Search results for ""Alma Books Ltd""

After the death of her father, an exiled Iranian man of letters, the bookish twenty-two-year-old Zebra finds herself alone in New York and decides to retrace the steps of her traumatic flight with her family from their homeland in the 1990s, hoping that in the process she will be inspired to write a major manifesto on literature. Her first stop is Barcelona, where she meets the Italian Ludo, who becomes her lover, intellectual sparring partner and travelling companion in her picaresque meanderings around Catalonia. A natural-born raconteur, Zebra takes the reader on an irresistible journey through her thoughts, as she conceives elaborate theories about art and is increasingly convinced that her mother has been reincarnated as a cockatoo. Sparkling with wit and mischief and brimming with imaginative vignettes and unconventional musings, Call Me Zebra is a riotous, erudite, unpredictable novel about literature, lust and dislocation.

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Following in the footsteps of other illustrious Italian gastronomic successes – from pizza to pasta, from mozzarella to Parmesan and mortadella – Prosecco is the most recent “made in Italy” product to have colonized the world. But what is its history, and how did it come to be a global phenomenon? Luigi Bolzon retraces the origins of Prosecco’s immense popularity back to the story of the Italian emigrants who left their country in the second half of the nineteenth century and the experiences of those who, knowingly or not, were most instrumental in cementing Prosecco’s reputation in the UK and worldwide. Peppered with anecdotes and containing a rich tapestry of direct testimonies from the protagonists of Prosecco’s ascent in the world of wines, Bolzon’s book delves deep into the Italian soul to offer an insightful look behind the production and the continuing success of Britain’s most loved bubbly.

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The Lives of Haydn, Mozart and Metastasio – Stendhal’s first published work – owes its inspiration to the audacious pragmatism of its author. After the collapse of the Napoleonic empire, Henri Beyle was jobless, soon destined to become a refugee and in desperate need of money. His most abiding passion in life was music, so why not write about it? Unfortunately, however, he knew next to nothing about it. So, calmly and without the slightest pang of conscience, he resolved to plunder the works of other writers – in particular those of the musicologist Giuseppe Carpani, who was annoyed and said so vociferously. The result of Stendhal’s unscrupulous plagiarism is one of the most fascinating literary enigmas of all time. How is it that what started as a blatant act of piracy evolved into a work of enduring value? Despite its unpropitious beginnings, this work represents the wrong-headedness of a genius – and the singular Louis-Alexandre-César Bombet who signed the Lives was already, in everything that mattered, the man who was to be Stendhal, one of the most prominent literary figures of the nineteenth century.

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After her tragic death in December 1938 at the early age of twenty-six, Antonia Pozzi’s poems – which she had been secretly writing for years – were brought to light and became the object of great critical attention, going through several editions in Italy and being translated into all the major European languages. Since then, her reputation has risen steadily, and she is now considered one of the greatest Italian poets of the twentieth century. This new version by prize-winning poet and translator Peter Robinson perfectly renders the delicate undertones and that sense of longing which is such a distinctive feature of Pozzi’s poetry.

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On a train journey, Pozdnyshev tells his story to a stranger: how his relationship with his wife gradually deteriorated from one of love and passion to jealousy and resentfulness, culminating in a mad act of desperation while she practised Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata with her violin teacher. An uncompromising examination of lust, suspicion and infidelity which was once forbidden by censors in Russia and banned in the US due to its shocking content, Tolstoy’s controversial novella – here presented in a new translation, along with ‘The Prisoner of the Caucasus’, ‘Master and Man’ and ‘After the Ball’ – is now considered one of the masterpieces of Tolstoy’s late period.

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Portraying the characters and events of a small Midwestern town at the end of the nineteenth century, Winesburg, Ohio is a chronological cycle of stories which reads like an episodic novel. Centring on George Willard, a young local reporter with big-city aspirations, and his conversations with fellow inhabitants, the book gives voice to a disparate cast of figures and lays bare the constraints and struggles of life in a small community.

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Set during the Pugachov rebellion against Catherine the Great, The Captain's Daughter was Pushkin's only completed novel and remains one of his most popular works. The inexperienced and impetuous young nobleman Pyotr Grinyev is sent on military service to a remote fortress, where he falls in love with Masha, Captain Mironov's daughter but then the ruthless Cossack Pugachov lays siege to the stronghold, setting in motion a tragic train of events.This volume also contains another work by Pushkin on the same theme, A History of Pugachov, which presents an impartial, meticulously researched history of the revolt, but was regarded in aristocratic circles as subversive on its publication. Together, these two works provide a fascinating insight into the character of the peasant who tried to overthrow an empress, written with the clarity and insight of Russia's greatest poet.

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Where can you find truth in a world that is so thoroughly ruled by lies? That is the question tackled by the investigation of a French journalist who endeavours to shed light on the enigma of an unexplained death: that of the Argentinian writer Alejandro Bevilacqua, found lying on the pavement underneath his balcony in Madrid in the mid-1970s. The few accounts of those who knew him – which include those of his last lover, a former fellow prison inmate, a sworn enemy and even the author Alberto Manguel himself – are contradictory and unreliable. Poor devil with a troubled childhood, literary genius and irresistible seducer, ordinary man masquerading as hero, pure and simple impostor – these are but a few facets of a mysterious figure in this tribute to falsehood. Between the lines, the reader must discover the only worthwhile truth: the fascinating homage Alberto Manguel pays to literature and its shape-shifting creations, which give infinite expressions to the objects of our desires.

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'A Landmark in Musical History' is John Luke Rose's title for the introduction to this extraordinary piece of theatre. It belongs to the German tradition of mystical writing, and a short note on the poem itself by Martin Swales and Timothy McFarland elucidates some of Wagner's literary techniques. Anthony Negus, who assisted Reginald Goodall on the WNO production of Tristan und Isolde, has contributed a penetrating analysis of the musical structure of the opera, while Patrick Carnegy assesses the remarkable solutions to staging an opera which some argue is best experienced with your back to the performers. Contents: Behind 'The Flying Dutchman', John Warrack; An introduction to 'The Flying Dutchman', John Deathridge; Loneliness, Love and Death, William Vaughan; The Overture to 'The Flying Dutchman', Richard Wagner; Remarks on Performing 'The Flying Dutchman', Richard Wagner; Der fliegende Hollander: Poem by Richard Wagner; The Flying Dutchman: English translation by David Pountney

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Trapped in a loveless marriage and weighed down by poverty, Ethan Frome’s days are enlivened by the presence of Mattie, his ailing wife Zeena’s youthful and charming cousin, who provides help to the household. When Zeena realizes that her husband’s feelings for Mattie go beyond simple affection, and that they seem to be reciprocated, the scene is set for a confrontation that will lead to heartbreak, misery and tragedy. A marked contrast to the mordantly satirical novels of manners set among New York high society for which she is best known, this story set in rural Massachusetts is considered by many to be Edith Wharton’s highest achievement, and is unsurpassed as a study of forbidden love and thwarted desire.

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This collection brings together in a single volume the four books that feature the famous young rabbit with the blue jacket and a penchant for mischief and disobedience: The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Tale of Benjamin Bunny, The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies and The Tale of Mr Tod. From Peter’s early adventures in the kitchen garden of Mr McGregor to his late exploits in the rescue of his cousin Benjamin’s baby bunnies, these stories show why Beatrix Potter remains one of the most beloved children’s authors this country has ever produced.

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Presented in a new translation by Roger Cockrell, The Village of Stepanchikovo and Its Inhabitants was originally conceived as a play and first published in 1859, shortly after the author's release from forced military service. Gogolian in style and tone, and waspish in its description of the villainous Opiskin, it is a sustained exercise in caricatural cruelty and a comedic tour de force. The young Sergei is summoned from St Petersburg by his uncle, the retired colonel Yegor Rostanev, to the remote country estate of Stepanchikovo. Rostanev's household, populated by a medley of remarkable characters, is dominated by the figure of Foma Opiskin, a devious, manipulative hanger-on who has everyone in thrall and plots to marry the colonel to the woman of his choice, Tatyana Ivanova. When Opiskin finds that his plans are being thwarted, a confrontation with Rostanev ensues, and all hell is let loose.

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When the Basque dragoon Don José meets a Gypsy woman at the factory he is guarding, he is immediately ensnared by her wiles. After she is arrested for injuring a co-worker and he helps her to flee, he is imprisoned and demoted, but she repays him at their next meeting with a day of excess and a night of love. As Carmen continues to exert her spell, José is dragged further and further into a seedy world of smugglers, robbers, fiery passions and uncontrollable jealousy – one that he will find difficult to escape alive. Carmen, the archetype of the amoral femme fatale, is Prosper Mérimée’s highest creation, and a model for many subsequent literary heroines. First published in 1846, this story of crime and desire – here accompanied by another famous novella by Mérimée, The Venus of Ille – has been adapted into a number of dramatic works, including the famous 1875 opera of the same name by Georges Bizet.

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On his return to London after serving in the Second Anglo-Afghan War as an assistant surgeon, Doctor Watson is looking for a place to live. He is introduced to a certain Mr Holmes, an eccentric, pipe-smoking gentleman who shows an interest in chemistry and is currently engaged in a test to detect human haemoglobin. What begins as a simple house-sharing enquiry soon turns into a fully fledged “study in scarlet”, a case of blood, murder and betrayal that will transport the reader from the streets of London to the early settlements of Salt Lake City in Utah…

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Three years have passed since the events narrated in Little Women, and the four March sisters are approaching adulthood, with all its accompanying challenges and expectations. Meg is preparing for her wedding, Beth continues to struggle with her health, Jo is more than ever devoting herself to literature and Amy is about to go on a tour of Europe with her aunt. Their experiences, hopes and ambitions are set in counterpoint to each other, until the whole family is brought together by tragedy and misfortune. Following on the immediate commercial success of Little Women, Good Wives completes the story of the March sisters and their friend Laurie, and is, together with its prequel, Louisa May Alcott’s crowning achievement and one of the most popular young-adult tales ever written.

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A respectable young widow and mother of two children, the Marquise of O- finds herself inexplicably pregnant after being rescued by a Russian officer from the attentions of his soldiers during the storming of her town's citadel. Convinced of her own innocence and wishing to vindicate her own integrity, the Marquise places an advert in the newspapers, appealing for the father to come forward and promising to marry him. But will this be enough to quench her family's doubts and the derision of the society around her? Will this help her solve the mystery and urge the perpetrator to acknowledge paternity of the child? One of the great classics of German literature, Heinrich von Kleist's sexually charged novella is as edgy today as it was when it was first published in 1808, and is accompanied here by two other celebrated stories, 'The Earthquake in Chile' and 'The Foundling', showcasing the range of their author's narrative abilities and his taste for the ambiguous and the paradoxical.

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When Paul d'Aspremont travels to Naples to join Alicia Ward, his beautiful fiancee, he is surprised to see her grow pale under his gaze, and to discover that an Italian suitor, Count Altavilla, is trying to win her affections. Soon the strange gestures and whispers of the locals convince him - against his better judgement - that indeed he has the evil eye, and that he must resort to extreme measures if he wants to shield Alicia from its deadly effects. This 1856 novella from the master of fantasy and the supernatural, featuring one of the most hauntingly surreal denouements in nineteenth-century fiction, is a brilliant and witty examination of man's innermost fantasies and fears.

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Few writers have known Italy better than Stendhal: he was only seventeen when he first rode south across the Alps in the wake of Napoleon’s armies, and he continued to travel and to live in Italy until a few months before his death. Some of his visits lasted only a few weeks, others continued for years, and he spent the last decade of his life as French Consul in Civitavecchia – yet he was never a tourist in the ordinary sense of the word. Italy, for Stendhal, was never a mere treasure trove of ruins, museums and galleries: it was the life of the country which fascinated him, its spirit, the inner workings of its heart and mind. This picture – or rather this living dream – of Italy he created is as fresh and tantalizing today as it was almost two centuries ago.

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Seduced by the chimerical world of the theatre and taking upon himself the grand ambition of becoming a successful performer and dramatist, the merchant's son Wilhelm Meister embarks on a tumultuous quest of self-discovery. Along his path he finds himself having to negotiate love, desire and the need to face up to his own past and responsibilities. A landmark in the history of European literature, Goethe's novel is not only one of the key works of Weimar Classicism and the prototype for the Bildungs-roman genre, but also a timeless tale of coming into one's own and a fascinating portrayal of the late-eighteenth-century theatre world.

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The lowly, downtrodden Paris civil servant Jean Folantin seeks respite from the boredom and isolation of his life in the small joys of food and the occasional embraces of a prostitute. But whatever he does, wherever he turns in his quest for some pleasure, his dissatisfaction only increases, until he is forced to realize that he has to abandon all hope and just “go with the flow”. This 1882 novella, a key work in Huysmans’ literary development – prefiguring in its protagonist the figure of Jean des Esseintes, the hero of À rebours, written two years later – is accompanied here by another masterly study of human despair, ‘M. Bougran’s Retirement’.

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A rich and varied array of stories and vignettes, The Pickwick Papers is based around the investigations of the Corresponding Society of the Pickwick Club, consisting of its founder Mr Samuel Pickwick and Messrs Tracy Tupman, Augustus Snodgrass and Nathaniel Winkle, who travel around the country and then report back to the club concerning their extraordinary adventures and experiences. Dickens’s first novel, The Pickwick Papers was an immediate success and caught the public imagination in a manner that few debuts have ever matched. Replete with colourful characters, fantastical anecdotes and a farcical plot, it catapulted its twenty-four-year-old author to literary stardom, and is widely considered to be one of the great comic masterpieces of nineteenth-century literature.

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Having crash-landed in the Sahara desert, a pilot comes across a young boy who introduces himself as the Little Prince and tells him the story of how he grew up on a tiny asteroid before travelling across the galaxies and coming to Earth. His encounters and discoveries, seen through childlike, innocent eyes, give rise to candid reflections on life and human nature. First published in 1943 and featuring the author’s own watercolour illustrations, The Little Prince has since become a classic philosophical fable for young and old, as well as a global publishing phenomenon, selling tens of millions of copies worldwide and being translated into dozens of languages.

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The mayor and local officials of a small provincial town in Russia have got it made: corruption is rife and they have all the power. Yet, when they learn that an undercover government inspector is about to make a visit, they face a mad dash to cover their tracks. Soon, the news that a suspicious person has recently arrived from St Petersburg and is staying in a local inn produces a series of events and misunderstandings that lead to a hilarious dénouement. Often quoted as Russian literature’s greatest comedy, The Government Inspector is a trenchant satire of the corruption, greed and stupidity of petty officialdom, and the crowning achievement of Gogol’s skills as a playwright.

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After the death of his father, the seventeen-year-old orphan David Balfour discovers the existence of an uncle, and sets off in search of him. His uncle Ebenzer is far from welcoming, however, and David, after barely escaping with his life, finds himself kidnapped and bound for America, where he is to be sold into slavery. Yet when the hot-headed Jacobite rebel Alan Breck Stewart comes on board, David soon finds himself thrust into a perilous adventure, and fleeing for his life across the Scottish Highlands. Inspired by real historical events, Kidnapped is an unforgettable and action-packed adventure story that has delighted and captivated readers for more than a century.

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"Written after Woolf had finished her emotionally draining work on The Waves, Flush purports to be an autobiography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s eponymous cocker spaniel, charting the dog’s early days in the countryside, his adoption by the famous poet, his subsequent life in London and his travels with his owners to Italy. While the resulting narrative is light-hearted and playful on the surface, Woolf ingeniously uses the faux-naif impressions of her animal narrator to voice her social criticism on topics such as the class system and the relationship between man and woman. Much like its predecessor Orlando, Flush is a genre-defying blend of biography and fantasy, and an accessible yet stylistically innovative jeu d’esprit."

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Presented through an ingeniously overlapping and intertwining series of letters written by six very different characters, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker is the story of Squire Matthew Bramble and his family’s journey across England and Scotland. From the gouty hypochondriac squire eager to take the waters in various spa towns to his malapropistic sister Tabitha, who is keenly looking for a husband, the characters recount their own experiences, desires and particular version of events, and in doing so introduce the reader to the extraordinary exploits of the ostler Humphry Clinker. Full of decadence, drunkenness and debauchery, and littered with double entendres, bawdy puns and scatological references, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, published only a few months before Smollett’s death, is a biting and sharply observed satire of the luxury and licentiousness of eighteenth-century society.

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"Jude Fawley, an intelligent and sensitive young Wessex schoolboy, dreams of studying at the famous university in Christminster, Hardy’s fictional representation of Oxford. He embarks on years of private study, but his plans are thrown into disarray when he is deceived into marriage and then deserted by the duplicitous Arabella Donn. Jude, still hoping to earn a place at the university, travels to Christminster to work as a stonemason. Here, he falls for his freethinking cousin Sue, but with the pair living together out of wedlock, the pressures of poverty and social disapproval soon threaten to ruin their lives. Full of passion, anger, fatalism and tragedy, Jude the Obscure attacks the inequalities and hypocrisies inherent within Victorian society’s attitudes towards marriage, social mobility, education and the role of women. The novel, which caused an immediate uproar on its publication, is now widely considered to be one of the great works of the nineteenth century, and the apotheosis of Hardy’s fiction."

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"In A Voyage to the Moon, the narrator, after an attempt to reach the moon using vials of dewdrops, finally finds himself in what appears to be the Garden of Eden, surrounded by Biblical patriarchs. After falling foul of the prophet Elijah, he soon meets a race who walk on all fours and whose nourishment comes in the form of vapour. Published posthumously and intended mainly as a satire of its age, this imaginative and entertaining tale – here presented in a lively translation by Andrew Brown – is now considered one of the pioneering works of science fiction."

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Stephen Glennard is in desperate need of money. So when he becomes aware of the potential value of a series of passionate love letters written to him by the recently deceased author Margaret Aubyn, he sells them and marries the beautiful Alexa Trent. However, his shame and guilt at building a new life on the betrayal of another’s love slowly begins to eat away at him, and Margaret’s memory has a power that can reach him from beyond the grave. The first of Edith Wharton’s works depicting life in “old New York”, The Touchstone is an acutely observed novella , and an exploration of the tension between self-serving opportunism and the desire to live a moral life.

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"The friends Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley leave Miss Pinkerton’s school together, ready to forge their paths in the tawdry and cut-throat world of the early nineteenth century. The scheming, brilliant and ruthless orphan Becky is better equipped than any to scale the heights of Regency society. Amelia, however, is sweet, quiet and passive, and longs for nothing more than the love of the self-obsessed and raffish soldier George Osborne. Amidst the machinations and jostling for wealth and status, Captain William Dobbin, with his hidden love for Amelia, stands alone as a steadfast, selfless and dutiful man. Woven into the climactic events of the Napoleonic Wars, and set against a backdrop of gaudy elegance and merciless personal ambition, Vanity Fair is an epic and sweeping satire, and a landmark of English literature."

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Russia’s literary world is shaken to its foundations when a mysterious gentleman – a professor of black magic – arrives in Moscow, accompanied by a bizarre retinue of servants. It soon becomes clear that he is the Devil himself, come to wreak havoc among the cultural elite of a disbelieving capital. But the Devil’s mission quickly becomes entangled with the fate of the Master – a man who has turned his back on his former life and taken refuge in a lunatic asylum – and his past lover, Margarita. Both a satirical romp and a daring analysis of the nature of good and evil, innocence and guilt, The Master and Margarita is the crowning achievement of one of the greatest Russian writers of the twentieth century.

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This third edition, newly revised and updated, includes comprehensive and all-new annotations (over 9,000 notes) by Joyce scholar Sam Slote, Trinity College, Dublin, and Marc A. Mamigonian and John Turner. A lively repository of literary allusion and colloquial realism, this dazzlingly innovative, ambitious novel is here presented in its 1939 version, which contains notable textual differences from the standard editions currently in print. Controversial, scandalous, erudite and funny, Ulysses is undisputedly a landmark of twentieth-century Modernism. It charts one day - 16th June 1904 - in the lives of three inhabitants of Dublin, the advertising salesman Leopold Bloom, the artist Stephen Dedalus and Bloom's wife Molly. Their peregrinations, thoughts and encounters form the basis of the narrative, which becomes a celebration of all human experience through the lives of specific individuals in a specific place at a specific time. Ulysses is both an experimental novel and a book intimately concerned with the events of modern life.

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In an examination of his laudanum addiction and the dreams and visions the drug engendered, Thomas De Quincey lays bare the celestial pleasures and infernal lows of an existence dependent on “subtle and mighty opium”. At once moving and rhapsodic, and suffused with a poetic and lyrical beauty, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater hauntingly evokes frightful scenes and phantasmagorical night-time wanderings, while reality, dream and memory blur and intertwine in a nebulous and protean haze. Published anonymously in The London Magazine, the Confessions were an immediate success, and soon speculation was rife as to the identity of the mysterious Opium-Eater. The work, which introduced the literary world to De Quincey’s unique “impassioned prose”, is now widely deemed to be De Quincey’s masterpiece.

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Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays; But here there is no light, Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. Despite his tragically short life, John Keats, a self-confessed “rebel Angel”, endures for many as a personification of the Romantic age. While contemporary critics mocked him as a “Cockney poet” and an uneducated lower-class “apothecary” who aspired to poetry, subsequent generations began to see and appreciate both the rich and impassioned sensuousness and the love of beauty and liberty that pervade his work. From Endymion and Hyperion to ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and the Odes, this collection, which presents Keats’s oeuvre in chronological order, displays his rapid poetic growth, the development of his philosophical and spiritual beliefs and the voluptuous, silken nature of his verse.

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Inspired by a box of wooden toy soldiers given as a present to her elder brother Branwell in 1826, Charlotte Brontë created, together with her siblings, a series of tales set in the imaginary realm of Glass Town. In ‘The Green Dwarf’, against the backdrop of war, the arrogant aristocrat Colonel Percy and the enigmatic Mr Leslie are vying for the affections of the beautiful Lady Emily. Soon, with the rivals both on the front line, and with the scheming Percy hatching a plot that involves the mysterious Green Dwarf, Leslie finds himself facing danger on all sides… Full of tragedy and passion, love and rivalry, the five sweeping tales contained in this volume display the precocious talent, lively imagination and flair for storytelling of the young Charlotte Brontë.

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The brooding, introverted Count von O— arrives in Venice during the carnival in order to escape from his duties and live incognito. But after encountering an enigmatic Armenian stranger who makes an uncanny pronouncement, a bizarre chain of events unfolds, involving a Jesuit secret society, a ghostly seance and a mysterious Sicilian magician – leading the Count to question his faith and morality. First serialized in 1787–89, this multilayered, fragmentary novel – which gave Friedrich Schiller a platform to expound his Enlightenment ideas on society and religion – has thrilled and engaged lovers of Gothic literature for over two centuries.

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In response to the dire economic conditions in eighteenth-century Ireland, A Modest Proposal ironically exhorts the poor to provide their offspring as food to the rich. Skilfully applying a wealth of classical rhetorical techniques, Swift’s satirical tour de force takes a savage swipe at the selfishness of the ruling classes and the heartlessness of the various utilitarian solutions put forward by contemporary thinkers. In addition to this seminal piece, this volume includes other humorous and polemical writings – which, taken together, provide an invaluable introduction to Swift as a master satirist and pamphleteer.

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“I know every move of your game… It has been a duel between you and me, Mr Holmes… If you are clever enough to bring destruction upon me, rest assured that I shall do as much to you.” With Sherlock Holmes’s reputation as the scourge of the criminal underworld preceding him, the ingenious detective, with the aid of Dr Watson, is confronted in these stories by some of his most fiendishly difficult cases yet. The collection culminates in ‘The Final Problem’, in which the evil Professor Moriarty is plotting the detective’s downfall. Soon Holmes and Watson are led across Europe in a deadly pursuit of their devilish quarry, until the final showdown in Switzerland, at the precipitous Reichenbach Falls…

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‘Tobermory’ – the title story of this collection – is widely considered one of Saki’s finest pieces, in which a short-sighted dinner-party guest introduces a talking cat to the diners, inadvertently revealing gossip and pushing fickle characters into the limelight – in the process undermining the common perceptions of grandiose and genteel high society. From some of his earliest successes, such as ‘Gabriel-Ernest’, ‘The Bag’ and the Clovis stories, about a young man with an impish sense of humour, to later tales such as ‘The Boar-Pig’, which is as bizarre as it is hilarious, and ‘The Toys of Peace’, which he was never able to see in print, this selection contains a wealth of well-known tales with vastly different themes – from reincarnation to psychological warfare – and bearing every trademark token of wit with which Saki has enthralled generations of eager readers.

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Gilbert Markham is fascinated by Helen Graham, the beautiful and enigmatic woman who has recently moved into Wildfell Hall. He is swift to befriend her and steadfastly refutes the local gossip calling her character and behaviour into question, yet he soon has cause to regret his infatuation, and grave doubts and misgivings begin to arise in his mind. It is only when Helen presents Gilbert with her diary and instructs him to read it that the shocking truth about her past life becomes clear. The first edition of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was so successful that it sold out in weeks, yet the novel was mired in controversy for its fierce defence of women's rights and what many contemporary critics viewed as its shocking and immoral subject matter.

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In ‘The Death of a Civil Servant’, an administrative clerk accidentally sneezes on a hierarchical superior at the opera, which results in great embarrassment and hilarious and futile attempts at atonement. The other short stories included in this volume, ‘A Calculated Marriage’, ‘The Culprit’, ‘The Exclamation Mark’, ‘The Speech-Maker’, ‘Who Is to Blame?’ and ‘A Defenceless Creature’ are in the same absurdly comical vein. This short collection shows Chekhov in an amusing, playful light, poking fun at the greed, sycophancy and ignorance of his characters, with the moral detachment that also characterizes his major, serious works.

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Most famous for his twenty-volume dissection of nineteenth-century French mores and society, the Rougon-Macquart novels, Zola was also an extremely accomplished short-story writer, as exemplified by the tales included in this volume. Concerned with the manifold aspects of everyday life and varying in their settings – from aristocratic drawing rooms to poverty-stricken garrets, from the hustle and bustle of Paris to the Provençal countryside of the author’s childhood – these stories will keep the reader riveted from the beginning to the end and surprise for their modernity. Contains: The Attack on the Mill The Girl Who Loves Me Rentafoil Death by Advertising Story of a Madman Big Michu The Way People Die A Flash in the Pan Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder Priests and Sinners Fair Exchange The Haunted House

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Inspired by Boileau’s Lutrin and illustrating the debate within European intellectual circles between the “Ancients”, who argued that all essential knowledge was to be found in classical texts, and the “Moderns”, who claimed that contemporary learning superseded the old sources, The Battle of the Books shows Swift at his wittiest and most trenchant. In this early satire, various books in St James’s Library take on a life of their own and come into conflict with one another, in a pastiche of the heroic epic genre. As well as providing humorous reflections on the nature of scholarship and education, Swift seizes the opportunity to take swipes at several authors and critics. The result is a timeless and entertaining parody by one of the most enduringly popular writers in the English language.

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First published in 1921, this volume collects some of the most comical stories Kipling published throughout his writing career. These tales derive their humour from absurd situations – a drunken Irish soldier waking up to find himself worshipped as a god in the Indian holy city of Benares, a monkey let loose in an English village – and from lampooning the attitudes and discourses of the time. While presenting many aspects which will be familiar to Kipling readers – rollicking adventures, exotic locales and an interest in the animal world – these Humorous Tales explore the more light-hearted and amusing side to the great master’s work.

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