Mary is a gripping tale of youth, first love, and nostalgia--Nabokov's first novel.  In a Berlin rooming house filled with an assortment of seriocomic Russian émigrés, Lev Ganin, a vigorous young officer poised between his past and his future, relives his first love affair.  His memories of Mary are suffused with the freshness of youth and the idyllic ambience of pre-revolutionary Russia.  In stark contrast is the decidedly unappealing boarder living in the room next to Ganin's, who, he discovers, is Mary's husband, temporarily separated from her by the Revolution but expecting her imminent arrival from Russia.

    It is here that Jeeves makes his first appearance with these unremarkable words: "Mrs. Gregson to see you, sir." Years later, when Jeeves became a household name, Wodehouse said he blushed to think of the off-hand way he had treated the man at their first encounter...In the story "Extricating Young Gussie," we find Bertie Wooster's redoubtable Aunt Agatha "who had an eye like a man-eating fish and had got amoral suasion down to a fine point." The other stories are also fine vintage Wodehouse: the romance between a lovely girl and a would-be playwright, the rivalry between the ugly policeman and Alf the romeo milkman, and the plight of Henry in the title piece, The Man with Two Left Feet, who fell in love with a dance hostess.

    When eleven-year-old Henrietta arrives at the Fishers’ well-appointed house in Paris, she is prepared to spend her day between trains looked after by an old friend of her grandmother’s. Little does Henrietta know what fascinations the Fisher house itself contains–along with secrets that have the potential to topple a marriage and redeem the life of a peculiar young boy. By the time Henrietta leaves the house that evening, she is in possession of the kind of grave knowledge that is usually reserved only for adults.

    At the center of the tale is Danny, whose house, like Arthur's castle, becomes a gathering place for men looking for adventure, camaraderie, and a sense of belonging. These "knights" are paisanos, men of mixed heritage, whose ancestors settled California hundreds of years before. Free of ties to jobs and other complications of the American way of life, they fiercely resist the corrupting tide of honest toil in the surrounding ocean of civil rectitude.As Steinbeck chronicles their deeds--their multiple loves, their wonderful brawls, their Rabelaisian wine-drinking--he spins a tale as compelling and ultimately as touched by sorrow as the famous legends of the Round Table, which inspired him.

    Volume 2. Introduction / by Loren D. Estleman --The hound of the Baskervilles --The valley of fear --His last bow : The adventure of Wisteria Lodge : The singular experience of Mr. John Scott Eccles ; The tiger of San Pedro ; The adventure of the cardboard box ; The adventure of the red circle ; The adventure of the Bruce-Partington plans ; The adventure of the dying detective ; The disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax ; The adventure of the devil's foot ; His last bow --The case-book of Sherlock Holmes : The adventure of the illustrious client ; The adventure of the blanched soldier ; The adventure of the Mazarin stone ; The adventure of the three gables ; The adventure of the Sussex vampire ; The adventure of the three Garridebs ; The problem of Thor Bridge ; The adventure of the creeping man ; The adventure of the lion's mane ; The adventure of the veiled lodger ; The adventure of Shoscombe old place ; The adventure of the retired colourman.

    If a novelist's first duty is to tell the truth, then the author has done his duty with unflinching courage. Intimacy gives us the thoughts and memories of a middle-aged writer on the night before he walks out on his wife and two young sons for of a younger woman. A very modern man, without political convictions or religious beliefs, he vaguely hopes to find fulfillment in sexual love. No one is spared Kureishi's cold, penetrating gaze or lacerating pen. "She thinks she's feminist, but she's just bad-tempered," the unnamed narrator says of his abandoned wife. A male friend advises him, "Marriage is a battle, a terrible journey, a season in hell, and a reason for living." At the heart of Intimacy is this terrible paradox: "You don't stop loving someone just because you hate them." Male readers will wince with recognition at the narrator's hatred of entrapment and domesticity, and his implacable urge towards freedom, escape, even loneliness. Female readers may find it a truly horrific revelation. Kureishi is only telling it like it is, in staccato sentences of pinpoint accuracy. By far the author's best yet: a brilliant, devastating work. --Christopher Hart, Amazon.co.uk

    It tells the story of Cécile, who leads a carefree life with her widowed father and his young mistresses until, one hot summer on the Riviera, he decides to remarry - with devastating consequences. In A Certain Smile Dominique, a young woman bored with her lover, begins an encounter with an older man that unfolds in unexpected and troubling ways. These two acerbically witty and delightfully amoral tales about the nature of love are shimmering masterpieces of cool-headed, brilliant observation.

    In her sweetly vibrant Mississippi drawl, Ms. Welty deftly draws the listener in to the uproariously multilayered "Why I Live at the P.O.," the spontaneous "Powerhouse" and the insightful voice of women's truths in "Petrified Man." Ms. Welty's reading brings immediacy and resonance to these wonderful tales.

    See the sample for the complete and navigable table of contents.

    It is goodbye to a Berlin wild, wicked, breathtaking, decadent beyond belief and already -- in the years between the wars -- welcoming death in through the door, though more with a wink than a whimper.~from the back cover

    Dumas transforms minor historical figures into larger- than-life characters: the Comte d’Artagnan, an impetuous young man in pursuit of glory; the beguilingly evil seductress “Milady”; the powerful and devious Cardinal Richelieu; the weak King Louis XIII and his unhappy queen—and, of course, the three musketeers themselves, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, whose motto “all for one, one for all” has come to epitomize devoted friendship. With a plot that delivers stolen diamonds, masked balls, purloined letters, and, of course, great bouts of swordplay, The Three Musketeers is eternally entertaining.

    While holding its audience with the gripping tension of a detective thriller, it is also a philosophical play about social conscience and the crumbling of middle class values. Time and the Conways and I Have Been Here Before belong to Priestley's 'time'plays, in which he explores the idea of precognition and pits fate against free will. The Linden Tree also challenges preconceived ideas of history when Professor Linden comes into conflict with his family about how life should be lived after the war.

    Her father, a famous musician, dies, and she is raised in the Paris Opera House with his dying promise of a protective angel of music to guide her. After a time at the opera house, she begins hearing a voice, who eventually teaches her how to sing beautifully. All goes well until Christine's childhood friend Raoul comes to visit his parents, who are patrons of the opera, and he sees Christine when she begins successfully singing on the stage. The voice, who is the deformed, murderous 'ghost' of the opera house named Erik, however, grows violent in his terrible jealousy, until Christine suddenly disappears. The phantom is in love, but it can only spell disaster.Leroux's work, with characters ranging from the spoiled prima donna Carlotta to the mysterious Persian from Erik's past, has been immortalized by memorable adaptations. Despite this, it remains a remarkable piece of Gothic horror literature in and of itself, deeper and darker than any version that follows.

    A pregnant mother's plans for the future unravel at the hospital; a travelling salesman learns the consequences of an almost-missed exit on the motorway in the newspaper the next morning; while a perfect date is spoilt by a single act of thoughtlessness. In those crucial moments Gavalda demonstrates her almost magical skill in conveying love, lust, longing, and loneliness. Someone I Loved is a hauntingly intimate look at the intolerably painful, yet sometimes valuable consequences that adultery can have on a marriage and the individuals involved. A simple tale, yet long in substance, Someone I Loved ends like most great love affairs, forever leaving you wanting just one more moment.

    However, it was these early stories that first earned her a reputation as a writer with "the liveliest imagination and most delicate style of her time." Influenced by Joyce, Proust, and the theories of William James, Bergson, and Freud, she strove to write a new fiction that emphasized the continuous flow of consciousness, time's passage as both a series of sequential moments and a longer flow of years and centuries, and the essential indefinability of character.Readers can discover these and other aspects of her influential style in the eight stories collected here, among them a delightful, feminist put-down of the male intellect in "A Society" and a brilliant and sensitive portrayal of nature in "Kew Gardens." Also included are "An Unwritten Novel," "The String Quartet," "A Haunted House," "Blue & Green," "The Mark on the Wall," and the title story.In recent years, Woolf's fiction, feminism, and high-minded sensibilities have earned her an ever-growing audience of readers. This splendid collection offers those readers not only the inestimable pleasures of the stories themselves, but an excellent entrée into the larger body of Woolf's work.