Jude The Obscure, an almost unbearably sad story about love and sexual desire mapped into the peculiar English matrixes of class and destiny in the Victorian 19th century, has come to be recognized as one of Hardy's most important novels. It tells the tragic story of Jude Fawley, a kid from the country whose aspirations to university scholarship are thwarted; his socially unacceptable love affair is also a disaster. *** In the sequence of Thomas Hardy's novels, Jude the Obscure (1895) is the last, and the fiercest, work. It is variously realistic and expressionistic, ironic and elegiac, symbolic and documentary; indeed, the list of its paradoxical attributes can be extended at length, for it is understated and strident, Victorian and modernistic, clumsy and adroit, benign and bitter, subtle and blatant. Its ferocity and ruthlessness mingle with its keen sensitivity, compassion and modes of comedy. Depicting a strife of ideas, beliefs, traditions and prejudices, it is wounded and sounding novel. Hardy denied that Jude the Obscure was autobiographical; but, in all its tensions and conflicts, which it both describes and enacts, it is more intimately (if obliquely) autobiographical than the entirety of the lengthy autobiography which Hardy published in the guise of his second wife. That Life of Thomas Hardy often voices reserve, prudence, detachment and circumspection; the novel voices the passion, anguish, anger and division of the deeper self. Through the mask of fictional identities and narration, Hardy speaks more vitally and comprehensively. W.B.Yeats wrote: “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” Out of the quarrels with others and with himself, Hardy made Jude The Obscure.  

From the #1 New York Times best-selling author of God Is Not Great, a provocative and entertaining guided tour of atheist and agnostic thought through the ages—with never-before-published pieces by Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Christopher Hitchens continues to make the case for a splendidly godless universe in this first-ever gathering of the influential voices—past and present—that have shaped his side of the current (and raging) God/no-god debate. With Hitchens as your erudite and witty guide, you'll be led through a wealth of philosophy, literature, and scientific inquiry, including generous portions of the words of Lucretius, Benedict de Spinoza, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Mark Twain, George Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Emma Goldman, H. L. Mencken, Albert Einstein, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and many others well-known and lesser known. And they’re all set in context and commented upon as only Christopher Hitchens—“political and literary journalist extraordinaire” (Los Angeles Times). Atheist? Believer? Uncertain? No matter: The Portable Atheist will speak to you and engage you every step of the way