The Bacchae by Euripides (Plume, $15). Dangerous, androgynous Dionysus sweeps into Greece with his bacchants and destroys a king, who ends up bloodily dismembered by his mother and her playmates. This classic play about the brutal power of primeval nature exposes the fragility of social institutions.
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Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (Penguin, $7). An exercise in Romantic Gothicism and a tempestuous love story. But this book is also a brilliant architectural construction by a woman who died a year after it was published, to a disappointing reception. The nesting time frames were more complex than anything attempted before in a novel.
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A Passage to India by E.M. Forster (Harvest, $13). A tragicomic clash of civilizations under the British Raj. Christian, Muslim, and Hindu strive for mutual understanding and fail. A bitter public trial follows a humiliating muddle and an existential puzzle in the eerie Marabar Caves.
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The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form by Kenneth Clark (Princeton, $35).A superb introduction to the history of the nude in Western art. Wonderfully written in a style of now vanished connoisseurship. Its lavish illustrations help train the eye in evaluating anatomical style and proportion.
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The Wit and Humor of Oscar Wilde edited by Alvin Redman (Dover, $8). One of the most important books in my life. As an adolescent, I discovered its British edition (called The Epigrams of Oscar Wilde) in a secondhand bookshop in Syracuse, N.Y. It neatly arranges Wilde’s hilarious one-liners and imperious aesthetic commandments by theme.
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Edie
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