Shelfology Book Pairing

(Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Osamu Dazai

The classic Japanese novel of alienation and the search for meaning and connection in the modern world, in a brilliant new translation—for fans of Salinger, Camus, Sartre, Hesse, and the hit anime series Bungo Stray Dogs and No Longer Allowed in Another World, both of which feature a character based on No Longer Human’s author, Osamu Dazai A Penguin Classics Graphic Deluxe Edition, with flaps, deckle-edged paper, and specially commissioned cover art by award-winning illustrator Yuko Shimizu featuring neon pink ink! Portraying himself as a failure, the protagonist of Osamu Dazai’s No Longer Human narrates a seemingly normal life even while he feels himself incapable of understanding human beings. Oba Yozo’s attempts to reconcile himself to the world around him begin in early childhood, continue through high school, where he becomes a “clown” to mask his alienation, and eventually lead to a failed suicide attempt as an adult. Without sentimentality, he records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness. Semi-autobiographical, No Longer Human is the final completed work of one of Japan’s most important writers. It has come to “echo the sentiments of youth” (The Mainichi Daily News) from postwar Japan to the postmodern society of technology. Still one of the ten bestselling books in Japan, No Longer Human is a powerful exploration of an individual’s alienation from society.

Introduction by Malcolm Jones

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky’s greatest novel is a story of murder told with hair-raising intellectual clarity and a feeling for the human condition unsurpassed in world literature. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final novel, published just before his death in 1881, chronicles the bitter love-hate struggle between a larger-than-life father and his three very different sons. The author's towering reputation as one of the handful of thinkers who forged the modern sensibility has sometimes obscured the purely novelistic virtues—brilliant characterizations, flair for suspense and melodrama, instinctive theatricality—that made his work so immensely popular in nineteenth-century Russia. This award-winning translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky—the definitive version in English—magnificently captures the rich and subtle energies of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece." Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Everyman’s Library Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.