Search results for ""alma books ltd""

In June 1862, Dostoevsky left Petersburg on his first excursion to Western Europe. Ostensibly making the trip to consult Western specialists about his epilepsy, he also wished to see firsthand the source of the Western ideas he believed were corrupting Russia. Over the course of his journey he visited a number of major cities, including Berlin, Paris, London, Florence, Milan, and Vienna. His impressions on what he saw, "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions", were first published in the February 1863 issue of Vremya (Time), the periodical he edited.

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Ebenezer Scrooge is a lonely, miserly old man who hates Christmas, which he dismisses as "humbug". One Christmas Eve, however, he is visited by a series of ghosts who reveal to him the innocence he has lost, the wretchedness of his future and the poverty of the present, which he has so far ignored. This experience teaches Scrooge the true meaning of the holiday and leaves him a transformed man. With its memorable cast of characters such as Scrooge, Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol is the most heart-warming of seasonal tales, a timeless classic that continues to enchant readers around the world and a lesson in charity and hopefulness that is as powerful today as when it was first written in 1843.

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As they relax after dinner on Christmas Eve, the members of a family and their guests turn to telling ghost stories. These ghoulish accounts range from the melancholy to the macabre, and get increasingly bizarre as the ghosts leap out of the tales and make an appearance in the family’s home. Fact and fiction, the real and unreal collide, until the reader is not sure who is haunting whom. A masterful work of comic horror, Jerome K. Jerome’s After-Supper Ghost Stories is a witty look at why Christmas Eve is so perfect for ghost stories and why ghosts love the Yuletide season.

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Widely considered one of the greatest American novels, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn tells the story of Huck Finn and his companion, the slave Jim, as they journey down the Mississippi river after running away from Huck’s alcoholic father and Jim’s owners. As they travel, they encounter a floating house, feuding families and cunning grifters, but more importantly Huck gets to know Jim and regard him as a friend and equal, overcoming the racial prejudices of the time, in a landmark narrative which poignantly addresses the issues of growing up and finding freedom.

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When the Americans Mr and Mrs Otis and their four children move into Canterville Chase, its previous occupant Lord Canterville warns them that the ghost of his ancestor still haunts the house. Their disbelief is soon shattered by the nightly sound of rattling chains in the hallways and the appearance of mysterious bloodstains in the living room. However, the ghost struggles to intimidate his new victims, as they counter his ghoulish behaviour with typically transatlantic pragmatism, offering lubricator for his chains and cleaning up the stains with detergent. As the spirit is deserted by his capacity to scare, Virginia, the Otises’ daughter, gets to know him and learns the tragic tale behind his sad fate. Sparkling with his trademark wit, this classic tale is one of Oscar Wilde’s finest stories and is presented here with three other comic mystery stories, ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’, ‘The Sphinx without a Secret’ and ‘The Model Millionaire’, all of which were first published together in 1891.

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Coming back to the "nest" of his family home in Russia after years of fruitless endeavours away from his roots, Lavretsky decides to turn his back on the vacuous salons of Paris and his frivolous and unfaithful wife Varvara Pavlovna. On his return he meets Liza, the daughter of one of his cousins, whom he had known when they were children and who rekindles in him long-smothered feelings of love. News of Varvara's death arrive from France, offering Lavretsky the prospect of a new life, but a cruel twist threatens to shatter his dreams and forces him to re-evaluate his plans. Hailed as a masterpiece of Russian literature, A Nest of the Gentry - Turgenev's most successful and widely read novel, here presented in a new translation by Michael Pursglove - deals with the personal struggles of the individual in a period of turbulent social change.

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The career of Mikhail Bulgakov, the author of Master and Margarita – now regarded as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature – was characterized by a constant and largely unsuccessful struggle against state censorship. This suppression did not only apply to his art: in 1926 his personal diary was seized by the authorities. From then on he confined his thoughts to letters to his friends and family, as well as to public figures such as Stalin and his fellow Soviet writer Gorky, while also encouraging his wife Yelena to keep a diary, with many entries influenced or even dictated by him. This ample selection from the diaries and letters of the Bulgakovs, mostly translated for the first time into English, provides an insightful glimpse into a fascinating period of Russian history and literature, telling the tragic tale of the fate of an artist under a totalitarian regime.

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Persuasion narrates the emotional journey of its protagonist Anne Elliot, who chances upon Captain Wentworth, a suitor she was persuaded to reject seven years earlier, and whose reappearance causes her to reflect on her past decisions and contemplate her marital future.Vividly depicting the society holiday towns of Lyme Regis and Bath and infused with its author's trademark wit, Austen's last completed novel, set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, is an entertaining and enduring account of the dilemmas facing young women in the early nineteenth century.

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When strange things are reported to be floating in rivers in rural Vermont after a flood, old myths about hill-dwelling monsters who abduct humans resurface in subsequent debates, much to the annoyance of local academic Albert N. Wilmarth. However, when he starts receiving letters from a man named Henry Wentworth Akeley about the supposed presence near his farmhouse of an extraterrestrial race worshipping ancient cosmic deities, Wilmarth finds himself drawn into an astonishing correspondence that leads to a harrowing discovery. A seminal early contribution to the horror and science-fiction genres, ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’ is presented here, along with other classics from the Lovecraft canon – such as ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, ‘The Shadow over Innsmouth’, ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ and ‘The Silver Key’ – in a brand-new collection showcasing the finest tales from the twentieth century’s foremost purveyor of terror.

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This collection of Dante Alighieri’s lyrics charts his poetic evolution and displays the ground on which his Vita nuova and Divine Comedy developed. Inspired in his early poems by troubadour love poetry, Dante would later come to master all the genres of the time, such as the canzone, the sonnet and the ballad. At the same time deeply personal – dealing with themes of love, death and exile – and imbued with the poetic and political milieux of the period, Dante’s Rime offer a fascinating glimpse into the imagination of arguably the greatest writer of all time.

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One of Tolstoy’s last published works of fiction, The Devil revolves around the young landowner Yevgeny’s irrepressible lust for Stepanida, a sensual peasant woman. Even when he gets married to a respectable upper-class lady, he finds himself unable to put an end to his encounters with Stepanida, and becomes increasingly consumed by guilt and helplessness in the face of his urges. In some ways comparable to the controversial Kreutzer Sonata, The Devil shows Tolstoy at his most salacious, and addresses the conflicts between desire, social norms and personal conscience. Also included in this volume is Family Happiness, one of Tolstoy’s earliest works, an entertaining and cynical account of marriage from the perspective of a disillusioned wife, and A Landowner’s Morning.

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Mark Twain's gloriously funny Diary of Adam and Eve, which John Updike described as a paradigm of the relations between sexes, is presented here with a number of other Twain pieces on our two oldest ancestors, showing the writer's interest in this most famous episode of the Bible. By giving a voice to Adam and Eve, and by hitting all the notes on the literary scale - from the intimate to the comical, from the journalistic to the idyllic - Twain displays the brilliance and wit for which he is rightly considered one of the greatest satirists of all time.

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In Bulgakov’s ‘Diaboliad’, the modest and unassuming office clerk Korotkov is summarily sacked for a trifling error from his job at the Main Central Depot of Match Materials, and tries to seek out his newly assigned superior, responsible for his dismissal. His quest through the labyrinth of Soviet bureaucracy takes on the increasingly surreal dimensions of a nightmare. This early satirical story, reminiscent of Gogol and Dostoevsky, was first published in 1924 and incurred the wrath of pro-Soviet critics. Along with the three other stories in this volume, which also explore the themes of the absurd and bizarre, it provides a fascinating glimpse into the artistic development of the author of The Master and Margarita.

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As Mrs Dalloway works on the preparations for a dinner party, her thoughts throughout the day wander from memories of the past to interrogations about the present and lead her to assess the choices she has made in life and love. Her monologue interweaves with the account of the distress, on that same day, of the shell-shocked veteran Septimus Warren Smith, whose trauma and hallucinations end in tragedy, as the links between the two characters unfold. One of Virginia Woolf's most famous novels, Mrs Dalloway is a triumph of experimentation, a cornerstone of Modernism and a subtle examination of love, freedom, mental illness and the female condition in society.

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While he is now mostly associated with his Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle was also celebrated for the many masterful tales he wrote outside of that cycle. In this collection, first published in 1922, he compiled various pieces of short fiction which fall into the categories of horror and detective fiction, two genres for which he has become a byword. These eclectic, captivating tales - dealing with topics such as mysterious jungles in the sky, seventeenth-century torture techniques, a bloodthirsty Brazilian cat and a train mysteriously disappearing between two stations - showcase Arthur Conan Doyle at his creative best.

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First published in 1938, The Theatre and Its Double is a collection of essays detailing Antonin Artaud’s radical theories on drama and theatre, which he saw as being stifled by conservatism and lack of experimentation. Containing the famous manifestos of the ‘Theatre of Cruelty’, the collection analyses the underlying impulses of performance, provides some suggestions on a physical-training method for actors and actresses, and features a long appreciation of the expressive values of Eastern dance drama.

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Published a year after The Great Gatsby, this short-story collection showcases many of the celebrated novel’s themes, as well as its unique writing style. Two of the most famous tales, the beautifully elegiac ‘The Rich Boy’ and ‘Winter Dreams’, deal with wealthy protagonists – the old-money Anson Hunter and the self-made man Dexter Green – as they come to terms with lost love, while ‘Absolution’, in which a boy confesses to a priest, was initially written as a background piece to The Great Gatsby. Also containing ‘The Baby Party’, ‘Rags Martin-Jones and the Pr–nce of W–les’, ‘The Adjuster’, ‘Hot and Cold Blood’, ‘The Sensible Thing’ and ‘Gretchen’s Forty Winks’ – all of which describe in various ways the 1920s society that Fitzgerald himself inhabited – All the Sad Young Men is a masterpiece of twentieth-century American fiction.

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Several years after emigrating from the USSR, the author discovers the battered suitcase he had brought with him gathering dust at the back of a wardrobe. As he opens the suitcase, the items he finds inside take on a riotously funny life of their own as Dovlatov inventories the circumstances under which he acquired them. A poplin shirt evokes a story of courtship and marriage, a pair of boots calls up the hilarious conclusion to an official banquet, two pea-green crêpe socks bring back memories of his attempt to become a black-market racketeer, while a double-breasted suit reminds him of when he was approached by the KGB to spy on a Swedish writer. Imbued with a comic nostalgia and overlaid with Dovlatov’s characteristically dark-edged humour and wry power of observation, The Suitcase is a profoundly human, delightfully ironic novel from one of the finest satirists of the twentieth century.

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On a crowded bus at midday, the narrator observes one man accusing another of jostling him deliberately. When a seat is vacated, the first man takes it. Later, in another part of town, the man is spotted again, while being advised by a friend to have another button sewn onto his overcoat. Exercises in Style retells this apparently unremarkable tale ninety-nine times, employing a variety of styles, ranging from sonnet to cockney to mathematical formula. Too funny to be merely a pedantic thesis, this virtuoso set of themes and variations is a linguistic rustremover, a guide to literary forms and a demonstration of imagery and inventiveness.

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Dmitry Rudin, a high-minded gentleman of reduced means, arrives at the estate of Darya Mikhailovna, where his intelligence, eloquence and conviction immediately make a powerful impression. As he stys on longer than intended, Rudin exerts a strong influence on the younger generation, and Darya's daughter, Natalya, falls in love with him. But circumstances soon will show whether Rudin has the courage to act on his beliefs, and whether he can live ip to the image he has created for himself.

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What happens to a vampire when he dies? How does somebody become a werewolf? How can you protect yourself from witches? All of these questions and more are answered in this book, which will finally give you all the information you ever wanted to know about ghosts, zombies, monsters and all kinds of creepy-crawly creatures that give us the heebie-jeebies. Full of tips, anecdotes and trivia – and delightfully illustrated by Axel Scheffler – Paul van Loon’s Horror Handbook is a fun and fascinating reference book for all fans of scary stories and things that go bump in the night.

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Have you ever looked up into the sky and wondered about space, astronomy and the universe? Perhaps you have. But you’ve probably never looked around you – at the sunglasses you wear or the selfies people take – and thought about space. The truth is, there is more of space on earth than you realize... Full of amazing facts about everyday innovations inspired by space travel and sections on the people who brought them to us, Space on Earth is an entertaining and fascinating look at space and the untold relationship with the planet we live on, helping children not only to feel the awe and wonder of the universe, but also to understand the reasons why space is relevant to us here on Earth.

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Zazie has just received a beautiful new notebook, and decides to keep a diary. Brimming with imagination, she writes down her impressions of her cat Roudoudou, her awful cousin Lucas and her new teacher, Mr Labat – who, with his pale skin and blood-red lips, must surely be a vampire! In order to save her life and those of her classmates, Zazie must find a way to get rid of Mr Labat – and what better way than by following the advice found in Bram Stoker’s Dracula… Sparkling, funny and a bit wacky, How to Get Rid of a Vampire (Using Ketchup, Garlic Cloves and a Bit of Imagination) is as entertaining and original as its brave and loveable heroine.

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Dark forces are at work in the House of the Double Axe. Stephan, the thirteen-year-old son of King Minos of Crete, stumbles across a terrifying conspiracy. Is the Minotaur, a half man half bull who eats human flesh, real? Or is something even more dangerous threatening to engulf both the palace and the world? Stephan must race to save his family from a terrible fate and find out what really lurks inside the labyrinth... You think you know the story? Think again. The Double Axe is the first instalment in Philip Womack’s Blood and Fire series, which reimagines classical myths from the point of view of teenage protagonists. It’s a thrilling tale of adventure, and an opportunity for young readers to engage with and learn more about classical mythology.

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With the Eurozone engulfed in an unprecedented crisis, one political figure looms largest of all, Angela Merkel, the leader of its most powerful economy. While foreign affairs have become the central issues of her chancellorship in this crucial election year, the entire world is anxiously looking to Germany to play its part in Europe's rescue. This authorized biography sheds light on the person behind the politician - from her youthful days of hitchhiking in Tbilisi to being the guest of honour at a White House state dinner - and examines how a girl from East Germany rose to the highest echelons of European power. As well as explaining how Angela Merkel's world view was shaped and influenced by her background and ideology, Stefan Kornelius's lively account discusses her personal relations with international counterparts such as David Cameron, Barack Obama or Vladimir Putin, as well as her attitude towards the countries and cultures over which they rule.

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Shortlisted for the HW Fisher Best First Biography Prize 2012 "The only Western woman to enlist as a soldier in the First World War, the Englishwoman Flora Sandes became a heroine and a media sensation when she fought for the Serbian Army and pursued a distinguished career in its ranks. This account charts her incredible story: her tomboyish childhood in genteel Victorian England, her mission to Serbia as a Red Cross volunteer and subsequent military enrolment, her celebrity lecture tours, her marriage to a fellow officer, her survival in a Gestapo prison during the Second World War and her final years in Suffolk. A fascinating character of her times and an inspiration to women the world over, Flora Sandes is brought to life and restored to her rightful place in history by this biography, compiled with the help of her family, and using hitherto unpublished private papers and photographs."

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The Leopard, published posthumously in 1958, was one of the most important works of fiction to appear in the Italian language in the twentieth century. Between 1925 and 1930, its author, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, wrote a number of letters to his cousins Casimiro and Lucio Piccolo in which he describes his travels around Europe (London, Paris, Zurich, Berlin). The letters, here published in English for the first time, display much of Lampedusa’s distinctive style present in his later work: not only the razor-sharp introspection, but also a wicked sense of humour, playful in its description of the comédie humaine.

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Two of Wedekind's most seminal plays, Earth-Spirit and Pandora's Box both focus on the actions of the young heroine Lulu, who embodies both animal sensuality and waif-like innocence, as she escapes a life on the streets, receives a society education, marries, takes on various lovers, becomes a dancer in a revue, is imprisoned for murder and encounters Jack the Ripper. When Earth-Spirit was premiered in Leipzig in 1898, Wedekind was vilified and persecuted for advocating unfeigned sexual pleasure and making his heroine a heartless whore. Death and Devil and Castle Wetterstein, the other plays that make up this volume, are essentially extensions of and complementary to the Lulu tragedies.

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As time ticks along with indifference, the inmates of the Washington District Jail drag on their daily routine behind bars. Innocent at their birth, these frail creatures who have lost their way now spend their lives shut out of society, deprived of all freedom, with little prospect of being readmitted into the human fold. Each prisoner has a story: some of them are charged with crimes of assault, murder and manslaughter, others of forgery, robbery and larceny - others still are not guilty of anything other than having been born to certain parents at a certain time in a certain country. A Long Day in a Short Life - Maltz's first novel to be published in the UK - is a powerful indictment of the penal system and a strong reminder about the underlying humanity of each individual.

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A man tells a woman that they have met before – that they became lovers but then agreed to separate for a year. The year is now up, and he has come back for her. At first, she remembers nothing, but as he relates their past together, real or imaginary, snapshots of memory appear – and she begins to believe him. As more details begin to re-emerge from the woman’s mind, the reader is shunted backwards and forwards between the past and the present, the actual and the illusory, that which is seen and that which is only glimpsed and guessed at. The director Alain Resnais was already famous for films such as Hiroshima, Mon Amour when he asked Alain Robbe-Grillet – the author of several seminal novels, including Jealousy and The Voyeur, and the leader of the Nouveau Roman school – to write a script for him. The result was Last Year at Marienbad, a film that, as well as winning the Golden Lion at the 1961 Venice Film Festival, has enthralled the critics, fascinated the public and become one of the greatest cult classics of modern cinema.

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‘La Traviata’ was Giuseppe Verdi’s eighteenth opera and shows him at the height of his middle-period powers. Adapted from ‘La Dame aux Camelias’ by Alexandre Dumas fils, it portrays the love between the courtesan Violetta Valery and the young Alfredo Germont in fashionable Parisian society, with its inevitable tragic outcome. It had its premiere at La Fenice in Venice in 1853 and has gone on to become one of the most performed and greatly loved of all operas. There are articles in the guide about Verdi’s preparations for the first performances, a musical commentary, an overview of the opera’s social background and an examination of how the libretto was adapted from Dumas’s play. Also included are a survey of important performances and performers, sixteen pages of illustrations, a musical thematic guide, the full libretto and English translation, a discography, bibliography and DVD and website guides.

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A series of sketches and observations of daily life – a crowd gathering in front of shop windows, an old man talking to his grandchild about death, a professor lecturing about Proust and Rimbaud, a woman concealing her disdain at a family gathering – Nathalie Sarraute’s first work of fiction places human existence under the microscope, revealing the dynamics at play between our thoughts and actions beneath the veneer of social convention. First published in 1939 to little fanfare, Tropisms was ahead of its time and finally received the recognition it deserved when it was republished in 1957 at the height of the nouveau roman movement, of which it is now considered a precursor.

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After a failed attempt on his life by an unknown terrorist cell, Professor Daniel Dupont decides to fake his own death. The government authorities, believing that the attack is part of a series of political assassinations, send Wallas, a recently promoted special investigator, to the provincial town where the crime took place. As he wanders the confusing streets of the town, he finds himself increasingly lost in a web of conspiracies, doppelgängers and memories. Cleverly deconstructing the detective genre, The Erasers, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s first published novel, shifts between various characters and time frames, while maintaining the suspense of a conventional thriller. The result is an engrossing examination of consciousness and reality which is also one the founding texts of the nouveau roman school.

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Helen and Ridley Ambrose are preparing to set off for an exotic resort off the coast of South America on the Euphrosyne, a ship belonging to Helen’s brother-in-law Willoughby Vinrace. Travelling with them is his daughter Rachel – a quiet, unremarkable girl raised in the London suburbs by her spinster aunts after the death of her mother. Along the way other people come aboard, such as the upper-class Clarissa and Richard Dalloway. As Rachel interacts with the passengers, intrigued by their different personalities, it becomes clear that what started for her as a mere sea voyage is turning into a journey of self-discovery and a rite of passage that will change her for ever. Published in 1915 after a long period of gestation and several drafts, The Voyage Out marks Virginia Woolf’s debut as a novelist. Perhaps the most accessible of her major works, it is essential both for understanding the early development of her style and for the light it sheds on her own biography and artistic vision.

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Set in a modern, urban Paris, the prose pieces in this volume constitute a further exploration of the terrain Baudelaire had covered in his verse masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil: the city with all its squalor and inequalities, the pressures of time and mortality, and the liberation provided by the sensual delights of intoxication, art and women. Published posthumously in 1869, Paris Spleen was a landmark publication in the development of the genre of prose poetry - a form which Baudelaire saw as particularly suited for expressing the feelings of uncertainty, flux and freedom of his age - and one of the founding texts of literary Modernism.

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A unique edition containing two stories, both precursors to Flaubert's later masterpiece, A Sentimental Education

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Gripped by mounting horror at the discovery of secrets harboured by the isolated school community, Barney Holland personifies the struggle of a young peace-time generation finding its way out of the shadow of war.

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A secret terrorist group infiltrates the household of a government official's son, with a view to spying on the father and, ultimately, assassinating him. But the young man entrusted with the task - an ailing, world-weary "nobody" - seized with the purposelessness of life and a sense of his own impending death, gradually becomes disillusioned with his mission, and decides to embark on a new path which will lead him to tragedy. Combining psychological detail with a strong sense of place and time, The Story of a Nobody bears all the hallmarks of Chekhov's genius, and perfectly captures the political and social tensions of its day.

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The articles which Stendhal contributed as French correspondent for the ‘London Magazine’, ‘New Monthly Magazine’ and other English Marketing Reviews of the 1820s are here brought together in a single volume, the only edition available in English. In them Stendhal – defying fashion and giving proof of the bold originality of his creative writing – provides an illuminating and often entertaining commentary on the politics and mores of post-Napoleonic France and Italy, and reveals his outstanding and all too rarely acknowledged gifts as a reviewer and literary critic. Together with the articles from the English Marketing Reviews, this edition includes translations of articles, essays and notes on Cornielle, Scott and Lord Byron, who was on terms of close acquaintance with Stendhal during his stay in Milan in 1816.

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The notorious adventurer and seducer Giacomo Casanova tells of his travels – on the run from the authorities of his native Venice – around northern Europe, poking fun at the ruling classes he encounters there, before focusing on a pivotal incident that occurs in Warsaw. Insulted by a Polish count over an Italian ballerina, Casanova finds himself forced to challenge his rival to a duel, and the sequence of events and their aftermath are described with gusto by the narrator. A rollicking autobiographical account by one of the most iconic figures of eighteenth-century Europe, The Duel is presented here with an extract about the same event from Casanova’s memoirs, written fifteen years later.

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In this dispassionate analysis of the act of murder, De Quincey’s innovative, idio­syncratic artistic vision found space for gruesome reportage, satire, aesthetic and literary criticism, in a work strewn with examples ranging from antiquity to his own time, including the urban serial-killer John Williams. De Quincey’s seminal 1827 work was greatly influential on such writers as Poe, Baudelaire and Borges, and the trace of its impact can still be found today in modern satire, black humour and crime and detective fiction.

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Documenting the colourful escapades of the former gladiator Encolpius and his less than faithful lover Giton, the "Satyricon" plunges the reader into the lives of ordinary Roman citizens, vividly revealing the Empire's seamy underbelly. A host of unforgettable characters are satirically presented, such as Trimalchio, the pretentious parvenu host, in a memorable banquet scene, the lascivious priestess Quartilla and the narrator's unreliable, roguish friend Ascyltus. Sometimes referred to as the first novel - although surviving only in fragments - this bawdy, picaresque and surprisingly modern narrative is considered one of the founding masterpieces of Western literature.

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Cecco Angiolieri, the enfant terrible of Italian literature, loved women, gambling, food and wine. It is said that he found comfort for his bad luck at the dice and with Becchina, his unreciprocating lover, only by pouring venomous scorn upon his miserly parents. Cecco’s outbursts of rage against his fate and his earthly view of the world – poles apart from the Stil Novo of Cavalcanti and Dante, the target of some of his fiercest sonnets – are perfectly encapsulated in his poetry, which is presented here with the facing Italian text in the witty verse translation of C.H. Scott and Anthony Mortimer.

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Baron Eduard and his second wife Charlotte enjoy a quiet, humdrum existence in their opulent castle, but when he invites his friend the Captain and she invites her niece Ottilie to stay with them, their lives are turned inside out as both hosts begin to feel attracted to their guests. Using one of the chemistry theories of the time as a metaphor throughout the novel, Goethe juxtaposes social interactions with scientific principles, while illustrating the typically Romantic concern of the individual coming to terms with society. Controversial when first published and still much critically debated today, Goethe’s Elective Affinities is an early model for the modern novel.

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Arriving at a rural monastery, the monk Ambrosius meets a young girl called Benedicta, shunned by the local community for being the daughter of the local hangman. Ambrosius is drawn into a dangerous friendship with her and, in defiance of the community and his superiors, he starts spending time alone with her. But when her virtue is corrupted by an impetuous young man, the stage is set for a battle between body and spirit, the sins of the past and the desire for redemption. Allegedly a rewriting from a lost German original, Ambrose Bierce’s 1892 novel reads as a seamless, almost folk-tale-like masterpiece.

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