'Some six or seven feet above the port bulwarks, framed in fog, and as utterly unsupported as the full moon, hung a Face. It was not human, and it certainly was not animal, for it did not belong to this earth as known to man'.
Rudyard Kipling, celebrated author of The Jungle Book, the Just So Stories and other entertaining fictions, was also a master of the short story in which he was able to combine the strange and unnerving in order to draw the reader into the world of his own dark imaginings. This collection presents the best of these strange tales in which ghosts, monsters and inexplicable happenings abound.
From the exotic and magical locale of India, to the leafy suburbs of England and then to the blood-soaked trenches of the First World War, Kipling provides us with a chilling array of experiences and images which will linger long in the memory.
There is a timeless element to these tales which make them as relevant and as stimulating today as when they were first written.
Henry James was arguably the greatest practitioner of what has been called the psychological ghost story. His stories explore the region which lies between the supernatural or straightforwardly marvellous and the darker areas of the human psyche. This edition includes all ten of his ghost stories, and as such is the fullest collection currently available. The stories range widely in tone and type. They include 'The Jolly Corner', a compelling story of psychological doubling; 'Owen Wingrave', which is also a subtle parable of military tradition; 'The Friends of the Friends', a strange story of uncanny love; and 'The Private Life', which finds a shrewd, high comedy in its ghostly theme. The volume also includes James's great novella The Turn of the Screw, perhaps the most ambiguous and disturbing ghost story ever written.
Rip van Winkle is an amiable man whose home and farm suffer from his lazy neglect; a familiar figure about the village, he is loved by all except his wife. One autumn day he escapes her nagging to wander up into the mountains, and there after drinking some liquor offered to him by a band of very strange folk, he settles down under a shady tree and falls asleep. He wakes up twenty years later and returns to his village to find that not only is his wife dead but war and revolution have changed many things. He, on the other hand, although older is not appreciably wiser and soon slips back into his idle habits.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow tells of conscientious schoolmaster Ichabod Crane. Orderly and strict in school, out of school his life is disorderly and his head full of fearful fantasies. He is in love with the beautiful Katrina but has a rival for her hand, a dashing young hero who, together with his prankster friends, plays on Ichabod's superstitions, notably with the story of a headless horseman who haunts the region. Tragedy strikes when their hapless victim encounters just such an apparition when returning home one dark and especially dismal night . . .
Three equally compelling stories, The Spectre Bridegroom, The Pride of the Village and Mountjoy, complete this collection of classic tales from the inspired pen of Washington Irving, one of America's greatest writers.
This is a book to be read by a blazing fire on a winter's night, with the curtains drawn close and the doors securely locked. The unquiet souls of the dead, both as fictional creations and as 'real' apparitions, roam the pages of this haunting selection of ghost stories by Rex Collings.
Some of these stories are classics while others are lesser-known gems unearthed from this vintage era of tales of the supernatural. There are stories from distant lands - 'Fisher's Ghost' by John Lang is set in Australia and 'A Ghostly Manifestation' by 'A Clergyman' is set in Calcutta. In this selection, Sir Walter Scott (a Victorian in spirit if not in fact), keeps company with Edgar Allen Poe, Sheridan Le Fanu and other illustrious masters of the genre.
With an Introduction and Notes by Owen Knowles, University of Hull.
Thackeray's upper-class Regency world is a noisy and jostling commercial fairground, predominantly driven by acquisitive greed and soulless materialism, in which the narrator himself plays a brilliantly versatile role as a serio-comic observer.
Although subtitled A Novel without a Hero, Vanity Fair follows the fortunes of two contrasting but inter-linked lives: through the retiring Amelia Sedley and the brilliant Becky Sharp, Thackeray examines the position of women in an intensely exploitative male world.
When Vanity Fair was published in 1848, Charlotte Brontë commented: ‘The more I read Thackeray’s works the more certain I am that he stands alone – alone in his sagacity, alone in his truth, alone in his feeling… Thackeray is a Titan.’
With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, M.A., Ph.D., Research Professor of English, Sussex University.
During his tragically short life, Stephen Crane gained fame as a vividly distinctive writer. His stories of evolving American society are unflinchingly realistic and shrewdly ironic. ‘Maggie: A Girl of the Streets’ tells of Maggie’s seduction and downfall into prostitution amid the harsh world of the Bronx, where life is a battlefield.
The other tales offer a diversity of insights into social hypocrisy, child psychology, and the wild violence of the frontiersmen. Such violence is ruthlessly depicted in ‘The Blue Hotel’. This collection of stories is replete with lively dialogue, ominous atmospheres, dry humour and graphic incidents.
Praised by Joseph Conrad and Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Crane’s memorable tales have become enduringly influential.
With an Introduction and Notes by Henry Claridge, Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of Kent at Canterbury.
The four novels gathered here constitute the complete longer works of one the most brilliant and original American writers. West’s vision of American modernity is terrifyingly comical and diagnoses the tawdriness and meretriciousness of much of American popular culture. His greatest work, Miss Lonelyhearts, which begins this collection, is unique in modern literature. It describes New York in the early years of the Great Depression through the point of view of an ‘agony aunt’ who corresponds with his suffering readers in the guise of ‘Miss Lonelyhearts: (Are you in trouble? – Do you need advice?)’. A Cool Million is, as its subtitle suggests, the ‘dismantling’ of a myth, here a caustic satire of the ‘rags to riches’ story. West’s final novel, The Day of the Locust, is a comic, yet apocalyptic account of the fantasies of 1930s Hollywood. This volume concludes with West’s parodic and surreal first venture into fiction, The Dream Life of Balso Snell.
Henry Claridge’s introduction to this new edition of West’s fictional writings contextualises his work in the United States of the Great Depression, in his evocation of 1930s Hollywood (where he worked as a writer of screenplays), and in the larger context of his Eastern European Jewish background, and, particularly, his reading of Dostoyesvky. The text comes with extensive annotations, a note on the textual history of West’s writings, and a guide to further reading for both the student and the general reader.
What Katy Did at School and What Katy Did Next continue the story of the high-spirited and rebellious American girl, Katy Carr, and her family, who first appeared in What Katy Did.
What Katy Did at School is a compelling tale of the intrigues of life at the New England girls' boarding school which Katy attends. Her trials and adventures are all interwoven with a sense of fun and gently ironic good humour.
What Katy Did Next describes a tour by Katy of Europe, as she evolves from the child of earlier books into a spirited young woman, and brings to a satisfying close this delightful trilogy.
Gaskell’s last novel, widely considered her masterpiece, follows the fortunes of two families in nineteenth century rural England. At its core are family relationships – father, daughter and step-mother, father and sons, father and step-daughter – all tested and strained by the romantic entanglements that ensue.
Despite its underlying seriousness, the prevailing tone is one of comedy. Gaskell vividly portrays the world of the late 1820s and the forces of change within it, and her vision is always humane and progressive.
The story is full of acute observation and sympathetic character-study: the feudal squire clinging to old values, his naturalist son welcoming the new world of science, the local doctor and his scheming second wife, the two girls brought together by their parent’s marriage…
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the most important and innovative figures of the European Middle Ages. Writing his Comedy (the epithet Divine was added by later admirers) in exile from his native Florence, he aimed to address a world gone astray both morally and politically. At the same time, he sought to push back the restrictive rules which traditionally governed writing in the Italian vernacular, to produce a radically new and all-encompassing work.
The Comedy tells of the journey of a character who is at one and the same time both Dante himself and Everyman through the three realms of the Christian afterlife: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. He presents a vision of the afterlife which is strikingly original in its conception, with a complex architecture and a coherent structure. On this journey Dante's protagonist - and his reader - meet characters who are variously noble, grotesque, beguiling, fearful, ridiculous, admirable, horrific and tender, and through them he is shown the consequences of sin, repentance and virtue, as he learns to avoid Hell and, through cleansing in Purgatory, to taste the joys of Heaven.
Henry James's last completed novel, The Golden Bowl, is the story of two flawed marriages. The lives and relationships of Maggie Verver and her widowed American millionaire father, Adam, are changed and challenged by the beautiful and charming Charlotte Stant, who is the former lover of Maggie's husband, the impoverished Italian, Prince Amerigo.
The narrative is underpinned by complex symbolism. The gilded crystal bowl with its almost invisible flaw is the vehicle which James uses to reveal past misdemeanours and make his characters face their own defects in this classic tale of redemption.
Lawrence's finest, most mature novel initially met with disgust and incomprehension. In the love affairs of two sisters, Ursula with Rupert, and Gudrun with Gerald, critics could only see a sorry tale of sexual depravity and philosophical obscurity. Women in Love is, however, a profound response to a whole cultural crisis. The 'progress' of the modern industrialised world had led to the carnage of the First World War. What, then, did it mean to call ourselves 'human'? On what grounds could we place ourselves above and beyond the animal world? What are the definitive forms of our relationships - love, marriage, family, friendship - really worth? And how might they be otherwise? Without directly referring to the war, Women in Love explores these questions with restless energy. As a sequel to The Rainbow, the novel develops experimental techniques which made Lawrence one of the most important writers of the Modernist movement.
Wuthering Heights is a wild, passionate story of the intense and almost demonic love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a foundling adopted by Catherine's father. After Mr Earnshaw's death, Heathcliff is bullied and humiliated by Catherine's brother Hindley and wrongly believing that his love for Catherine is not reciprocated, leaves Wuthering Heights, only to return years later as a wealthy and polished man. He proceeds to exact a terrible revenge for his former miseries.
The action of the story is chaotic and unremittingly violent, but the accomplished handling of a complex structure, the evocative descriptions of the lonely moorland setting and the poetic grandeur of vision combine to make this unique novel a masterpiece of English literature.
The child of parents who divorce, remarry and then embark on adulterous affairs, Maisie Farange survives by her intelligence and spirit. For all its sombre theme of childhood innocence exposed to a corrupted adult world, this novel is one of James's comic masterpieces. The outrageous behaviour of the characters on the seedy fringes of the English upper class is conveyed with wit and relish. The dual perspective of a sophisticated narrator richly appreciative of the absurdities of the adult sexual merry-go-round and the candid vision of Maisie, 'rebounding' from one parent to another like a 'shuttlecock', together create an 'associational magic'.
Strangely, unexpectedly, from so much that is tawdry, comes a tale of moral energy and subtlety. James's foresight was in understanding the modernity of his subject, which is even more relevant today in the twenty-first century.
When people use the adjective 'Kafkaesque', it is The Trial they have in mind - the nightmarish world of Joseph K., where the rules are hidden from even the highest officials, and any help there may be comes from unexpected sources.
K. is never told what he is on trial for, and when he says he is innocent, he is immediately asked 'innocent of what?' Is he perhaps on trial for his innocence? Could he have freed himself from the proceedings by confessing his guilt as a human being? Has the trial been set up because he is incapable of admitting his guilt, and hence his humanity?
The Trial is a chilling and at the same time blackly amusing tale that maintains, to the very end, a constant, relentless atmosphere of disorientation and quirkiness. Superficially the subject-matter is bureaucracy, but the story's great strength is its description of the effect on the life and mind of Josef K. It is in the last resort a description of the absurdity of 'normal' human nature.
Following on from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884-5) Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) became one of Mark Twain's most popular books. Again we meet his world famous characters: Tom Sawyer, 'Nigger Jim', and Huck Finn - together now on a fantastical balloon journey across the Atlantic to meet lions and Bedouins in the Sahara and retrace something of Twain's own expedition to the Holy Land in his best-selling The Innocents Abroad (1869).
Later, in Tom Sawyer Detective (1896), Twain returns us the banks of the Mississippi and a murder mystery involving identical twins and stolen diamonds. The author is back in his formative territory, the region his imagination could never leave behind. It provides him with another comedy of human foibles starring the irrepressible Tom Sawyer.
After Sherlock Holmes' apparently fatal encounter with the sinister Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, the great detective reappears, to the delight of the faithful Dr Watson in The Adventures of the Empty House.
The stories are illustrated by Sidney Paget, the finest of illustrators, from which our images of Sherlock Holmes and his world derive.
This is the second of three volumes of The Complete Sherlock Holmes newly typeset from the original copies of The Strand Magazine The three books present all the Holmes stories in order of first publication.
Jules Verne (1828-1905) is internationally famous as the author of a distinctive series of adventure stories describing new travel technologies which opened up the world and provided means to escape from it. The collective enthusiasm of generations of readers of his 'extraordinary voyages' was a key factor in the rise of modern science fiction.
In The Mysterious Island a group of men escape imprisonment during the American Civil War by stealing a balloon. Blown across the world, they are air-wrecked on a remote desert island. In a manner reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe, the men apply their scientific knowledge and technical skill to exploit the island's bountiful resources, eventually constructing a sophisticated society in miniature. The book is also an intriguing mystery story, for the island has a secret.
Dickens?s final novel, left unfinished at his death, is a tale of mystery whose fast-paced action takes place in an ancient cathedral city and in some of the darkest places in nineteenth-century London. Drugs, sexual obsession, colonial adventuring and puzzles about identity are among the novel?s themes. At the centre of the plot lie the baffling disappearance of Edwin Drood and the many explanations of his whereabouts.
A sombre and menacing atmosphere, a fascinating range of characters and Dickens?s usual superb command of language combine to make this an exciting and tantalising story.
Also included in this volume are a number of unjustly neglected stories and sketches, with subjects as different as murder and guilt and childhood romance. This unusual selection illustrates Dickens?s immense creativity and versatility.
With an Introduction and Notes by Peter Preston, University of Nottingham. Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz) and George Cruickshank.
The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), with its combination of the sentimental, the grotesque and the socially concerned, and its story of pursuit and courage, which sets the downtrodden and the plucky against the malevolent and the villainous, was an immediate popular success.
Little Nell quickly became one of Dickens' most celebrated characters, who so captured the imagination of his readers that while the novel was being serialised, many of them wrote to him about her fate.
Dickens was conscious of the ‘many friends’ the novel had won for him, and ‘the many hearts it turned to me when they were full of private sorrow’, and it remains one of the most familiar and well-loved of his works.
Ten produkt jest zapowiedzią. Realizacja Twojego zamówienia ulegnie przez to wydłużeniu do czasu premiery tej pozycji. Czy chcesz dodać ten produkt do koszyka?
