Baltasar And Blimunda

In early 18th-century Lisbon, Baltasar, a soldier who has lost his left hand in battle, falls in love with Blimunda, a young girl with visionary powers. From the day that he follows her home from the auto-da-fe where her mother is burned at the stake, the two are bound body and soul by love of an unassailable strength. A third party shares their supper that evening: Padre Bartolomeu Lourenco, whose fantasy is to invent a flying machine. As the Crown and the Church clash, they purse his impossible, not to mention heretical, dream of flight.

Bulfinch's Mythology

The justly famous Mythology by Thomas Bulfinch contains three volumes the major contents of which are retained in this abridgment for the student and general reader. The Age Of Fable -- The gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome, as well as the mythology of the Germanic tribes, England and the Near East. The Legend Of Charlemange -- Accounts of the reign of the first great French Emperor, his wars and conquests. The Age Of Chivalry -- King Arthur and his court, Lancelot and Guenever, and the death of Arthur.

Brave New World

The book begins with a lengthy introduction, detailing the author???s views of how he thinks the entire world will function in the far future, in a global society that he terms The World State. The individual story only begins in the 7th chapter, where the reader is properly introduced to the story of Bernard and Lenina, two inhabitants of the World State. Bernard has a single friend in life, whose name is Helmholtz Watson. Bernard and Lenina go on a holiday to New Mexico where they meet John the Savage and Linda, both of whom have lived hard lives due to being ostracised by all the people they lived with.

Chekhov : The Essential Plays

Because Chekhov???s plays convey the universally recognizable, sometimes comic, sometimes dramatic, frustrations of decent people trying to make sense of their lives, they remain as fresh and vigorous as when they were written a century ago. Gathered here in superb new renderings by one of the most highly regarded translators of our time???versions that have been staged throughout the United States, Canada, and Great Britain???are Chekhov???s four essential masterpieces for the theater.

The Old Man And The Sea

Set in the Gulf Stream off the coast of Havana, Hemingway's magnificent fable is the tale of an old man, a young boy and a giant fish. This story of heroic endeavour won Hemingway the Nobel Prize for Literature. It stands as a unique and timeless vision of the beauty and grief of man's challenge to the elements.

The Key

This is the diary of a middle-aged man who is deeply in love with his younger wife, Ikuko. In spite of that love, the pair have grown physically apart, each unsure of the other's desires...until the day Ikuko discovers her husband's diary with its desperate hints of jealousy and voyeurism. Ikuko realises she has found the key to his very soul.

Little Women

Christmas won't be the same this year for Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, as their father is away fighting in the Civil War and the family has fallen on hard times. But though they may be poor, life for the four March sisters is rich with colour, as they play games, put on wild theatricals, make new friends, argue, grapple with their vices, learn from their mistakes, nurse each other through sickness and disappointments and get into all sorts of trouble.

The Hotel

It's the balmy days of the 1920s and where could be more pleasant for a holiday than a hotel on the Italian Riviera? Filled with prosperous English visitors, the Hotel offers a closed world of wealth and comfort. It also provides the stage for the display of social niceties, for passionate but unspoken love affairs and for the comedy of the shared bathroom. With great wit and insight Elizabeth Bowen's first novel lays bare the intricacies and eccentricities of polite society.

Fifty Great Short Stories

50 Great Short Stories is a comprehensive selection from the world???s finest short fiction. The authors represented range from Hawthorne, Maupassant, and Poe, through Henry James, Conrad, Aldous Huxley, and James Joyce, to Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, Faulkner, E.B. White, Saroyan, and O???Connor. The variety in style and subject is enormous, but all these stories have one point in common???the enduring quality of the writing, which places them among the masterpieces of the world???s fiction.

Green Hills Of Africa

Green Hills of Africa is Ernest Hemingway's lyrical journal of a month on safari in the great game country of East Africa, where he and his wife Pauline journeyed in December 1933. Hemingway's well-known interest in - and fascination with - big-game hunting is magnificently captured in this evocative account of his trip. It is an examination of the lure of the hunt and an impassioned portrait of the glory of the African landscape and of the beauty of a wilderness that was, even then, being threatened by the incursions of man.

The Complete Enderby

Enderby is a poet, social critic and Catholic. He may be found hiding in the lavatory where much of his best work is composed, or perhaps in Rome, brainwashed into respectability by a glamorous wife, aftershave and the dolce vita. Whether he is pursuing revenge and inspiration in Morocco, expounding on his notorious sex film on a TV chat show, or writing a hit musical based on the life and work of Shakespeare, Enderby emerges triumphant.

The Complete Short Stories

This volume contains all of Kafka's shorter fiction, from fragments, parables and sketches to longer tales. Together they reveal the breadth of Kafka's literary vision and the extraordinary imaginative depth of his thought. Some are well-known, others are mere jottings, observations of daily life, given artistic form through Kafka's unique perception of the world.

The Complete Short Stories Of Saki

The buttoned-up world of the British upper classes is exploded by the brilliance, wit and audacity of Saki's bomb-like stories. In 'The Open Window' an imaginative teenager gives a visitor the fright of his life. In 'The Unrest Cure' the ordered home of a respectable country gent is rocked to its core. An d 'Laura' expresses the hope of revenge via reincarnation. For punchlines, twists, satire and pure mirth, Saki's stories are second-to-none.

Death In Venice And Other Stories

This superb translation of Death in Venice and six other stories by Thomas Mann is a tour de force, deserving to be the definitive text for English-speaking readers. These seven stories represent Mann’s early writing career and a level of literary quality Mann himself despaired of ever again matching. In these stories he began to grapple with themes that were to recur throughout his work. In Little Herr Friedemann, a character’s carefully structured way of life is suddenly threatened by an unexpected sexual passion. In Gladius Dei, puritanical intellect clashes with beauty. In Tristan, Mann presents an ironic and comic account of the tension between an artist and bourgeois society. All seven of these stories are accomplished and memorable, but it is Death in Venice that truly forms the centerpiece of the collection. The themes that Mann weaves through the shorter pieces come to a climax in this stunning novella, one of the most hauntingly magnificent tales of art and self-destruction ever written.

The Dollmaker

Gertie is the young mother of five children ??? uneducated, determined, strong. Her only ambition is to own her own small farm in the Kentucky hills where she lives, to become self-sufficient and free. Whenever the struggle to live off the land eases, her inarticulate imagination takes its freedom and flies. Because Gertie is also an artist, a sculptor of wood and creator of beautiful handmade dolls. When the family is forced to move to industrial Detroit, with its pre-fab houses, appliances bought on credit and neighbours on every side, life turns into an incomprehensible, lonely nightmare. Gertie realises she must adapt to a life where land, family and creativity are replaced by just one thing: the constant need for money. ???A masterwork??? A superb book of unforgettable strength and glowing richness??? New York Times WITH AN AFTERWORD BY JOYCE CAROL OATES

Don Fernando

Considered by Graham Greene to be Maugham's best work, Don Fernando is a paean to a golden age of enormous creative energy. It discusses the writings of St. Teresa and the paintings of El Greco, and comments with sagacity and wit on such illustrious figures as Cervantes, Velazquez and the creator of Don Juan. This vibrant assessment of a great people at their greatest hour is full of happy surprises, curious facts and stimulating opinions that reflect Maugham's lifelong enchantment with the landscape and people of Spain.

England Made Me

Anthony Farrant has always found his way, lying to get jobs and borrowing money to get by when he leaves them in a hurry. His twin sister Kate persuades him to move and sets him up with a job as bodyguard to Krogh, her lover and boss, an all-powerful Swedish financier. But Farrant does have a sense of decency, and when Krogh gives orders that offend him, he leaks information to Minty, a down-trodden journalist, with drastic results.

A Gun For Sale

Raven is an assassin, a hired killer, and his brutal murder of the Minister raises the spectre of war across Europe. As the nation prepares for battle, Raven goes on the run, hunted by the police and hunting the man who paid him in stolen banknotes, eventually unearthing the terrible truth behind the killing. A Gun for Sale was published two years before Brighton Rock, and its themes and characters provide a striking echo to that more famous novel, providing a fascinating glimpse into the working mind of a master novelist.

Sons And Lovers

Henry Fielding