It follows the passage of strange, gentle Abel Tiffauges from submissive schoolboy to "ogre" of the Nazi school at the castle of Kaltenborn, taking us deeper into the dark heart of fascism than any novel since The Tin Drum. Until the very last page, when Abel meets his mystic fate in the collapsing ruins of the Third Reich, it shocks us, dazzles us, and above all holds us spellbound.

    These nineteen stories resonate with all the great themes that Cather staked out like tracts of fertile land: the plight of people hungry for beauty in a country that has no room for it; the mysterious arc of human lives; and the ways the American frontier transformed the strangers who came to it, turning them imperceptibly into Americans. In these fictions, Cather displays her vast moral vision, her unerring sense of place, and her ability to find the one detail or episode that makes a closed life open wide in a single exhilarating moment.

    These pieces, written mostly before McCullers was nineteen, provide invaluable insight into her life and her gifts and growth as a writer. The collection also contains the working outline of “The Mute,” which became her best-selling novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. As new generations of readers continue to discover her work, Carson McCullers’s celebrated place in American letters survives more surely than ever. Edited by McCullers’s sister and with a new introduction by Joyce Carol Oates, The Mortgaged Heart will be an inspiration to writers young and old.

    As puppet master, Julius artfully plays on the human tendency to embrace drama and intrigue and to prefer the distraction of confrontations to the difficult effort of communicating openly and honestly.

    But in fact, he was on his way from one life and one identity to another: for having worked his passage as ship's boy in the Mary of Barrashaw and earned his keep in Lord Southampton's news, he found himself an apprentice in the company of actors known as the Lord Chamberlain's players. The playhouse was a new and absorbing world, into which Nicholas entered wholeheartedly, though still with a double load of secrets - for among the players only Will knew of his connection with Marlowe, and not even Will knew that the connection was not once of kinship but founded on sheer chance.The Player's Boy is Antonia Forest's first historical novel, but she shows herself as much at home in the 1590s as in the 1960s. The plot is as exciting, the characterization as sharp, the dialogue as entertaining as in her contemporary stories, and she also gives a fascinating picture of England and the English theatre at the end of the great Elizabethan age.

    In her late teens she escaped from her respectable middle-class home to enter the bohemian world of the Slade School of Art and the artistic and intellectual circles centred on Bloomsbury and Garsington. At the age of twenty-two she met Lytton Strachey. He was a homosexual and an intellectual; she detested her own femininity and had been haphazardly educated. Nevertheless, they formed a deeply affectionate relationship which survived their sexual difficulties, separations, and infidelities until Strachey's death. Three months later, unable to continue life alone, Carrington shot herself.Despite her suicide, Carrington was not made for melancholy or tragedy. She was warm-hearted and fiecely loyal to her friends; she fizzed with vitality. Her bubbling imaginatin could make an adventure out of gooseberry-picking or a drama out of the behaviour of her cats. Her letters and diaries, punctuated by enchanting drawings, testify to the childlike exuberence of spirit that retains its power to captivate. Michael Holroyd placed her among the great letter-writers, not because of the famous people she mentions but because of her evocative, unselfconscious literary power: 'Love, loneliness, beauty, elation and harrowing despair are what she wrote about with such freshness and immediacy...It is because she carried her instincts so miraculously intact from childhood into adult life that Carrington is unique'Superbly edited by David Garnett, this book constitutes one of the most candid, entertaining, and moving autobiographies ever written.

    When her great-uncle died she was left a lonely cottage near the village of Nethersham with its hills and beech woods. Ivy liked the country, she had gipsy blood which made her fearless, independent and utterly content with the company of her dog, rescued unknown to the law from his undeserving owners. Ivy wanted nothing of the outside world but she could not cut herself off completely. One visitor at least was welcome: the runaway boy Mike who came in from the freezing night to share her fire. Any stray, any sick of suffering creature went straight to her heart.

    With a real life personality as blah as the leaf rakes in the hardware store where he works, he's of no interest to anyone. When handed a script, however, he asks, "Who am I this time?" and on the stage he becomes the role he plays. It can be powerful, witty or even cruel but, body and soul, Harry lives the role until the curtain falls. A girl falls in love with him but it's with the Harry who is "in character." Then she fights to keep him from his usual post-curtain collapse by trapping him into starting a new scene from a classical romance—to continue offstage!