Munro) stands alongside Anton Chekhov and O Henry as a master of the short story. His extraordinary stories are a mixture of humorous satire, irony and the macabre, in which the stupidities and hypocrisy of conventional society are viciously pilloried. This collection includes Sredni Vastar and The Unrest Cure. 'We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other married couples they sometimes live apart'[Description from back cover]

    This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university who knows better than most that “there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.” Kingsley Amis’s scabrous debut leads the reader through a gallery of emphatically English bores, cranks, frauds, and neurotics with whom Dixon must contend in one way or another in order to hold on to his cushy academic perch and win the girl of his fancy.More than just a merciless satire of cloistered college life and stuffy postwar manners, Lucky Jim is an attack on the forces of boredom, whatever form they may take, and a work of art that at once distills and extends an entire tradition of English comic writing, from Fielding and Dickens through Wodehouse and Waugh. As Christopher Hitchens has written, “If you can picture Bertie or Jeeves being capable of actual malice, and simultaneously imagine Evelyn Waugh forgetting about original sin, you have the combination of innocence and experience that makes this short romp so imperishable.”

    This giftable edition of Dickens’s 1843 work will delight those who already know the perennial classic, as well as any collector of beautiful case-bound books.Additionally, this collector’s edition will include shorter, lesser-known works by famous authors from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each story and poem has been lovingly selected to celebrate the heart of the season and to gently remind readers of the true meaning of Christmas.

    They are easier to fight for than principles'In Casino Royale, the first of Fleming's 007 adventures, a game of cards is James Bond's only chance to bring down the desperate SMERSH agent Le Chiffre. But Bond soon discovers that there is far more at stake than money.Live and Let Die'You start to die the moment you are born'Live and Let Die, Ian Fleming's second 007 novel, takes Bond from Harlem to Jamaica in a frenzied hunt for the deadly gangster Mr Big and his macabre network of associates.

    Chapman's fine new edition has, among its other merits, the advantage of waking the Jane Austenite up.... The novels continue to live their own wonderful internal life...freshened and enriched by contact with the life of facts. His illustrations are beyond all praise.--E.M. Forster, Abinger Harvest.This beautiful set provides the definitive text of Austen's six great comic masterpieces and her minor works (the latter include three high-spirited efforts written at about age fifteen; a charming fragment, The Watsons, which has been thought to be a sketch for Emma; and a tantalizing fragment, Sanditon, written in the last year of her life). All six volumes feature splendid early 19th-century illustrations as well as Chapman's detailed explanatory notes. Chapman has collated all the editions published in the author's lifetime and previously unpublished manuscripts, establishing an authoritative text that retains the punctuation, the spelling, and division into volumes of the originals. In addition, at the end of each work he supplies notes on textual matters and appendixes on such matters as the modes of address, or characters, or carriages and travel, as these seem warranted by the text. Additional changes have been incorporated by Mary Lascelles.

    NOTES ABOUT To Kill a MockingbirdNOT the book To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

    In this toasted tomorrow, the highly-mechanized Puffy Products is bent on producing the supremely lightest loaf. The story is what happens if bread isn't just airy, but pumped full of lighter-than-air helium. Leiber (Ships to the Stars) didn't often bake up such a souffle of spoof, but he's a master in the kitchen. And "Bread Overhead" has just enough to say about human nature to be filling, besides.

    It has a biographical Preface by Lear himself, and concludes with some delightful 'heraldic' sketches of his cat, Foss.

    Her thoughts are taken up with the costumes she is making for the church school play, by the hopelessness of preaching to the poor and by debts she cannot pay in 1930s Depression England. Suddenly her routine shatters and Dorothy finds herself down and out in London. She is wearing silk stockings, has money in her pocket and cannot remember her name. Orwell leads us through a landscape of unemployment, poverty and hunger, where Dorothy's faith is challenged by a social reality that changes her life.

    In these stories, four writers—all exiles from revolutionary Russia—explore four deaths in a world in which old certainties have crumbled.

    Because once you hand over your life to the dice, anything can happen. Entertaining, humorous, scary, shocking, subversive, The Dice Man is one of the cult bestsellers of our time.

    But they should never have stolen Levon’s Ride.Levon Cade returns in this relentless novella of retribution.Levon and his daughter Merry are on the run. When their SUV is taken off a mall parking lot, it’s up to Levon to find it. The car means nothing to him but the million dollars in cash and uncut diamonds that are hidden in it mean freedom for Levon and his little girl. He uses his skills and courage to uncover a widespread network of thieves and invite the wrath of a local gang.More of the remorseless violence and high-speed action that readers have come to expect from Chuck Dixon. Includes five illustrations by legendary comic book artist and illustrator Butch Guice.Jaye Manus, Editor

    A small-town 1940s America of restrictive social pressures and foreclosed opportunities provides the novel’s background.The publication of the hilarious Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) was a cultural event that turned Roth into a reluctant celebrity. The confession of a bewildered psychoanalytic patient thrust through life by his unappeasable sexuality yet held back by the iron grip of his unforgettable childhood, Portnoy unleashed Roth’s comic virtuosity and opened new avenues for American fiction.In Our Gang (1971), described by Anthony Burgess as a “brilliant satire in the real Swift tradition,” Roth effects a savage takedown of the administration of Richard Nixon (who figures here as Trick E. Dixon). Written before the revelations of the Watergate scandal, Our Gang continues to resonate as a broad and outraged response to the clownish hypocrisy and moral theatrics of the American political scene.The Kafkaesque excursion The Breast (1972) introduces David Kepesh in the first volume of a trilogy that continues with The Professor of Desire (1977) and The Dying Animal (2001). The Breast prompted Cynthia Ozick to remark, “One knows when one is reading something that will permanently enter the culture.”Publisher’s series: Library of America #158

    Take in the atmosphere of the Great White Way in its heyday at a little speakeasy called Good Time Charley's. Here are thirty-two of Damon Runyon's best-loved, most "Runyonesque" stories, each woven around the mobsmen, chorus girls, gamblers, and racetrack hustlers of the Broadway he knew and loved. Runyon captures with an acute eye and ear the colorful lives and language of a bygone era, one that lives on in our imagination—and on stage.

    As in her acclaimed novels The Siege and A Spell of Winter, world-class storyteller Helen Dunmore shows us with subtlety and humor precisely who her characters are and why we should care for them. In each taut, agile tale, they grow to surprise, concern, and move us as they negotiate situations that are often both mundane and bizarre: a cafeteria cook confronts her Polish pen pal in a meeting that is unexpectedly intense; a divorced mother gains insight from a parking meter; a boastful writer is put in his place in spectacular fashion; and in a chilling future, conception is ruthlessly controlled by the government. In several stories a soulful, curious woman named Ulli takes up residence in the reader's imagination -- stumbling across a strangely magnetic collector of religious icons, contemplating a youthful pregnancy, and remembering a troubled lover. In Ice Cream, Dunmore reveals both her poet's ear for the concise and piercing potentialities of language and the novelist's ambition of scope, proving her status as "a master of the shorter form" (The Sunday Telegraph). "Spellbinding ... She captures a moment in time and leaves us reeling at the echoes." -- Michael McLoughlin, The Irish News "Cool, elegant, and beautifully controlled, the stories collected in Ice Cream display Dunmore's virtuosity of language." -- Pamela Norris, The Independent on Sunday "All the senses are vibrantly alive in these stories." -- Katie Owen, The Sunday Telegraph