Best Selling Books by Joseph Conrad

"Heart of Darkness" is a small, but perhaps the most famous adventure story written by Joseph Conrad. The narrative is written on behalf of the sailor Marlowe, who tells the reader about his past adventures. In the African wilds, there is an illegally operating elephant bone mining company. While crossing the continent, Marlowe travels to one of its divisions. As he is getting closer to his destination, the main character hears more and more stories about some almighty Kurtz, an agent of the company, whom the locals mention with fear and hatred. What awaits Marlowe after meeting him? Pretty illustrations by Vladislav Trotsenko provide you with new impressions from reading this legendary story.

Conrad''s life in his own words, now edited for scholarly use for the first time.

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time Originally published in 1904, Nostromo is considered by many to be Conrad''s supreme achievement. Set in the imaginary South American republic of Costaguana, the novel reveals the effects of unbridled greed and imperialist interests on many different lives. Although each character''s potential for good is ultimately corrupted, Nostromo underscores Conrad''s belief in fidelity, moral discipline, and the need for human communion. The author himself described the book as ''an intense creative effort on what I suppose will remain my largest canvas.'' ''Conrad endeavored to create a great, massive, multiphase symbol that would render his total vision of the world, his sense of individual destiny, his sense of man''s place in nature, his sense of history and society,'' observed Robert Penn Warren. ''Nostromo is the most strikingly modern of Conrad''s novels,'' said V. S. Pritchett. ''It is pervaded by a profound, even morbid sense of insecurity which is the very spirit of our age.'' This volume is the companion to the acclaimed multipart series aired on Masterpiece Theatre.

Nostromo, a Tale of the Seaboard - Joseph Conrad - Joseph Conrad, who knew the human nature inside out, telling the story of Nostromo and portraying his personages is ironic and even slightly derisive... Every man, somewhere deep inside, has his own share of rascality... And every human doing has two sides... Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions. Only in the conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery over the Fates. The events take place in the South American country of Costaguana, which is being torn with greed, political ambitions, poverty and revolutions... They had stopped near the cage. The parrot, catching the sound of a word belonging to his vocabulary, was moved to interfere. Parrots are very human. "Viva Costaguana!" he shrieked, with intense self-assertion, and, instantly ruffling up his feathers, assumed an air of puffed-up somnolence behind the glittering wires. There always are pushers and those who are pushed... In all these households she could hear stories of political outrage; friends, relatives, ruined, imprisoned, killed in the battles of senseless civil wars, barbarously executed in ferocious proscriptions, as though the government of the country had been a struggle of lust between bands of absurd devils let loose upon the land with sabres and uniforms and grandiloquent phrases. And on all the lips she found a weary desire for peace, the dread of officialdom with its nightmarish parody of administration without law, without security, and without justice. One day the pushed ones grow tired of being cat''s paws and rebel... Some outwardly, some inwardly... But anyway, in the end they turn out to be the ones who pay for their rebellion.

The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide. The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

The Secret Agent (1907) is a compelling tale of espionage and terrorism set in Edwardian London. Ironically subtitled ''A Simple Tale'', it paints a terrifying portrait of revolutionaries and anarchists whose personal lives are as barren and futile as their public acts of violence. It concludes with the unwitting accomplice of a would-be terrorist blowing himself to bits with his own bomb, the terrorist''s subsequent murder by his own wife, and the wife''s own suicide. This new edition is based on a painstaking comparison of the original manuscript of the work with its first, truncated appearance in the American magazine Ridgeway''s: A Militant Weekly for God and Country, and with all subsequent book-form publications overseen by Conrad himself. The result is a new text, purged of the printers'' errors and editorial interventions that have been reproduced in all previous printings. There is also a critical introduction, an essay on the text, a textual apparatus, and helpful explanatory notes.

Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad. Lord Jim is a novel by Joseph Conrad originally published as a serial in Blackwood''s Magazine from October 1899 to November 1900. An early and primary event in the story is the abandonment of a passenger ship in distress by its crew, including a young British seaman named Jim. He is publicly censured for this action and the novel follows his later attempts at coming to terms with himself and his past. When this novel first appeared in book form a notion got about that I had been bolted away with. Some reviewers maintained that the work starting as a short story had got beyond the writer''s control. One or two discovered internal evidence of the fact, which seemed to amuse them. They pointed out the limitations of the narrative form. They argued that no man could have been expected to talk all that time, and other men to listen so long. It was not, they said, very credible. After thinking it over for something like sixteen years, I am not so sure about that. Men have been known, both in the tropics and in the temperate zone, to sit up half the night ''swapping yarns''. This, however, is but one yarn, yet with interruptions affording some measure of relief; and in regard to the listeners'' endurance, the postulate must be accepted that the story was interesting.

Joseph Conrad was an English-language writer, best known for works like "Nostromo," "Lord Jim," and "Heart of Darkness," immortalized on screen by Marlon Brando in "Apocalypse Now." Of Polish origin but settled in England, Joseph Conrad was considered one of the most important authors in the English language, and "Nostromo" is regarded by critics as his finest work. The novel is set in the fictional South American republic of "Costaguana," which has a long history of tyranny, revolution, and war but experiences a period of stability. The character Nostromo is an Italian expatriate who rose to his position through bravery and is seen as a useful instrument to the local oligarchy. Nostromo is tasked with removing the silver from Sulaco to keep it away from the revolutionaries. Unfortunately, Nostromo''s exploits do not bring him the expected recognition, leading him into corruption and eventual destruction. The captivating work "Nostromo" is part of the collection "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die."

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.

Heart of Darkness, a novel by Joseph Conrad, was originally a three-part series in Blackwood''s Magazine in 1899. It is a story within a story, following a character named Charlie Marlow, who recounts his adventure to a group of men onboard an anchored ship. The story told is of his early life as a ferry boat captain. Although his job was to transport ivory downriver, Charlie develops an interest in investing an ivory procurement agent, Kurtz, who is employed by the government. Preceded by his reputation as a brilliant emissary of progress, Kurtz has now established himself as a god among the natives in "one of the darkest places on earth." Marlow suspects something else of Kurtz: he has gone mad.Includes a biography of the author.

Joseph Conrad''s novel "The Secret Agent" is referred to in many places as the prototype of today''s political and espionage thrillers. The agent of the title, Mr. Verloc, has grown complacent in his role as an informant to a foreign embassy in London and is pressured by his superiors into pulling off a shocking act of terrorism in order to prove his worth to his colleagues. "The Secret Agent" is mostly about the domestic repercussions that occur when things go badly wrong. Joseph Conrad effectively toys with the reader''s expectations, introducing several characters and sets the stage for what appears to be a thriller with political overtones: several people have a vested interest (personally or politically) in the outcome of Mr. Verloc''s actions. What "The Secret Agent" does well is give its reader a deliciously tangible sense of the seedy underworld at play in late 19th-century London. Joseph Conrad personifies the mist, funk and squalor of London until the city itself nearly becomes a character in the action. Also, for anyone who maybe knows Conrad for being an obtuse, thick writer (especially if your previous knowledge of him comes from reading "Heart of Darkness" and "Lord Jim"), "The Secret Agent" is refreshingly straight forward.