Marcel Proust (1871-1922) spent the last fourteen years of his life writing "A la recherche du temps perdu". It is an intimate epic, an excavation of the self, and a comedy of manners by turns and all at once. Proust is the twentieth century's Dante, presenting us with a unique, unsettling picture of ourselves as jealous lovers and unmitigated snobs, frittering our lives away, with only the hope of art as a possible salvation. He offers us a form of redemption for a sober and secular age.
Scott Moncrieff's delightful translation was for many years the only access to Proust in English. A labour of love that took him nearly as many years as Proust spent writing the original. Moncrieff's translation strives to capture the extraordinary blend of muscular analysis with poetic reverie that typifies Proust's style. It remains a justly famous classic of translation.
Robin Hood is the best-loved outlaw of all time.
In this edition, Henry Gilbert tells of the adventures of the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest - Robin himself, Little John, Friar Tuck, Will Scarlet, and Alan-a-Dale, as well as Maid Marian, good King Richard, and Robin's deadly enemies Guy of Gisborne and the evil Sheriff of Nottingham.
The Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare Series presents a newly-edited sequence of William Shakespeare's works. The textual editing takes account of recent scholarship while giving the material a careful reappraisal.
Romeo and Juliet is the world's most famous drama of tragic young love. Defying the feud which divides their families, Romeo and Juliet enjoy the fleeting rapture of courtship, marriage and sexual fulfilment; but a combination of old animosities and new coincidences brings them to suicidal deaths.
This play offers a rich mixture of romantic lyricism, bawdy comedy, intimate harmony and sudden violence. Long successful in the theatre, it has also generated numerous operas, ballets and films; and these have helped to make Romeo and Juliet perennially topical.
This specially commissioned selection of Conrad's short stories includes favourites such as Youth, a modern epic of the sea; The Secret Sharer, a thrilling psychological drama; An Outpost of Progress, a blackly comic prelude to Heart of Darkness; Amy Foster, a moving story of a shipwrecked, alienated Pole; and The Lagoon and Karain, two exotic, exciting Malay tales. Il Conde and The Tale are subtle portrayals of bewildered outrage; An Anarchist and The Informer are sardonic depictions of revolutionaries; and Prince Roman is a tale of magnificent, doomed heroism set in Conrad's native Poland during the Uprising of 1831. Both those new to Conrad's work and those familiar with his novels will delight in this wide-ranging collection.
Marcel Proust (1871-1922) spent the last fourteen years of his life writing "la recherche du temps perdu". It is an intimate epic, an excavation of the self, and a comedy of manners by turns and all at once. Proust is the twentieth century's Dante, presenting us with a unique, unsettling picture of ourselves as jealous lovers and unmitigated snobs, frittering our lives away, with only the hope of art as a possible salvation. He offers us a form of redemption for a sober and secular age.
Scott Moncrieff's delightful translation was for many years the only access to Proust in English. A labour of love that took him nearly as many years as Proust spent writing the original. Moncrieff's translation strives to capture the extraordinary blend of muscular analysis with poetic reverie that typifies Proust's style. It remains a justly famous classic of translation.
Transplanted to Europe from her native America, Isabel Archer has candour, beauty, intelligence, an independent spirit and a marked enthusiasm for life. An unexpected inheritance apparently gives her freedom, but despite all her natural advantages she makes one disastrous error of judgement and the result is genuinely tragic. Her tale, told with James inimitable poise, is of the widest relevance.
Wilde's only novel, first published in 1890, is a brilliantly designed puzzle, intended to tease conventional minds with its exploration of the myriad interrelationships between art, life, and consequence. From its provocative Preface, challenging the reader to believe in 'art for art's sake', to its sensational conclusion, the story self-consciously experiments with the notion of sin as an element of design.
Yet Wilde himself underestimated the consequences of his experiment, and its capacity to outrage the Victorian establishment. Its words returned to haunt him in his court appearances in 1895, and he later recalled the 'note of doom' which runs like 'a purple thread' through its carefully crafted prose.
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.
Dickens had already achieved renown with The Pickwick Papers. With Oliver Twist his reputation was enhanced and strengthened. The novel contains many classic Dickensian themes - grinding poverty, desperation, fear, temptation and the eventual triumph of good in the face of great adversity.
Oliver Twist features some of the author's most enduring characters, such as Oliver himself (who dares to ask for more), the tyrannical Bumble, the diabolical Fagin, the menacing Bill Sikes, Nancy and 'the Artful Dodger'.
For any reader wishing to delve into the works of the great Victorian literary colossus, Oliver Twist is, without doubt, an essential title.
Set in the mid-19th century, and written from the author's first-hand experience, North and South follows the story of the heroine's movement from the tranquil but moribund ways of southern England to the vital but turbulent north. Elizabeth Gaskell's skilful narrative uses an unusual love story to show how personal and public lives were woven together in a newly industrial society.
This is a tale of hard-won triumphs - of rational thought over prejudice and of humane care over blind deference to the market. Readers in the twenty-first century will find themselves absorbed as this Victorian novel traces the origins of problems and possibilities which are still challenging a hundred and fifty years later: the complex relationships, public and private, between men and women of different classes.
The greatest French detective in his most fiendish case. Even if Hercule Poirot had been born a Frenchman, not a Belgian, he would have to take second place in detection to Joseph Rouletabille, the brilliant young sleuth created by Gaston Leroux.
Here, in his first and most baffling case, the eighteen year old reporter astounds readers with his audacity and ingenuity. Who could have tried to murder Mademoiselle Stangerson, beautiful daughter of a famous radium scientist ? And how could they have entered and escaped from a completely locked and watched room ? With the Surete's top sleuth vying against him, Rouletabille is determined to prove only he can solve the case. This classic work of French detective fiction was much admired by Agatha Christie. As a connoisseur of the detective story she said this was 'one of the best'. Others would praise it even more highly than that.
The best detective story ever written
JOHN DICKSON CARR
The most dazzlingly brilliant detective story I have ever read
ARNOLD BENNETT
One of the great classics of western literature, Les Misérables 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.
The reader is also treated to the unforgettable descriptions of the Battle of Waterloo and Valjean’s flight through the Paris sewers.
Volume 1 of 2
An invaluable companion to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain's inimitable portrait of ‘the great Father of Waters’. Part memoir, part travelogue, it expresses the full range of Twain's literary personality, and remains the most vivid, boisterous and provocative account of the cultural and societal history of the Mississippi Valley, from ‘the golden age’ of steamboating to the violence wrought by the Civil War.
This new edition of Life on the Mississippi contains a comprehensive introduction, extensive annotations and a guide to further reading designed to appeal to both the student and the general reader.
Generally considered to be F. Scott Fitzgerald's finest novel, The Great Gatsby is a consummate summary of the "roaring twenties", and a devastating expose of the ‘Jazz Age’.
Through the narration of Nick Carraway, the reader is taken into the superficially glittering world of the mansions which lined the Long Island shore in the 1920s, to encounter Nick's cousin Daisy, her brash but wealthy husband Tom Buchanan, Jay Gatsby and the mystery that surrounds him.
The Great Gatsby is an undisputed classic of American literature from the period following the First World War and is one of the great novels of the twentieth century.
This book comes with an introduction and notes by Dr Tim Middleton, Head of English Studies, University of Ripon and York. In seeking to discover his inner self, the brilliant Dr Jekyll discovers a monster. First published to critical acclaim in 1886, this mesmerising thriller is a terrifying study of the duality of man's nature This volume also includes Stevenson's 1887 collection of short stories, "The Merry Men" and Other Tales and Fables. "The Merry Men" is a gripping Highland tale of shipwrecks and madness; "Markheim", the sinister study of the mind of a murderer; "Thrawn Janet", a spine-chilling tale of demonic possession; "Olalla", a study o degeneration and incipient vampirism in the Spanish mountains; "Will O'the Mill", a thought-provoking fable about a mountain inn-keeper; and "The Treasure of Franchard", a study of French bourgeois life
'There he lay looking as if youth had been half-renewed, for the white hair and moustache were changed to dark iron-grey, the cheeks were fuller, and the white skin seemed ruby-red underneath; the mouth was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran over the chin and neck. Even the deep, burning eyes seemed set amongst the swollen flesh, for the lids and pouches underneath were bloated. It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood; he lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion.'
Thus Bram Stoker, one of the greatest exponents of the supernatural narrative, describes the demonic subject of his chilling masterpiece Dracula, a truly iconic and unsettling tale of vampirism.
In 1869 a young Russian was strangled, shot through the head and thrown into a pond. His crime? A wish to leave small group of violent revolutionaries, from which he had become alienated. Dostoevsky takes this real-life catastrophe as the subject and culmination of Devils, a title that refers the young radicals themselves and also to the materialistic ideas that possessed the minds of many thinking people Russian society at the time.
The satirical portraits of the revolutionaries, with their naivety, ludicrous single-mindedness and readiness for murder and destruction, might seem exaggerated - until we consider their all-too-recognisable descendants in the real world ever since. The key figure in the novel, however, is beyond politics. Nikolay Stavrogin, another product of rationalism run wild, exercises his charisma with ruthless authority and total amorality. His unhappiness is accounted for when he confesses to a ghastly sexual crime - in a chapter long suppressed by the censor.
This prophetic account of modern morals and politics, with its fifty-odd characters, amazing events and challenging ideas, is seen by some critics as Dostoevsky's masterpiece.
That is not dead that can eternal lie And with strange aeons even death may die Millenia ago, the Old Ones ruled our planet. Since that time, they have but slumbered. But when a massive sea tremor brings the ancient stone city of R'lyeh to the surface once more, the Old Ones awaken at last.
The Whisperer in Darkness brings together the original Cthulhu Mythos stories of the legendary horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. Included in this volume are several early tales, along with the classics 'The Call of Cthulhu', 'The Dunwich Horror' and 'At the Mountains of Madness'. Arm yourself with a copy of Abdul Alhazred's fabled Necronomican and prepare to face terrors beyond the wildest imaginings of all, save H.P. Lovecraft.
Wilde's works are suffused with his aestheticism, brilliant craftsmanship, legendary wit and, ultimately, his tragic muse. He wrote tender fairy stories for children employing all his grace, artistry and wit, of which the best-known is The Happy Prince. Counterpoints to this were his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which shocked and outraged many readers of his day, and his stories for adults which exhibited his fascination with the relations between serene art and decadent life. Wilde took London by storm with his plays, particularly his masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest.
His essays - in particular De Profundis- and his Ballad of Reading Gaol, both written after his release from prison, strikingly break the bounds of his usual expressive range. His other essays and poems are all included in this comprehensive collection of the works of one of the most exciting writers of the late nineteenth century.
Dickens wrote of David Copperfield: 'Of all my books I like this the best'. Millions of readers in almost every language on earth have subsequently come to share the author's own enthusiasm for this greatly loved classic, possibly because of its autobiographical form.
Following the life of David through many sufferings and great adversity, the reader will also find many light-hearted moments in the company of a host of English fiction's greatest stars including Mr Micawber, Traddles, Uriah Heep, Creakle, Betsy Trotwood, and the Peggoty family.
Few readers, arriving at the end of David Copperfield, will not wish to echo Thackeray’s famous praise, having read the first monthly part – ‘Bravo Dickens’.
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