Search results for ""alma books ltd""

Found in the Codex Atlanticus of Leonardo da Vinci’s writings and drawings, ‘The Prophecies’ are a collection of enigmatic divinatory pronouncements, some punning and playful, others dire and ominous. While the author’s intentions behind these utterances are unclear, they clearly attest to the artist’s fevered and troubled imagination and offer a glimpse into a world very similar to that depicted in his lost painting The Battle of Anghiari. This volume also contains a further selection of Leonardo da Vinci’s fragmentary writings, in the form of fables and aphorisms. Taken together, these pieces provide an invaluable insight into the thought processes of one of the Renaissance’s most productive minds.

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Coming back into town after a hunting expedition, Alexandre Dumas witnesses an incredible scene: a man has come to hand himself in to the mayor after decapitating his wife, terrified by the fact that her severed head spoke to him even after her death. This prompts the guests at a dinner Dumas attends later that evening to exchange stories of death and the supernatural, ranging from accounts of the guillotine during the Terror to tales of vampires and fratricide in the Carpathians. The Thousand and One Ghosts – here presented in its first and only translation into English – is a gloriously macabre work by the celebrated author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, which also touches on the serious political issue of capital punishment.

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Ichabod Crane is a young schoolmaster from Connecticut now living in Sleepy Hollow, a settlement in New York State notorious for rumours of ghostly visitations, especially from the infamous Headless Horseman. Considered an outsider by the local inhabitants, he falls in love with the eighteen-year-old Katrina Van Tassel, but has to contend with the loutish Brom Bones for her affections. Then one night Crane’s mounting problems come to a head when he finally experiences the horrors of the supernatural first-hand… A classic tale of American Gothic, ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ has found a central place in the collective imagination and inspired many adaptations. Also included in this volume is a selection of some of Irving’s most celebrated ghostly tales, such as ‘The Phantom Island’ and ‘The Devil and Tom Walker’.

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“Though absent long, These forms of beauty have not been to me, As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din Of towns in cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart” William Wordsworth’s verse was the embodiment of the Romantic age, with its evocation of a unifying spirit running through all things. This collection brings together a rich and diverse selection of his works, from the epic autobiographical masterpiece The Prelude to much-loved shorter poems such as ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ and ‘She Was a Phantom of Delight’. Alongside his more personal and introspective compositions, poems such as ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’, ‘She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways’ and ‘The Idiot Boy’ demonstrate, in an era of political and social ferment, the manner in which Wordsworth, together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, forged a revolutionary new poetic style through the publication of Lyrical Ballads – one that embraced the vernacular and subjects previously deemed unworthy of poetry – and thus changed the literary landscape of England for ever.

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During a conversation about literary forgeries, Erskine tells his young guest that he has received – as a legacy from a friend, the Cambridge scholar Cyril Graham – what is purported to be an Elizabethan portrait. The painting depicts a beautiful young man in late-sixteenth-century costume, whom Graham claimed to be Willie Hughes, a boy-actor serving in Shakespeare’s company. This prompts Erskine’s guest to delve deeper into the mystery surrounding the real identity of the dedicatee and the inspiration of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, with unforeseen consequences. Far from being a dry exposition of a literary theory, The Portrait of Mr W.H. – which the author himself described as one of his “early masterpieces” – is an engaging and entertaining narrative exploring the intricate facets of trust and betrayal, historical truth and fiction, written with Wilde’s trademark dialogical sharpness and stylistic perfection.

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When her wealthy family prepares to host a lavish summer party, the young, hitherto sheltered Laura Sheridan suddenly feels a kinship with the staff and the helpers hired to set up the venue for the festivities. As she learns of the death of one of their working-class neighbours, this burgeoning sense of class consciousness is heightened by a realization of her own mortality. Published in 1922, at the height of literary Modernism, `The Garden Party' is now considered one of the key texts of that movement. This volume, which also includes all of Katherine Mansfi eld's other published short stories, is an invaluable resource for anyone wishing to discover one of the early twentieth century's finest writers.

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Assembling at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, twenty-nine pilgrims begin their journey to Canterbury Cathedral. To entertain themselves on their long road, their host suggests that they regale each other with stories, with the teller of the best tale set to earn a free supper. The pilgrims correspond to all sections of medieval society, from the crusading knight to the drunken cook, and their tales span a range of genres, including the comic ribaldry and deception of `The Miller's Tale' and the story of chivalry and courtly romance told by the Franklin. Unfinished at the time of his death, The Canterbury Tales are here presented in their original Middle-English. This edition contains a wealth of material and over 3,000 notes which will help all students of Chaucer's masterpiece.

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“Though Earth and moon were gone, And suns and universes ceased to be, And Thou wert left alone, Every Existence would exist in Thee.” From the transcendent beauty of nature observed on the Yorkshire moors to fierce and forceful confrontations of mortality, Emily Brontë’s poems are powerful and passionate works that eloquently elaborate upon her sister Charlotte’s description of her as ""a solitude-loving raven, no gentle dove”. While only twenty-one of Emily Brontë’s poems were published in her lifetime, her poetic oeuvre is rich and varied, and not only includes visionary poems such as ‘No Coward Soul Is Mine’ and ‘Remembrance’, but also features the poems that describe the imagined realm of Gondal and its inhabitants, which she created with her sister Anne.

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The pioneer of modern Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin has exerted - through his novel in verse Eugene Onegin, his plays, his short stories and his narrative poetry - a lasting influence well beyond the borders of his motherland. A slightly lesser-known, but by no means less important aspect of his writing is his vast production of shorter verse, a genre at which he excelled and arguably still remains unsurpassed. This volume, part of Alma's series of the complete poetic works of Alexander Pushkin, collects the poems Pushkin wrote in his mid-to-late twenties, during his exile in Mikhaylovskoye and his subsequent return to metropolitan life. It includes some of his lyrical masterpieces, such as 'To Anna Kern' and 'I Loved You...' - arguably the two most famous love poems in the Russian language - 'To the Sea', 'Andre Chenier', 'The Prophet', 'Stanzas Addressed to Nicholas I', 'Deep in Siberian Mines', 'Arion', 'An Angel', 'The Talisman', 'Remembrance', 'A Flower' and 'Anchar, Tree of Poison', each presented in a verse translation opposite the original Russian text. Enriched with notes, pictures and an appendix on Pushkin's life and works, this will be essential reading for anyone wishing to explore the Russian bard's genius.

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When Lord Petre had the effrontery of cutting off a lock of Lady Arabella Fermor’s hair, a veritable war erupted between the two noble families. A mutual friend, saddened by their estrangement, asked Alexander Pope, then a young poet, to write a poem about it, in order to make a joke of it and “laugh them together again”. But the result – which in its ingenuity and poetical brilliance reaches peaks of epic sublime – concealed darker and more dangerous undertones that unleashed an even greater storm between the parties involved – and among the whole literary world of the time. As Belinda glides along the Thames admired for her beauty and the crafty Baron schemes to take his prize, a host of supernatural beings – elves, sylphs, gnomes – dance around them to avoid the impending doom, in what is Pope’s crowning poetical achievement and perhaps the greatest satirical poem ever written. Included in this volume are the original two-canto version of The Rape of the Lock and Pope’s hilarious mock-interpretation of the poem as a seditious work, A Key to the Lock.

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The son of a gypsy woman, Sebastien is found as a newborn baby in the Alps and brought up by Cesar and his grandchildren Angelina and Jean. Born on the same day, Belle is a beautiful white Pyrenean Mountain Dog who has been neglected and passed on from owner to owner, until one day she escapes from a kennel. When Sebastien rescues the runaway Belle from the wrath of the villagers, the boy and the dog form a lifelong friendship and embark on exciting adventures in the mountains. First published in 1965 to coincide with the internationally successful television series of the same name, Belle and Sebastien is a heart-warming story of camaraderie, adventure and freedom. Available for the first time into English, this edition Includes extra material for young readers, including a section on the book, information about the author and a test-yourself quiz.

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On his thirtieth birthday, the bank clerk Josef K. is suddenly arrested by mysterious agents for an unspecified crime. He is told that he will be set free, but must make regular appearances at a court in the attic of a tenement building while his trial proceeds. Although he never comes to know the particulars of his case, Josef K. finds his life taken over by the opaque bureaucratic procedures and is tormented by the psychological pressures exerted by his legal nightmare. Published the year after the author's death, but written ten years earlier, The Trial is the most acclaimed of Kafka's three novels, and is both a haunting meditation on freedom and the powerlessness of the individual in the face of state power, and an ominous prefiguration of the totalitarian excesses of the twentieth century.

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When the orphaned William refuses his uncles’ proposal to become a clergyman and angrily leaves his job in the counting-house of his brother’s mill, he decides to accept a position as an English teacher at a boys’ school in Brussels. When his career leads him to take up an additional post at a girls’ school nearby, William becomes emotionally involved with the manipulative headmistress of the establishment, Mademoiselle Reuter. The tensions rise until one of his pupils and fellow teachers – for whom he has tender feelings – is suddenly dismissed and is nowhere to be found. Based on Charlotte Brontë’s own autobiographical experience in Brussels as a teacher and only published posthumously, The Professor was Charlotte Brontë’s first attempt at full-length fiction and bears all the hallmarks of her future work, with touches of genius and an unparalleled sharpness of style.

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The well-educated daughter of a penniless clergyman, Agnes Grey is treated like a child by her own family and so sets out to prove herself by seeking employment as a governess. Soon, however, her idealistic notions regarding the education and care of her wards are dashed as she battles to control the wild Bloomfi eld children in her fi rst situation, and is then held in low regard by the superior Murray household.

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Conflict between father and son is one of the oldest themes in literature, and in this open letter to his father - a letter which was never sent - Kafka tries to come to terms with one of the most deeply rooted obsessions of his troubled soul. Written as a long, tense and dramatic confession in which writer and man are gathered together in front of an ambivalent figure of authority, "Dearest Father" is a desperate attempt to retrace the origins of a turbulent and highly conflicted relationship between an unflinching parent and an extremely sensitive child. Both a merciless indictment of his father and an impassioned appeal to him, Kafka's inspired work is one of the most lucid and touching psychological documents of the twentieth century.

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While Charles Dickens is best known and celebrated for his prolific journalistic output and novelistic creations, he also devoted some of his creative energies to verse. At turns sentimental, melancholy, playful, humorous and satirical, and ranging considerably in tone and format – from songs to narrative prologues for novels and squibs for newspapers – the poems in this collection highlight Dickens’s gift for language and his unfailing power to touch.

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One of the many aspects of Alexander Pushkin’s immense contribution to Russian language and literature, and perhaps the one he is most popular for, is his mastery of the love poem, a genre which he perfected like few others before or after him. This volume contains a selection of his most famous and enduring verse explorations of love, such as ‘I Loved You’, ‘Night’ and ‘I Well Recall a Wondrous Meeting’, pieces which are crowning achievements of the European canon and still have the same timeless emotional resonance today.

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A spoof encyclopedia of contemporary accepted wisdom and commonplaces, the Dictionary of Received Ideas sees Flaubert at his witty and satirical best. Perhaps intended as a companion to his final, unfinished novel Bouvard and Pécuchet, this compilation was the result of a lifetime of collecting the absurd and the clichéd with darkly humorous explanations. A playful look at nineteenth-century values and talking points, this dictionary will provide enduring entertainment and prove relevant even today.

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Never published in its author’s lifetime and intended solely for his own children, to whom he read it every Christmas, The Life of Our Lord is an accessible and gently humorous take on the life of Jesus Christ and his teachings. Far removed from the sharp satire and social dimension of his more famous writings, but showcasing his characteristic humanity and genius for storytelling, this is both an essential work for those wanting to see a different, more intimate side to Dickens and a timeless retelling for children and adults alike.

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Spurred by a lifelong fascination with the great emperor, French novelist Honoré de Balzac set himself the pains­taking task of collecting a selection of Napoleon’s aphorisms from his public speeches and the gazettes of the time. Arranged into four themes (covering social life, the military arts, the exercise of power and the teachings of experience and misfortune), Napoleon’s pithy pills of wisdom – often Machiavellian, cynical, dry and sometimes cruel – offer a unique insight into the mind of a man who prided himself on preferring action over thought and the sword over the pen, and conjure up one of the most eminent and influential historical figures of all time.

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Against the backdrop of growing discontent in Paris, Doctor Manette is released from the Bastille after eighteen years of unjust imprisonment and begins a new life in England with his devoted daughter Lucie. There, the gifted but dissolute lawyer Sydney Carton and the exiled French nobleman Charles Darnay find their lives increasingly intertwined with those of the Manettes. Yet soon both men are drawn ineluctably from the peaceful English capital to the horror and bloodshed of the Paris Terror and the looming threat of the guillotine. Representing a departure from the social satire of most of his other novels and deemed by Dickens himself to be "the best story I have written", A Tale of Two Cities is a powerful historical novel about the repercussions of epochal events on the personal lives of people on both sides of the Channel.

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A tongue-in-cheek manual on how servants should cope with the demands of their masters and perform their tasks in ways that will best satisfy their indolence, wastefulness and greed, Directions to Servants takes a caustic and irreverent look at master-servant relations. Written towards the end of his writing career and published posthumously, this pamphlet shows Swift – who was himself known to be strict but fair to his own servants, as illustrated in the Appendix to this volume – at his witty and mischievous best.

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Described by Herman Melville as being “as deep as Dante”, ‘Young Goodman Brown’ is set during the Salem witch trials and features the sort of narrative ambiguities and troubling uncertainties over the reality of events that Hawthorne was known for, leading readers to ponder what they have read long after the last page has been turned. Rich in allegory and symbolism, and suffused with darkness, tragedy, satire and the supernatural, the tales in this collection, written by a master of the short-story genre, delve into the conflict between good and evil, explore the concept of Original Sin and bring to life the moralistic and superstitious early days of the New England colonies.

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Anne is an orphan with a penchant for daydreaming and distinctive flaming-red hair that catches the eye of everyone she meets. She is overjoyed to be sent to Green Gables, the Cuthberts' farm, which she imagines to be the home she has always dreamt of. When her new family, who had been expecting the arrival of a boy, display reservations about the newcomer, Anne must win them over with her charm, beauty and intelligence and find a way to fit in. Originally published in 1908, L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables has come to be acclaimed as one of the world's greatest children's tales. Its numerous sequels, adaptations and spin-offs are a testament to the beauty of this simple story, which continues to enchant readers to this day.

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Bathsheba Everdene is a headstrong young woman who attracts the attentions of a succession of ill-matched suitors: a quiet sheep farmer, a handsome soldier and an older, wealthy landowner. As the men vie for her affections, she struggles to retain her independence of spirit in the face of their declarations. Introducing readers to the fictional county of Wessex, Thomas Hardy’s fourth work of fiction was one of his greatest triumphs, both commercially and critically. Its tale of passion, jealousy and unrequited love is now regarded as one of the finest novels of the nineteenth century, and one of the greatest love stories of all time.

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A mysterious stranger named Chichikov arrives in a small provincial Russian town and proceeds to visit a succession of landowners, making each of them an unusual and somewhat macabre proposition. He offers to buy the rights to the dead serfs who are still registered on the landowner's estate, thus reducing their liability for taxes. It is not clear what Chichikov's intentions are with the dead serfs he is purchasing, and despite his attempts to ingratiate himself, his strange behaviour arouses the suspicions of everyone in the town.A biting satire of social pretensions and pomposity, Dead Souls has been revered since its original publication in 1842 as one of the funniest and most brilliant novels of nineteenth-century Russia. Its unflinching and remorseless depiction of venality in Russian society is a lasting tribute to Gogol's comic genius.

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Depicting the adventures of Rat, Mole, Badger and the pretentious Mr Toad, The Wind in the Willows sees these four animals getting into all sorts of trouble as they wander along the river, through the Wild Wood and around the grand Toad Hall. Adapted for the stage by A.A. Milne as Toad of Toad Hall, and recreated for film and TV numerous times, Kenneth Grahame's tale has been an essential part of every English child's formative reading for over a century, with new generations of readers succumbing to its charm, wit and wonder.

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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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