Modiano weaves together a series of exquisitely crafted stories about such jettisoned boys at the exclusive Valvert School on the outskirts of Paris: abandoned children of privilege, left to create new family ties among themselves. Misfits and heroes, sports champions and good-hearted...