Joseph Conrad

By the time Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) produced this novel in 1907, terrorism had torn its way through London: Victoria station had been partially destroyed, the House of Commons damaged, and Scotland Yard attacked with dynamite. Conrad's story is set in 1886, at the height of these troubles, and was inspired by the 1894 attempt to bomb Greenwich Observatory. Written just after Nostromo (1904), it is a marked departure from Conrad's usual seafaring form and plunges the reader into the claustrophobic, grimy world of late nineteenth-century London. Mr Adolf Verloc - anarchist, spy, and purveyor of pornographic material - heads a cast of shadowy characters all affected directly or indirectly by the anarchist organisation to which he belongs. Although critics acknowledged its power, the novel and its dark subject matter were uneasily received in Conrad's lifetime. This reissue of the first edition confirms the book's place as a classic of twentieth-century fiction.

Lord Jim is a novel by Joseph Conrad first published in October 1899. An early and primary event is the abandonment of a ship in distress by its crew including the young British seaman Jim. He is publicly censured for this action and the novel follows his later attempts at coming to terms with his past. Joseph Conrad (born J zef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski(3 December 1857 - 3 August 1924) was a Polish novelist who wrote in English, after settling in England. Conrad is regarded as one of the great novelists in English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties . He wrote stories and novels, often with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an indifferent universe. He was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature.

Since its first appearance in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1899 and 1900, Lord Jim (1900) has been acclaimed as a modernist masterwork. Its narrative innovations and psychological complexity make it one of the most influential fictions written in the twentieth century and it has challenged and stimulated generations of readers as well as writers on and of fiction. This edition, established through modern textual scholarship, presents Conrad's novel and its preface in a form more authoritative than any so far printed. The Introduction situates the novel in Conrad's career and traces its sources and contemporary reception. The explanatory notes identify literary and historical references and real-life places and indicate Conrad's main influences. Glossaries, maps and illustrations are provided for further context, as well as a new transcription of 'Tuan Jim: A Sketch', a partial draft of the novel, and appearing in print for the first time, Conrad's contract for the book.

'no consideration, no delicacy, no tenderness, no scruples should stand in the way of a woman ... from taking the shortest cut towards securing for herself the easiest possible existence' Chance(1914) was the first of Conrad's novels to bring him popular success and it holds a unique place among his works. It tells the story of Flora de Barral, a vulnerable and abandoned young girl who is 'like a beggar,without a right to anything but compassion'. After her bankrupt father is imprisoned, she learns the harsh fact that a woman in her position 'has no resources but in herself. Her only means of action is to be what she is.' Flora's long struggle to achieve some dignity and happiness makes her Conrad's most moving female character. Reflecting the contemporary interest in the New Woman and the Suffragette question, Chance also marks the final appearance of Marlow, Conrad's most effective and wise narrator. This revised edition uses the English first edition text and has a new chronology and bibliography. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

'An impenetrable mystery seems destined to hang for ever over this act of madness or despair.' Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London's Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be 'A Simple Tale' proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats and London's fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations. Based on the text which Conrad's first English readers enjoyed, this new edition includes a critical introduction which describes Conrad's great London novel as the realization of a 'monstrous town', a place of idiocy, madness, criminality, and butchery. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

'To the white men in the waterside business and to the captain of ships he was just Jim - nothing more. He had, of course, another name, but he was anxious that it should not be pronounced.' Lord Jim tells the story of a young, idealistic Englishman - 'as unflinching as a hero in a book' - who is disgraced by a single act of cowardice while serving as an officer on the Patna, a merchant-ship sailing from an Eastern port. His life is blighted: an isolated scandal assumes horrifying proportions. An older man, Marlow, befriends Jim, and helps to establish him in Patusan, a remote Malay settlement. There he achieves a kind of peace, but his courage is put to the test once more. Lord Jim is one of the most profound and rewarding psychological novels in English. Set in the context of social change and colonial expansion in late Victorian England, it embodies in Jim the values and the turmoil of a fading empire. In his introduction and notes to this new edition Jacques Berthoud explores the social and cultural dynamics that inform the novel. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

‘Spookily topical’ Guardian Read the world’s first political thriller. London is under threat. It has become a haven for political exiles and anarchists. Frequent bomb threats and disturbances interrupt the lives of the city's inhabitants, who live in fear of the terrorists in their midst. One such terrorist is Verloc. He is the secret agent who is given the mission to strike right at the heart of London's pride by blowing up Greenwich Observatory. But his decision to drag his innocent family into the plot leads to tragic consequences on a more personal than political level. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY GILES FODEN

This compact novel, completed in 1900, as with so many of the great novels of the time, is at its baseline a book of the sea. An English boy in a simple town has dreams bigger than the outdoors and embarks at an early age into the sailor's life. The waters he travels reward him with the ability to explore the human spirit, while Joseph Conrad launches the story into both an exercise of his technical prowess and a delicately crafted picture of a character who reaches the status of a literary hero.