It appeared in two phases. A few first copies were printed and illuminated by William Blake himself in 1789; five years later he bound these poems with a set of new poems in a volume titled Songs of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.

    Lovelace, however, proves himself to be an untrustworthy rake whose vague promises of marriage are accompanied by unwelcome and increasingly brutal sexual advances. And yet, Clarissa finds his charm alluring, her scrupulous sense of virtue tinged with unconfessed desire. Told through a complex series of interweaving letters, "Clarissa" is a richly ambiguous study of a fatally attracted couple and a work of astonishing power and immediacy. A huge success when it first appeared in 1747, and translated into French and German, it remains one of the greatest of all European novels. Its rich ambiguities - our sense of Clarissa's scrupulous virtue tinged with intimations of her capacity for self-deception in matters of sex; the wicked and amusing faces of Lovelace, who must be easily the most charming villain in English literature - give the story extraordinary psychological momentum. .

    Newly designed and typeset in a modern 5.5-by-8.5-inch format by Waking Lion Press.

    Framed by a moving and dramatic account of his last illness, Author opens in the early 1880s, describing James's close friendship with an illustrator named George du Maurier and his intimate but problematic relationship with fellow American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson. At the end of the decade, Henry, worried by the failure of his books to sell, resolves to achieve fame and fortune as a playwright, while du Maurier diversifies into writing novels. The consequences that ensue mingle comedy, irony, pathos, and suspense. As Du Maurier's novel Trilby becomes the bestseller of the century, Henry anxiously awaits the opening night of his make-or-break play, Guy Domville. This event, on January 5, 1895, and its complex sequel form the climax to Lodge's absorbing novel.

    It is the first of four connected plays--including 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V--generally considered Shakespeare's finest history plays. The drama of Richard II centers on the power struggle between the grandiloquent King Richard and the plain-spoken, blunt Henry Bolingbroke, who is banished from Britain at the beginning of the play. But when Henry's father John of Gaunt dies, Richard confiscates his property with no regard to his son's rights, and Bolingbroke returns to confront the king, who surrenders his crown and is imprisoned in Pomfret Castle, where he is soon murdered. This new edition in the acclaimed Oxford Shakespeare series features a freshly edited version of the text. The wide-ranging introduction describes the play's historical circumstances, both the period that it dramatizes (the start of the "wars of the roses") and the period in which it was written (late Elizabethan England), and the play's political significance in its own time and our own. It also focuses on the play's richly poetic language and its success over the centuries as a play for the stage. Extensive explanatory notes help readers at all levels understand and appreciate the language, characters, and dramatic action and the book's lively illustrations provide a sense of the historical background and performance of the play.

    Among the famous poems featured here are “Mandalay,” “Gunga Din” “The Ballad of East and West,” and the beloved “If.”

    The experiment proved successful both in this country and in America. Two of the characters which appear in these pages -- "Rosamond," and "Uncle Joseph" -- had the good fortune to find friends everywhere who took a hearty liking to them. A more elaborately drawn personage in the story -- "Sarah Leeson" -- was, I think, less generally understood. The idea of tracing, in this character, the influence of a heavy responsibility on a naturally timid woman, whose mind was neither strong enough to bear it, nor bold enough to drop it altogether, was a favorite idea with me, at the time, and is so much a favorite still, that I privately give "Sarah Leeson" the place of honor in the little portrait-gallery which my story contains. Perhaps, in saying this, I am only acknowledging, in other words, that the parents of literary families share the well-known inconsistencies of parents in general, and are sometimes unreasonably fond of the child who has always given them the most trouble. -- Wilkie Collins, _January, 1861_

    Dorian Gray, a naive and irresistible young man, is lured by decadent Lord Henry Wotton into a life of depravity. Dorian becomes steeped in sin, but his face remains perfect, unlined - while only his portrait, locked away, reveals the blackness of his soul.

    Echoes of Waiting for Godot resound, reality and illusion mix, and where fate leads heroes to a tragic but inevitable end.

    Insel , the only novel by the surrealist master Mina Loy, is a book like no other--about an impossible friendship amid the glamorous artistic bohemia of 1930s Paris.

    It also includes a large body of his satiric or humorous occasional verse, much of which is fugitive and little known to the general reader. In addition, the volume provides the text of the surviving prose "Epiphanies, Giacomo Joyce" - the fascinating Trieste notebook that Joyce compiled while finishing "A Portrait of the Artist" and beginning "Ulysses", in which he first explored the world of his autobiographical novel.

    "[Woolf's] essays...are lighter and easier than her fiction, and they exude information and pleasure.... Everything she writes about novelists, like everything she writes about women, is fascinating.... Her well-stocked, academic, masculine mind is the ideal flint for the steel of her uncanny intuitions to strike on" (Cyril Connolly, New Yorker). Editorial Note by Leonard Woolf.

    Controversial but successful on the London stage, this play reveals the fate of a "notorious woman" in Victorian England.

    Castigated by his contemporaries for his treatment of moral, spiritual and political rebellion, and his sometimes sadistic and blasphemous subject matter, his poetry is imaginative through both classical and romantic traditions.