Arnold Bennett

Anna vive junto a su padre Ephraim y su hermana Agnes en Bursley, una de las poblaciones de las Cinco Villas, célebres por su industria alfarera. Plegada a la estricta disciplina impuesta por su padre, su vida discurre de manera tranquila entre su hogar y la escuela metodista. Esta monotonia se ve alterada cuando alcanza la mayoria de edad y resultan evidentes las atenciones que le dedica Henry Mynors, el soltero mas codiciado de Bursley. Anna se enfrenta entonces al dilema de claudicar bajo el yugo paterno o seguir los dictados de su corazon y su conciencia. Ambientada en los albores del s.XX, la novela nos regala un personaje femenino inolvidable, que encarna las contradicciones que le embargan al tomar las riendas de su propia vida en una epoca de algidas transformaciones sociales.

CHAPTER I. MENTAL EFFICIENCYCHAPTER II. EXPRESSING ONES INDIVIDUALITYCHAPTER III. BREAKING WITH THE PASTCHAPTER IV. SETTLING DOWN IN LIFECHAPTER V. MARRIAGECHAPTER VI. BOOKSCHAPTER VII. SUCCESSCHAPTER VIII. THE PETTY ARTIFICIALITIESCHAPTER IX. THE SECRET OF CONTENT

This preface, though placed at the beginning, as a preface must be, should be read at the end of the book.I have received a large amount of correspondence concerning this small work, and many reviews of itsome of them nearly as long as the book itselfhave been printed. But scarcely any of the comment has been adverse. Some people have objected to a frivolity of tone; but as the tone is not, in my opinion, at all frivolous, this objection did not impress me; and had no weightier reproach been put forward I might almost have been persuaded that the volume was flawless! A more serious stricture has, however, been offerednot in the press, but by sundry obviously sincere correspondentsand I must deal with it. A reference to page 43 will show that I anticipated and feared this disapprobation. The sentence against which protests have been made is as follows:"In the majority of instances he [the typical man] does not precisely feel a passion for his business; at best he does not dislike it. He begins his business functions with some reluctance, as late as he can, and he ends them with joy, as early as he can. And his engines, while he is engaged in his business, are seldom at their full h.p."

¿Hay una combinación más intrínsecamente humana que esa guerra sin cuartel entre libertad y fiesta, violencia y sacrificio, carácter y frustración que es el fútbol? Espejo del Homo ludens descrito por Huizinga: ese afortunado personaje con el don de jugar, el verdadero sentido de su vida. El fútbol todo lo convierte en representación, en espectáculo, pero nunca dejará de ser otras muchas cosas; entre ellas, uno de esos hilos invisibles que padres e hijos se inventan con el fin de unirse para siempre. Instalados frente a una maquinita súper engrasada con millones de euros, dólares, yenes, pesos, y retransmitida urbi et orbe.

Every town should have a 'card' - someone who gets talked about, someone who does mad and wonderful things, someone who makes you laugh. Bursley in the Five Towns has a 'card': Edward Henry Machin (Denry for short). Denry begins life in a poor little house where the rent is twenty-three pence a week. But before he's thirty, he's made a lot of money, and had more adventures than you and I have had hot dinners. The town of Bursley never stops talking about him. Whatever will young Denry do next?

''Deeply moving, original, and dealing with material that I had never encountered in fiction, but only in life'' Margaret Drabble.Growing up in the world of the ''five towns'' of industrial England, with their furnaces and chimneys, huddled red-brown streets, prayer meetings and small-minded bigotry, Anna is dominated by her miserly and tyrannical father. When she inherits a fortune and finds love, she struggles to break free from the constraints upon her, even though she is torn between duty and her deepest feelings. Arnold''s novel of parental tyranny and rebellion is a portrayal of a woman of great spirit, complexity and integrity.

One of fiction''s greatest chancers - the story of Denry Machin and his unceasing, ingenious efforts to become a great man.Set in the raw, Victorian world of the ''Five Towns'', The Card tells the extremely funny and tangled story of Denry Machin''s rise from mediocrity to fame through a series of ludicrous and yet perversely successful schemes. He dances, pleads, cheats and inspires his way through life in a series of set-pieces which wonderfully evoke a now long-gone world of civic balls, seaside excursions, newspaper boys and patent chocolate remedies.As everybody said after one of his most stylish coups, Denry ''was not simply a card; he was the card.''

Henry Earlforward, a shabby Clerkenwell bookseller, has retired from life to devote himself (and his wife Violet) to a consuming passion for money. Miserliness becomes a fatal illness and Bennett gives a terrifying description of its ravages. But the book''s horrible situation is saved through the character of Elsie - whose life-affirming refusal to engage with the nightmarish world of the bookseller transforms the story.Bennett wished in Riceyman Steps to create an English novel as powerful as anything by Balzac, the writer he most admired, with the same sense of great human issues being played out within the confines of a household. The result is an unforgettable work which is also a gripping description of the harsh, battered London of the period just after the First World War.

El destino de Denry Machin parece estar escrito en piedra: hijo de una costurera, trabaja como secretario y no tiene aspiraciones que estén por encima de su clase social. Pero, de repente, todo cambia cuando descubre que tiene la oportunidad de incluir su nombre en la lista de invitados al baile de la condesa de Chell. En la fiesta, le gana una apuesta al rico Harold Etches y unos dias mas tarde, cuando su jefe lo despide, las ganancias constituyen su unico sustento economico. A partir de entonces, Denry enlaza una aventura con otra en un arduo intento por convertirse en una persona de renombre. Y cuando menos se lo espera, encuentra el amor, o eso cree el.Ambientada en la segunda mitad del s. XIX, El as nos muestra al Arnold Bennett de humor mas brillante y con mas gancho: tanto las ambiciones del personaje principal como su vida amorosa estan marcadas por situaciones ridiculas y divertidas. Ademas, la aguzada mirada satirica de Bennett sobre la gente de provincias que vive en la region denominada the Potteries, famosa por la industria de la ceramica, no hace sino potenciar el divertimento.Esta novela clave de Arnold Bennett, ambientada en la region"The Potteries"donde tienen lugar sus obras mas destacadas, hara las delicias del lector. Denry Machin lo tiene todo para pasar desapercibido en la vida: u...

Bestseller gótico escrito por uno de los mejores autores ingleses del siglo xx, según la BBC.Obra maestra de suspense.Mantendrá en vilo al lector de la primera a la última página.Autor de enorme éxit

In the autumn of 1903 I used to dine frequently in a restaurant in the Rue de Clichy, Paris. Here were, among others, two waitresses that attracted my attention. One was a beautiful, pale young girl, to whom I never spoke, for she was employed far away from the table which I affected. The other, a stout, middle-aged managing Breton woman, had sole command over my table and me, and gradually she began to assume such a maternal tone towards me that I saw I should be compelled to leave that restaurant. If I was absent for a couple of nights running she would reproach me sharply: "What! you are unfaithful to me?" Once, when I complained about some French beans, she informed me roundly that French beans were a subject which I did not understand. I then decided to be eternally unfaithful to her, and I abandoned the restaurant. A few nights before the final parting an old woman came into the restaurant to dine. She was fat, shapeless, ugly, and grotesque. She had a ridiculous voice, and ridiculous gestures. It was easy to see that she lived alone, and that in the long lapse of years she had developed the kind of peculiarity which induces guffaws among the thoughtless. She was burdened with a lot of small parcels, which she kept dropping. She chose one seat; and then, not liking it, chose another; and then another. In a few moments she had the whole restaurant laughing at her. That my middle-aged Breton should laugh was indifferent to me, but I was pained to see a coarse grimace of giggling on the pale face of the beautiful young waitress to whom I had never spoken.I reflected, concerning the grotesque diner: "This woman was once young, slim, perhaps beautiful; certainly free from these ridiculous mannerisms. Very probably she is unconscious of her singularities. Her case is a tragedy. One ought to be able to make a heartrending novel out of the history of a woman such as she.

Illustrated by Frank Craig

Why does not some mental efficiency specialist come forward and show us how to make our minds do the work which our minds are certainly capable of doing? I do not mean a quack. All the physical efficiency specialists who advertise largely are not quacks. Some of them achieve very genuine results. If a course of treatment can be devised for the body, a course of treatment can be devised for the mind. Thus we might realize some of the ambitions which all of us cherish in regard to the utilization in our spare time of that magnificent machine which we allow to rust within our craniums. We have the desire to perfect ourselves, to round off our careers with the graces of knowledge and taste. How many people would not gladly undertake some branch of serious study, so that they might not die under the reproach of having lived and died without ever really having known anything about anything! It is not the absence of desire that prevents them. It is, first, the absence of will-powernot the will to begin, but the will to continue; and, second, a mental apparatus which is out of condition, "puffy,""weedy," through sheer neglect. The remedy, then, divides itself into two parts, the cultivation of will-power, and the getting into condition of the mental apparatus. And these two branches of the cure must be worked concurrently