Pig snatching and the eminent destruction of Blandings Castle makes for a rollicking story with Uncle Fred, at his shining best in the springtime, right at the center of it.Contains "Uncle Fred in the Springtime", "Uncle Dynamite" and "Cocktail Time".

    While he has garnered acclaim as a novelist, Bellow's shorter works prove equally strong. Primarily set in a sepia-toned Chicago, characters (mostly men) deal with family issues, desires, memories, and failings--often arriving at humorous if not comic situations. In the process, these quirky and wholly real characters examine human nature. The narrative is straightforward, with deftly handled shifts in time, and the prose is concise, sometimes pithy, with equal parts humor and grace. In "Looking for Mr. Green," Bellow describes a relief worker sized up by tenants: "They must have realized that he was not a college boy employed afternoons by a bill collector, trying foxily to pass for a relief clerk, recognized that he was an older man who knew himself what need was, who had more than an average seasoning in hardship. It was evident enough if you looked at the marks under his eyes and at the sides of his mouth." This collection should appeal both to those familiar with Bellow's work and to those seeking an introduction. --Michael Ferch

    There are over seven hundred letters in this impressive collection, dating from Larkin's late teens until close to his death at the age of sixty-three in 1985. Early letters to school friends, including the writer Kingsley Amis, form a portrait of the young artist, full of jazz, literature, and obscenities. Later correspondents include the novelist Barbara Pym (whose fictional portraits of genteel English country life Larkin so admired), Robert Conquest, Andrew Motion, and Julian Barnes.In his Introduction, Anthony Thwaite writes: "What is remarkable, for all the masks he put on, is how consistently Larkin emerges, whoever he is writing to . . . [The letters] are an informal record of the lonely, gregarious . . . intolerant, compassionate, eloquent, foul-mouthed, harsh and humorous Philip Larkin, who was not only one of the finest poets of our time but also a compulsive and entertaining letter-writer."

    Written by two well-known scholars in the field of literary study, this well-respected text puts an emphasis on the individual contributors to the development of literary criticism, from Plato and Aristotle to the present.

    After capturing a hawk in order to join a secret club, Jim rejects club membership and arranges a new life for the hawk.

    Drawing on a number of current literary theories (but avoiding most of their jargon), Attebery makes a case for fantasy as a significant movement within postmodern literature rather than as a simple exercise of nostalgia. Attebury examines recent and classic fantasies by Ursula K. Le Guin, John Crowley, J.R.R. Tolkien, Diana Wynne Jones, and Gene Wolfe, among others. In both its popular and postmodern incarnations, fantasic fiction exhibits a remarkable capacity for reinventing narrative concentions. Attebery shows how plots, characters, settings, storytelling frameworks, gender divisions, and references to cultural texts such as history and science are all called into question the moment the marvelous is admited into a story.

    The publication of this revised third edition of Ritual and Other Stories reflects the continued interest in Machen's work, and collects together his more elusive short fiction. Through the publication of Ritual and its companion 'best of' volume Tales of Horror and the Supernatural, Tartarus has now reissued all Machen's short stories in accessible form.As R.B. Russell writes in his new Introduction, 'the great strength of Ritual is that it spans Machen's career and thus reveals his development as a writer'. As well as two early pieces from the 1880s, Ritual contains from the 1890s stories that compare well with Machen's better-known decadent work, such as The Great God Pan. These include the exquisite prose-poem 'Rus in Urbe' (1890), and the stories from the Ornaments in Jade collection, written in the 1890s but not published until 1924. Machen's much underrated later work is represented by, amongst others, 'The Tree of Life' (1936), 'one of the most sympathetic stories Machen ever wrote', and the title story 'Ritual', which although written in 1937 'could have been penned at any time in his career, and is undeniably Machen at his best'.Ritual & Other Stories contains:The Priest and the Barber, The Spagyric Quest of Beroaldus Cosmopolita, The Town of Long Ago, Candletime, Cidermas, Over the Gate, Of the Isle of Shadows, A Further Account of the Academy of Lagado, Tales from Barataria, Sir John's Chef, Rus in Urbe, By the Brook, The Autophone, The Brook Farm, A Remarkable Coincidence, A Double Return, A Wonderful Woman, The Lost Club, An Underground Adventure, Jocelyn's Escape, The Red Hand, The Rose Garden, The Turanians, The Idealist, Witchcraft, The Ceremony, Psychology, Torture, Midsummer, Nature, Holy Things, The Young Man in the Blue Suit, The Soldiers' Rest, The Monstrance, The Dazzling Light, The Little Nations, The Men from Troy, The Light That Can Never Be Put Out, Drake's Drum, A New Christmas Carol, 7B Coney Court, Munitions of War, The Gift of Tongues, The Islington Mystery, Johnny Double, The Cosy Room, Awaking, Opening the Door, The Compliments of the Season, The Dover Road, The Exalted Omega, The Tree of Life, Out of the Picture, Change, Ritual.

    " What passing-bells for those who die as castle? - Only the monstrous anger of the guns.''This edition contains all Wilfred Owen's war poetry with an Introduction and Notes on Owen as a poet by Dominic Hibberd.It also includes an Historical Introduction & Study Guide written for Australian students by William Hovey, formerly History Co-ordinator at Santa Sabina College, Strathfield NSW.Mr Hovey provides an Historical Introduction to the western front and relates Owen's poetry to the Australian troops in the trenches and to the factors that motivated them to enlist.The Study Guide has a full list of books and other resources relevant to the study of the Australian experience of World War One and a selection of assignments and activities for student use.