Joseph Conrad

Reflecting Conrad's genius for narrative that focuses on the quest for inner truths, The Arrow of Gold is an exploration of the dangerous appetites of men and of human vulnerability, as well as a profound meditation on the emotional boundary between people. Boasting a cast of extraordinary and eccentric personalities, including the heroine Doña Rita, this is a story of adventure on the high seas, of the revelation of love, of the crushing weight of loss, and of freedom found in the recklessness of unadorned sincerity. During the Carlist war of the early 1870s, a young sailor, the unnamed protagonist, joins the champions of Don Carlos de Bourbon, pretender to the throne of Spain. The Carlists use the eager youth's intense attraction to the sea to persuade him to run perilous enterprises for their cause, ventures he later learns have been financed by the beautiful mistress and heiress of a rich man's fortune. When he falls in love with her, he finds himself moved absolutely by this discovery, despite the fact that she is unable to return his love fully. In the end he is left alone with his first love, the sea, his brief time with the mysterious Doña Rita marking a tumultuous awakening to a life of passion, the desolation that hides in its shadow, and the possibility of rebirth in its wake. Although not as well known as his earlier novels Lord Jim and Nostromo, The Arrow of Gold was critically acclaimed when it first appeared in 1919 and is still considered to be among the best of Conrad's later works.

The most supportive, easy-to-use and focussed literature guides to help your students understand the texts they are studying at GCSE and A Level

The twenty-six essays collected in Notes on Life and Letters (first published 1921) offer a kaleidoscopic view of Joseph Conrad's literary views and interest in the events of his day, including the Titanic disaster, First World War, and the re-emergence of his native Poland as a nation state. The introduction gives the history of the gathering of these diverse pieces into a single volume, traces the book's reception, and offers new perspectives on its relationship to Conrad's other writings. His essays underwent multiple layers of unauthorized intervention by typists, compositors and editors: this history is set out in the essay on the text and in the apparatus. The notes explain literary and historical references, identify places mentioned, and gloss foreign terms. Two maps supplement the explanatory material. This edition, first published in 2004 and established through modern textual scholarship, presents Conrad's essays and reviews in an authoritative form.

Political turmoil convulses 19th-century Russia, as Razumov, a young student preparing for a career in the czarist bureaucracy, unwittingly becomes embroiled in the assassination of a public official. Asked to spy on the family of the assassin-- his close friend -- he must come to terms with timeless questions of accountability and human integrity.

The first part, titled Letters, contains essays on such topics as Books, Henry James, Alphonse Daudet, Guy de Maupassant, Anatole France, Turgenev, Stephen Crane, Tales of the Sea, An Observer in Malaya, The Life Beyond, and The Censor of Plays. The second part, title Life, includes such topics as Autocracy and War, The Crime of Partition, Note on the Polish Problem, Tradition, Confidence, Flight, Some Reflections on the Loss of the "Titanic," Protection of Ocean Liners, and A Friendly Place.Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born English novelist best known in his own time as a writer of sea stories. He is now more admired as a novelist of moral exploration and a master of narrative technique - a major 20th century novelist.