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Widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, Joseph Conrad is celebrated as a forerunner of modernist fiction, whose innovative narrative style and anti-heroes had a significant influence on the course (More) of English literature. This comprehensive eBook presents the only complete works of Joseph Conrad in digital format, with numerous illustrations, rare texts appearing for the first time.
* Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Conrad’s life and works
* Concise introductions to the novels and other texts
* ALL 19 novels, with individual contents tables
* Images of how the books were first printed, giving your eReader a taste of the original texts
* Excellent formatting of the texts
* All of the collaborative works with Ford Madox Ford
* Includes the rare unfinished novel SUSPENSE, available in no other collection
* Special chronological ordering of the short stories
* Easily locate the short stories you want to read
* Includes Conrad’s essays – spend hours exploring the author’s critical works
* The complete memoirs – explore the author’s life in detail
* Special criticism section, with 11 essays by critics such as Virginia Woolf, Henry James and John Galsworthy evaluating Conrad’s contribution to literature
* Scholarly ordering of texts into chronological order and literary genres

Pocos autores pueden compararse con la desmesura de la invención, la variedad de registros, la profundidad de inmersión de su viaje hacia los lugares más oscuros y recónditos de la mente y la delicadeza descriptiva de Joseph (More) Conrad. Se recoge aquí en lengua española por vez primera la totalidad de la narrativa breve de uno de los autores más determinantes y fundamentales del siglo XX: desde relatos en los que ensayó motivos para sus obras mayores hasta algunas de sus piezas mejor resueltas como Tifón, El cómplice secreto, o Falk, o novelas tan desconocidas por el lector en español como El colono de Malata o El alma del guerrero y, también, su obra más célebre, El corazón de las tinieblas. Conrad nos maravilla con toda una multitud de marineros, anarquistas, lúcidos locos y delirantes asesinos; el terreno en el que el hombre comienza a jugar con fuego es, definitivamente, el terreno en el que se despliega todo el hipnótico arte narrativo del autor. Por todos estos motivos, el presente volumen constituye un festín literario de primer orden para cualquier lector. La cantidad y la calidad del material aquí reunido no hacen sino constatar, de la manera más contundente, el grandísimo talento de Joseph Conrad.

Set in a time of oppressive colonisation, when large areas of the world were still unknown to Europe, and Africa was literally on maps and minds as a mysterious shadow, Heart of Darkness famously explores the rituals of (More) civilisation and barbarism, and the frighteningly fine line between them. We get the tale through a classic unreliable narrator, relating as Marlow, a ship’s captain, tells how he was sent by the Company to retrieve the wayward Kurtz, and was shaken to discover the true depths of darkness in that creature’s, and in his own, soul. Conrad based the work closely on his own terrible experience in the Congo. This work has been reinterpreted and adapted into many modern forms, the most well known being the film Apocalypse Now.

El argumento de esta pequeña pieza, la cual tuvo tres títulos (El duelo, Los duelistas, o Un asunto de honor, este último a sugerencia de su amigo Ford Madox Ford), nos lleva a las campañas napoleónicas entre 1801-1815. Más que (More) centrarse exhaustivamente en el desarrollo militar de la época, el autor conduce su cámara hacia dos jóvenes oficiales.

A través de un personaje ficticio (el viejo marinero “Marlow”), Conrad describe una travesía por el río Congo en busca del señor “Kurtz” que es el jefe de una explotación de marfil. El encuentro con Kurtz, será la confirmación de (More) la hipócrita actitud colonialista y pone en tela de juicio su carácter de cruzada moral y comercial. El director de cine Francis Ford Coppola se basó en este breve relato para su película Apocalypse Now, que si bien estaba ambientada en la guerra de Vietnam, mantenía el espíritu del relato de Conrad.

Victory (also published as Victory: An Island Tale) is a psychological novel by Joseph Conrad first published in 1915, through which Conrad achieved “popular success”.
Through a business misadventure, the European Axel Heyst ends (More) up living on an island in what is now Indonesia, with a Chinese assistant Wang. Heyst visits a nearby island when a female band is playing at a hotel owned by Mr. Schomberg. Schomberg attempts to force himself sexually on one of the band members, Alma, later called Lena. She flees with Heyst back to his island and they become lovers.

A classic of early literary modernism, Lord Jim tells the story of a young “simple and sensitive character” who loses his honor in a display of cowardice at sea — and of his expiation of that sin against his own “shadowy ideal of (More) conduct” on the remote island of Patusan. The novel, written by Conrad for magazine serialization during an intense and chaotic ten months in 1899 and 1900, has, in the words of Thomas C. Moser, “the rare distinction of being a masterpiece in two separate genres. It is at once an exotic adventure story of the Eastern seas in the popular tradition of Kipling and Stevenson and a complexly wrought ‘art novel’ in the tradition of Flaubert and James.

Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London’s Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich (More) Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be ‘a simple tale’ proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats and London’s fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations.
The Secret Agent is Conrad’s dark, and darkly comic story of a band of spies, anarchists, agents-provocateurs plotting and counter-plotting in the back streets of London in the early 20th Century.

Dedicated to the author’s son who was wounded in World War 1, The Shadow-Line is a short novel based at sea by Joseph Conrad; it is one of his later works, being written from February to December 1915. It was first published in (More) 1916 as a serial and in book form in 1917. The novella depicts the development of a young man upon taking a captaincy in the Orient, with the shadow line of the title representing the threshold of this development. The novella is notable for its dual narrative structure. The full, subtitled title of the novel is The Shadow-Line, A Confession, which immediately alerts the reader to the retrospective nature of the novella. The ironic constructions following from the conflict between the ‘young’ protagonist (who is never named) and the ‘old’ drive much of the underlying points of the novella, namely the nature of wisdom, experience and maturity. Conrad also extensively uses irony by comparison in the work, with characters such as Captain Giles and the ship’s ‘factotum’ Ransome used to emphasise strengths and weaknesses of the protagonist. The novella has often been cited as a metaphor of the First World War, given its timing and references to a long struggle, the importance of camaraderie, etc. This viewpoint may also be reinforced by the knowledge that Conrad’s elder son, Borys, was wounded in the First World War. Others however see the novel as having a strong supernatural influence, referring to various plot-lines in the novella such as the ‘ghost’ of the previous captain potentially cursing the ship, and the madness of first mate Mr Burns. Conrad himself, however, denied this link in his ‘Author’s Note’ (1920), claiming that although critics had attempted to show this link, “The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is.”