Search results for ""Everyman""
Everyman In Search Of Lost Time Volume 2
In this second volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator turns from the childhood reminiscences of Swann’s Way to memories of his adolescence. Having gradually become indifferent to Swann’s daughter Gilberte, the narrator visits the seaside resort of Balbec with his grandmother and meets a new object of attention—Albertine, “a girl with brilliant, laughing eyes and plump, matt cheeks.”For this authoritative English-language edition, D. J. Enright has revised the late Terence Kilmartin’s acclaimed reworking of C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation to take into account the new definitive French editions of Á la recherché du temps perdu (the final volume of these new editions was published by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in 1989).
£20.00
Everyman Sondheim: Lyrics
Legendary American composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim has won eight Tonys, eight Grammys, six Olivier Awards, an Academy Award and a Pulitzer Prize. His brilliant songs and lyrics of genius have entertained us for more than half a century and his Broadway shows revolutionized musical theatre. Working together with Sondheim, editor Peter Gethers has selected for this volume lyrics from across Sondheim's career, drawn from shows including West Side Story, Gypsy, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods. The result is a delightful pocket-sized treasury of the best of Sondheim
£10.99
Everyman Art and Artists
Painting and sculpture have inspired great poetry, but so also have photography, calligraphy, tapestry and folk art. Included here are poems celebrating Leonardo da Vinci's 'Mona Lisa', Monet's 'Waterlilies' and Grant Wood's 'American Gothic'; well-known poems such as Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' and Auden's 'Musée de Beaux-Arts', Homer's immortal account of the forging of the Shield of Achilles and Garcia Lorca's breathtaking ode to the surreal paintings of Salvador Dali. Allen Ginsberg writes about Cézanne, E. E. Cummings about Picasso, Billy Collins about Hieronymous Bosch, and Joyce Carol Oates about Edward Hopper. Here too are poems that take on the artists themselves, from Michelangelo and Rembrandt to Georgia O'Keeffe and Andy Warhol. Altogether, this brilliantly curated anthology proves that a picture can be worth a thousand words - or a few very well-chosen ones.
£9.99
Everyman Measure For Measure
Two contemporary poets turns their attention to poetry as a living, rhythmic, often musical performance. Their wide-ranging selections encompass epic, folk songs, the Romantics, the Victorians, poets of the Harlem Renaissance and contemporary hip hop. For many readers, the most familiar poetic metre is the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare, but this only scratches the surface of the extraordinary diversity of rhythmic patterns that poets have employed over the ages. Measure for Measure has sections on Accentual Metre (Kipling, Bishop, Auden), Trochees (Blake, Dickinson, Dorothy Parker), Anapests (Byron, Frost, Langston Hughes); other sections cover iambs, ballads, and more exotic metres like amphibrachs, dipodics, hendecasyllabics and sapphics
£9.99
Everyman Letters of Emily Dickinson
The same inimitable voice and dazzling insights that make Emily Dickinson's poems immortal can be found in the whimsical, humorous, and often deeply moving letters she wrote to her family and friends throughout her life. The selection of letters presented here provides a fuller picture of the eccentric recluse of legend, showing how immersed in life she was: we see her tending her garden; baking bread; marking the marriages, births, and deaths of those she loved; reaching out for intellectual companionship; and confessing her personal joys and sorrows. These letters, invaluable for the light they shed on their author, are, as well, a pure pleasure to read.
£12.00
Everyman Kipling
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) is perhaps the most controversial major English poetof the last two centuries, not least because of his apparent enthusiasm for the empire. A child of British India, he first became famous for tales of imperial life, notably Kim, the Jungle Book and Barrack Room Ballads. Kipling wrote verse in every classical form from the epigram to the ode, but his most distinctive gift was for the ballads and narrative poems in which he draws vivid characters in universal situations and articulates profound truths in plain language. Yet he was also a subtle and deeply affecting anatomist of the human heart, with a feeling for the natural world which rivals his younger contemporary, D. H. Lawrence. Shattered by World War I in which he lost his only son, his work darkens and deepens in later years, but never loses its extraordinary vitality.
£12.00
Everyman Herbert Poems
Herbert experimented brilliantly with a remarkable variety of forms, from hymns and sonnets to "pattern poems," the shape of which reveal their subjects. Such technical agility never seems ostentatious, however, for precision of language and expression of genuine feeling were the primary concerns of this poet who admonished his readers to "dare to be true." An Anglican priest who took his calling with deep seriousness, he brought to his work a religious reverence richly allied with a playful wit and with literary and musical gifts of the highest order. His best-loved poems, from "The Collar" and "Jordan" to "The Altar" and "Easter Wings," achieve a perfection of form and feeling, a rare luminosity, and a timeless metaphysical grandeur.
£9.99
Everyman Tennyson Poems
This collection includes, of course, such celebrated poems as "The Lady of Shalott" and "The Charge of the Light Brigade." There are extracts from all the major masterpieces-"Idylls of the King," "The Princess," "In Memoriam"-and several complete long poems, such as "Ulysses" and "Demeter and Persephone," that demonstrate his narrative grace. Finally, there are many of the short lyrical poems, such as "Come into the Garden, Maud" and "Break, Break, Break," for which he is justly celebrated.
£12.00
Everyman Lullabies And Poems For Children
In this enchanting collection, favourite bed-time songs for children – 'Rock-a-bye, Baby', 'Bye, Baby Bunting', 'Golden Slumbers' – mingle with less familiar lullabies from around the world. Added to these are beautiful lyrics to sing or read to your little ones, from Brahms's 'Lullaby' to Gershwin's 'Summertime'; from Shakespeare's lullaby for the fairy queen Titania to Langston Hughes's lullaby for a 'night black baby'.Here, too, are nursery rhymes, and poems for older children by a wide variety of authors – Walter de la Mare, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, T.S. Eliot and Ogden Nash, to name but a few. Whether the intent is to soothe or to amuse, there is something here for every mood, every child, and the child in every adult.
£12.00
Everyman Beat Poets
This rousing anthology features the work of more than twenty-five writers from the great twentieth-century counter-cultural literary movement. Writing with an audacious swagger and an iconoclastic zeal, and declaiming their verse with dramatic flourish in smoke-filled cafés, the Beats gave birth to a literature of previously unimaginable expressive range. The defining work of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac provides the foundation for this collection, which also features the improvisational verse of such Beat legends as Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure and the work of such women writers as Diane di Prima and Denise Levertov. LeRoi Jones’s plaintive ‘‘Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note’’ and Bob Kaufman’s stirring ‘‘Abomunist Manifesto’’ appear here alongside statements on poetics and the alternately incendiary and earnest correspondence of Beat Generation writers. Visceral and powerful, infused with an unmediated spiritual and social awareness, this is a rich and varied tribute and, in the populist spirit of the Beats, a vital addition to the libraries of readers everywhere.
£12.00
Everyman James Merrill Poems
James Merrill once called his poetic works 'chronicles of love and loss', and in twenty books written over four decades he used the details of his life - comic and haunting, exotic and domestic - to shape a compelling, sometimes intensely moving, personal portrait. Sophisticated, witty and ironic, his poetry also engages passionately with topical issues - war, terrorism, political corruption, AIDS, climate change and the destruction of nature. An admirer of Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop and W. H. Auden, Merrill, like them, has left a legacy that will speak to readers for years to come.
£9.99
Everyman Prague Stories
The Golden City of Prague has long been an intellectual centre of the western world. The writers collected here range from the early nineteenth century to the present and include both Prague natives and visitors from elsewhere. Here are stories, legends, and scenes from the city's past and present, from the Jewish fable of the golem, a creature conjured from clay, to tales of German and Soviet invasions. The international array of writers ranges from Franz Kafka to Ivan Klíma to Bruce Chatwin, and includes the award-winning British playwright Tom Stoppard and former American Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, both of whom have Czech roots. Covering the city's venerable Jewish heritage, the glamour of the belle-époque period, World War II, Communist rule, the Prague Spring, the Velvet Revolution, and beyond, Prague Stories weaves a remarkable selection of fiction and nonfiction into a literary portrait of a fascinating city.Richard Bassett, former Central European correspondent for The Times, knows his subject inside out. Here is Prague in all its brilliance, a city rich in folklore both Slavic and Jewish, whose history is the stuff of legend - Jan Hus, Charles IV and his eponymous bridge, serial defenestrations; Prague in the dark years of World War II, in the grey years of Communism, in the excitement of the Velvet Revolution. And here is today's Prague, a vibrant cosmopolitan capital where a new generation of Czech writers - Sylva Fischerova, Daniela Hodrova and others - explores its identity in new and exciting ways.A unique collection of fiction and non-fiction to delight and stimulate travellers and stay-at-homes alike.
£12.99
Everyman Russian Stories
Russian Stories rounds up marvellous short stories by all the Russian heavyweights, including Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov, Bulgakov, Babel and Nabokov, and continuing up to contemporary writers such as Tatyana Tolstaya and the recent Nobel Prize winner, Svetlana Alexievich. There is no similar one-volume collection of the best of the Russian greats in English. Women writers are particularly well represented and predominate in the last fifty years; also included is a story by the recently rediscovered Teffi, who was widely hailed a century ago in Russia as 'the female Chekhov'.
£12.83
Everyman Rome Stories
During its three-thousand-year history Rome has been an imperial metropolis, the capital of a nation and the spiritual core of a great world religion. For writers from antiquity to the present, however, the place holds an alternative significance as a realm of fantasy, aspiration and desire. Captivating and lethal at one and the same moment, its fatal gift of beauty both transfigures and betrays those in thrall to it. Rome Stories explores the city's fateful impact through the writing of classical historians, a Renaissance sculptor, 18th-century tourists, American, British and French novelists and the authors of modern Rome, each testing and unravelling the city's ageless paradoxes. Gibbon admires the Last of the Tribunes, Goethe decodes the mysteries of the Carnival and Stendhal's subversive aristocrats mingle revolution with a little cross-dressing amid their gilt mirrors and frescoed ceilings From Plutarch to Pasolini, from Hawthorne to Wharton, the city of Caesars and popes, of dreamers, chancers and hustlers confronts the questing imagination with its eternally unflinching gaze.
£10.99
Everyman Wedding Stories
The stories collected here--including such gems as Stephen Crane's "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," O. Henry's "The Marry Month of May," F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Bridal Party," Joy Williams's "The Wedding," and Lorrie Moore's "Thank You For Having Me", encompass comic wedding mishaps, engagements broken and mended, honeymoon adventures, and scenes both heartwarming and heartbreaking. There are glamorous weddings in Paris and New York, and more eccentric ones in the Wild West and on a remote island beach. There are nervous brides, forgetful grooms, meddling guests, interrupted nuptials, second thoughts, and second chances. Above all, there are all kinds of people - young and old, rich and poor, divorced and widowed, with or without children - joining together in the age-old quest for matrimonial happiness.
£10.99
Everyman Shaken and Stirred: Intoxicating Stories
In this lively collection, wine snobs receive their comeuppance at the hands of Roald Dahl and Edgar Allan Poe; innocents over-imbibe in tales by Jack London and Alice Munro; riotous partying exacts a comic price in stories by P. G. Wodehouse and Kingsley Amis; Charles Jackson and Jean Rhys chronicle liquor-soaked epiphanies; while John Cheever, Vladimir Nabokov and Robert Coover set their characters afloat on surreal, soul-revealing adventures. Here, too, are well-lubricated tales by Dickens, Twain, Beckett, Colette, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing, Frank O'Connor, Penelope Lively, and many more.The settings include hotels and restaurants, a wine cellar in Italy, a café in Paris, a bar in Dublin, a New York nightclub, Jazz Age speakeasies, suburban lawn parties and the occasional gaol cell, and are peopled by lovers and loners, barmen and chorus girls, youths taking their first sips and experienced tipplers nursing hangovers.Whether living it up or drowning their sorrows, the vividly drawn characters in these sparkling pages will leave you shaken and stirred.
£10.99
Everyman Fishing Stories
Fishing Stories nets an abundant catch of wonderful writing in a wide variety of genres and styles. The moods range from the rollicking humour of Rudyard Kipling’s “On Dry-Cow Fishing as a Fine Art” and the rural gothic of Annie Proulx’s “The Wer-Trout” to the haunting elegy of Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It.”Many of these tales celebrate human bonds forged over a rod, including Guy de Maupassant’s “Two Friends,” Jimmy Carter’s “Fishing with My Daddy,” and Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden. Some deal in reverence and romance, as in Roland Pertwee’s “The River God,” and some in adventure and the stuff of legend, as in Zane Grey’s “The First Thousand-Pounder” and Ron Rash’s “Their Ancient Glittering Eyes.” There are works that confront head-on the heartbreaks and frustrations of the sport, from Thomas McGuane’s meditation on long spells of inaction as the essence of fishing in “The Longest Silence” to Raymond Carver on a boy’s deflated triumph in the gut-wrenching masterpiece “Nobody Said Anything.” And alongside the works of literary giants are the memories of people both great and humble who have found meaning and fulfillment in fishing, from a former American president to a Scottish gamekeeper’s daughter.Whether set against the open ocean or tiny mountain streams, in ancient China, tropical Tahiti, Paris under siege, or the vast Canadian wilderness, these stories cast wide and strike deep into the universal joys, absurdities, insights, and tragedies of life.
£12.99
Everyman Robert Burns
The perfect gift for poetry lovers. A comprehensive collection of the Scottish Bard's songs and poems.The 19th-century scholar and educationalist J S Blackie summed up Burns's importance to Scotland and the Scots with the words:'When Scotland forgets Burns, then history will forget Scotland.'Today, Burns is unique in the affection and fascination that his memory inspires. The fruits of his legacy can be seen not only in Scotland but around the world - on product packaging, in advertising and on a wealth of merchandise, as well as through continued scholarship and academic study.
£12.00
Everyman Stories of Motherhood
In this beautifully packaged anthology A. S. Byatt, Alice Munro, Elizabeth Bowen, Sherwood Anderson, Edith Wharton, Anita Desai, Colm Tóibín, Lorrie Moore and many others reflect upon all aspects of motherhood in stories lyrical and satirical, realistic and fantastic, hilarious and heartbreaking. Here at last is a gift-book that is neither sentimental nor 'inspirational', offering instead high-quality literary fiction which will continue to entertain long after the chocolates have been eaten and the flowers thrown away.
£15.00
Everyman The White Guard
Kiev - Kyiv - is in chaos. Russia has withdrawn from World War I but the Germans have set up a puppet government in Ukraine. Civil war rages: the Bolsheviks have seized power in Russia, but the anti-revolutionary White Guard who have fled to Ukraine, are rallying to resist. In the meantime, Ukrainian nationalists are camped outside the capital, and a Red army is on its way to bring everyone to heel. While all this is going on, the Turbin family try to eke out their existence in Kyiv and discuss what they should do. They are exactly the sort of family - monarchist intelligentsia - for whom the future looks particularly menacing.Bulgakov's brilliant and evocative prose brings the city and the moment unforgettably to life and sheds some fascinating light on the complex interwoven histories of Ukraine and Russia.
£15.00
Everyman Never Let Me Go
As children, Kathy, Ruth and Tommy attended an exclusive boarding-school in the English countryside. Idyllic in some ways yet vaguely sinister, 'Hailsham' was a place of intense friendships, mysterious rules, and 'guardians' who constantly reminded the students how special they were. Now thirty-one, Kathy looks back on their shared past and tells how she and her friends gradually came to understand the shocking reason for the careful nurturing they had received. An affecting meditation on friendship, love and mortality.
£16.99
Everyman Independent People
Set in the early decades of the twentieth century, Independent People is a masterly realist novel evoking in rich detail a family and a rural community struggling to survive in the starkest of landscapes. At the same time it is infused with an intense awareness of Iceland's saga tradition and folklore. Bjartur of Summerhouses is a hard and sometimes cruel man, but his flinty determination to achieve independence is both genuinely heroic and bleakly comic. Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude before managing to purchase an isolated piece of land rumoured to be cursed, Bjartur wants nothing more than to tend his flocks unbeholden to any man. But his daughter wants to live unbeholden to him, and what ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. An utterly compelling read.
£15.99
Everyman The Ambassadors
The original American in Paris. This dark comedy, seen as one of the masterpieces of James's final period, has all the elements of great writing, brilliant plot and gorgeous setting- An Edwardian gentleman from the States arrives in seedy and sophisticated Paris to rescue his wayward future step son. But his innocent American background has not prepared him for such seduction... Beautiful hardback gift edition of this collectable classic. This complex tale of self-discovery -- considered by the author to be his best work -- traces the path of an aging idealist, Lambert Strether. Arriving in Paris with the intention of persuading his young charge to abandon an obsession with a French woman and return home, Strether reaches unexpected conclusions.
£12.99
Everyman Go Tell It on the Mountain
'Go back to where you started, or as far back as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it. Sing or shout or testify or keep it to yourself: but know whence you came.'Originally published in 1953, Go Tell it on the Mountain was James Baldwin's first major work, based in part on his own childhood in Harlem. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual and moral struggle towards self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understood themselves.
£15.99
Everyman The Book of Evidence & The Sea
The Book of Evidence, shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1989 and The Sea, which won the Booker prize in 2005, take us into the hauntingly confused worlds of two ageing male protagonists - washed- up scientist Freddie Montgomery, desperate to explain why he is being held in an Irish prison for murder (The Book of Evidence) and recently widowed art historian Max Morden, who has returned to a sleepy seaside boarding house to relive the events of his first adolescent awakenings (The Sea). With spellbinding virtuosity, Banville piles ambiguity upon ambiguity to construct tense tales of sex, betrayal and self-deception, which keep us turning the page, while questioning our own certainties about memory and identity. In both works, the acclaimed Irish novelist is revealed at his masterful best, conjuring dark wit, suspense and drama from the stunning lyrical beauty of his near-perfect prose.
£12.99
Everyman The Sea, The Sea & A Severed Head
First published in 1961, The Severed Head is regarded is one of Iris Murdoch’s most entertaining works. A dark and ferocious comic masterpiece, the novel traces the turbulent emotional journey of Martin Lynch-Gibbon, a smug, well-to-do London wine merchant and unfaithful husband, whose life is turned inside out when his wife leaves him for her psychoanalyst. In The Sea, the Sea the landscape shifts to the seclusion of an isolated house on the edge of England’s North Sea, where Charles Arrowby, a big name in London’s glittering theatrical world, has retired to write his memoirs. Arrowby’s plans begin to unravel when he meets his first love and becomes haunted by the idea of rekindling his adolescent passion. The Severed Head and Booker prize-winner The Sea, the Sea are two of Iris Murdoch’s most accomplished novels, displaying all her talent for combining profundity with playful creativity. Both tragic and comic, brooding and hilarious, they brilliantly reveal how much our lives are governed by the lies we tell ourselves as well as our all-consuming desire for love, significance and, ultimately, redemption.
£14.99
Everyman They Were Found Wanting and They Were Divided: The Transylvania Trilogy Vol. 2
The liberal hero, Balint, is at odds with the politics of his time; he lyrically describes the idyllic pre-industrial world of Hungarian Transylvania, later to fall into the hands of first the Nazis and then the Communists, his love for Adrienne, married to an unpleasant and dangerous lunatic, and a Proustian society helplessly bent on its own destruction.This is a novel hard to put down, a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature that deserves to be much more widely known.First published in English in the early 1990s by a small publisher, and a huge word-of-mouth success, this is the first edition in hardback, and in two rather than three volumes.
£20.00
Everyman Flaubert's Parrot/History of the World
Flaubert’s Parrot, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984, concerns the attempts of an increasingly bemused researcher to establish certain facts about a famous French novelist and the stuffed bird which used to sit on his desk.A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters blends fact and fiction in a virtuoso kaleidoscope of vignettes from Noah’s time to the present. One of the author’s most inventive works, it was praised by Salman Rushdie as ‘frequently brilliant, funny, thoughtful, iconoclastic and a delight to read’.
£12.99
Everyman The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
Hugo's grand medieval melodrama tells the story of the beautiful Esmeralda, a gypsy girl loved by three men: Archdeacon Frollo, his adoptive son Quasimodo, bell-ringer of Notre-Dame cathedral, and Captain Phoebus. Falsely accused of trying to murder Phoebus, who attempts to rape her, Esmeralda is sentenced to death and rescued from the gallows by Quasimodo who defends her to the last.The subject of many adaptations for stage and screen, this remains perhaps one of the most romantic yet gripping stories ever told.
£14.07
Everyman The English Patient
Hana, a Canadian nurse, exhausted by death, and grieving for her own dead father; the maimed thief-turned-Allied-agent, Caravaggio; Kip, the emotionally detached Indian sapper - each is haunted in different ways by the man they know only as the English patient, a nameless burn victim who lies in an upstairs room. His extraordinary knowledge and morphine-induced memories - of the North African desert, of explorers and tribes, of history and cartography; and also of forbidden love, suffering and betrayal - illuminate the story, and leave all the characters for ever changed.
£12.99
Everyman Dracula
Though Stoker did not invent vampires - and in fact based his character's life-in-death on extensive research into European folklore - his novel elevated the nocturnal monster to iconic stature, spawning a genre of stories and movies which flourishes to this day. A century of imitation has done nothing to diminish its power. As the suave and chilling Count stalks his prey from a crumbling castle in the Carpathians to a lunatic asylum in Purfleet and the bedrooms of his swooning female victims, the drama builds to a fever pitch of sensuality and suspense.Dracula is not only a classic of Gothic horror and a wellspring of modern mythology: it is also irresistible entertainment.
£14.99
Everyman Collected Nonfiction Volume 1: Selections from the Autobiography, Letters, Essays, and Speeches
Politics, religion, culture, travel, science and technology, family life: nothing escaped the eye and pen of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, nineteenth-century America's most famous writer and a legend in his own lifetime. Though chiefly known today for his classic novels of childhood, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and for his short stories, he produced even more nonfiction of an impressive quality.Twain lived a life as exciting as his fiction, and in his Autobiography we find him running wild, like the heroes of his novels, in the countryside around his childhood home in Missouri and navigating the treacherous waters of the Mississippi River as a trained steamboat pilot, while his letters show him travelling thousands of miles over the United States on hectic lecture tours (he was a great showman, raconteur and performer of his own works), hobnobbing with princes and presidents and being lionized in the capitals of Europe.His trademark wit, candour, sarcasm and irrepressible humour shine through on every page of this selection, but here too, beyond the entertainer, we discover in his speeches and essays the social and moral issues - slavery, imperialism - which concerned him, and meet the private man behind that towering public figure, whose long marriage never lost its romance, but who bore the sorrow of losing two of his three daughters while still in their twenties. A sometimes moving, sometimes hilarious and always riveting read.
£15.00
Everyman Roald Dahl Collected Stories
Many of these stores are now so famous from film and television adaptations that they need no introduction. Roald Dahl is well known as a master of the macabre and the unexpected in the tradition of Saki, and this volume does not disappoint. He began his literary career by writing about his own experiences in the RAF during World War II but soon developed this talent in a series of short-story collections. He is perhaps even more celebrated as an author of children's books, but the best of his short stories represent a claim for him to be numbered among the most remarkable story writers of the 20th century.The present volume includes for the first time all the stories in chronological order as established by Dahl's biographer, Jeremy Treglown, in consultation with the Dahl estate.
£18.99
Everyman The Dain Curse, The Glass Key, and Selected Stories
With his diamond-sharp prose and artfully handled intrigue, Dashiell Hammett virtually invented hard-boiled crime fiction. This omnibus edition includes four linked stories - 'The House in Turk Street', 'The Girl with the Silver Eyes', 'The Big Knockover' and '$106,000 Blood Money - featuring the Continental Op, Hammett's anonymous tough-guy detective. In The Dain Curse, the Op takes on a wealthy young woman who appears to be the victim of a deadly family curse. And in The Glass Key - Hammett's own favourite among his works - we encounter his most cynical, morally ambiguous hero and a hard-boiled version of a love triangle. In the works collected here, we can observe the process by which Hammett both stripped crime fiction down to its most subtle and searing essentials and elevated it to high literature.
£14.99
Everyman Not George Washington
This early novel, written in collaboration with a friend, is a fascinating curiosity which suggests that Wodehouse might have become a very different, experimental sort of writer, had he continued to write in the same vein.Using multiple narrators, playing with literary stereotypes and identities, it tells the story of an aspiring young writer, James Orlebar Cloyster, prepared to do almost anything, first for success and then for gratification. By making Cloyster a mild, affable young man of the sort so familiar in his later novels, Wodehouse creates a comic disparity between the character’s lofty professions of virtue and his unscrupulous behaviour. As the story progresses, we realise that he is not unusual: all the main characters are unscrupulous in one way or another, ready to cheat and lie in pursuit of their ends, hence the title of the book.Not George Washington contains many fine scenes, and Cloyster’s narrative displays the calm mastery of story-telling Wodehouse had already made his own. If awkwardly executed, it is cleverly plotted, springing several surprises along the way. Clearly autobiographical in origin, it also invites readers to reflect on the nature of talent, fame, failure and success, villainy and honour - themes which continued to recur in the author’s work for another sixty years.
£10.99
Everyman The Prince and Betty
A classic musical comedy plot turned into a novel, The Prince and Betty is the story of a man who gives up everything for his girl. Fortunately, she chances to be the step-daughter of a millionaire. John Maude and Betty Silver are in love, but when John turns out to be heir to the principality of Mervo, a small Mediterranean island not a thousand miles from Monte Carlo, he finds himself ensnared in the establishment of a new casino on the island, much to his beloved’s high-minded disgust. She leaves him and takes a job with an American family in London; he abandons his post to follow her. Eventually their misunderstandings are disentangled: the pair are reunited, betrothed and bound for a new life in the United States. And so it is that, in the process of telling their story, published early in his career, Wodehouse constructs the critique of Europe versus America, privilege versus enterprise, decadence versus adventure, which was to underpin many of his later tales.
£15.00
Everyman The Best of Wodehouse
P.G. Wodehouse was, by common consent, the most brilliant writer of English comedy in the 20th century, equally celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic. He achieved the unusual distinction of combining the widest possible popularity with the highest literary standards, attracting both the devotion of readers and the respect of his peers from Hilaire Belloc to Graham Greene. Several of his characters have already entered popular mythology. This anthology includes two novels, fourteen short stories and extracts from Wodehouse's autobiography.The Code of the Woosters was written in 1938 when Wodehouse was at the height of his powers. The vintage plot involves Bertie Wooster attempting to steal a cream jug from a country house at the behest of his aunt Dahlia - or, as Bertiehimself puts it, 'the sinister affair of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeleine Bassett, old Pop bassett, Stiffy Byng, the Rev H.P. ('Stinker') Pinker, the eighteenth-century cow-creamer and the small, brown, leather-covered notebook.' The outcome is a dazzlingly intricate plot and a wonderfully satisfying farce.Uncle Fred in the Springtime, published in 1939, brings one of the author's favourite characters, Uncle Fred aka Lord Ickenham, to his most celebrated comic location, Blandings Castle, where the dastardly Duke of Dunstable is again attempting to steal Lord Emsworth's prize pig. Called in to thwart the duke, Uncle Fred poses as pompous 'looney-doctor' Sir Roderick Glossop, with complicated results. The short stories feature all Wodehouse's most famous creations - Jeeves and Wooster, Ukridge, Bingo Little, Mr Mulliner, the Earls of Emsworth and Ickenham. Finally, extracts from Over Seventy, a memoir as amusing and beautifully written as the novels, offer an insight into the attitudes and working habits of a very private man.
£18.00
Everyman The Luck Stone
Originally published as a serial in Chums under the pseudonym of Basil Windham, The Luck Stone is thoroughly Wodehouse with his trademark sticky situations, quirky characters, sly humour and wit, and of course, his renowned prose. All written in the form of a letter to a friend, this dark and suspenseful plot will never fail to disappoint
£15.00
Everyman The Count of Monte Cristo
On the day of his wedding, Edmond Dantes, master mariner, is arrested in Marseille on trumped-up charges and spirited away to the cellars of the Chateau d'If, an impregnable sea fortress in which he is imprisoned indefinitely. Escaping from the chateau by a series of daring manoeuvres, he unearths a great treasure on the island of Monte Cristo, buried there by a former fellow prisoner who bequeaths to him the secret of its whereabouts. Thus armed with unimaginable wealth and embittered by his long imprisonment, he resolves to devote his life to tracking down and punishing those responsible. This classic nineteenth-century translation has been revised and updated by Peter Washington, with an introduction by award-winning novelist Umberto Eco.
£20.69
Everyman The Girl in Blue
The vintage plot concerns a Gainsborough miniature, a mouldering country house, an overweight solicitor, a fortune-hunter, a butler who isn't a butler, an American corporate lawyer and his kleptomaniac sister; but the heart of the story - in every sense - concerns Jerry West and his determined pursuit of air hostess Jane Hunnicutt, the eponymous Girl in Blue. When Jane unexpectedly becomes a millionairess, Jerry despairs of wooing her, but the sun never goes behind a cloud for long in Wodehouse: Jerry gets his Jane in the end, but only after a series of trials which raise the comic stakes to the author's highest level.
£12.99
Everyman Indiscretions of Archie
It wasn't Archie's fault, really. It's true he went to America and fell in love with Lucille, the daughter of a millionaire hotel proprietor . . . and if he did marry her -- well, what else was there to do? From his point of view, the whole thing was a thoroughly good egg; but Mr. Brewster, his father-in-law, thought differently, Archie had neither money nor occupation, which was distasteful in the eyes of the industrious Mr. Brewster; but the real bar was the fact that he had once adversely criticized one of his hotels. Archie did his best to heal the breach; but, being something of an ass, genus priceless, he found it almost beyond his powers to placate the "man-eating fish" whom Providence had given him as a father-in-law. . . .
£15.00
Everyman Doctor Sally
When Bill Bannister meets Dr Sally Smith, love blossoms immediately. Unfortunately there is just the small problem of Lottie Higginbotham, former actress, serial bride and human fireball, with whom Bill is already involved.The well-meaning interference of Bill's old friend, Squiffy Tidmouth, once married to Lottie, only complicates matters further, until everything is straightened out in a series of comic encounters at Bill's ancestral home and everyone lives happily ever after.
£12.99
Everyman Sam the Sudden
Not-so-fresh off the tramp steamer from America, Sam Shotter settles in the sleepy suburb of Valley Fields. His pastoral peace is short-lived, however, when Soapy Molloy, Dolly the Dip, and Chimp Twist arrive on the scene looking for two million dollars they seem to have mislaid in the vicinity. Not only does Sam discover he's living right bang next door to the girl of his dreams, but he's sitting, rather embarrassingly, on a goldmine. Some rather superior sleuthing will be required.
£12.99
Everyman Uncle Dynamite
Although the story of Uncle Dynamite concerns Bill Oakshott's struggle to find ways of getting his girl while financing his inheritance at Ashenden Manor, the real hero of the book is Frederick Altamont Cornwallis, fifth Earl of Ickenham. This noble lord describes himself as 'one of the hottest earls that ever donned a coronet' and he was also one of his creator's favourite characters, featuring in three other novels. Lord Ickenham sees it as his mission to bring a little joy into the lives of others, and on this occasion he surpasses himself.
£12.99
Everyman My Man Jeeves
Containing drafts of stories later rewritten for other collections (including Carry On, Jeeves), My Man Jeeves offers a fascinating insight into the genesis of comic literature's most celebrated double-act. All the stories are set in New York, four of them featuring Jeeves and Wooster themselves; the rest concerning Reggie Pepper, an earlier version of Bertie. Plots involve the usual cast of amiable young clots, choleric millionaires, chorus-girls and vulpine aunts, but towering over them all is the inscrutable figure of Jeeves, manipulating the action from behind the scenes.Early or not, these stories are masterly examples of Wodehouse's art,turning the most ordinary incidents into golden farce.
£12.99
Everyman The Girl on the Boat
When Sam Marlowe falls in love with his cousin's sparky ex-fiancée he finds himself up against stiff opposition from her millionaire father, her father's best friend and the best friend's son for whom she is destined, all of them travelling together aboard the RMS Atlantic. Nothing daunted, Sam perseveres in his suit: though he fails at sea he eventually triumphs on land. This Anglo-American musical comedy in prose begins in New York, crosses the Atlantic in leisurely fashion and ends in an English country house where all manner of things go bump in the night.
£12.99
Everyman Ring For Jeeves
The only Jeeves story in which Bertie Wooster makes no appearance, involves Jeeves on secondment as butler and general factotum to William Belfry, ninth Earl of Rowcester (pronounced Roaster). Despite his impressive title, Bill Belfry is broke, which may explain why he and Jeeves have been working as Silver Ring bookies, disguised in false moustaches and loud check suits. All goes well until the terrifying Captain Brabazon-Biggar, big-game hunter, two-fisted he-man and saloon-bar bore, lays successful bets on two outsiders, leaving the would-be bookies three thousand pounds down and on the run from their creditor. Ring For Jeeves is the story of their misadventures as they attempt to evade the incandescent Captain, combined with Bill's attempt to sell his crumbling mansion to rich American widow, Rosalinda Spottsworth - who just happens to be Brabazon-Biggar's former flame...
£12.99
Everyman Mulliner Nights
Always to be found in the bar-parlour of the Angler's Rest where he is a favourite with the accomplished barmaid, Miss Postlethwaite, Mr Mulliner, the narrator of Meet Mr Mulliner, returns for another series of stories about his extraordinary relations, including Lancelot, Adrian, Cyril, Sacheverell, Eustace, Egbert and Augustine Mulliner. In a text teeming with tipsy bishops, angry baronets, lady novelists and haughty dowagers, the Mulliner boys always manage to come out on top.
£12.99