Flanagan, a grand-scale promoter in the P. T. Barnum vein, organizes a cross-country footrace from Los Angeles to New York, with a purse of $150,000 for the winner. Two thousand runners from around the world gather to participate in the grueling trek, which takes them through mountains, deserts, plains, and cities, forcing some friends and some alliances, tempered of course by the intense competition of the situation. Only a portion of the novel is set in Illinois, but organized fisticuffs in Springfield and organized crime in Chicago provide interesting and lively entertainment, along with period views of those cities.

    They till the rough soil and sleep in the same bed, touched only occasionally by the advances of the twentieth century.In depicting the lives of Benjamin and Lewis and their interactions with their small local community Chatwin comments movingly on the larger questions of human experience.

    There is Mark Ainger, the vicar, who introduces his sermons with remarks like ‘Those of you who are familiar with the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.’ His wife Sophia with her cat, ‘I feel sometimes that I can’t reach Faustina as I’ve reached other cats.’ Rupert Stonebird, anthropologist and eligible bachelor. The well-bred Ianthe Broome who works at the library and forms an unsuitable attachment with a young man there. The sharp-tongue Mervyn Cantrell, chief librarian, who complains that ‘when books have things spilt on them it is always bottled sauce or gravy of the thickest and most repellent kind rather than something utterly exquisite and delicious.’ There is also Daisy Pettigrew, the vet’s sister, another obsessional cat person, and Sister Dew who bears a strong resemblance to Sister Blatt in Excellent Women.

    The title character of Monsignor Quixote is a village priest, elevated to the rank of monsignor through a clerical error, who travels to Madrid accompanied by his best friend, Sancho, the Communist ex-mayor of the village, in Greene's lighthearted variation on Cervantes.

    Prynne is Britain's leading late Modernist poet. His austere yet playful poetry challenges our sense of the world, not by any direct address to the reader but by showing everything in a different light, enacting slips and changes of meaning through shifting language. When his Poems was first published in 1999, it was immediately acclaimed as a landmark in modern poetry. This expanded edition includes four later collections only previously available in limited editions.

    These diaries chronicle the last 30 years of his life, from his wartime concert tours through his private and professional depression in the 1950s to his triumphant reemergence and knighthood in the 1960s and '70s. Compulsive reading ... what Coward has to say about other people is light-hearted, witty, often shrewd, totally without malice ... his final entertainment for everyone's pleasure are these diaries. - Sunday Times A constant delight. A goldmine of gossip with a cast of a thousand stars. - Guardian

    Sherlock Holmes strives to destroy Professor Moriarty who is at the bottom of half the evil in London while the criminal genius vows the same for the detective.

    In the hairdressing salon, he was an expert with the tools of his trade. But back at home with his mother, it was quite a different matter. He didn't know how to deal with women since he was a prototype late developer. But after Joan's party, he would never be the same again...

    Much new information about Hardy has since become available, often in volumes edited or co-edited by Millgate himself, and many established assumptions have been challenged and revolutionized by scholarly research. In this extensively revised, fully reconsidered, and considerably-expanded new edition Millgate, the world's leading Hardy scholar, draws not only upon these new materials but upon an exceptional understanding of Hardy gained from long immersion in the study of his life and work. Many large and small aspects of Hardy's life are here freshly illuminated, including his family background, his fumbling self-education as a poet, his difficult relations with his first wife and hers with his family, his sexual infatuations, his secret collaborations with aspiring women writers, his clandestine composition of his own official biography, and the memory-invoking techniques by which he sustained his remarkable creativity into extreme old age. Thorough, authoritative and eminently readable, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited will become the standard life of Hardy for a new generation.

    Full color illustrations throughout.

    An important feature of this book is its carefully annotated bibliographies. The bibliographies and the text may be used independently; both have been prepared to complement and reinforce each other.

    She shows how these animate a pervasive Victorian vision of a mobile female outcast with divine and demonic powers. Fear of such disruptive, self-creating figures, Auerbach argues, produces the approved ideal of the dutiful, family-bound woman. The awe they inspire associates them with characters in literature, the only vehicles of immortality in whom most Victorians could unreservedly believe.Auerbach looks at a wonderful variety of sources: Svengali, Dracula, and Freud; poets and major and minor novelists Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and Ruskin; lives of women, great and unknown; Anglican sisterhoods and Magdalen homes; bardolatry and the theater; Pre-Raphaelite paintings and contemporary cartoons and book illustrations. Reinterpreting a medley of fantasies, she demonstrates that female powers inspired a vivid myth central to the spirit of the age.

    Mr Storey's greatest strength is his eye for social detail' - The TimesThe Contractor: 'A subtle and poetic parable about the nature and joy of skilled work, the meaning of community and the effect of its loss' - Observer The Restoration of Arnold Middleton: 'There is a distinction, and even a power, in this play, which comes from facing honestly the perplexities that accompany the encroachment of a fantasy life on everyday experience' - Edwin Morgan The Farm: Few writers today 'see so vividly, think so intelligently, command so much sheer understanding of people and society' - The Times Literary Supplement

    It includes "Lizzie Leigh," "The Old Nurse's Story," "Half a Life-time Ago," "Lois the Witch," "The Crooked Branch," "Curious, if True," and "Cousin Phillis."

    Louis Post-Dispatch"Thanks to Marcus's arduous labor of selection, we have here a living, breathing evocation of the early feminist and socialist movements in England as recorded by a highly opinionated participant." --Jessica Mitford"The Young Rebecca reflects [West's] consuming interest in feminist and socialist issues. Quite apart from their technical excellence, these articles are remarkable because they were produced by a girl barely out of her teens, and because many of them read as if they were written last Tuesday." --The Atlanta Journal..". a fierce and funny scourge of establishment figures... her prose sparkles... " --Book World, The Washington PostJane Marcus brings together some of Rebecca West's early journalistic writings, collected here for the first time, which reveal West's passionate responses to political and literary events as well as her experience in the suffrage campaign. Included are articles from The Freewoman, The Clarion, and the Daily News, among others.