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.

    His nasty little prank has gone horribly wrong: he has fed his closest friend a sandwich laced with a hallucinogenic drug and the young man has fallen out of a window to his death. Consumed with guilt, Edward experiences a debilitating crisis of conscience. While Edward torments himself for not being good, his stepbrother, Stuart, a brilliant mathematics student, quits his promising scholastic career to live like a monk, devoting himself to the difficult task of becoming good. As Stuart seeks salvation, Edward searches for redemption through a reunion with his famous father, the reclusive painter Jesse Baltram. Funny and compelling, The Good Apprentice, first published in 1986*, is at once a supremely sophisticated entertainment and an inquiry into the spiritual crises that afflict the modern world.*First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin Inc. 1986

    It includes Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, The Canterville Ghost, The Sphinx Without a Secret and The Model Millionaire.Written between 1887 and 1891, at the height of his creative powers, these stories confirm Oscar Wilde’s reputation as a master storyteller in their sense of fun, quick intelligence and witty dissection of Victorian society. They also reveal his compassion for the poor and downtrodden who were so readily ignored by that age.

    But the upheavals that afflict Murakami’s characters are even deeper and more mysterious, emanating from a place where the human meets the inhuman. An electronics salesman who has been abruptly deserted by his wife agrees to deliver an enigmatic package—and is rewarded with a glimpse of his true nature. A man who has been raised to view himself as the son of God pursues a stranger who may or may not be his human father. A mild-mannered collection agent receives a visit from a giant talking frog who enlists his help in saving Tokyo from destruction. As haunting as dreams, as potent as oracles, the stories in After the Quake are further proof that Murakami is one of the most visionary writers at work today.

    The novel centres upon the hapless members of a love triangle united by their sexual obsessions and by their fascination with Catherine Tekakwitha, the 17th-century Mohawk saint. By turns vulgar, rhapsodic, and viciously witty, Beautiful Losers explores each character’s attainment of a state of self-abandonment, in which the sensualist cannot be distinguished from the saint.

    Set in northern Italy in the late eighteenth century, it concerns the decisions that must be made by Odo Valsecca, a young man of liberal ideas who inherits a dukedom during the years of the French Revolution. Forced to choose between conflicting loyalties - those to the forces of social reform with which he allied himself before he came to power, or those of the feudal tradition to which he belongs by blood - Odo must define himself.

    Sarah's writing is incredible in that she is able to write these witty, lush scenes that have you smiling along until suddenly, in a single sentence, she reaches out to break your heart.This story introduces us to one of the main characters of Unspoken, Jared Lynburn. Seeing him as the broken, dangerous, closed-off teenager that he appears to be from the outside allows us to anticipate all of the insight we'll have into his character when we get inside his head--which we will, since he's the heroine's "imaginary friend."I enjoy the contrast of Jared's loneliness in the rough streets of Hunters Point/Bayview in San Francisco and the small, strange English town Jared is headed toward, and the girl he is about to meet. But most of all, in this story, I enjoy Jared himself, a character who is a study in contrasts--pushed to such extremes of despair and fury that he's truly capable of anything and yet capable of vast kindness, gentleness and humor.Holly Black is a best-selling author of contemporary fantasy, including The Spiderwick Chronicles.

    Daphne du Maurier has instinct, with the result that every woman instinctively wants to read her." -New York Times Book ReviewMaria, Niall and Celia have grown up in the shadow of their famous parents - their father, a flamboyant singer and their mother, a talented dancer. Now pursuing their own creative dreams, all three siblings feel an undeniable bond, but it is Maria and Niall who share the secret of their parents' past affairs. Alternately comic and poignant, The Parasites is based on the artistic milieu its author knew best, and draws the reader effortlessly into that magical world.

    Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in modern literature, permitted the publication of this first volume of Miller’s famed mixture of memoir and fiction, which chronicles with unapologetic gusto the bawdy adventures of a young expatriate writer, his friends, and the characters they meet in Paris in the 1930s. Tropic of Cancer is now considered, as Norman Mailer said, "one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century."

    WATT was the beginning of Samuel Becket's post-war literary career, the fruition of the years in hiding in the Vaucluse mountains from the Gestapo, which also largely inspired WAITING FOR GODOT. But it remains, unlike the work that followed it, extremely Irish, a philosophical novel full of the grim humour that was already his trade-mark in such earlier fictions as MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS and MURPHY. The perambulations of WATT, especially in the home of the eccentric Mr. Knott, and the sketching of logic to elicit meaning, must be among the most comic inventions of modern literature. First published by the libertine Olympia Press in 1953, it has established itself as one of the most quoted and best-loved of Becket's novels. The typographical oddities and omissions are as Beckett left the text.

    From the cruel irony of 'A Member of the Family' to the fateful echoes of 'The Go-Away Bird' and the unexpectedly sinister 'The Girl I Left Behind Me', in settings that range from South Africa to the Portobello Road, Muriel Spark coolly probes the idiosyncrasies that lurk beneath the veneer of human respectability.

    Hempel, fiercely admired by writers and reviewers, has a sterling reputation that is based on four very short collections of stories, roughly fifteen thousand stunning sentences, written over a period of nearly three decades. These are stories about people who make choices that seem inevitable, whose longings and misgivings evoke eternal human experience. With compassion, wit, and the acutest eye, Hempel observes the marriages, minor disasters, and moments of revelation in an uneasy America. When "Reasons to Live, " Hempel's first collection, was published in 1985, readers encountered a pitch-perfect voice in fiction and an unsettling assessment of the culture. That collection includes "San Francisco," which Alan Cheuse in "The Chicago Tribune" called "arguably the finest short story composed by any living writer." In "At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, " her second collection, frequently compared to the work of Raymond Carver, Hempel refined and developed her unique grace and style and her unerring instinct for the moment that defines a character. Also included here, in their entirety, are the collections "Tumble Home" and "The Dog of the Marriage." As Rick Moody says of the title novella in Tumble Home, "the leap in mastery, in seriousness, and sheer literary purpose was inspiring to behold.... And yet," he continues, ""The Dog of the Marriage, " the fourth collection, is even better than the other three...a triumph, in fact." "The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel" is the perfect opportunity for readers of contemporary American fiction to catch up to one of its masters. Moody's passionate and illuminating introduction celebrates both the appeal and the importance of Hempel's work.

    His incomparable, distinct voice--often wildly humorous, always engaging--has led the New York Times to call Means "one of our most talented younger writers."

    Nancy, Dee, Kev and Celia - each has their own secret story, unknown to their fellow passengers. And of course Tom himself has his own reasons for returning home so regularly...Once again, Maeve Binchy has conjured up a cast of very human characters with real joys and real sadnesses, portrayed with her trademark wit, compassion and warmth.

    The novella tells the story of a day in the meticulously ordered life of bank security guard Jonathan Noel, who has been hiding from life since his wife left him for her Tunisian lover. When Jonathan opens his front door on a day he believes will be just like any other, he encounters not the desired empty hallway but an unwelcome, diabolical intruder . . .