The Complete Works


William Shakespeare - 1623
    Part 1 King Henry IV. Part 2 King Henry V King Henry VI. Part 1 King Henry VI. Part 2 King Henry VI. Part 3 King Richard III King Henry VIII Troilus and Cressida Coriolanus Titus Andronicus Romeo and Juliet Timon of Athens Julius Caesar Macbeth Hamlet King Lear Othello Anthony and Cleopatra Cymbeline Pericles Venus and Adonis Rape of Lucrece Sonnets Lover's Complaint Passionate Pilgrim Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music Phoenix and the Turtle

Homely Girl, A Life: And Other Stories


Arthur Miller - 1992
    With Homely Girl, A Life, he turns his attention to a smaller, more intimate, canvas, but one that in its deceptive delicacy still encompasses a vast range of human fears, ambitions, and desires. Janice—the eponymous homely girl—has hated her face ever since she was a child and her mother held up Ivory Snow advertisements to her, saying, "Now that is beauty." Homely she is, but also fiercely herself. Still,it is not until she falls in love with a blind musician that she feels her full nature unfold in this exquisite portrait of a woman finding a language to describe herself.Flanked by two stories also set in Manhattan, "Fame" and "Fitter's Night," Homely Girl, A Life pays homage to a city constantly reinventing itself—and to the classic Miller themes of work, honor, and identity."Chekhovian . . . deserves praising to the top of the highest skyscraper for its humanity, wit, depth" —A.N. Wilson

The Best Short Stories by Black Writers: 1899 - 1967


Langston HughesRalph Ellison - 1967
    A classic anthology of short stories by Black writers including James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright -- edited and with an introduction by Langston Hughes. Originally published in 1967, The Best Short Stories by Black Writers offers a timeless and unforgettable portrait of the tragedy, comedy, triumph, and suffering that were part of African American life from 1899 to 1967.

Jules Verne: Seven Novels (Extraordinary Voyages, #1 & 3 & 4 & 6 & 7 & 11 & 12)


Jules Verne - 1975
    Collecting:Five Weeks in a Balloon,Around the World in Eighty Days,A Journey to the Center of the Earth,From the Earth to the Moon,Round the Moon,Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,The Mysterious Island.This omnibus offers a unique compilation of seven of Vernes Voyages, stories in which he extrapolated developing technology and invention into marvellous fiction.This volume offers readers a generous introduction to Jules Verne, whose books are as alive today as they were for readers new to the ideas expressed in them during his time.This edition of the text is exquisitely bound in bonded-leather, with distinctive gilt edging and an attractive silk-ribbon bookmark. Decorative, durable, and collectable, these books offer hours of pleasure to readers young and old and are an indispensable cornerstone for any home library.

Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times


Neil Astley - 2002
    Auden, Maya Angelou, Billy Collins, Louise Gluck, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Rita Dove, and hundreds more-Staying Alive is a unique anthology that illuminates the vital force of our humanity, the passion of our aspirations, the power of our spirituality. From the enigma of death to the sweetness of friendship, these poems speak to life's mysteries and consolations and help us navigate the most trying times in recent memory. Staying Alive is already an astonishing best-seller in the United Kingdom, where it has gained a wide-ranging audience. This new edition, specially revised for its American readership, reconnects acionados and newcomers alike to the force of poetry, helping us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves.

The Troll Garden: Short Stories


Willa Cather - 1905
    The passions, ambitions, and pretensions, the cant and the pathos of the art world, artists, pseudo-artists, aficionados, and dilettantes—all are amply represented here in the midst of their foibles, grand affairs, and failures, drawn with great style and subtlety by a writer gathering her formidable powers. With the psychological precision of her early master Henry James and the practical wisdom and wit of her contemporary Edith Wharton, Cather shows us innocents seduced, sophisticates undone, marriages sundered, idealism compromised, and the rare soul uplifted by art.

The New Yorker Stories


Ann Beattie - 2010
    Her name became an adjective: Beattiesque. Subtle, wry, and unnerving, she is a master observer of the unraveling of the American family, and also of the myriad small occurrences and affinities that unite us. Her characters, over nearly four decades, have moved from lives of fickle desire to the burdens and inhibitions of adulthood and on to failed aspirations, sloppy divorces, and sometimes enlightenment, even grace. Each Beattie story, says Margaret Atwood, is "like a fresh bulletin from the front: we snatch it up, eager to know what’s happening out there on the edge of that shifting and dubious no-man’s-land known as interpersonal relations." With an unparalleled gift for dialogue and laser wit, she delivers flash reports on the cultural landscape of her time. Ann Beattie: The New Yorker Stories is the perfect initiation for readers new to this iconic American writer and a glorious return for those who have known and loved her work for decades.

Scary Stories Treasury


Alvin Schwartz - 1981
     Reviews "A wonderful collection of tales that range from creepy to silly to haunting. ...Gammell's drawings add just the right touch..." -- John Scieszka, Entertinment Weekly"Guaranteed to make your teeth chatter and your spine tingle." -- School Library Journal"Read these if you dare." -- The New York Times

Selected Novels and Short Stories


Patricia Highsmith - 2010
    For the reader uninitiated in the deadly world of her canon, this collection offers the first serious introduction to her remarkable range and psychological insight.With an introduction provided by Joan Schenkar—author of the acclaimed biography The Talented Miss Highsmith—Patricia Highsmith: Selected Novels and Short Stories continues the remarkable renaissance of this literary master. Even with her first novels, Highsmith tore at the very fabric of 1950s middle-class society, revealing the stark emotional brutality that lurked beneath the sunny facade of Eisenhower suburbia.Chosen by Joan Schenkar, the selections in this book—two iconic American novels and a trove of her most representative short stories—char the virtuosic range of Highsmith's voice, as she deftly leaps from suspense to horror, from biting social satire to deeply moving psychological drama. In Strangers on a Train (1950)—Highsmith's debut novel about the inspiration for the classic Hitchcock film—a casual conversation between acquaintances devolves into a tangled web of murder, desperation, and manipulation. This thriller provides as thorough an examination of guilt and obsession as can be found in contemporary literature. Highsmith's second novel, The Price of Salt (1952), is a seductive tale of sexual obsession that demonstrates the astounding versatility of Highsmith's insight into human nature, and has only recently begun to receive commensurate literary recognition. Written during the intensely creative period of her late twenties, The Price of Salt blends Highsmith's richly figured language with the then scandalous subject of lesbian love. The accompanying thirteen short stories demonstrate Highsmith's mastery of the short story form and reveal her to be as fine a craftsman as any American twentieth-century novelist.This volume introduces a new generation to the haunting fiction of one of our most underappreciated literary geniuses.

The Quincunx


Charles Palliser - 1989
    The suspension of disbelief happens easily, as the reader is led through twisted family trees and plot lines. The quincunx of the title is a heraldic figure of five parts that appears at crucial points within the text (the number five recurs throughout the novel, which itself is divided into five parts, one for each of the family galaxies whose orbits the narrator is pulled into). Quintuple the length of the ordinary novel, this extraordinary tour de force also has five times the ordinary allotment of adventure, action and aplomb.

Beauty and the Beast - All Four Versions


Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont - 1983
    There is also an image gallery showcasing over thirty classic Beauty and the Beast illustrations by Walter Crane and others.Beauty and the Beast – All Four VersionsBeauty and the Beast by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve.Beauty and the Beast by Jeanne-Marie LePrince de Beaumont.  The Singing, Springing Lark by the Brothers Grimm.Beauty and the Beast by Andrew Lang.  Image Gallery.

The Dinner Party and Other Stories


Joshua Ferris - 2017
    Eleven stories by Joshua Ferris, many of which were first published in The New Yorker, on topics such as the modern tribulations of marriage, ambition, and the fear of missing out.The dinner party --The valetudinarian --The pilot --A night out --The breeze --Ghost town choir --More abandon (or whatever happened to Joe Pope?) --Fragments --The stepchild --Life in the heart of the dead --A fair price

Consider Her Ways and Others


John Wyndham - 1956
    Odd is a tale of how an ordinary man profited from an extraordinary time paradox when he stops to help a man seemingly lost and confused, and then learns the reasons why.Stitch in Time concerns an elderly lady reflecting on a lost love and, thanks to her sons' experiments with time, finally discovering the reason why her lover abandoned her so many years ago.Oh Where, Now, is Peggy MacRafferty? is a social satire on Hollywood glamour in which a bright, individual young Irish woman becomes part of the celebrity circuit, and loses all that makes her special in the process of becoming a star.Random Quest combines romance and parallel universes.A Long Spoon is the story of how a demon is summoned by mistake and the lengths the couple that invoked him have to go to get rid of him without losing their souls in the bargain.

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories


Jeff VanderMeerWilliam Gibson - 2010
    Together these stories form The Weird, and its practitioners include some of the greatest names in twentieth and twenty-first century literature.Exotic and esoteric, The Weird plunges you into dark domains and brings you face to face with surreal monstrosities. You won't find any elves or wizards here... but you will find the biggest, boldest, and downright most peculiar stories from the last hundred years bound together in the biggest Weird collection ever assembled. The Weird features 110 stories by an all-star cast, from literary legends to international bestsellers to Booker Prize winners: including William Gibson, George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Franz Kafka, China Miéville, Clive Barker, Haruki Murakami, M. R. James, Neil Gaiman, Mervyn Peake, and Michael Chabon.