Lawrence, Chekhov and Hemingway, Bukowski's writing is passionate, extreme and has attracted a cult following, while his life was as weird and wild as the tales he wrote. This collection of short stories gives an insight into the dark, dangerous lowlife of Los Angeles that Bukowski inhabited.From prostitutes to classical music, Bukowski ingeniously mixes high and low culture in his 'tales of ordinary madness'. These are angry yet tender, humorous and haunting portrayals of life in the underbelly of Los Angeles.A .45 to pay the rent --Doing time with public enemy no. 1 --Scenes from the big time --Nut ward just east of Hollywood --Would you suggest writing as a career? --The great Zen wedding --Reunion --Cunt and Kant and a happy home --Goodbye Watson --Great poets die in steaming pots of shit --My stay in the poet's cottage --The stupid Christs --Too sensitive --Rape! Rape! --An evil town --Love it or leave it. A dollar and twenty cents --No stockings --A quiet conversation piece --Beer and poets and talk --I shot a man in Reno --A rain of women --Night streets of madness --Purple as an iris --Eyes like the sky --One for Walter Lowenfels --Notes of a potential suicide --Notes on the pest --A bad trip --Animal crackers in my soup --A popular man --Flower horse --The big pot game --The blanket

    With his traveling book wagon named Parnassus, he moves through the New England countryside of 1915 on an itinerant mission of enlightenment. Mifflin's delight in books and authors is infectious--with his singular philosophy and bright eyes, he comes to represent the heart and soul of the book world. But a certain spirited spinster, disgruntled with her life, may have a hand in changing all that. This roaring good adventure yarn is spiced with fiery roadside brawls, heroic escapes from death, the most groaning boards in the history of Yankee cookery, and a rare love story--not to mention a glimpse at a feminist perspective from the early 1900s.

    Published the same year as her first novel, Adam Bede, this overlooked work displays the gifts for which George Eliot would become famous—gritty realism, psychological insight, and idealistic moralizing. It is unique from all her other writing, however, in that it represents the only time she ever used a first-person narrator, and it is the only time she wrote about the supernatural. The tale of a man who is incapacitated by visions of the future and the cacophony of overheard thoughts, and yet who can’t help trying to subvert his vividly glimpsed destiny, it is easy to read The Lifted Veil as being autobiographically revealing—of Eliot’s sensitivity to public opinion and her awareness that her days concealed behind a pseudonym were doomed to a tragic unveiling (as indeed came to pass soon after this novella’s publication). But it is easier still to read the story as the exciting and genuine precursor of a moody new form, as well as an absorbing early masterpiece of suspense.The Art of The Novella SeriesToo short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

    Blending the miraculous with the macabre, and leavened by a mischievous gallows humor, these bewitching tales are like nothing being written in Russia-or anywhere else in the world-today.

    The most famous work by the Australian novelist and poet, For the Term of His Natural Life is a powerful tale of an Australian penal settlement, which originally appeared in serial form in a Melbourne paper.

    Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.Virtually unknown during his lifetime, Franz Kafka is now one of the world’s most widely read and discussed authors. His nightmarish novels and short stories have come to symbolize modern man’s anxiety and alienation in a bizarre, hostile, and dehumanized world. This vision is most fully realized in Kafka’s masterpiece, “The Metamorphosis,” a story that is both harrowing and amusing, and a landmark of modern literature. Bringing together some of Kafka’s finest work, this collection demonstrates the richness and variety of the author’s artistry. “The Judgment,” which Kafka considered to be his decisive breakthrough, and “The Stoker,” which became the first chapter of his novel Amerika, are here included. These two, along with “The Metamorphosis,” form a suite of stories Kafka referred to as “The Sons,” and they collectively present a devastating portrait of the modern family.Also included are “In the Penal Colony,” a story of a torture machine and its operators and victims, and “A Hunger Artist,” about the absurdity of an artist trying to communicate with a misunderstanding public. Kafka’s lucid, succinct writing chronicles the labyrinthine complexities, the futility-laden horror, and the stifling oppressiveness that permeate his vision of modern life.Jason Baker is a writer of short stories living in Brooklyn, New York.

    Originally published in 1924 and long out of print, these tales are vintage Wharton, dealing boldly with such themes as infidelity, illegitimacy, jealousy, the class system, and the condition of women in society Included in this remarkable quartet are False Dawn, The Old Maid, The Spark, and New Year's Day.

    At once nostalgic for a bygone, more innocent age and foreshadowing the turbulences of the 20th century, this wrenching novel is a triumph of bitter realism.

    The novel is full of esoteric references to the Kabbalah. The title of the book refers to an actual pendulum designed by the French physicist Léon Foucault to demonstrate the rotation of the earth, which has symbolic significance within the novel.Bored with their work, and after reading too many manuscripts about occult conspiracy theories, three vanity publisher employees (Belbo, Diotallevi and Casaubon) invent their own conspiracy for fun. They call this satirical intellectual game "The Plan," a hoax that connects the medieval Knights Templar with other occult groups from ancient to modern times. This produces a map indicating the geographical point from which all the powers of the earth can be controlled—a point located in Paris, France, at Foucault’s Pendulum. But in a fateful turn the joke becomes all too real.The three become increasingly obsessed with The Plan, and sometimes forget that it's just a game. Worse still, other conspiracy theorists learn about The Plan, and take it seriously. Belbo finds himself the target of a real secret society that believes he possesses the key to the lost treasure of the Knights Templar.Orchestrating these and other diverse characters into his multilayered semioticadventure, Eco has created a superb cerebral entertainment.

    The plot spans from 1912 to 1944. For more than half a century the book has been loved by children and adults alike. The novel has undergone more than 100 printings, including translations into other languages. Based on its story, plays have been staged and an opera has been written. The plot of the book also became the basis of two movies of the same title in 1955 and 1976. In 1995 in Pskov, the home town of the author, a monument was erected to the characters of the book and a "Two Captains" museum was opened.The real prototype for Captain Tatarinov was Lieutenant Georgii Brusilov, who in 1912 organized a privately funded expedition seeking a west-to-east Northern sea route. The steamship "St. Anna," specially built for the expedition, left Petersburg on 28 July 1912. Near the shores of Yamal peninsula it was seized by ice and carried in the ice drift to the north of the Kara Sea. The expedition survived two hard winters. Of the 14 people who left the stranded steamship in 1914, only two made it to one of the islands of Frants-Joseph Land and were spotted and taken aboard "St. Foka," the ship of the expedition of G. Y. Sedov. The ship log they had kept with them contained the most important of the scientific data, after the study of which Sedov's expedition found the previously unknown island in the Kara Sea, Vize Island. The ultimate fate of "St.Anna" and its remaining crew is still unknown. Veniamin Kaverin (1902-1989) wrote novels, short stories, fairy tales, memoirs, and biographies. In the early 1920s, Veniamin Kaverin was a member of experimental literary group "Serapionovi bratya." In 1946 his novelTwo Captains became the winner of the USSR State Literature Award.

    It is the story of Lassiter, a gunslinging avenger in black, who shows up in a remote Utah town just in time to save the young and beautiful rancher Jane Withersteen from having to marry a Mormon elder against her will. Lassiter is on his own quest, one that ends when he discovers a secret grave on Jane’s grounds. “[Zane Grey’s] popularity was neither accidental nor undeserved,” wrote Nye. “Few popular novelists have possessed such a grasp of what the public wanted and few have developed Grey’s skill at supplying it.”

    Their powers of speech are magically taken from them and instead they have only tarot cards with which to tell their tales. What follows is an exquisite interlinking of narratives, and a fantastic, surreal, and chaotic history of all human consciousness.