Lord Jim (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) » (Special Value)

Most readers know Joseph Conrad for creating Marlow's harrowing journey through the African Congo in Heart of Darkness. Conrad was adept at capturing the physical and cultural experiences he gleaned from 15 years at sea, but he also wrote political thrillers, essays, and plays based on his own short stories. His best works tend to be brief, but pack in a remarkable perspicacity about humanity's deepest faults.

Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

• New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
• Comments by other famous authors
• Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations
• Bibliographies for further reading
• Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

With Lord Jim, first published in 1900, Joseph Conrad transformed a tale of seafaring adventure into a subtle study of the meaning of honor and courage, loyalty and betrayal. When Jim, an idealistic merchant seaman and ship’s officer, abandons the supposedly sinking Patna and its passengers, he dashes his youthful dreams of glory in a single stroke. Condemned in court for his impetuous act of cowardice, Jim relegates himself to a life roaming the Far East.

Unforgettably told by Marlow, who also narrates Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the story of Lord Jim plumbs the mysteries of a man renounced by society but driven by a desire for redemption.

A. Michael Matin is a professor in the English Department of Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina. He has published articles on various twentieth-century British and postcolonial writers, and has written the introduction and notes for the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fiction by Joseph Conrad.