Search results for ""everyman""

Trees have starred in stories ever since Ovid described the nymph Daphne's metamorphosis into a laurel, and the landscape of literature has long been enlivened by wild woodlands, sacred groves, and fertile orchards. This delightful collection ranges from Ovid to Austen and from Robin Hood's Sherwood Forest (via Thomas Love Peacock's Maid Marian) to Washington Irving's 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow'. Here are forest-haunted fairy tales both classic (the Brothers Grimm) and inventively retold (Angela Carter). There is room in these woods for comedy as well as terror, in Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm, and Alexander McCall Smith's 'Head Tree'. Notable writers from around the world contribute arboreal fiction-from South Africa, Finland, France, Zimbabwe, Russia, Martinique, and India, as well as Britain, Ireland, Canada and America. From Daphne du Maurier's 'The Apple Tree' to R. K. Narayan's 'Under the Banyan Tree', the sheer range of stories in these pages will leave readers refreshed and dazzled.

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Scottish Stories is a treasury of great writing from a richly literary land, where the short story has flourished for over two centuries. Here are chilling supernatural stories from Robert Louis Stevenson, Eric Linklater and Dorothy K. Haynes; side-splittingly funny stories from Alasdair Gray and Irvine Welsh; a stylish offering from urban realist William McIlvanney. Iain Crichton Smith evokes the Gaelic-speaking highlands, George Mackay-Brown the Orkney islands, Andrew O'Hagan working-class Glasgow; while Leila Aboulela, originally from Sudan, ponders the relations between colonizers and colonized from her home in Aberdeen. Though there is no one 'Scottishness' that binds the authors together, writes editor Gerard Carruthers, each has a Scottish footprint or accent. And perhaps more importantly, all are masters of their form.

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With its intricate rhyme scheme and dance-like pattern of repeated lines, its marriage of recurrence and surprise, the villanelle has fascinated poets ever since it was introduced almost two centuries ago. Many well-known names in the past have tried their hand at it, and the villanelle is enjoying a revival among writers today. The poems collected here range from the classic villanelles of the nineteenth century - by Thomas Hardy, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Oscar Wilde and others - to such famous and memorable examples as Dylan Thomas's 'Do not go gentle into that good night,' Elizabeth Bishop's 'One Art' and Sylvia Plath's 'Mad Girl's Love Song'. Here too are the cutting-edge works of contemporary poets, including Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Sherman Alexie and Rita Dove, demonstrating the dazzling variety that can be found within the parameters of a single strict poetic form.

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A perfect gift of timeless erotic stories ranging from ancient Greek myth to modern stories of longing and lust. This beautifully jacketed Everyman's Library Pocket Classics hardcover anthology has a full-cloth binding and silk ribbon marker. Accounts of ardour and transgression also flow from unexpected pens: an astonishingly explicit scene from an unfinished novel by Edith Wharton, and Guy de Maupassant's heated tale of a young peasant woman offering her breast to a starving stranger on a train. Hunger is the fierce undercurrent to these stories: the gnawing lust of one lover for another, or the greedy pursuit of a particular inclination. The elegant depravity of an eighteenth-century French aristocrat, the dreamlike seductions of an Egyptian jinni in the form of a snake, the brutal anonymity of a highway truck-stop encounter--the stories in this richly varied collection reveal that the urge to articulate sexual desire is as inventive as it is timeless.

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Love Stories brings together a captivating assortment of short stories inspired by romantic entanglement in its many forms: first love, infatuation, obsession, unrequited love, marriage, adultery, jealousy, and the complicated bonds of those who have spent their lives together.An array of writers evoke a variety of moods, from the raw, erotic passion of Lawrence and Colette to the wickedlycynical comedy of Dorothy Parker and Roald Dahl; from the agonizing madness of jealousy in Nabokov's 'That in Aleppo Once ...' to romantic illusions in Scott Fitzgerald's 'Winter Dreams'. Objects of passion range from a glamorous silent-movie star in Elizabeth Bowen's haunting 'Dead Mabelle' to a faithful ghost in Kawabata's 'Immortality' and a successful heart surgeon and serial husband in Margaret Atwood's 'Bluebeard's Egg'. Jhumpa Lahiri plumbs the depths of a couple sundered by tragedy while Lorrie Moore movingly portrays a husband and wife brought together by it. Katherine Mansfield, Tobias Wolff and William Trevor explore the intricacies of long-term relationships, while Maupassant, Calvino and T. C. Boyle convey the elemental force of love in extremely different ways.Together these nineteen stories make an enticing gift for lovers at any stage of life. Perfect for Valentine's Day.

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The unforgettable canines gathered here include Kipling's heroically faithful 'Garm', Bret Harte's irrepressible scoundrel of a 'yaller dog' and the aggressively affectionate three-legged pit bull who lives in a block of flats for dogs in Jonathan Lethem's 'Ava's Apartment'. Here are stories which touchingly illuminate the dog's role in the emotional lives of humans, such as Tobias Wolff's 'Her Dog', where a widower shares his grief for his wife with her grieving pet. Here, too, are humorous glimpses of the canine point of view, from O. Henry's tale of a dissatisfied lapdog's escape to P. G. Wodehouse's cheerfully naïve watchdog who simply wants everybody to get along. These writers and others - Ray Bradbury, JamesThurber and Penelope Lively among them - offer imaginative, lyrical and empathetic portraits of man and woman's most devoted companion

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Rabindranath Tagore published his first volume of poetry at the age of thirteen. He went on to become a towering figure in Bengali and world literature.Tagore was remarkably productive over his long life; his complete works fill 32 large volumes and include 60 collections of verse and more than 2,000 songs, two of which have become the national anthems of India and of Bangladesh. In both his poetry and prose he was a great innovator, continually breaking with tradition, endlessly changing his own style, so this volume is full of variety and surprise. If lyric poetry was the anchor of Tagore's creativity, he also wrote devotional, satirical, humorous and even nonsense verse.His themes were as varied as his forms - love, the beauty of nature; philosophy, politics, his hopes and fears for his country, and for the future of mankind. In his fiction he showed profound sympathy for the perspectives of women, children and the poor. This selection - a substantial 900+ pages - offers a representative overview of his work, including his best-known novel, The Home and the World, and his best-known play, Red Oleander, as well as many short stories, novellas, essays, poems and songs.Rudrangshu Mukherjee has drawn on the work of various translators, from early renderings by Surendranath Tagore, the author's nephew, to modern ones by William Radice, Kaiser Haq and Madhuchchhanda Karlekar. Tagore translated some of his work himself, and all the essays and lectures were composed in English

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In an interview, Updike once said, "If I had to give anybody one book of me, it would be the Olinger Stories." These stories were originally published in The New Yorker and then in various collections before Vintage first put them together in one volume in 1964, as a paperback original. They follow the life of one character from the age of ten through manhood, in the small Pennsylvania town of Olinger (pronounced, according to Updike, with a long O and a hard G), which was loosely based on Updike's own hometown. "All the stories draw from the same autobiographical well," Updike explained, "the only child, the small town, the grandparental home, the move in adolescence to a farm." The selection was made and arranged by Updike himself, and was prefaced by a lovely 1,400-word essay by the author that has never been reprinted in full elsewhere until now.

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OSCAR AND LUCINDA is a sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel set in nineteenth-century England and Australia where the two potential lovers lead parallel lives until chance brings them together on board ship.A narrative tangle of love, religion, gambling, commerce and colonialism culminates in a nightmare expedition – the result of a wager – to transport a glass church across the Australian wilderness. In TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG the legendary Australian outlaw Ned Kelly speaks for himself in a voice that is direct, colloquial, theatrical, and utterly magical. To his pursuers he is nothing but a monstrous criminal, but to his own people he is a hero, defying British imperial authority in support of the poor Irish settlers who are its victims. In a dazzling act of ventriloquism, Carey brings the famous bushranger unforgettably to life.

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Post-colonial Africa is dissected with pitiless lucidity in this disturbing novel about an outsider, the young Indian trader, Salim, who has moved from the coastal settlement where he grew up to an unnamed country in the African interior (largely based on the Democratic Republic of Congo), settling on that very bend in the river where Conrad had set his Heart of Darkness some seventy years before. Salim enters a ghost town, once a flourishing European outpost, which is fast returning to the bush. A new dictator 'the Big Man' is about to impose his regime with the assistance of Raymond, 'The Big Man's White Man', whose humanitarian concerns have won him international acclaim, but whose plans for the country's future are arrogant and delusional. Salim becomes obsessed by Raymond's wife, Yvette, and begins and affair with her. Personal and political tragedy follow, civil war returns, and Salim, contemplating the disastrous course of his life since leaving home, speaks for the powerlessness of ordinary people everywhere in the face of historical upheaval: 'I couldn't protect anyone [and] no one could protect me... we could only in various ways hide from the truth... One tide of history has brought us here ... Another tide of history was coming to wash us away.'.

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Blood's a Rover takes us into the 70s. RFK and MLK are dead. A kid private eye clashes with a mob goon and an enforcer for FBI director Edgar Hoover in L.A. There's an armoured-car heist and a cache of missing emeralds. Revolution brews in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Amidst all this, all three anti-heros fall for Red revolutionary Joan Rosen Klein. Each will pay 'a dear and savage price to live History'.

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These humorous and poignant tales of lovers, loneliness, and never-quite-belonging, delivered in her characteristically knowing, wry voice, confirm Lorrie Moore as a master of the short story form. Self-Help, Like Life, Birds of America and Bark, her four acclaimed collections, are all here, and for good measure so too are a handful of stories excerpted from the novels Anagrams, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and The Gate at the Stairs. But at the author's request, the order of play is gloriously random: 'I didn't want this Everyman's volume to be one that simply glued all the books together in the obvious sequential order,' she writes. 'I wanted instead to let the magical alphabet set individual stories side by side in an otherwise unexpected and unchronological way so that friction or frost might occur: they could jostle and rap and spark or repel .... It might all be like a playlist set to shuffle ...' So, a joyous new discovery for first-time readers and for Moore fans, a multitude of new angles from which to view her incomparable ouevre.

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The Black Dahlia depicts the infrastructure of L.A.'s most sensational murder case. A young cop morphs into the obsessed lover and lust-crazed avenger. His rogue investigation is a one-way ticket to hell.The Big Nowhere blends the crime novel with the political novel. It is winter, 1950, and the L.A. authorities are targeting movieland Reds. The three cops assigned to the job are out to grab all the kudos they can. But a series of brutal sex killing intervenes ...L.A. Confidential plumbs the depths: political corruption, scandal-rag journalism, racism and gangland wars, savage slaughter in an all-night hash house. And the inglorious Los Angeles Police Department to disentangle the conspiracy that links it all together.White Jazz gives us the tortured confession of a cop who's gone to the bad - killer, slum landlord and parasitic exploiter. He's also a pawn in a police power struggle and beginning to realize it. But he's just met a woman and wants to claw his way out of the pit. Somehow.

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In The Bloody Chamber, Carter's famous collection of deeply unsettling stories inspired by fairy tales, a Beauty is turned into a Beast and Little Red Riding's grandmother is stoned to death as a witch; a young music student is swept off her feet in Paris by a middle-aged aristocrat and transported to his ancestral abode to re-enact the story of Bluebeard against a sumptuous fin de siècle background; a British soldier on a cycling holiday in Transylvania in the summer of 1914 finds himself the guest of an alluring female vampire. By contrast, in Wise Children, Carter's last novel), the comic, the bawdy and the life-enhancing prevail. An irrepressible elderly lady recalls the many colourful decades she and her sister spent as vaudeville performers - a tale as full of twins and mistaken identities as any plot of Shake- speare's. The early collection, Fireworks, reveals Carter taking her first forays into the fantastic writing that was to become her unforgettable legacy. The Everyman's Library omnibus gathers the best of Angela Carter in one astonishing volume.

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Throughout her short but brilliant literary career, Nell Larsen wrote piercing dramas about the black middle class that featured sensitive, spirited heroines struggling to find a place where they belong. Passing is a disturbing story about the unravelling lives of two childhood friends, one of whom turns her back on her past and marries a white racist. Just as disquieting is the portrait in Quicksand of biracial Helga Crane, who is unable to escape her loneliness no matter where and with whom she lives. Race and marriage offer few securities here or in the other stories in this compulsively readable collection, rich in psychological complexities and imbued with a vibrant sense of place - be it 1920s Harlem, Chicago, or Copenhagen.

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This generous collection of fifty-two stories selected from across her prolific career by the author, is preceded by a preface in which she discusses the sources of her art.With irony and an unfailing eye for the telling detail, Gallant weaves stories of spare complexity, often pushing the boundaries of the form in boldly unconventional directions. The settings in the COLLECTED STORIES range from Paris to Berlin to Switzerland, from the Riviera to the Côte d'Azur, and her characters are almost all exiles of one sort or another, as she herself was the most of her expatriate life. The wit and precision of her prose, combined with her expansive view of humanity, provide a rare and deep reading pleasure. With breathtaking control and compression, Gallant delivers a whole life, a whole world, in each story.

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When Catherine Sloper falls for Maurice Townsend, her father, a wealthy New York doctor, believes that Townsend is a fortune hunter after his daughter’s inheritance. He forbids the marriage but Catherine persists in her affection, encouraged by her foolish aunt Lavinia who has a weakness for Maurice herself. Dr Sloper takes Catherine abroad to distract her from the infatuation, but she proves to be as stubborn as her father. The book is a vivid study of the four central characters drawn in what are, for this author, unusually strong primary colours.Six novels by Henry James and two volumes of his shorter fiction are already published in Everyman’s Library.

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In the summer of 1956, Stevens, the ageing butler of Darlington Hall, embarks on a leisurely holiday that will take him deep into the English countryside and into his past . . . A haunting tale of lost causes and lost love, The Remains of the Day, winner of the Booker Prize, contains Ishiguro's now celebrated evocation of life between the wars in a Great English House - within its walls can be heard ever more distinct echoes of the violent upheavals spreading across Europe.

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George Orwell was a novelist unlike any other, fiercely devoted to presenting the truth as he saw it. The three novels in this collection date from the 1930s, before his political satires Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four made him world-famous. Compelling works in their own right, they are all studies of men at odds with their surroundings. In Burmese Days, the darkest of the three, a frustrated expatriate finds himself trapped between the decadence of his own people and the corruption of the natives they claim to rule. Coming Up for Airdramatizes the frustration of every little man in his hopeless struggle against bourgeois respectability. Keep the Aspidistra Flying is a sort of comedy in which minor poet Gordon Comstock engages briefly with romantic dreams before realizing that salvation is to be found, not in escape from his life but engagement with it.

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In the five novels by Ireland's greatest comic writer we can explore the full range of his invention, from the multi-layered madness of At Swim-Two-Birds to the piercing realism of The Hard Life and the surreal logic of The Third Policeman. This is a world where bicycles listen to conversations, inventors search formethods of 'diluting' water, and characters play truant while novelists sleep; a world where spiteful fairies wreak havoc and heroes from legend blunder into suburban sitting-rooms. This is recognizably the Ireland of Joyce and Beckett - rowdy, high-spirited, by turns sensual and and cerebral -transformed by O'Brien's unique vision.

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In these articles first produced for magazines and substantially rewritten for book publication, Wodehouse reveals his enduring brilliance as a comic writer of non-fiction. But the move out of fiction does not mean a move into unfamiliar territory: any reader of Wodehouse’s stories will be familiar with the topics covered here which preoccupied him all his life, ranging from Shakespeare, Hollywood and musical comedy, to butlers, thrillers, ocean liners and income tax.

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In Journey to the Centre of the Earth, an obsessive German professor and his nephew travel towards the earth’s core in the steps of a medieval explorer beneath an Icelandic volcano where they discover a lost world. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is famous for its portrayal of the Byronic Captain Nemo and his submarine, the Nautilus, in which he explores the ocean while wreaking vengeance on mankind for their wickedness. In Around the World in Eighty Days, a starchy Englishman suspected of robbing the Bank of England accepts a bet that he cannot circumnavigate the globe in that time, and proceeds to do so, accompanied by his resourceful valet, Passepartout.The three novels combine fantasy and rich local colour with true learning and cod science in a mixture which attracts readers of all ages.

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"Deep down in his heart the genuine Englishman has a rugged distaste for seeing his country invaded by a foreign army. People were asking themselves by what right these aliens had overrun British soil. An ever-growing feeling of annoyance had begun to lay hold of the nation.”Clarence Chugwater is not a Boy Scout for nothing. It is summer 1909 and everyone is too interested in the Test Match to notice that England has been invaded by the Germans. And the Russians. And the Chinese. Not to mention a ‘boisterous band of the Young Turks’, a mad Mullah, and a brace of North African pirates. The government has recently abolished the army so there is nothing to be done about it anyway, except give a masterly display of polite indifference. But this would be to reckon without patriotic Clarence, ‘Boy of Destiny’, who alone is prepared to stand up to the foe, and who devises a highly unorthodox plan to restore his country to freedom…The Swoop! Or, How Clarence Saved England reprints the 33 black and white drawings by C. Harrison that accompanied the first edition. It is supplemented by The Military Invasion of America, in which Clarence’s story is humorously transplanted across the Atlantic.

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Monty Bodkin has returned to London from Hollywood, leaving Sandy Miller, his secretary there, heartbroken, because Monty loves English hockey international Gertrude Butterwick instead of her. Holding down a job for a year was the condition laid down by Gertrude’s father before Monty and Gertrude could be married, a condition Monty has unexpectedly fulfilled by blackmailing Hollywood movie mogul Ivor Llewellyn. Back in England, he intends to claim his bride, but the path to true love never runs smooth, as Monty is about to find out.

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The `Frozen Assets' of the title belong to Edmund Biffen Christopher and they are the legacy of his Godfather which he will receive if he manages to avoid been arrested, something of a previous habit of Biffen's, until after his thirtieth birthday one week hence. Lord Tilbury, proprietor of the Mammoth publish company, whom we met previously in `Bill the Conqueror', `Summer Lightning' and `Heavy Weather', is keen that Biffen does fall foul of the law as he will then receive the legacy himself. Tilbury has therefore engaged his usual henchman, Percy Pilbeam, to ensure that Biffen is lead astray and that it is brought to the attention of the constabulary. Only Wodehouse can scare up a happy ending where everyone gets exactly what is coming to them.

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Freddie Widgeon wants the money to buy shares in a coffee plantation in Kenya so that he can marry Sally Foster. Soapy and Dolly Molloy want to get their hands on a cache of stolen jewels hidden in the house of Freddie's neighbour in the suburb of Valley Fields. When their paths cross, the ensuing misunderstandings lead to vintage Wodehouse comedy.

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It is an intriguing collection, where most of the stories concern relationships, sports and household pets, and interestingly does not feature any of Wodehouse's regular characters; one however, "Extricating Young Gussie", is remarkable as the first appearance of some of Wodehouse's most well-known and beloved characters, Jeeves and his master Bertie Wooster (although here Bertie's surname appears to be Mannering-Phipps, and Jeeves' role is very small), along with Bertie's fearsome Aunt Agatha.

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Psmith helps acting editor Billy Windsor change the image of Cosy Moments magazine and they are stalked by gangsters when their expose of slum tenements angers an unscrupulous landlord.

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A collection of stories featuring familiar Wodehouse characters includes Jeeves and Wooster, Ukridge and his fearsome Aunt Julia, Bingo Little and his wife, romantic novelist Rosie M. Banks, twin Mulliner brothers George (the screenwriter) and Alfred (the conjuror),Galahad Threepwood, dotty Lord Emsworth and his younger son Freddie, the dog-biscuit salesman. In between stories, their creator explores some of the more extraordinary items in the American news of his day.

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Typical. Just when Bertie thinks that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world, things start to go wrong again...There's young Bingo Little, who's in love for the umpteenth time and needs Bertie to put in a good word for him with his uncle; Aunt Agatha, who forces Bertie to get engaged to the formidable Honoria Glossop; and the troublesome twins, Claude and Eustace, whose antics when let loose in London know no bounds.Add to that some friction in the Wooster home over a red cummerbund, purple socks and some snazzy old Etonian spats, and poor Bertie's really in the soup...Only one man can save the day - the inimitable Jeeves.Characters Bertie Wooster - Narrator who went to school with Bingo. Won a prize at his first school for the best collection of wild flowers. Jeeves - Bertie's valet who has an aunt who loves the romantic novels of Rosie M. Banks Bingo Little - Mortimer's nephew who loves Mabel. Tells his uncle that Bertie is really Rosie M. Banks. Mabel - Waitress in a tea shop Mortimer Little - Retired fat businessman who owned Little's Liniment - "It Limbers Up the Legs." He is a gourmet. Jane Watson - Mortimer's cook engaged to Jeeves, but not for long

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Do Butlers Burgle Banks? (1968) features Mike Bond, the hitherto fortunate owner of Bond's Bank, who finds himself in a spot of trouble so serious that he wants someone to burgle the bank before the trustees inspect it. Fortunately for him, Horace Appleby, currently posing as his butler, is on hand to oblige. For Horace is, in fact, not a butler at all but the best sort of American gangster, prudently concealing himself in an English country house while hiding from his rivals. Looking for peace and safety, Horace is to discover before long that the hot-spots of New York are a whole lot more restful than the English countryside. This is the lightest of light comedies, a Wodehousian soufflé from his later years.

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This book features more stories about the incredible Mulliner clan, following on from Meet Mr Mulliner. This volume includes such classic Wodehouse tales as 'The Man Who Gave Up Smoking', 'The Awful Gladness of the Mater', 'Unpleasantness at Bludleigh Court' and 'The Passing of Ambrose'.

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Very Good Jeeves! (1930) is a collection of eleven short stories starring Bertie Wooster in eleven alarming predicaments from which he has to be rescued by his peerless gentleman's gentleman. Whether Bertie is tangling with a red-headed ball of fire such as Roberta Wickham, dealing with an irate headmistress, placating a rampaging aunt, puncturing the wrong hot water bottle, singing 'Sonny Boy', or simply trying to concentrate on his golf handicap, Jeeves is always there to help - though rarely in ways which his employer expects. These brilliantly plotted stories give the essence of Wodehousian comedy.

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While staying with his Aunt Dahlia to help out in the election at Market Snodsbury, Bertie Wooster comes up against the familiar horrors of Florence Craye, his former fiancee, and Roderick Spode, head of the Black Shorts, in a plot tangle from which, as usual, only the ingenuity of Jeeves can save him.

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A humorous novel in which an Earl and his aristocratic family are divided by what is seen as a socially unsuitable marriage.

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Gussie Fink-Nottle simply must marry Madeline Bassett or Bertrand Wooster will be obliged to proffer the ring in his stead. In a daring attempt at securing the engagement, Jeeves and Bertie visit a rural leper colony.

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Nothing but trouble can ensue when Bertie Wooster's Aunt Dahlia instructs him to steal a silver jug from Totleigh Towers, home of magistrate and hell-hound, Sir Watkin Bassett. First he must face the peril of Sir Watkin's droopy daughter, Madeleine, and then the terrors of would-be Dictator, Roderick Spode and his gang of Black Shorts. But when duty calls, Bertram answers, and so there follows what he himself calls 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'. In a plot with more twists than an English country lane, it takes all the ingenuity of Jeeves to extract his master from the soup again.

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The everyman Signet Shakespeare series continues with the first volume of Comedies containing The Comedy of Errors, The taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona. It also includes Loves Labour's Lost, Romeo and Juliet (sic) and A Midsummer Night's Dream.

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In nine of Wodehouse's ripest stories from the 1920s, the characters are united by their worship of golf. From Rodney Spelvin, the sickeningly good-looking romantic poet who comes to his senses when he discovers the game, to Rollo Podmarsh, who finishes his round even when he thinks himself fatally poisoned, and Chester Meredith who discovers eloquence on the eighteenth green, we meet the full range of humanity in fair weather and foul. P.G. Wodehouse is recognised as the greatest English comic writer of the twentieth century. His characters and settings have entered our language and our mythology. Launched on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, the Everyman Wodehouse will eventually contain all the novels and stories, edited and reset. Each Everyman volume will be the finest edition of the master ever published.

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The Everyman Signet Shakespeare series continues with the second volume of Histories, containing HENRY IV, parts I and II, HENRY V and HENRY VIII. As before, there is an extended introduction by Tony Tanner, a bibliography and author chronology. The plays are lightly annotated and the text is therefore ideal for both students and general readers.

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This is the fourth volume in the series of Everyman Pocket Poet Love Poems, following the success of Love poems, Erotic Poems and Love Letters. LOVE SONGS AND SONNETS takes a wider view of love, covering all aspects of human relationships, from passionate first love to fianl regret. Includes poems by Shakespere, Donne, Dickinson, Lowell. Larkin, Herbet, Horace, Hardy, Rilke, Auden and Burns - and many more. Published in good time for Valentine's Day 1997.

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The second volume of the Everyman Signet Shakespeare completes the survey of Shakespeare's tragic output with Titus Andronicus, Troilus and Cressida, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens and Coriolanus. The authoritatively edited texts of the plays are supplemented with extensive bibliographies, a chronology of Shakespeare's life and times, and a substantial introduction in which Professor Tony Tanner examines Shakespeare's evolution as a tragedian while also providing detailed discussions of the individual plays.

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In 2009 Knopf published a new translation of Cavafy's Complete Poems by the brilliant and award-winning writer and scholar Daniel Mendelsohn. Now Mendelsohn has made a selection of the poet's best-loved works for a Pocket Poets edition, including such favorites as "Waiting for the Barbarians," "Ithaca," and "The God Abandons Antony." Whether advising Odysseus as he returns home to Ithaca or portraying a doomed Marc Antony on the eve of his death, Cavafy's poems make thehistoric profoundly and movingly personal. A towering figure of twentieth-century poetry, Cavafy is a stellar addition to the Everyman Pocket Poets series.

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Rumi: Unseen Poems – the second volume of Rumi in the Everyman Pocket Poet series – is a treasury of poems which have never been translated before, researched and translated by Rumi biographer Brad Gooch and the Iranian writer Maryam Mortaz.The thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi was trained in Sufism, a mystic tradition within Islam. He founded the Mevlevi Order, often known as the Whirling Dervishes, who use dance and music as part of their spiritual devotion. His poetry combines the sacred and the sensual, expressing both rapturous divine love, and aching human love for his companion and teacher, Shams of Tabriz. It has long been popular in the West, never more so than in the last twenty-five years, when a new wave of free translations introduced him to an ever-widening audience. However, some of these recent translations have been more in the nature of interpretations by writers who are not Persian speakers. Cultural and Islamic references central to an understanding of Rumi's poetry have been toned down or omitted. And so vast was Rumi's output that earlier scholarly translators were obliged to be selective, leaving a rich vein of verse still unmined. From this Gooch and Mortaz have made a selection of ghazals (short lyric poems) and rubaiyat (quatrains), aiming in their own translations to achieve fidelity to the originals while preserving all Rumi's lyric exuberance.This book makes a perfect companion to the first Everyman volume of Rumi, which presents the very best of the twentieth-century translations.

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Considered by many readers, including Shaw, Chesterton, Conrad and Trilling, as one of Dickens's finest achievements, Bleak House tells the complex story of a notorious lawsuit in which love and inheritance are set against the classic urban background of nineteenth-century London, where fog on the river, seeping into the very bones of the characters, symbolizes the pervasive corruption of the legal system and the society which supports it. Displaying the writer's familiar panoramic sweep and enormous cast of brilliant characters, the novel is also a bold experimental narrative in which public and private worlds are brought into sharp focus. It was first published in monthly parts, 1852-3, accompanied by the illustrations by 'Phiz' reproduced in this volume. This edition also reprints the original Everyman preface by G. K. Chesterton.

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A dazzling collection of early stories and later fragments which throw an entirely new light on Jane Austen. In particular, they reveal a precociously brilliant genius with a talent for broad comedy and even farce. Most of the pieces in this collection are very funny indeed, and several - including the novella LADY SUSAN and the unfinished novel SANDITION are also neglected masterpieces. Other material includes the celebrated HISTORY OF ENGLAND, poems, prayers, the Plan of a Novel, etc. The volume is arranged in two parts, with the mature stories in Part 1 edited for easy reading, and the juvenilia collected by Austen herself presented exactly as she wrote them in Part 2. It includes everything she wrote apart from letters and the six famous novels, and is the final volume in the complete Everyman edition of her works now available in seven uniform volumes.

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The beautiful Everyman gift edition in hardback.The Lord Orlando's country seat has 365 rooms. An exquisitely beautiful youth, he is a favourite of the ageing Queen Elizabeth and enjoys all that Court and tavern have to offer. He falls passionately in love with the intriguing Sasha, an androgynous Russian princess, who jilts him. Stricken, he takes up Literature, penning huge quantities of poems and plays, 'all romantic, and all long'. A few decades later a still youthful Orlando is appointed ambassador to Constantinople by Charles II. Here he wakes up one day and finds he has the body of a woman. "Different sex, same person", she observes, unphased.In London, it is the eighteenth century, and she can hobnob with "men of genius" Pope and Swift, Johnson and Boswell. She has affairs with both women and men, but before long it is the nineteenth century, oppressively gloomy and moral and probably time to find a husband. Fortunately, in a Brontësque moment on a moor, the gender- nonconforming Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, newly back from Cape Horn, gallops past and scoops her up into bliss.Woolf's most unusual and joyous novel was inspired by her affair with the dashing author and aristocrat, Vita Sackville West.

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* In size, price, and elegant packaging, these books will make ideal gifts * Beautiful 3-colour jacket designed to give a uniform look * Unique and highly distinctive black-and-white pattern on each spine * Full-cloth, flexible covers * Sewn bindings * Silk ribbon markers and headbands * Gold stamping on front and spine * Decorative patterned endpapers * Newly designed typographic settings in classic typefaces * Portable format-size 6 1/4 x 4 ins (15. 75 x 10. 25 cm) * Cream wove acid free paper * 256pp each volume

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