Each volume offers an inviting mix of classics and less familiar pieces, complemented by concise genre introductions, short headnotes and annotations, brief author biographies, and a glossary of terms.The Readers also include access to innovative writing tips, study and review material, and much more at LitWeb and Norton Literature Online.

    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.

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    Anderson has cleared away the dross and shown us the golden roots of fantasy before it became a genre.”–Michael Moorcock, author of The Eternal ChampionMany of today’s top names in fantasy acknowledge J.R.R. Tolkien as the author whose work inspired them to create their own epics. But which writers influenced Tolkien himself? In a collection destined to become a classic in its own right, internationally recognized Tolkien expert Douglas A. Anderson, editor of The Annotated Hobbit, has gathered the fiction of the many gifted authors who sparked Tolkien’s imagination. Included are Andrew Lang’s romantic swashbuckler “The Story of Sigurd,” which features magic rings and a ferocious dragon; an excerpt from E. A. Wyke-Smith’s The Marvelous Land of Snergs, about creatures who were precursors to Tolkien’s hobbits; and a never-before-published gem by David Lindsay, author of A Voyage to Arcturus, a novel that Tolkien praised highly both as a thriller and as a work of philosophy, religion, and morality.In stories packed with magical journeys, conflicted heroes, and terrible beasts, this extraordinary volume is one that no fan of fantasy or Tolkien should be without. These tales just might inspire a new generation of creative writers.

    This rich treasury includes Tolkien's most beloved short fiction plus his essay on fantasy. Publisher's Note Tolkien's Magic Ring, by Peter S. Beagle The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son Tree and Leaf On Fairy-Stories Leaf by Niggle Farmer Giles of Ham The Adventures of Tom Bombadil The Adventures of Tom Bombadil Bombadil Goes Boating Errantry Princess Mee The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon The Stone Troll Perry-the-Winkle The Mewlips Oliphaunt Fastitocalon Cat Shadow-bride The Hoard The Sea-Bell The Last Ship

    With a bias toward realism editors Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks have selected fiction that “tells a story”–and tells it with a masterful handling of language, situation, and insight.But what is so special about this volume is that it mirrors our age, our concerns, and our lives. Whether it’s the end of a marriage, as in Bobbie Ann Manson’s “Shiloh,” or the struggle with self-esteem and weight in Andre Dubus’s “The Fat Girl,” the 36 works included her probe issues that give us that “shock of recognition” that is the hallmark of great art—wonderful, absorbing fiction that will be read and reread for decades to come.

    In the retelling, Olympus becomes small-town Olinger High School; Chiron is George Caldwell, a science teacher there; and Prometheus is Caldwell’s fifteen-year-old son, Peter. Brilliantly conflating the author’s remembered past with tales from Greek mythology, John Updike translates Chiron’s agonized search for relief into the incidents and accidents of three winter days spent in rural Pennsylvania in 1947. The result, said the judges of the National Book Award, is “a courageous and brilliant account of a conflict in gifts between an inarticulate American father and his highly articulate son.”

    Each story contains the common elements of the gothic tale--a warped sense of time, a claustrophobic setting, a link to archaic modes of thought, and the impression of a descent into disintegration. Yet taken together, they reveal the progression of the genre from stories of feudal villains amid crumbling ruins to a greater level of sophistication in which writers brought the gothic tale out of its medieval setting, and placed it in the contemporary world. Bringing together the work of such writers as Eudora Welty, Thomas Hardy, Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joyce Carol Oates, and Jorge Luis Borges, The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales presents a wide array of the sinister and unsettling for all lovers of ghost stories, fantasy, and horror.

    Tales of shadows and voices in the dark from the likes of H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Nathaniel Hawthorne and William Hope Hodgson are cast with previously unpublished stories by some of the best writers of horror today.A dazzling collection of the most gripping tales of horror, vividly told."Ecdysis", by Rebecca J. Alfred"The Damned Thing", by Ambrose Bierce"Beyond the Wall", by Ambrose Bierce"Mirror's Keeper", by Michael Bondies"The Watcher by the Threshold", by John Buchan"The Dying Art", by Glen Damien Campbell"The Yellow Sign", by Robert W. Chambers"Breach", by Justin Coates"The Dead Smile", by F. Marion Crawford"The Screaming Skull", by F. Marion Crawford"The Child's Story", by Charles Dickens"The Leather Funnel", by Arthur Conan Doyle"In Search of a New Wilhelm", by John H. Dromey"Leonora", by Elise Forier Edie"A Game of Conquest", by David A. Elsensohn"Thing in the Bucket", by Eric Esser"The Murdered Cousin", by Sheridan Le Fanu"The Grey Woman", by Elizabeth Gaskell"Worth the Having", by Michael Paul Gonzalez"Extraneus Invokat", by Ed Grabianowski"The Three Strangers", by Thomas Hardy"Young Goodman Brown", by Nathaniel Hawthorne"The Gateway of the Monster", by William Hope Hodgson"The Challenge From Beyond", by Robert E. Howard, Frank Belknap Long, H. P. Lovecraft, A. Merritt, and C. L. Moore"The Man in the Ambry", by Gwendolyn Kiste"Start With Color", by Bill Kte'pi"The Rocking-Horse Winner", by D. H. Lawrence"The Magnificat of Devils", by James Lecky"The Dunwich Horror", by H. P. Lovecraft"The Call of Cthulu", by H. P. Lovecraft"The Horia", by Guy de Maupassant"The Woman of the Wood", by A. Merritt"The Vampire", Jan Neruda"The Masque of the Red Death", by Edgar Allan Poe"The Premature Burial", by Edgar Allan Poe"Trial and Error", by Frank Roger"The Mortal Immortal", by Mary Shelley"The Body Snatcher", by Robert Louis Stevenson"Dracula's Guest", by Bram Stoker"Blessed Be the Bound", by Lucy Taylor"Dead End", by Kristopher Triana"Justified", by DJ Tyrer"Afterward", by Edith Wharton"Deep-sixed Without a Depth Gauge", by Andrew J. Wilson"The Dew of Heaven, Like Ashes", by William R. D. Wood

    These nostalgic stories, filled with all the wit and wisdom of L.M. Montgomery, take us back to a time when letters held not only news of friends and family, but the power to change lives.

    Kipling is considered one of England's greatest writers, but was born in Bombay. He was educated in England, but returned to India in 1882, where he began writing fantasy and supernatural stories set in his native continent: "The Phantom Rickshaw," "The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes," and his most famous horror story, "The Mark of the Beast" (1890). This masterwork collection, edited by Stephen Jones (Britain's most accomplished and acclaimed anthologist) for the first time collects all of Kipling's fantastic fiction, ranging from traditional ghostly tales to psychological horror.

    Written between the 1920s and 1950s, these sixty-five tales—eleven of which have been translated into English for the first time—display all the shades of Nabokov's imagination. They range from sprightly fables to bittersweet tales of loss, from claustrophobic exercises in horror to a connoisseur's samplings of the table of human folly. Read as a whole, The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov offers an intoxicating draft of the master's genius, his devious wit, and his ability to turn language into an instrument of ecstasy.The Wood-SpriteRussian Spoken HereSoundsWingstrokeGodsA Matter of ChanceThe SeaportRevengeBeneficenceDetails of A SunsetThe ThunderstormLa VenezianaBachmannThe DragonChristmasA Letter That Never Reached RussiaThe FightThe Return of ChorbA Guide to BerlinA Nursery TaleTerrorRazorThe PassengerThe DoorbellAn Affair of HonorThe Christmas StoryThe Potato ElfThe AurelianA Dashing FellowA Bad DayThe Visit to the MuseumA Busy ManTerra IncognitaThe ReunionLips to LipsOracheMusicPerfectionThe Admiralty SpireThe LeonardoIn Memory of L.I. ShigaevThe CircleA Russian BeautyBreaking the NewsTorpid SmokeRecruitingA Slice of LifeSpring in FialtaCloud, Castle, LakeTyrants DestroyedLikMademoiselle OVasiliy ShishkovUltima ThuleSolus RexThe Assistant ProducerThat in Aleppo OnceA Forgotten PoetTime and EbbConversation Piece, 1945Signs and SymbolsFirst LoveScenes From the Life of A Double MonsterThe Vane SistersLance

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    Cimmeria poem1 The Phoenix on the Sword 19322 The Frost-Giant's Daughter 19763 The God in the Bowl 19524 The Tower of the Elephant 19335 The Scarlet Citadel 19336 Queen of the Black Coast 19347 Black Colossus 19338 Iron Shadows in the Moon 19349 Xuthal of the Dusk 193310 The Pool of the Black One 193311 Rogues in the House 193412 The Vale of Lost Women 196713 The Devil in Iron 1934

    Nature, man and human history are reflected on in the verse of English and American poets and such prose works as the Gettysburg Address and the Declaration of Independence.