Language: English, Binding: Paperback, Number of pages: 448, Publishers: British Library Publishing, Author: William Hope Hodgson, ISBN-13: 9780712355759, Date of issue: 2024
Unusually for Dickens, Hard Times is set, not in London, but in the imaginary mid-Victorian Northern industrial town of Coketown with its blackened factories, downtrodden workers and polluted environment. This is the soulless domain of the strict utilitarian Thomas Gradgrind and the heartless factory owner Josiah Bounderby. However human joy is not excluded thanks to 'Mr Sleary's Horse-Riding' circus, a gin-soaked and hilarious troupe of open-hearted and affectionate people who act as an antidote to all the drudgery and misery endured by the ordinary citizens of Coketown.
VINTAGE EARTH is a collection of novels to transform our relationship with the natural world. 'And so, with great care, he planted his hundred acorns'In 1910, while hiking through the wild lavender in a wind-swept, desolate valley in Provence, a man comes across a shepherd called Elzeard Bouffier. Staying with him, he watches Elzeard sorting and then planting hundreds of acorns as he walks through the wilderness.Ten years later, after surviving the First World War, he visits the shepherd again and sees the young forest he has created spreading slowly over the valley. Elzeard's solitary, silent work continues and the narrator returns year after year to see the miracle he is gradually creating: a verdant, green landscape that is a testament to one man's creative instinct. VINTAGE EARTH is a series of books that reveals our ever-changing relationship with the environment.These are stories old and young, set in worlds real or imagined, that allow us to explore our connection to the natural world. Transformative, wild, surprising and essential, these novels take on the most urgent story of our times.
In his pioneering treatise on education, the great French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) presents concepts that had a significant influence on the development of pedagogy in the eighteenth century, and yet many of his ideas still sound radical today. Written in reaction to the stultifying system of rote learning and memorization prevalent throughout Europe at the time, Emile is a utopian vision of child-centered education, full of the sentiments of Romanticism, a movement that Rousseau inspired. Imagining a typical boy named Emile, Rousseau creates an ideal model of one-on-one tutelage from infancy to manhood with himself as the child's mentor. As in so many of his other famous works, here, too, Rousseau asserts his main thesis that human beings are by nature good; it is only the distorting influences of civilization that have corrupted them.
As his tale begins, Orlando is a passionate young nobleman whose days are spent in rowdy revelry, filled with the colourful delights of Queen Elizabeth's court. By the close, he will have transformed into a modern, 36-year-old woman and three centuries will have passed.
A commercial and critical success when it was first published in 1931, and now considered by some to be Virginia Woolf's most ambitious novel. This new edition includes pictures and a section on Virginia Woolf's life and works.
One of the great Classics of Western Literature, Les Miserables is a magisterial work which is rich in both character portrayal and meticulous historical description. Characters such as the absurdly criminalised Valjean, the street urchin Gavroche, the rascal Thenardier, the implacable detective Javert, and the pitiful figure of the prostitute Fantine and her daughter Cosette, have entered the pantheon of literary dramatis personae. Volume 2 of 2
Part of Alma Classics Evergreen series, The Beautiful and Damned is a tragic examination of the pitfalls of greed and materialism and the transience of youth and beauty.
Jude Fawley is a rural stone mason with intellectual aspirations. Frustrated by poverty and the indifference of the academic institutions at the University of Christminster, his only chance of fulfilment seems to lie in his relationship with his unconventional cousin, Sue Bridehead. But life as social outcasts proves undermining, and when tragedy occurs, Sue has no resilience and Jude is left in despair.
"Oh, good God," he kept saying with great relish. "Good God..." 'Gooseberries' is accompanied here by 'The Kiss' and 'The Two Volodyas' - three exquisite depictions of love and loss in nineteenth-century Russia by Chekhov, the great master of the short story form. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Anton Chekhov (1860-1904). Chekhov's works available in Penguin Classics are The Steppe and Other Stories, Ward No. 6 and Other Stories, The Lady with the Little Dog and Other Stories, The Shooting Party, Plays and A Life in Letters.
In Jane Austen's first published novel, her portrait of two heroines' parallel experiences of love, loss, and hope offers a powerful analysis of how women were shaped by the claustrophobic society they had to survive. This new edition includes a new introduction, and revised notes and bibliography.
J.R.R. Tolkien famously described the Second Age of Middle-earth as a 'dark age, and not very much of its history is (or need be) told'. And for many years readers would need to be content with the tantalizing glimpses of it found within the pages of The Lord of the Rings and its appendices, including the forging of the Rings of Power, the building of the Barad-dûr and the rise of Sauron. It was not until Christopher Tolkien published The Silmarillion after his father's death that a fuller story could be told. Although much of the book's content concerned the First Age of Middle-earth, there were at its close two key works that revealed the tumultuous events concerning the rise and fall of the island of Númenor. Raised out of the Great Sea and gifted to the Men of Middle-earth as a reward for aiding the angelic Valar and the Elves in the defeat and capture of the Dark Lord Morgoth, the kingdom became a seat of influence and wealth; but as the Númenóreans' power increased, the seed of their downfall would inevitably be sown, culminating in the Last Alliance of Elves and Men. Even greater insight into the Second Age would be revealed in subsequent publications, first in Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth, then expanded upon in Christopher Tolkien's magisterial twelve-volume The History of Middle-earth, in which he presented and discussed a wealth of further tales written by his father, many in draft form. Now, adhering to the timeline of 'The Tale of Years' in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings, editor Brian Sibley has assembled into one comprehensive volume a new chronicle of the Second Age of Middle-earth, told substantially in the words of J.R.R. Tolkien from the various published texts, with new illustrations in watercolour and pencil by the doyen of Tolkien art, Alan Lee.
M. R. James's classic ghost stories are some of the finest in English, creating menace and terror in lonely country houses and remote inns. This is the only one-volume edition to include all James's published stories, an appendix of James's writings on the ghost story, and a critical introduction and notes.
Alexander the Great died at the age of thirty-three, leaving behind an empire that stretched from Greece and Egypt to India. After Alexander's death in 323 B.C. his only direct heirs were two unborn sons and a simpleton half-brother. Every long-simmering faction exploded into the vacuum of power. Wives, distant relatives and generals all vied for the loyalty of the increasingly undisciplined Macedonian army. Most failed and were killed in the attempt. For no one possessed the leadership to keep the great empire from crumbling. But Alexander's legend endured to spread into worlds he had seen only in dreams.
To celebrate its 40th anniversary, the first ever illustrated edition of this collection of tales which takes readers further into the stories told in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, featuring 18 full-colour paintings depicting scenes from the First, Second and Third Ages of Middle-earth. Unfinished Tales is a collection of narratives ranging in time from the Elder Days of Middle-earth to the end of the War of the Ring, and provides those who have read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings with a whole collection of background and new stories. The book concentrates on the realm of Middle-earth and comprises such elements as The Quest of Erebor, Gandalf's lively account of how it was that he came to send the Dwarves to the celebrated party at Bag-End; the emergence of the sea-god Ulmo before the eyes of Tuor on the coast of Beleriand; and an exact description of the military organization of the Riders of Rohan.Unfinished Tales also contains the only story about the long ages of Numenor before its downfall, and all that is known about such matters as the Five Wizards, the Palantiri and the legend of Amroth. The tales were edited by Christopher Tolkien, who provides a short commentary on each story, helping the reader to fill in the gaps and put each story into the context of the rest of his father's writings. In celebration of its 40th anniversary, this new edition features 18 stunning paintings from critically acclaimed Tolkien artists, Alan Lee, John Howe & Ted Nasmith, which reveal the three Ages of Middle-earth like never before.
A classic work that has charmed generations of readers, this collection assembles Carson McCullers' best stories, including her beloved novella "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe." A haunting tale of a human triangle that culminates in an astonishing brawl, the novella introduces readers to Miss Amelia, a formidable southern woman whose cafe serves as the town's gathering place. Among other fine works, the collection also includes "Wunderkind," McCullers' first published story written when she was only seventeen about a musical prodigy who suddenly realizes she will not go on to become a great pianist.
Unique collection of Lovecrafts best horror stories. Affordably priced and beautifully produced. Will appeal to all fans and collectors of Lovecrafts work. Fully annotated edition.
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time§§Slaughterhouse-Five , an American classic, is one of the world's great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we fear most.
Wessex Tales was the first collection of Hardy's short stories, and they reflect the experience of a novelist at the height of his powers. These seven tales, in which characters and scenes are imbued with a haunting realism, show considerable diversity of content, form and style, and range from fantasy to realism and from tragedy to comedy.
Roger Ackroyd knew too much. He knew that the woman he loved had poisoned her brutal first husband. He suspected also that someone had been blackmailing her. Now, tragically, came the news that she had taken her own life with a drug overdose. But the evening post brought Roger one last fatal scrap of information. Unfortunately, before he could finish the letter, he was stabbed to death...
This edition, published to coincide with the eightieth anniversary of the first publication in 1939, fully incorporates Joyce's manuscript amendments and includes a critical introduction by Dr Sam Slote of Trinity College Dublin."
`The Funniest writer ever to put words on paper' Hugh Laurie`I mean, if you're asking a fellow to come out of a room so that you can dismember him with a carving knife, it's absurd to tack a 'sir' on to every sentence.
Korea's most prized literary masterpiece: a Buddhist journey questioning the illusions of human life--presented in a vivid new translation by PEN/Hemingway finalist Heinz Insu Fenkl *Named one of the year's most anticipated books by The New York
Austen's hilarious early stories and sketches, now collected in one gorgeous clothbound volume Jane Austen's earliest writing dates from when she was just eleven-years-old, and already shows the hallmarks of her mature work. But it is also a product of the times in which she grew up--dark, grotesque, often surprisingly bawdy, and a far cry from the polished, sparkling novels of manners for which she became famous. Drunken heroines, babies who bite off their mothers' fingers, and a letter-writer who has murdered her whole family all feature in these highly spirited pieces. This edition includes all of Austen's juvenilia, including her "History of England" and the novella Lady Susan, in which the anti-heroine schemes and cheats her way through high society.
Language: English, Binding: Hardback, Number of pages: 288, Publishers: Flame Tree Publishing, Author: Judith John, ISBN-13: 9781839649684, Date of issue: 2022
'"Everything Flows" is as important a novel as anything written by Solzhenitsyn, and Robert Chandler's superb translation makes it a joy to read' - Antony Beevor. Ivan Grigoryevich has been in the Gulag for thirty years. Released after Stalin's death, he finds that the years of terror have imposed a collective moral slavery. He must struggle to find a place for himself in an unfamiliar world. Grossman tells the stories of those people entwined with Ivan's fate: his cousin Nikolay, a scientist who never let his conscience interfere with his career, Pinegin, the informer who had Ivan sent to the camps and Anna Sergeyevna, Ivan's lover, who tells of her involvement as an activist in the Terror famine of 1932-3. "Everything Flows" is Vasily Grossman's final testament, written after the Soviet authorities suppressed "Life and Fate". 'Vasily Grossman is the Tolstoy of the USSR' - Martin Amis.
Brand-new translation from acclaimed translator Hugh Aplin of One of the best-selling Russian classics in the UK over the last year.Includes many stories never translated into English before
From the bestselling author of Alone in Berlin, his acclaimed novel of a young couple trying to survive life in 1930s Germany'Nothing so confronts a woman with the deathly futility of her existence as darning socks'A young couple fall in love, get married and start a family, like countless young couples before them. But Lammchen and 'Boy' live in Berlin in 1932, and everything is changing. As they desperately try to make ends meet amid bullying bosses, unpaid bills, monstrous mothers-in-law and Nazi streetfighters, will love be enough?The novel that made Hans Fallada's name as a writer, Little Man, What Now? tells the story of one of European literature's most touching couples and is filled with an extraordinary mixture of comedy and desperation.It was published just before Hitler came to power and remains a haunting portrayal of innocents whose world is about to be swept away forever. This brilliant new translation by Michael Hofmann brings to life an entire era of austerity and turmoil in Weimar Germany. 'An inspired work of a great writer ...Fallada is a genius. The "Little Man" is Mr Everybody' Beryl Bainbridge'There are chapters which pluck the nerves...there are chapters which raise the spirits like a fine day in the country. The truth and variety of the characterization is superb...it recognizes that the world is not to be altered with moral fables' Graham Greene'Fallada deserves high praise for having reported so realistically, so truthfully, with such closeness to life' Herman Hesse'Fallada at his best' Philip Hensher'Performs the most astounding task, of taking us to a moment before history' Los Angeles Review of Books
In 1851, at the age of twenty-two, Tolstoy joined the Russian army and travelled to the Caucasus as a soldier. The four years that followed were among the most significant in his life, and deeply influenced the stories collected here. Begun in 1852 but unfinished for a decade, "The Cossacks" describes the experiences of Olenin, a young cultured Russian who comes to despise civilization after spending time with the wild Cossack people. Sevastopol Sketches, based on Tolstoy's own experiences of the siege of Sevastopol in 1854-55, is a compelling consideration of the nature of war, while Hadji Murat, written towards the end of his life, returns to the Caucasus of Tolstoy's youth to explore the life of a great leader torn apart by a conflict of loyalties. Written at the end of the nineteenth century, it is amongst the last and greatest of Tolstoy's shorter works.
HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. JACOB'S ROOM, Virginia Woolf's third novel, marks her first foray into Modernist experimentation. The narrative traces Jacob's childhood in Cornwall and his education at Cambridge, culminating in an evocative portrait of his adult life in London and abroad. Jacob is romantically torn between the artistic Florinda, the upper-middle-class Clara Durrant and the beautiful, but married, Sandra Wentworth Williams. This tissue of romance, though, is torn apart by the cataclysmic events of the First World War. Woolf poignantly depicts the life of Jacob through a sequence of alternating perspectives that combine letters, fragments of dialogue and the ephemeral impressions of those nearest to him. Jacob's voice becomes the absent centre of one of Modernism's first great novels.
Language: English, Binding: Paperback, Number of pages: 208, Publishers: Alma Books Ltd., Author: Alain Robbe-Grillet, ISBN-13: 9780714544595, Date of issue: 2018
Pretty, impecunious Mary Preston, newly arrived as a guest of her Aunt Agnes at the magnificent wooded estate of Rushwater, falls head over heels for handsome playboy David Leslie. Meanwhile, Agnes and her mother, the eccentric matriarch Lady Emily, have hopes of a different, more suitable match for Mary. At the lavish Rushwater dance party, her future happiness hangs in the balance ...
Language: English, Binding: Paperback, Number of pages: 128, Publishers: Alma Books Ltd., Author: Jeremias Gotthelf, ISBN-13: 9781847499240, Date of issue: 2024
Bombed-out Cologne after the war is a strange place to be. The black market in jam and corsets is booming, half-destroyed houses offer opportunities for stealing doors and eggcups, and de-Nazification parties are all the rage. Ferdinand - daydreamer,
What does persuasion mean - a firm belief, or the action of persuading someone to think something else? Anne Elliot is one of Austen's quietest heroines, but also one of the strongest and the most open to change. She lives at the time of the Napoleonic wars, a time of accident, adventure, the making of new fortunes and alliances.A woman of no importance, she manoeuvres in her restricted circumstances as her long-time love Captain Wentworth did in the wars.Even though she is nearly thirty, well past the sell-by bloom of youth, Austen makes her win out for herself and for others like herself, in a regenerated society.
8-volume edition featuring the very best of Sherlock Homes complete and unabridged.Sherlock Holmes is a fictional detective created by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Referring to himself as a "consulting detective" in the stories, Holmes is known for his proficiency with observation, deduction, forensic science, and logical reasoning that borders on the fantastic, which he employs when investigating cases for a wide variety of clients, including Scotland Yard.Though not the first fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes is arguably the best known. Over 25,000 stage adaptations, films, television productions and publications feature the detective, and Guinness World Records lists him as the most portrayed literary human character in film and television history. Holmes's popularity and fame are such that many have believed him to be not a fictional character but a real individual.This collection combines the very best of Sherlock Holmes in 8-volumes, complete and unabridged. The volumes include: 1. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, 2. The Hound of the Baskervilles, 3. The Valley of Fear, 4. His Last Bow 5. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes 6. The Return of Sherlock Holmes 7. A Study in Scarlet & 8. The Sign of Four.
Our Mutual Friend, Dickens' last complete novel, gives one of his most comprehensive and penetrating accounts of Victorian society. Its vision of a culture stifled by materialistic values emerges not just through its central narratives, but through its apparently incidental characters and scenes. The chief of its several plots centres on John Harmon who returns to England as his father's heir. He is believed drowned under suspicious circumstances - a situation convenient to his wish for anonymity until he can evaluate Bella Wilfer whom he must marry to secure his inheritance. The story is filled with colourful characters and incidents - the faded aristocrats and parvenus gathered at the Veneering's dinner table, Betty Higden and her terror of the workhouse and the greedy plottings of Silas Wegg.
This volume of Jane Austen's classic novel of manners and mores in early 19th-century England has an exquisitely designed foil-stamped binding, with distinctive coloured edging and an attractive silk-ribbon bookmark.
Representing a departure from the social satire of most of his other novels and deemed by Dickens himself to be "the best story I have written", A Tale of Two Cities is a powerful historical novel about the repercussions of major world events on the personal lives of people on both sides of the Channel.
The Professor is Charlotte Brontes first novel, in which she audaciously inhabits the voice and consciousness of a man, William Crimsworth. Like Jane Eyre he is parentless; like Lucy Snowe in Villette he leaves the certainties of England to forge a life in Brussels. But as a man, William has freedom of action, and as a writer Bronte is correspondingly liberated, exploring the relationship between power and sexual desire. William's first person narration reveals his attraction to the dominating directress of the girls' school where he teaches, played out in the school's 'secret garden'. Balanced against this is his more temperate relationship with one of his pupils, Frances Henri, in which mastery and submission interplay. The Professor was published only after Charlotte Brontes death; today it gives us a fascinating insight into the first stirrings of her supreme creative imagination.
Little Women is one of the best-loved children's stories of all time, based on the author's own youthful experiences. It describes the family life of the four March sisters living in a small New England community, Meg, the eldest, is pretty and wishes to be a lady; Jo, at fifteen is ungainly and unconventional with an ambition to be an author; Beth is a delicate child of thirteen with a taste for music and Amy is a blonde beauty of twelve. The story of their domestic adventures, their attempts to increase the family income, their friendship with the neighbouring Lawrence family, and their later love affairs remains as fresh and beguiling as ever. Good Wives takes up the story of the March sisters, some three years later, when, as young adults, they must face up to the inevitable trials and traumas of everyday life in their search for individual happiness.
"The Brothers Karamazov" is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving Karamazov and his three sons - the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational Ivan; and the healthy young novice Alyosha. Through the gripping events of their story, Dostoevsky portrays the social and spiritual strivings in what was both a golden age and a tragic turning point in Russian culture.
Part of Alma Classics Evergreen series, this edition is thoroughly edited and extensively annotated and includes pictures and a comprehensive section on Austen's life and works.
