Author Biography: A. R. Ammons has been awarded the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, among many other honors. He lives in Ithaca, New York.

    What is even more astonishing, and what this selection of stories from across his entire career reveals, is the way that his talent grew and developed over time. The work he did toward the end of his long writing life is even better than that which marked its splendid beginnings. The forty stories collected here range across a surprising variety of subjects and techniques. Here are his superb war stories, “Mary Postgate,” “The Gardener,” and “The Drums of the Fore and Aft,” as well as his famous forays into horror in “The Mark of the Beast,” science fiction in “With the Night Mail,” and the ghost story in “The House Surgeon.” “The Man Who Would Be King” is an unforgettable adventure tale, “‘Love-o’-Women’” and “Without Benefit of Clergy” reveal his insight into love and passion, and “Baa Baa, Black Sheep” is a searing revisiting of Kipling’s childhood trauma. From the nightmarish allegory of “The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes” and the mystical visions in “The Bridge-Builders” to the brilliant portrait of obsession and sacrifice in his masterpiece, “The Wish House,” these stories showcase Kipling’s remarkable narrative gifts.

    Known as one of the greatest poets of the Restoration, he wrote and published popular satirical and bawdy poetry. This complete collection of his poetry presented in this paperback edition by Filiquarian Publishing, is a classic and should be read by those interested in the writings of John Wilmot, and satire writings throughout history. You can't go wrong with classic poems such as, "Signior Dildo," "By All Love's Soft, Yet Mighty Powers," and "A Satyre Against Mankind."

    "On gray days when most modern poetry seems one dull colorless voice speaking through a hundred rival styles, one turns to Stevie Smith and enjoys her unique and cheerfully gruesome voice. She is a charming and original poet," commented Robert Lowell about the book that introduced Stevie to American readers, her Selected Poems (New Directions, 1964). The Selected won her many enthusiasts, but it was not until the release of Hugh Whitemore’s film Stevie in 1981 that her poetry found a wider audience and sent that little book repeatedly back to press. The title of Miss Smith’s first published collection (London, 1937) was A Good Time Was Had By All, and indeed that is what her poetry, embroidered by her delightful, apposite doodles, provides. It brings us too into the company of wit, irony, and, as Brendan Gill remarked, "images of joy and terror." A Newsweek reviewer wrote, "Even in the lightest of her verse, the briefest epigram, there is a resonance, the reverberation of a triangle, if not a gong."

    Thady will defend his masters to the end, but eventually his naivety and blind loyalty cause him to ignore the warning signs as the family's excesses lead them to ruin. This volume also includes Ennui, the entertaining 'confessions' of the Earl of Glenthorn, a bored, spoiled aristocrat. Desperate to be free from 'the demon of ennui', Glenthorn's quest for happiness takes him through violence and revolution, and leads to intriguing twists of fate. Both novels offer a darkly comic and satirical exposé of the Irish class system, and a portrait of a nation in turmoil.

     Born in 1554, Sir Philip Sidney was hailed as the perfect Renaissance patron, soldier, lover, and courtier, but it was only after his untimely death at the age of thirty-one that his literary accomplishments were truly recognized. This collection ranges more widely through Sidney's works than any previous volume and includes substantial parts of both versions of the Arcadia, The Defence of Poesy and the whole of the sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella. Supplementary texts, such as his letters and the numerous elegies which appeared after his death, help to illustrate the whole spectrum of his achievements, and the admiration he inspired in his contemporaries.

    It relates the story of a young dreamer and English soldier, Edward Waverley, who was sent to Scotland in 1745. He journeys North from his aristocratic family home, Waverley-Honour, in the south of England (alleged in an English Heritage notice to refer to Waverley Abbey in Surrey) first to the Scottish Lowlands and the home of family friend Baron Bradwardine, then into the Highlands and the heart of the 1745 Jacobite uprising and aftermath.

    Praised by his contemporaries and emulated by his successors, Charles Olson (1910-1970) was declared by William Carlos Williams to be "a major poet with a sweep of understanding of the world, a feeling for other men that staggers me." This complete edition brings together the three volumes of Olson's long poem (originally published in 1960, 1968, and 1975) in an authoritative version.

    Religio Medici is a fascinating, witty and intimate exploration of his views on faith and tolerance, while substantial selections from Pseudodoxia Epidemica display Browne's breadth of knowledge and omnivorous curiosity in his account of common errors in a startling array of subjects including sciences, history, literature and philosophy. Hydriotaphia or 'Urn Buriall' is an intriguing meditation on death and the desire for immortality, The Garden of Cyrus considers the mysterious order to be found in nature, and A Letter to a Friend and the aphoristic Christian Morals provide profound spiritual guidance to readers.

    Trotsky wrote, `Certainly Blok is not one of us, but he came towards us. And that is what broke him.' Pasternak said, `He is as free as the wind.'

    Under the direction of Stephen Greenblatt, General Editor, the editors have reconsidered all aspects of the anthology to make it an even better teaching tool.

    News From Nowhere, one of the most significant English works on the theme of utopia, is the tale of William Guest, a Victorian who wakes one morning to find himself in the year 2102 and discovers a society that has changed beyond recognition into a pastoral paradise, in which all people live in blissful equality and contentment. A socialist masterpiece, News From Nowhere is a vision of a future free from capitalism, isolation and industrialisation. This volume also contains a wide selection of Morris's writings, lectures, journalism and letters, which expand upon the key themes of News From Nowhere.

    This is the first edition to present the novel as it originally appeared, with indications of the changes Carlyle made to later editions.

    This richly varied collection of observation, fancy and fiction shows the London he knew so intimately at its best and worst - its streets, theatres, inns, pawnshops, law courts, prisons, omnibuses and the river Thames - in honest and visionary descriptions of everyday life and people. Through pen portraits that often anticipate characters from his great novels, we see the condemned man in his prison cell, garrulous matrons, vulgar young clerks and Scrooge-like bachelors, while Dickens's powers for social critique are never far from the surface, in unflinching depictions of the vast metropolis's forgotten citizens, from child workers to prostitutes. A startling mixture of humour and pathos, these Sketches reveal London as wonderful terrain for an extraordinary young writer.Sketches is a remarkable achievement, and looks towards Dickens's giant novels in its profusion of characters, its glimpses of surreal modernity and its limitless fund of pathos and comic invention.

    And few episodes in postwar literature have the legendary stature of Hughes's romance with, and marriage to, the great American poet Sylvia Plath.The poems in Birthday Letters are addressed (with just two exceptions) to Plath, and were written over a period of more than twenty-five years, the first a few years after her suicide in 1963. Some are love letters, others haunted recollections and ruminations. In them, Hughes recalls his and Plath's time together, drawing on the powerful imagery of his work--animal, vegetable, mythological--as well as on Plath's famous verse.Countless books have discussed the subject of this intense relationship from a necessary distance, but this volume--at last--offers us Hughes's own account. Moreover, it's a truly remarkable collection of poems in its own right.