This story of three closely related Oxfordshire communities - a hamlet, the nearby village and a small market town - is based on the author's experiences during childhood and youth. It chronicles May Day celebrations and forgotten children's games, the daily lives of farmworkers and craftsmen, friends and relations - all painted with a gaiety and freshness of observation that make this trilogy an evocative and sensitive memorial to Victorian rural England.With a new introduction by Richard Mabey

    Middlemarch, Eliot’s most famous work, paints a rich and complex portrait of English society. In Silas Marner, an embittered man retreats from the outside world, thinking only of work and money. Then his wealth is stolen, and a young foundling comes into his life and changes everything. Also included: the short story “Amos Barton.”

    Every word tells, & the number of unusually stirring incidents is legion, while the plot is phenomenal in its strength, merit & ingeniousness.

    This fascinating catalog of the comic relates the ironic and ludicrous adventures of a noted (but mysterious) English travel-book writer whose reported “death” throws the London literary world into a tizzy. Anthony Powell is also the author of O, How the Wheel Becomes It! and Venusberg.

    Click the excerpt link to read a complete short story.Here is an unprecedented fiction debut that is cause for celebration. Growing up in a family that valued the art of storytelling and the power of oral history, Thomas Steinbeck now follows in his father's footsteps with a brilliant story collection. Down to a Soundless Sea resonates with the rich history and culture of California, recalling vivid details of life in Monterey County from the turn of the century through the 1930s. Steinbeck accomplishes an amazing feat: his stories have the feel of classic literature, but his haunting voice, forceful narrative drive, and dazzling imagery are unmistakably his own. In seven stories, Steinbeck traces the fates and dreams of an eccentric cast of characters, from sailors and ranchers, to doctors and immigrants—as each struggles to carve out a living in the often inhospitable environment of rocky cliffs, crashing surf, and rough patches of land along the California coast and the Big Sur. In "Blind Luck," a wayward orphan finds his calling at sea, only to learn that life must concede to the whims of authority and the ravages of nature. In "Dark Watcher," with the country at the start of the Great Depression, a professor craves a plausible discovery to boost his academic standing—and encounters the Indian myth of a shadowed horsemen that may ruin his career. "An Unbecoming Grace" tracks the route of a country physician who cares for an ill-tempered cur—but feels more concern for the well-being of the patient's beleaguered young wife. The collection concludes with "Sing Fat and the Imperial Duchess of Woo," a novella that follows the tragic love story between a young apothecary and the woman he hopes to marry. Deeply felt and richly imagined, full of compelling drama and historical authenticity, Down to a Soundless Sea heralds the arrival of a bold new voice in fiction. Thomas Steinbeck has written stories as memorable and rugged as the coastline that inspired them.

    As two armies march, Commander Vimes faces unpleasant foes who are out to get him … and that’s just the people on his side. A great stage adaptation by Stephen Briggs of Terry Pratchett’s best-selling novel.Terry Pratchett has sold 27 million books worldwide. Stephen Briggs is his chosen stage adaptor.

    Since publication of The Outsider and Others in 1939, his work has been published in many parts of the world, widely anthologised, and filmed. His books include The Survivor and Others, The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Doom That Came to Sarnath, Fungi from Yuggoth and Other Poems, The Tomb and Other Tales, At the Mountains of Madness, The Lurker at the Threshold (Lovecraft and Derleth) and The Lurking Fear. Lovecrat was born and lived most of his life in Providence, Rhode Island.1."Foreword", by August Derleth2."Providence"3."On a Grecian Colonnade in a Park"4."Old Christmas"5."New England Fallen"6."On a New England Village Seen by Moonlight"7."Astrophobos"8."Sunset"9."To Pan"10."A Summer Sunset and Evening"11."To Mistress Sophia Simple, Queen of the Cinema"12."A Year Off"13."Sir Thomas Tryout"14."Phaeton"15."August"16."Death"17."To a Youth"18."My Favorite Character"19."To Templeton and Mount Monadnock"20."The Poe-et's Nightmare"21."Lament for the Vanished Spider"22."Regnar Lodbrug's Epicedium"23."Little Sam Perkins"24."Drinking Song from the Tomb"25."The Ancient Track"26."The Eidolon"27."The Nightmare Lake"28."The Outpost"29."The Rutted Road"30."The Wood"31."The House"32."The City"33."Hallowe'en in a Suburb"34."Primavera"35."October"36."To a Dreamer"37."Despair"38."Nemesis"39."Yule Horror"40."To Mr. Finlay, Upon His Drawing for Mr. Bloch's Tale, 'The Faceless God'"41."Where Once Poe Walked"42."Christmas Greetings to Mrs. Phillips Gamwell—1925"43."Brick Row"44."The Messenger"45."To Klarkash-ton, Lord of Averoigne"46."Psychopompos"47."The Book"48."Pursuit"49."The Key"50."Recognition"51."Homecoming"52."The Lamp"53."Zaman's Hill"54."The Port"55."The Courtyard"56."The Pigeon-Flyers"57."The Well"58."The Howler"59."Hesperia"60."Star Winds"61."Antarkos"62."The Window"63."A Memory"64."The Gardens of Yin"65."The Bells"66."Night Gaunts"67."Nyarlathotep"68."Azathoth"69."Mirage"70."The Canal"71."St. Toad's"72."The Familiars"73."The Elder Pharos"74."Expectancy"75."Nostalgia"76."Background"77."The Dweller"78."Alienation"79."Harbour Whistles"80."Recapture"81."Evening Star"82. "Continuity"Cover Illustration: Gervasio Gallardo

    So too are his abiding themes: the madness of war, the vanity of human striving, and the social costs of technological innovation.Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano (1952), is the story of Dr. Paul Proteus, chief engineer at the Ilium Works, an electronics company in upstate New York. Ill at ease with himself and his changing times, Proteus must choose sides in a looming civil war that threatens the brave new world he has helped to create. A kind of postwar Metropolis, Player Piano is at once a witty satire on the culture of General Electric headquarters, where Vonnegut once worked as a publicist, and a profound meditation on the dignity and necessity of work.Set on Earth, Mars, Mercury, and the moons of Saturn, The Sirens of Titan (1959) is a vertiginous ride down a funnel in space-time with a trio of stuffed shirts spoiling for their pratfalls: Winston Niles Rumfoord, a patrician New Englander and paragon of style; his beautiful touch-me-not wife, Beatrice; and Malachi Constant, the world’s luckiest, wealthiest man. Are they really what they imagine themselves to be, the perfected products of a benevolent universe? Or does somebody up there despise them? Only Salo, the gentleman-robot from the planet Tralfamadore, knows for sure.In 1961 a German American named Howard W. Campbell, Jr.—the Tokyo Rose of the Third Reich—is discovered in Manhattan by a team of Nazi hunters and brought to Jerusalem to stand trial. Mother Night (1962) presents Campbell’s prison-cell confessions, revealing him to be a double agent who infiltrated the highest echelons of the Nazi propaganda ministry in order to broadcast intelligence to the Allies. But as he awaits his date with justice, Campbell faces an even more rigorous trial in the court of his own conscience.Rounding out the volume are six of Vonnegut’s best science fiction stories, including “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” “EPICAC,” “Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow,” and “Harrison Bergeron,” the fantasy that skewered “political correctness” before there was a name for it.

    This anthology has two main objectives: to introduce students to a wide range of poetry in English from the last 400 years, and to provide them with guidance on how to approach poetry examinations. The poems are divided into six collections, not by theme or by historical period, but as satisfying small anthologies of twenty-two poems each. Clear guidance is given on what is expected in an essay for a poetry examination, and actual answers are reproduced which help the student analyse what kind of response gets good marks and why.

    English author and critic, member of Bloomsbury group and friend of Virginia Woolf who achieved fame through his novels, which include: Room with a View, Maurice, A Passage to India, and Howard's End. The Celestial Omnibus is a collection of short-stories Forster wrote during the prewar years, most of which were symbolic fantasies or fables. Contents: The Story of a Panic; The Other Side of the Hedge; The Celestial Omnibus; Other Kingdom; The Curate's Friend; and The Road from Colonus. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.

    He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster." Thus begins Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark; this, the author tells us, is the whole story except that he starts from here, with his characteristic dazzling skill and irony, and brilliantly turns a fable into a chilling, original novel of folly and destruction. Amidst a Weimar-era milieu of silent film stars, artists, and aspirants, Nabokov creates a merciless masterwork as Albinus, an aging critic, falls prey to his own desires, to his teenage mistress, and to Axel Rex, the scheming rival for her affections who finds his greatest joy in the downfall of others. Published first in Russian as Kamera Obskura in 1932, this book appeared in Nabokov's own English translation six years later. This New Directions edition, based on the text as Nabokov revised it in 1960, features a new introduction by Booker Prize-winner John Banville.

    A young woman visits her father following his nervous breakdown, and a devoted sister is profoundly unsettled by the sermon her brother insists on reciting. Whether in childhood or Vietnam, in memory or the eternal present, these people are revealed in the extenuating, sometimes extreme circumstances of everyday life, and in the complex consequences of their decisions—that, for instance, can bring together an innocent inner-city youth and a little girl attacked, months earlier, by a dog in a wintry park. Yet each story, however crucial, is marked by Mr. Wolff’s compassionate understanding and humor.In short, fiction of dazzling emotional range and absolute authority.

    In each of these tales Margaret Atwood deftly illuminates the single instant that shapes a whole life: in a few brief pages we watch as characters progress from the vulnerabilities of adolescence through the passions of youth into the precarious complexities of middle age.  By superimposing the past on the present, Atwood paints interior landscapes shaped by time, regret, and life's lost chances, endowing even the banal with a sense of mystery.  Richly layered and disturbing, poignant at times and scathingly witty at others, the stories in Wilderness Tips take us into the strange and secret places of the heart and inform the familiar world in which we live with truths that cut to the bone.Contents:True trash --Hairball --Isis in darkness --The bog man --Death by landscape --Uncles --The age of lead --Weight --Wilderness tips --Hack Wednesday.

    Typee is a fast-moving adventure tale, an autobiographical account of the author's Polynesian stay, an examination of the nature of good and evil, and a frank exploration of sensuality and exotic ritual.The 100 Greatest Masterpieces of American Literature a limited edition collection is published under the auspices of The American Revolution Bicentennial Administration

    She has been called “an American virtuoso of the short story form” (Salon) and “one of the quiet giants . . . of American fiction” (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Now, for the first time, Davis’s short stories will be collected in one volume, from the groundbreaking Break It Down (1986) to the 2007 National Book Award nominee Varieties of Disturbance. The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is an event in American letters.