Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fiction (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (B&N Classics)

A classic deserving of the title. My dad is an English lit major and this is one of his favorite books. He tried to get me to read it for years before I finally did. Very well written and a very convicting viewpoint on humanity. English was Conrad's 4/5th language and he's way more eloquent than me!

Fast delivery, happy w the product

This book had many writings and notes it it. I havn't read it yet so I don't know if I will like it. It is for a class so I have to read it!

This book is so over-rated. Unless you are some type of literature major, this book is boring, difficult to read - meaning it just doesn't flow well. Oh the horror, the horror...

Collected in this volume are two of Conrad’s best-known works (Heart of Darkness and “The Secret Sharer”) along with two of his lesser-known works (“Youth” and “Amy Foster”). Together they provide an engaging and challenging overview of his complex oeuvre.As a self-proclaimed literature nerd, I appreciated A. Michael Matin’s helpful and well-written introduction (along with his footnotes and endnotes) to this collection. Before delving into this volume, I’d had just a passing familiarity with Conrad and his work. I knew that he was born in Poland and that he published in English (his third language); Matin traces these and other relevant elements of Conrad’s life—especially his experience as a seaman—and describes their influence on his work. Consequently, he highlights the many autobiographical aspects of Conrad’s fiction; he resists, however, a strictly autobiographical reading of his narratives.The three shorter works carry greater appeal for me than does Heart of Darkness, which is probably Conrad’s most famous piece. While its themes are “universal” and intriguing, the text itself seems anticlimactic in comparison to the reputation it has developed over the past 100+ years. Perhaps enlightened thinking about race and imperialism have dimmed its worth, and while it might prove generative for discussions of these issues, I cannot conceive of using this text in a secondary English Language Arts classroom, which is where many students encounter it and subsequently develop a deep loathing for it.Like Heart of Darkness, “Youth” and “The Secret Sharer” are set on the water. The former is an almost comical tale of a young mate’s doomed voyage on a dilapidated ship, and the latter is a psychological story of a young captain’s puzzling decision to harbor a confessed murderer who is also the captain’s doppelgänger. Although nothing profoundly dramatic occurs in either story, the depth of character in each is enough to warrant reading them. I suspect that “The Secret Sharer” is ripe for a queer reading as well, if one does not already exist.“Amy Foster,” the story that is likely least familiar to most readers, is a sad romance. The protagonist, contrary to the title, is not Amy Foster herself but her husband, a foreigner shipwrecked on the shores of her town in England. Ostracized and misunderstood by the town, he ingratiates himself to them by rescuing a young girl from drowning. Despite the grudging acceptance—and his subsequent marriage to Amy—this affords him, he still suffers a wretched fate.A tough but enjoyable read, I’d recommend this collection to any hardcore literature lover, especially those with a penchant for nautical tales.

As with this 1899 classic novella, sometimes too much descriptive writing can somewhat muddy the waters. Written by Joseph Conrad (pen name for Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) and originally published in three monthly issues of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, I occasionally lost touch with the story as I got lost in his flowery language. This is not a bad thing, just a slight sidetrack from the story. You probably remember this seaman/author best for his famous 1900 novel, Lord Jim. Even the first paragraph had to be read several times before I understood that The Nellie, a cruising yawl was a two-masted fore-and-aft-rigged sailboat sailing down The Thames River in London, England. Since Conrad spent his first 36 years mostly at sea, he assumed his sailor’s cant was a language known by all his readers. I’m not complaining because the story was enjoyable, just not the cat’s meow for a speed reader. An example of Conrad’s descriptive writing (he was very good at describing a character) can be found on page 54 when he is describing the company’s chief accountant that he finds in the muggy jungle, “When near the buildings I met a white man, in such an unexpected elegance of get-up that in the first moment I took him for a sort of vision. I saw a high starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clear necktie, and varnished boots. No hat. Hair parted, brushed, oiled, under a green-lined parasol held in a big white hand. He was amazing, and had a penholder behind his ear.” Most of the novel was written with these embellishments.The story starts out with Our narrator and protagonist, Charlie Marlow, on a cruise ship (the Nellie) anchored on the Thames River telling some of the passengers how he was appointed captain of a steamboat on the Congo River in darkest Africa. Ever since he was a child, he was mesmerized by the blank spaces on maps. The one that intrigued him the most was the Congo and the big snake-like river, The Congo. After many years out to sea, Marlow applies for a riverboat captaincy on a Congo River steamboat with a Brussels, Belgium ivory trading company. He gets the job and heads to the African coast on a French steamer. Most of the story revolves around his difficulties getting to his job, which was more than 200 miles up the river. He gets on a steamer captained by a Swede and gets dropped off 30 miles up river to his company’s first station. It is blazing hot and steamy. He is horrified at the condition of the blacks working on the railroad. They are going to die under these harsh conditions. He takes a caravan of 60 men and travels on foot to the central station where he finds out from the general manager that his steamboat was curiously wrecked. The general manager says they left without him because they were trying to get to a Mr. Kurtz, who was reportedly dying. Is that why they were trying to get to him? Mr. Kurtz ran the trading post in ivory country. Marlow learns that, “Kurtz sends in as much ivory as all the others put together.” By the way, the paragraphs are very long, which was commonplace in that era. It takes several months to repair the river steamboat before Marlow departs up river to bring back the mysterious Mr. Kurtz from his station. Is Kurtz really sick? Why do the natives adore him? Why does the company want him back? Has Kurtz gotten too big for his britches? The descriptive writing was so good, I felt like I was sweltering on the Congo River in darkest Africa during the entire story. Somehow I missed the crux of Conrad’s novella. Was he chastising Belgium for their imperialistic attitude towards Africa? Or their treatment of the natives? Was he trying to say that (so-called) civilized society should have the right to rule barbarians, or just the opposite? The United States had that attitude in the late 1800s and early 1900s (the Manifest Destiny). Remember Horace Greeley’s famous phrase, “Go west, young man”...and we did, all the way to Japan and China. I know that Joseph Conrad had a reason for writing this novella...I just don’t know what it was. Because of these reasons, I'll give it a weak five star rating (Haha) and I do recommend reading this 117 year old novella.