Nostromo: (Joseph Conrad Classics Collection)

Publisher Marketing: In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco-the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity-had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo. The clumsy deep-sea galleons of the conquerors that, needing a brisk gale to move at all, would lie becalmed, where your modern ship built on clipper lines forges ahead by the mere flapping of her sails, had been barred out of Sulaco by the prevailing calms of its vast gulf. Some harbours of the earth are made difficult of access by the treachery of sunken rocks and the tempests of their shores. Sulaco had found an inviolable sanctuary from the temptations of a trading world in the solemn hush of the deep Golfo Placido as if within an enormous semi-circular and unroofed temple open to the ocean, with its walls of lofty mountains hung with the mourning draperies of cloud. On one side of this broad curve in the straight seaboard of the Republic of Costaguana, the last spur of the coast range forms an insignificant cape whose name is Punta Mala. From the middle of the gulf the point of the land itself is not visible at all; but the shoulder of a steep hill at the back can be made out faintly like a shadow on the sky. Review Citations: Library Journal 10/01/1997 (EAN 9780786111251, Analog Audio Cassette) Wilson Fiction Catalog 01/01/2000 pg. 136 (EAN 9780679409908, Hardcover) Wilson Fiction Catalog 01/01/2006 pg. 193 (EAN 9780679409908, Hardcover) Wilson Fiction Catalog 01/01/2010 pg. 121 (EAN 9780679409908, Hardcover) Wilson Fiction Catalog 01/01/2014 pg. 161 (EAN 9780679409908, Hardcover) Audio File 08/01/2011 pg. 35 (EAN 9781441750518, Compact Disc) Contributor Bio:  Conrad, Joseph Polish author Joseph Conrad is considered to be one of the greatest English-language novelists, a remarkable achievement considering English was not his first language. Conrad's literary works often featured a nautical setting, reflecting the influences of his early career in the Merchant Navy, and his depictions of the struggles of the human spirit in a cold, indifferent world are best exemplified in such seminal works as Heart of Darkness, Lord JimM, The Secret Agent, Nostromo, and Typhoon. Regarded as a forerunner of modernist literature, Conrad's writing style and characters have influenced such distinguished writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William S. Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, and George Orwell, among many others. Many of Conrad's novels have been adapted for film, most notably Heart of Darkness, which served as the inspiration and foundation for Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalpyse Now.