OBD Adult New Classics

A breakthrough into the twenty-first century, this novel and movie puts the man of today into the credible environment of tomorrow, when he has conquered the perils of interplanetary travel and is ready for what comes next. You are hurtling across the abyss of space on an expedition to unexplored planets. Your only companion is a fellow astronaut: The three hibernauts who lie in a deep-freeze sleep will not be awakened until their skills are needed....

Construction engineer Bartley Alexander is a troubled, middle-aged man torn between Winifred, his American wife - a cold woman with clearly defined standards - and Hilda Burgoyne - an alluring mistress in London who has helped him recapture his youth and sense of freedom. Alexander's relationship with Hilda gnaws away at his sense of propriety and honor and eventually proves disastrous. (He is with Hilda when a messenger, unable to find him, fails...

"Tolstoy produced many drafts of Anna Karenina. Crafting and recrafting each sentence with careful intent, he was anything but casual in his use of language. His project, translator Marian Schwartz observes, "was to bend language to his will, as an instrument of his aesthetic and moral convictions." In her magnificent new translation, Schwartz embraces Tolstoy's unusual style - she is the first English language translator ever to do so. Previous translations...

From the Publisher: Cat's Cradle is Vonnegut's satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet's ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist; a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer; and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny.

In the near-future, a violent teen leads a gang through nightly terror sprees before he is caught and agrees to experimental behavior-modification therapy.

"Boris Pasternak's Widely acclaimed novel comes gloriously to life in a magnificent new translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhnosky, the award-winning translators of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and to whom The New York Review of Books declared, "the English-speaking world is indebted." First published in Italy in 1957 amid international controversy--the novel was banned in the Soviet Union Until 1988, and Pasternak declined the Nobel...

Maurice Bendrix is a sardonic and cynical writer who reflects on his affair with Sarah, a married woman, during the bombing of London in 1940.

A new edition of Heart of Darkness, the 1899 masterpiece by Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad about a voyage up the Congo River into the Heart of Africa. The story is narrated by Charles Marlow, recalling his obsessive quest to locate the ivory trader Kurtz, who has become ensconced deep in the jungle managing a remote outpost. As he ventures further and further down the Congo, Marlow finds himself and his surroundings become increasingly untethered....

After John Blackthorne shipwrecks in Japan, he makes himself useful to a feudal lord in a power struggle with another and becomes a samurai.

"For generations, children around the world have come of age with Louisa May Alcott's March girls: hardworking eldest sister Meg, headstrong, impulsive Jo, timid Beth, and precocious Amy. With their father away at war, and their loving mother Marmee working to support the family, the four sisters have to rely on one another for support as they endure the hardships of wartime and poverty. We witness the sisters growing up and figuring out what role...