In this extraordinary novel, Stingo, an inexperienced twenty-two year old Southerner, takes us back to the summer of 1947 and a boarding house in a leafy Brooklyn suburb. There he meets Nathan, a fiery Jewish intellectual; and Sophie, a beautiful and fragile Polish Catholic. Stingo is drawn into the heart of their passionate and destructive relationship as witness, confidant and supplicant. Ultimately, he arrives at the dark core of Sophie's past: her memories of pre-war Poland, the concentration camp and - the essence of her terrible secret - her choice.

How does a writer compose a suicide note? This was not a question that the prize-winning novelist William Styron had ever contemplated before. In this true account of his depression, Styron describes an illness that reduced him from a successful writer to a man arranging his own destruction. He lived to give us this gripping description of his descent into mental anguish, and his eventual success in overcoming a little-understood yet very common condition. The unabridged text of Darkness Visible by William Styron VINTAGE MINIS: GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS. A series of short books by the world's greatest writers on the experiences that make us human Also in the Vintage Minis series: Swimming by Roger Deakin Babies by Anne Enright Calm by Tim Parks Work by Joseph Heller

Three stories are told: a young Southerner wants to become a writer; a turbulent love-hate affair between a brilliant Jew and a beautiful Polish woman; and of an awful wound in that woman's past--one that impels both Sophie and Nathan toward destruction.

The completely restored, unexpurgated version of Jones' classic novel of war, just in time for the 60th anniversary of its National Book Award for fiction in 1962. With the help of Jones expert George Hendricks and Jones' daughter, the book is now restored to its original form and will be published as Jones meant it to be.

In the summer of 1985 William Styron was overtaken by persistent insomnia and a troubling sense of malaise - the first signs of a deep depression that would engulf his life and leave him on the brink of suicide . Darkness Visible describes his devastating descent into depression, taking us on an unprecedented journey into the realm of madness. It is an intimate portrait of the agony of Styron's ordeal, as well as a probing look at an illness that affects millions but is still widely misunderstood.

Through his remarkable candour and powers of description comes a true understanding of the anguish of a mind desperate unto death . Written in Styron's clear and marvellously compelling prose, Darknes s Visible is a bold and ultimately uplifting exploration of depression 's dark reality.

In the late summer of 1831, in a remote section of southeastern Virginia, there took place the only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery...

The revolt was led by a remarkable Negro preacher named Nat Turner, an educated slave who felt himself divinely ordained to annihilate all the white people in the region.

The Confessions of Nat Turner is narrated by Nat himself as he lingers in jail through the cold autumnal days before his execution. The compelling story ranges over the whole of Nat's Life, reaching its inevitable and shattering climax that bloody day in August.

The Confessions of Nat Turner is not only a masterpiece of storytelling; is also reveals in unforgettable human terms the agonizing essence of Negro slavery. Through the mind of a slave, Willie Styron has re-created a catastrophic event, and dramatized the intermingled miseries, frustrations--and hopes--which caused this extraordinary black man to rise up out of the early mists of our history and strike down those who held his people in bondage.


From the Hardcover edition.

In this brilliant collection of "long short stories, " the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sophie's Choice returns to the coastal Virginia setting of his first novels. Through the eyes of a man recollecting three episodes from his youth, William Styron explores with new eloquence death, loss, war, and racism.

Essays discuss American history, slavery, the Holocaust, prisons, the military, and American authors.

Two extraordinary works about soldiers in a time of dubious peace by a writer of vast eloquence and moral authority. With stylistic panache and vitriolic wit, William Styron depicts conflicts between men of somewhat more than average intelligence and the military machine. In The Long March, a novella, two Marine reservists fight to retain their dignity while on a grueling exercise staged by a posturing colonel. The uproariously funny play In the Clap Shack charts the terrified passage of a young recruit through the prurient inferno of a Navy hospital VD ward. In both works, Styron wages a gallant defense of the free individual--and serves up a withering indictment of a system that has no room for individuality or freedom.

William Styron traces the betrayals and infidelities--the heritage of spite and endlessly disappointed love--that afflict the members of a Southern family and that culminate in the suicide of the beautiful Peyton Loftis.

A work of great personal courage and a literary tour de force, this bestseller is Styron's true account of his descent into a crippling and almost suicidal depression. Styron is perhaps the first writer to convey the full terror of depression's psychic landscape, as well as the illuminating path to recovery.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE In 1831 Nat Turner awaits death in a Virginia jail cell. He is a slave, a preacher, and the leader of the only effective slave revolt in the history of 'that peculiar institution'. William Styron's ambitious and stunningly accomplished novel is Turner's confession, made to his jailers under the duress of his God. Encompasses the betrayals, cruelties and humiliations that made up slavery - and that still sear the collective psyches of both races.