In the foothills of the French Alps the narrator meets a shepherd who has quietly taken on the task of planting one hundred acorns a day in an effort to reforest his desolate region. Not even two world wars can keep the shepherd from continuing his solitary work. Gradually, this gentle, persistent man's work comes to fruition: the region is transformed; life and hope return; the world is renewed.

    The second chapter considers the way in which the West was seen at the time by residents of Central and Eastern Europe, while the third outlines the practice of Ketman, the act of paying lip service to authority while concealing personal opposition, describing seven forms applied in the people's democracies of mid-20th century Europe.The four chapters at the heart of the book then follow, each a portrayal of a gifted Polish man who capitulated, in some fashion, to the demands of the Communist state. They are identified only as Alpha, the Moralist; Beta, The Disappointed Lover; Gamma, the Slave of History; and Delta, the Troubadour. However, each of the four portraits were easily identifiable: Alpha is Jerzy Andrzejewski, Beta is Tadeusz Borowski, Gamma is Jerzy Putrament and Delta is Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński.The book moves toward its climax with an elaboration of "enslavement through consciousness" in the penultimate chapter and closes with a pained and personal assessment of the fate of the Baltic nations in particular.

    D. Salinger published in April 1953. It includes two of his most famous short stories, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and "For Esmé – with Love and Squalor". (Nine Stories is the U.S. title; the book is published in many other countries as For Esmé - with Love and Squalor, and Other Stories.)The stories are:"A Perfect Day for Bananafish""Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut""Just Before the War with the Eskimos""The Laughing Man""Down at the Dinghy""For Esmé – with Love and Squalor""Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes""De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period""Teddy"

    The story follows the exploits of a Greek: Captain Michalis and his blood brother, Nurey Bey, a Turk, through war, love , friendship, hatred and a backdrop of the island of Crete with all its beauty, drama, joy and sadness. This book was unanimously praised by critics worldwide as the work of a master with characters that come to life and destined to live forever.

    Earbrass begins writing his new novel. Weeks ago he chose its title at random from a list of them he keeps in a little green note-book. It being tea-time of the 17th, he is alarmed not to have thought of a plot to which The Unstrung Harp might apply, but his mind will keep reverting to the last biscuit on the plate. So begins what the Times Literary Supplement called "a small masterpiece." TUH is a look at the literary life and its "attendant woes: isolation, writer's block, professional jealousy, and plain boredom." But, as with all of Edward Gorey's books, TUH is also about life in general, with its anguish, turnips, conjunctions, illness, defeat, string, parties, no parties, urns, desuetude, disaffection, claws, loss, trebizond, napkins, shame, stones, distance, fever, antipodes, mush, glaciers, incoherence, labels, miasma, amputation, tides, deceit, mourning, elsewards. You get the point. Finally, TUH is about Edward Gorey the writer, about Edward Gorey writing The Unstrung Harp. It's a cracked mirror of a book, and it's dedicated to RDP or Real Dear Person.

    Apparently 'a fairly ordinary tale about the destruction of a happy marriage' (Nina Bawden) yet 'it makes compulsive reading' in its description of an ordinary family struck by disaster when the husband, in a moment of weak, mid-life vanity, runs off with a French girl. Dorothy Whipple is a superb stylist, with a calm intelligence in the tradition of Elizabeth Gaskell.

    Cross Damon is a man at odds with society and with himself, a man who hungers for peace but who brings terror and destruction wherever he goes.As Maryemma Graham writes in her Introduction to this edition, with its restored text established by the Library of America, "The Outsider is Richard Wright's second installment in a story of epic proportions, a complex master narrative designed to show American racism in raw and ugly terms ... The stories of Bigger Thomas ... and Cross Damon bear an uncanny resemblance to many contemporary cases of street crime and violence. There is also a prophetic note in Wright's construction of the criminal mind as intelligent, introspective, and transformative."In addition to the Introduction by Maryemma Graham, this edition includes a notes section by Arnold Rampersad."

    The first entry included here is dated 1918 and the last, three weeks before her death in 1941. Between these points of time unfolds the private world??—??the anguish, the triumph, the creative vision??—??of one of the great writers of the twentieth century. “A Writer’s Diary . . . is Virginia Woolf . . . The whole vibrates with the ups and downs of a passionate relationship . . . in the intensities, variations, alarms and excursions, panics and exaltations of her relationship to her art.”??—??New York Times Book ReviewEdited and with a Preface by Leonard Woolf.

    Through pithy and poetic chapter-moments - "spring landscape: detail," "death of grandmother," "first beau," "low yellow," "everybody will be surprised" - Maud Martha grows up, gets married, and gives birth to a daughter. Maud Martha, a gentle woman with "scraps of baffled hate in her, hate with no eyes, no smile..." who knows "while people did live they would be grand, would be glorious and brave, would have nimble hearts that would beat and beat," is portrayed with exquisitely imaginative and tender detail by Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize

    There he befriends the young, bright Andrew, a conscientious objector serving as an orderly. As they find solace and companionship together in the idyllic surroundings of the hospital, their friendship blooms into a discreet, chaste romance. Then one day, Ralph Lanyon, a mentor from Laurie’s schoolboy days, suddenly reappears in Laurie’s life, and draws him into a tight-knit social circle of world-weary gay men. Laurie is forced to choose between the sweet ideals of innocence and the distinct pleasures of experience. Originally published in the United States in 1959, The Charioteer is a bold, unapologetic portrayal of male homosexuality during World War II that stands with Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar and Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories as a monumental work in gay literature.

    This best-selling novel, first published in 1953 to wide acclaim by author Grubb, (who like Powers lived in Clarksburg, West Virginia), served as the basis for Charles Laughton's noir classic . Renamed "Harry Powell," the lead character in this book, with LOVE and HATE tattooed on his fingers, is remembered as one of the creepiest men in book and cinema history.

    The one book Black Lizard never published, it's the dream-like tale of a man after a jailbreak, who meets up with the woman of his dreams... and his nightmares. Phenomenal work of the period, ranking with the best efforts of Thompson, Woolrich, Goodis et al.

    In Saul Bellow’s masterly translation, the title story follows the exploits of Gimpel, an ingenuous baker who is universally deceived but who declines to retaliate against his tormentors. Gimpel and the protagonists of the other stories in this volume all inhabit the distinctive pre–World War II ghettos of Poland and, beyond that, the larger world created by Singer’s unforgettable prose.

    Nine of his finest stories were selected by Mishima himself for translation in this book; they represent his extraordinary ability to depict, with deftness and penetration, a wide variety of human beings in moments of significance. Often his characters are sophisticated modern Japanese who turn out to be not so liberated from the past as they had thought.In the title story, "Death in Midsummer," which is set at a beach resort, a triple tragedy becomes a cloud of doom that requires exorcising. In another, "Patriotism," a young army officer and his wife choose a way of vindicating their belief in ancient values that is as violent as it is traditional; it prefigured his own death by seppuku in November 1970. There is a story in which the sad truth of the relationship between a businessman and his former mistress is revealed through a suggestion of the unknown, and another in which a working-class couple, touching in their simple love for each other, pursue financial security by rather shocking means.Also included is one of Mishima's "modern Nō plays," remarkable for the impact which its brevity and uncanny intensity achieve. The English versions have been done by four outstanding translators: Donald Keene, Ivan Morris, Geoffrey Sargent, and Edward Seidensticker.Photograph on back cover by T. Kamiya; cover design by David Ford

    When Kafka's literary executor, Max Brod, published the diaries in 1948, he omitted these notebooks--which include short stories, fragments of stories and other literary writings--because, he wrote, -notations of a diary nature, dates, are found in them only as a rare exception.- The Blue Octavo Notebooks have thus remained little known and yet are among the most characteristic and brilliantly gnomic of Kafka's work. In addition to otherwise unpublished material, the notebooks contain some of Kafka's most famous aphorisms within their original context. This edition of the English translation has been corrected with reference to the German text for certain omissions and discrepancies of sequence. Followers of Kafka will require this book and will find it most rewarding.- --Library Journal.

    His images are beautiful and exact, but until now no translator had ever been able to make his characters speak unaffectedly on the American stage. Michael Dewell of the National Repertory Theatre and Carmen Zapata of the Bilingual Foundation of the Arts have created these versions expressly for the stage. The result, both performable and readable, has been thoroughly revised for this edition, which is introduced by Christopher Maurer, general editor of the Complete Poetical Works of García Lorca.

    With penetrating logic, Yogananda reveals the spiritual yearning that lies behind all human striving. Fulfillment of that ultimate longing for transcendence, he explains, is attainable through a science as universal and practical as the sciences on which we rely for material knowledge and attainments.

    With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.

    Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

    It is the chronicle of a six months collecting trip to the West African colony of British Cameroon - now Cameroon - (Dec 1947 - Aug 1948) - that Durrell made with the highly regarded aviculturist and ornithologist John Yealland.Their reasons for going on the trip were twofold: "to collect and bring back alive some of the fascinating animals, birds, and reptiles that inhabit the region," and secondly, for both men to realise a long cherished dream to see Africa.Its combination of comic exaggeration and environmental accuracy, portrayed in Durrell's light, clever prose, made it a great success. It launched Durrell's career as a writer of both non-fiction and fiction, which in turn financed his work as a zookeeper and conservationist.The Bafut Beagles and A Zoo in My Luggage are sequels of sorts, telling of his later returns to the region.

    Between 1st January 1915 and her death in 1941 she regularly recorded her thoughts with unfailing grace, courage, honesty and wit. The result is one of the greatest diaries in the English language.

    Set in the 1950s, this unforgettable classic deftly evokes a tragic love affair and offers a window onto the powerful ways in which class, race, and love intersected in midcentury America.

    As its title implies, not only is it a full-length portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln but, in reality, a double biography of Abraham and his hitherto misunderstood and much maligned wife.” Harry J. Carman, The American Historical Review Many people in history have claimed that Abraham Lincoln never loved Mary Todd Lincoln, and that in fact his love was focused upon Anne Rutledge. They have claimed that his wife hurt him politically though she drove him to the Presidency, that she embarrassed him financially as well as socially and inflicted on him the agony of adjustment to her psychopathic personality. Yet, is there any truth to any of these claims? Ruth Painter Randall’s brilliant biography of Mary and Abraham Lincoln sheds new light upon their marriage and dispels the myths that have surrounded it. By using a huge quantity of material, including long-lost telegrams and letters, Randall has reconstructed what the marriage was truly like and provided a picture of Mary Lincoln without any prejudice or unsupported evidence. This book rehabilitates the reputation of Mary Lincoln and deserves to be read by all those who wish to find the truth about the remarkable relationship between Mary and her husband and the impact that she made on him throughout his years in office. “Never has such a story seemed better worth telling or better told.” Saturday Review "Out of the most searching scrutiny ever leveled on the Lincolns' family affairs comes the picture of a tempestuous yet essentially happy marriage." New York Herald Tribune "This is a very moving book. It is also a nice example of what a first-rate historian can do with a difficult subject." The New Yorker "It is a book that can be recommended without reservation: A combination of profound research and fine prose style, it meets both the requirements of the Lincoln scholar and the casual reader who is looking for a truly fascinating story." San Francisco Chronicle "A miracle of sound scholarship, graceful writing, and feminine understanding." Chicago Sunday Tribune ". . . documented fact far more absorbing than any fiction that has lately come my way." Christian Science Monitor “A passionate defense of Mary Lincoln and a revelation conclusively documented of a marriage rooted in unremitting devotion and mutual love.” Kirkus Review “a vivid portrayal of mid-nineteenth-century life in Illinois and at Washington, as it confronted a sensitive, warm-hearted, cultivated, ill-balanced personality eventually thrust into an environment beyond her powers of understanding or of self-control.” Jeannette P. Nichols, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography Ruth Painter Randall was an American biographer who focused upon the lives of the Lincoln family. Her other books include Lincoln's Sons and Colonel Elmer Ellsworth: a biography of Lincoln's friend and first hero of the Civil War. Mary Lincoln: Biography of a Marriage was first published in 1953 and Randall passed away in 1971.

    He is also known to be paranoid, spendthrift, and wayward. In sixteenth-century Prague, seat of Christendom, he rules without the ongoing assistance of the Jewish financier Mordechai Meisl.In the ghetto, the Great Rabbi and mystic seer guides his people in the uneasy cohabitation of Jew and Christian. Meanwhile, under Rudolph’s imprimatur, Meisl becomes fabulously wealthy with a hand in transactions across Europe. But his beautiful wife, Esther, also forms a unique bond with Rudolf II . . .By night under the stone bridge, she and the emperor entwine in their dreams under the guise of a white rosemary bush and a red rose. Only by severing the two plants can the Great Rabbi break the spell of forbidden love and deliver the city from the wrath of God.In this “tantalizing blend of the occult and the laughable, of chaos and divine order,” Perutz brings Old Prague to life with a cast of characters ranging from alchemists to the angel Asael, and including the likes of Johannes Kepler and the outlaw prince Wallenstein (The New York Times Book Review).

    Set in the years leading up to World War II, it is the fictionalized account of the time spent in Mallorca by the author and his wife, who experience the most unpredictable and surreal adventures, pursued all the while by Nazis and Francoists. And just as the chaos comes to seem manageable, the Spanish Civil War erupts. Drawing comparisons to Don Quixote and The Man Without Qualities, The Island of Second Sight is a novel of astonishing and singular richness of language and purpose. At once ironic and humanistic, hilarious and profoundly serious, philosophical and grotesque, The Island of Second Sight is a literary tour de force.Praise for The Island of Second Sight"A masterpiece...Fabulous in all senses of the word." —Iain Bamforth, Times Literary Supplement"A genuine work of art." —Paul Celan"[The Island of Second Sight] is comparable in profundity as well as in complexity to Mann's own Magic Mountain. It is in a class with two other massive German masterpieces...: Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil and Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities." —Allen Guttmann, Amherst Magazine"There is a widely held misconception that Germans have no sense of humor. Here is evidence to the contrary as Thelen, belatedly, through his translator, gets a chance to show the English speaking world." —Anthea Bell, Literary Review

    Hartley's finest novel, encounters a world of unimagined luxury. But when his friend's beautiful older sister enlists him as the unwitting messenger in her illicit love affair, the aftershocks will be felt for years. The inspiration for the brilliant Joseph Losey/Harold Pinter film starring Julie Christie and Alan Bates, The Go-Between is a masterpiece—a richly layered, spellbinding story about past and present, naiveté and knowledge, and the mysteries of the human heart. This volume includes, for the first time ever in North America, Hartley's own introduction to the novel.

    Southern describes the chief forms of social, political & religious organization.

    With his trend-setting Mike Hammer detective novels, Mickey Spillane shot to superstardom as one of the most notorious bestselling sensations in publishing history. This powerhouse collection includes three of the master's long-out-of-print greatest novels-together for the first time in one explosive volume:The Big KillOne Lonely NightKiss Me, DeadlyIncludes a special introduction by Shamus and Edgar Award-winner Lawrence Block

    The stories collected here range from delightfully barbed portraits of the British upper classes to an alternative ending to Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust; from a "missing chapter" in the life of Charles Ryder, the nostalgic hero of Brideshead Revisited, to a plot-packed morality tale that Waugh composed at a very tender age; from an epistolary lark in the voice of "a young lady of leisure" to a darkly comic tale of scandal in a remote (and imaginary) African outpost.The Complete Stories is a dazzling distillation of Waugh's genius-abundant evidence that one of the twentieth century's most admired and enjoyed English novelists was also a master of the short form.

    Translated from the Swedish by Anthony Barnett. P"r Lagerkvist (1891-1974) was one of Sweden's greatest, most prolific, twentieth-century novelists and short story writers. EVENING LAND is the first complete translation of Lagerkvist's ninth and final volume of poetry, the deceptively simple Aftonland (1953). An intensely private man who refused to court publicity, the author was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1951. Barnett's translation (his translation of Robert Giroux's BLANK from the French is also available at SPD) sets straight an earlier, unfinished and otherwise compromised version by W. H. Auden and Leif Sj"berg. "All things exist, only I exist no more, / everything remains, the fragrance of rain in the grass/ as I remember it and the sough of the wind through the trees, / the flight of clouds and the human heart's disquiet.// Only my heart's disquiet no longer exists"-(from "The Dead")

    

    A dystopian novel set in a perversely benevolent future in which an attempt is made to remould the identity of a so-called heretic, Professor Burden, who had, up until then, regarded himself as a loyal citizen of the State.

    They were the human reckage of World War II - the displaced persons.Waiting to receive them was a handful of workers dedicated to one of humanity's most gigantic tasks - the resettlement of more than two million people without a country

    But when the Civi War between the two parties broke out, and two years later they were old enough to take part in it, they found themselves fighting for different sides.This story tells of the last stages of the Civil War waged in the west country; and the account of the part played by Simon in the fighting makes exciting reading. Several times in the course of it he encounters Amias ; and these meetings leave him torn by conflicting loyalties. Finally the day comes when he is forced to put the strength of the friendship to the test, weighing it against his loyalty to the Parliamentarian cause.Rosemary Sutcliffe has written a compelling and unbiased story of the troubled times of the civil war, describing vividly and accurately the final campaign in the west and sharing the life and thoughts and feelings of some of the people who became involved in it."Here is an author who writes with great distinction...Simon is a book that I recommend with all my heart" - Noel Streatfield

    In Feeling and Form she did just that. It offers the reader nothing less than a systematic, comprehensive theory of art, applied in turn to painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, music, the dance, drama and film. --- from book's back cover

    But after the initial strangeness of a new life is over, life with the Kennedys gets better and better. The Kowalskis make their own young friends; Grandmother Kennedy gradually warms to the newcomers and when Hedy's aunt returns to try to claim her, new love and security keep Hedy where she is.

    I cannot promise the reader that at any point he will shake his sides with laughter, but I can promise him a wry pleasure to be derived from the skilful dissection of folly.” Bertrand Russell Professor Mmaa’s Lecture, given to a packed auditorium, deals with the habits, mentality and culture of Homo sapiens. But both the professor and his entire audience are termites; the whole story is set inside a termite mound.Naturally, Themerson’s attempt to comprehend humankind by examining how they would have been understood by insects is very funny. Termites have no sight, just a sense of smell, and can only explain their surroundings and lives through their insects’ angle on the world. The closing scene of the novel reveals what the termites have been researching and what has happened to their mound, giving the whole story an ironic twist.But this novel has much more to offer. Themerson’s heightened expertise and instinct for parodying the language and methods of scholarship, and the morals and manners of the academic world, produces a merciless and comical survey of philosophical views and attitudes. He pillories religion, language, reason and scholarship, as insect thinkers with suspiciously familiar names scuttle through the pages of the novel. A great many cases of dogmatic thinking and narrow-mindedness are exposed to ridicule. The only path that seems to earn the author’s approval is pluralism of ideas. You can see just why Bertrand Russell calls this novel a useful gospel for sceptics.Professor Mmaa’s Lecture is in the tradition of philosophical satire, whose most famous proponents are Voltaire and Swift, and is a rare incidence of light yet deep prose that can be read with great pleasure on several levels.

    Wodehouse has long stood in the forefront of contemporary writers. His name and characters have become part of the English language. Yet there are few modern authors about whom less is known or more is speculated. A gentle, unassuming man, he has sidestepped personal publicity where he could, preferring to retire to quiet backwaters where he could devote himself to his two life interests- reading and writing. And much of his writing at such moments took the form of personal letters to friends- gay, self revealing documents that disclosed better than the pen of any biographer the true nature of the man. Bill Townend- a friend of his boyhood days- was among the most regular of his correspondents, and this volume comprises a selection of the letters Wodehouse wrote to him over a period of more than thirty years. Beginning in the days when he was still struggling for recognition, the letters bridge the years to the present day. Shrewd and often deliciously funny, they tell of the people he meets, the books he is reading, and reveal the infinite care which goes into writing, rewriting and polishing of each new work that comes from his pen. The war years, life inside a German prison camp, his release from internment and the repercussions to the broadcasts he made from Germany to America form an important side of the book. Then come the post war years which show him working as prodigiously as ever, in his seventieth year.

    The book is dedicated to Tirzah Garwood (then Ravilious and later Swanzy) but the woodcuts are not by her because she had died two years before. They were done by a friend, Malcolm Ford (who, like Stella Martin Currey’s husband, taught at Colchester Royal Grammar School).These are the contents for January: there is a quotation, as there is before every month, from the British Merlin (1677), an Almanac known nowadays as Rider’s British Merlin. It starts ‘This is the Season for good husbands to lop and prune superfluous Branches and Fruit trees’ and ends: ‘The best physick is warm diet, warm Cloaths, good Fires, and a merry, honest Wife.’ Then there is a ten-page essay on ‘Books for the Family’. Of course it is now a bit out of date, but the mention of Pamela Brown, Eve Garnett and Belloc’s Cautionary Verses (among dozens of good suggestions) can never be dismissed. After this is a funny piece about a visit to the hairdresser. Next there are a few pages about a burst pipe, a cake recipe, a description of A Visit to the Tower of London, an extract from Jane Eyre and finally an extract from our own Tea with Mr Rochester.November again has an extract from the British Merlin (‘Set Crab Tree stocks to graft on’), eight pages on the art of embroidery (‘One of the loveliest and most lovable rooms I have ever seen had copies of old flower paintings and they were all embroidered in delicate stitches on very fine yellow silk… Another fascinating adventure in embroidery is to copy an old map’). Then there are suggestions for a Guy Fawkes Party (‘sausage rolls, gingerbread men, conspirator biscuits and toffee’), a quite detailed piece on ‘deciding whether you can eat the mushrooms which grow in the garden’, a recipe for the said biscuits (you cut them to look like conspirators), a short piece on visiting an art gallery with children (pick out the animals eg. the little dog in The Arnolfini Portrait, the dragon in St George and the Dragon), an extract from Elizabeth and her German Garden by our very own Elizabeth von Arnim, and finally an extract from Emma.But it was her novelist’s eye and ear that makes One Woman’s Year such a gem. In between the sometimes period details are many extremely useful pieces on dressing-up boxes, phrases to be used in thank-you letters, an extract from The Young Visiters, or which flowers to have in vases for every month of the year. One cannot imagine anyone who would not find this book both useful and endearing.

    An unusual situation gives Tracy legal guardianship of her younger sister, Tina, who is equally anxious to escape from their Aunt Martha, who sends her from one boarding school to another on an irresponsible merry-go-round of loneliness. Both girls agree that they have had the wrong kind of luxury, and being without money is their price for freedom and the chance for a wholesome, normal life.

    Translation of: Aus dem Leben eines Fauns.

    Unwisely, she is as captivated by the live man as by her dead hero.

    Volume One of The Emotional Plague of MankindIntroductionThe TrapThe Kingdom of Heaven on EarthThe Genital EmbraceSeduction into LeadershipThe Mystification of ChristThe Great Gap-Man's SittingThe March on JerusalemJudas IscariotPaul of TarsusProtecting the Murderers of ChristMocenigoToward GolgothaThe Disciples SleepGethsemaneThe Scourging'You Say It'The Silent GlowCrucifixion & ResurrectionAppendixBibliography

    The Lost Steps describes his search, his adventures, and the remarkable decision he makes in a village that appears to be truly outside history.

     Juliet, an only child, is delighted to have Ellen, or Fenny, as she becomes, as her governess. And when Fenny is introduced to Madeleine’s close friend, Lucrezia Warner and their new tutor Daniel, her life seems to take on another level of happiness. Though she is not entirely sure that his feelings for her are as strong as her feelings for him… When Juliet and her father return to London, Fenny decides to take up employment with the Warners and even though Daniel’s time with the Warners ends along with all chance of romance, Fenny’s love of Italy and her love for the children fulfils her future. Unmarried and following a series of unfortunate relationships, she finds herself content with watching the children grow up and lead their lives. But things don’t seem as idyllic as the farms, hillsides and valleys that surround them as fascism threatens the heart of Italy. As appealing as the views are, life at the villa is far from perfect…. Praise for Lettice Cooper ‘Certainly Lettice Cooper’s finest novel’ – Storm Jameson Lettice Cooper was an English writer. She began to write stories when she was seven, and studied Classics at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford graduating in 1918. Her first novel, The Lighted Room, one of ten novels written whilst she was in Yorkshire, was published in 1925. Cooper went to live with her sister in Bayswater, London, and spent a year as Associate Editor of the Time and Tide. She published twenty novels, in addition to children’s books and non-fiction, including biographies of Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson.

    Bertrand Russell, the English logician and philosopher, celebrated for his work in mathematical logic and known to a wider public for his social and political campaigns, was also a man with a great sense of humour. This socio-political alphabet, written by Russell “for the guidance of the first steps of the infant mind”, started life as a private joke in correspondence between Russell and the Themersons, who decided to publish it.Russell’s alphabet teaches far more than just the letters of the alphabet, as ‘A’ stands not for ‘apple’ but for ‘asinine: what you think’, followed by other ‘satirical letters’ such as ‘O’ for ‘objective: a delusion which other lunatics share’ and ‘L’ for ‘liberty: the right to obey the police’. Russell was delighted with the publication and said that Franciszka Themerson's drawings "heightened all the points I most wanted to make”. A satire by both the philosopher and the illustrator, the book is compelling for the simplicity of its design, and for the mix of whimsical humour in the drawings with the satirical bite of the words. As Nick Wadley has observed of another Gaberbocchus book, The Way it Walks (1954), a book of cartoons illustrated by Franciszka Themerson, “for all their appearance of naiveté, the book’s drawings are subtle, wise and funny – affectionate, ridiculous, merciless and moral all at once”. These contrasting qualities are also evident in Franciszka Themerson’s painting, her stage design, as well as her book illustration, in which whimsical playfulness often sits closely beside the savage and the grotesque.A reviewer in the Dublin Magazine, wrote about the book: “Bertrand Russell’s alphabet book is designed to improve the minds of the young in our acrimonious and utilitarian world. It will encourage them remorselessly to deflate the loftiest sentiments and neatly to undermine the blandest attitudes of relatives, theorists and reformers”. In The News Chronicle, Fredrick Laws said: "...wickedly and prettily illustrated... and designed to appeal to infant minds." The book was also published in a limited and a trade edition in 1953, and in 1954 The Good Citizen’s Alphabet was chosen by the National Book League for their Exhibition of Book Design held in London in that year.In 1962, as part of the celebrations of Russell’s 90th birthday, Gaberbocchus published Russell’s History of the World in epitome, a small booklet, offered “for use in Martian infant schools”. It consists of one sentence of nineteen words, ‘Since Adam and Eve ate the apple, man has never refrained from any folly of which he was capable”, accompanied by a drawing of Adam and Eve, a drawing of a battle scene and finally, a photograph of the mushroom cloud of Hiroshima. As with The Good Citizen’s Alphabet, simplicity of form is combined with depth of meaning, this time to an even greater degree. As Christopher Macy noted in The Humanist, “No one could say more in one sentence than Russell”. In 1970, Gaberbocchus published The Good Citizen's Alphabet and History of the World in epitome in one small volume.

    Susan's friendship with Larry, the glamorous wife of a local farmer, is one of the things that keeps her going during tough times.

    Jean-Marie buys some tiny shoes for him and there is a happy Christmas for all. Charming pictures in yellow, black & white and in full color.

    Once there, she was responsible for the destruction of two Italian cruisers and played a pivotal part in Operation Pedestal, the convoy that saved Malta from surrender. Alastair Mars writes simply and without pretension, and his words evoke the claustrophobic yet heroic world of the submariner.

    Listing the virtues of this book could go on and on; in the meantime, readers will find them for themselves." - The Guardian"One of the most sensitive and civilised of Brontë critics,Miss Margaret Lane has had the excellent idea of travelling through Mrs. Gaskell's Life, making additions and commentaries in the light of modern knowledge ... The result is an elegant and sympathetic book, beautifully illustrated with woodcuts by Joan Hassell." - Naomi Lewis, BBC"Excellent ... Adorned with charming illustrations." - Raymond Mortimer, Sunday Times

    Heartsnatcher is Boris Vian's most playful and most serious work. The main character is Clementine, a mother who punishes her husband for causing her the excruciating pain of giving birth to three babies. As they age, she becomes increasingly obsessed with protecting them, going so far as to build an invisible wall around their property.

    s/t: new edition with five additional playsThe Countess Cathleen (1892), The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), Cathleen Ni Houlihan (1902), The Pot of Broth (1904), The King's Threshold (1904), The Shadowy Waters (1911), Deirdre (1907), The Green Helmet (1910), On Baile's Strand (1904), The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919), The Hour-Glass (1914), The Unicorn from the Stars (1908), The Player Queen (1922), The Dreaming of the Bones (1919), Calvary (1920), The Cat and the Moon (1926), Sophocles' King Oedipus (1928), Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus (1934), The Resurrection (1931), The Words Upon the Window-Pane (1934), A Full Moon in March (1935), The Herne's Egg (1938), Purgatory (1939), The Death of Cuchulain (1939)

    It is here that Dymphna Cusack sets a dramatic tale of family disunion, feminine rivalries, soldiers' lusts and lovers' ecstasies.

    Fripsey's business was coming on a visit that would bear on his promotion. Marcy, the next door neighbor, gets involved to help save the day.

    It is presented with neither evidence nor judgment as to its validity. This determination is for the reader to make. Here is Richard Matheson's classic chilling, ghost story Slaughter House. Can a dead woman really come between two brothers?Slaughter House was originally published in "Weird Tales" in 1953.

    Russia's expansion into the region in the late eighteenth century brought conflict with the Ottoman Empire, creating a new area of contention between these two states, and the borderlands remained in a state of intermittent conflict until the end of the First World War. This volume, first published in 1953, discusses the four major conflicts which took place in the region during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on military strategy, the book describes in great detail battles, skirmishes and logistical problems of warfare in a mountainous and remote region. Illustrated with thirty-nine maps, it provides a wealth of information for military historians and remains an authoritative account.

    His favoured employees, invited to his country house at weekends, are envied; his children 'still rich and safe and spoiled', appear to lead a charmed existence. The success of his reputation is such that Baron believes it himself. Only Celia, his eldest daughter, knows that beneath this facade her father weaves a thread of tyranny which ensnares and damages all who come close to him- his son Tobias, whose affections disguise his sense of inferiority; Liz who struggles to meet her father's perfection; the upright Anthony Carey whom Baron regards as a touchstone of truth, and even Harry Levitt, himself a seasoned dissembler. For those who are shadowed by a man whose power rests on hypocrisy and self-deceit, inevitably become tarnished by the same qualities.