The Secret Agent

Zusatztext “ The Secret Agent is an astonishing book. It is one of the best—and certainly the most significant—detective stories ever written.” — Ford Madox Ford “ The Secret Agent is an altogether thrilling ‘crime story’ . . . a political novel of a foreign embassy intrigue and its tragic human outcome.” — Thomas Mann    “One of Conrad’s supreme masterpieces.” — F. R. Leavis    “[ The Secret Agent ] was in effect the world’s first political thriller—spies! conspirators! wily policemen! murders! bombings . . .  Conrad was also giving artistic expression to his domestic anxieties—his overweight wife and problem child! his lack of money! his inactivity! his discomfort in London! his uneasiness in English society! his sense of exile! of being an alien . . . The novel has the perverse logic and derangement of a dream.” —from the Introduction to the Everyman's Library edition by Paul Theroux Informationen zum Autor Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) lived a life as fantastic as any of his fiction. His aristocratic parents were ardent Polish patriots who died when he was a child as a result of their revolutionary activities. Conrad went to sea at sixteen, taught himself English, and gradually worked his way up until he passed his master’s examination and was given command of merchant ships in Asia and on the Congo River. At the age of thirty-two, he decided to try his hand at writing. Although his work won the admiration of critics, sales were small. He was a nervous, introverted, gloomy man for whom writing was an agony, but he was rich in friends who appreciated his genius, among them Henry James, Stephen Crane, and Ford Madox Ford.  E. L. Doctorow  is the author of numerous acclaimed novels, including  Ragtime , World's Fair , and  Billy Bathgate . Debra Romanick Baldwin is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program at the University of Dallas, where she teaches the western literary tradition from Homer and Dante to Woolf and Bellow. Past President of the Joseph Conrad Society of America, she has written over a dozen articles and essays on Conrad, as well as on Flannery O’Connor, St. Augustine, and Primo Levi. Klappentext This chillingly prophetic examination of terrorism by the author of Heart of Darkness is the literary precursor to the espionage thrillers of Graham Greene and John Le Carré. Inspired by an actual attempt to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, The Secret Agent portrays the world of late-nineteenth-century London, with its fatuous civil servants, corrupt police, and squalid underworld characters like Verloc, a pornographer acting as a government informant. Verloc's assignment is to provoke the radicals whose group he has penetrated into committing an act of such violence that they will be discredited and their appeal to the masses destroyed. With its questionable characters and amoral caricatures, the novel is as much a black satire of English society as a frightening mirror of the present day. With an Introduction by E. L. Doctorow and a New Afterword by Debra Romanick BaldwinI Mr. Verloc, going out in the morning, left his shop nominally in charge of his brother-in-law. It could be done, because there was very little business at any time, and practically none at all before the evening. Mr. Verloc cared but little about his ostensible business. And, moreover, his wife was in charge of his brother-in-law. The shop was small, and so was the house. It was one of those grimy brick houses which existed in large quantities before the era of reconstruction dawned upon London.1 The shop was a square box of a place, with the front glazed in small panes. In the daytime the door remained closed; in the evening it stood discreetly but suspiciously ajar. The window contained photographs of more or less undressed dancing girls; nondes...

Product details

• Authors: Joseph Conrad, Joseph/ Doctorow Conrad, E. L. Doctorow, Debra Romanick Baldwin
• Publisher: Signet USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 04.08.2015
• EAN: 9780451474292
• ISBN: 978-0-451-47429-2
• No. of pages: 288
• Dimensions: 108 mm x 171 mm x 19 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature