A casual introduction a challenge to a simple game of chess a lovers' reunion a meaningless infidelity from such small seeds Zweig brings forth five startlingly tense tales-meditations on the fragility of love the limits of obsession the combustibility of secrets & betrayal To read anything by Zweig is to risk addiction; in this collection the power of his writing-which with its unabashed intensity & narrative drive made him one of the bestselling & most acclaimed authors in the world-is clear & irresistible Each of these stories is a bolt of experience unforgettable & unique ...

No poet is more emblematically American than Robert Frost Hailed as the most eminent the most distinguished Anglo-American poet' by TS Eliot he is the only writer in history to have been awarded four Pulitzer Prizes In iconic poems like Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' simple images summon the rural landscape of New England & Frost unfailingly moves the reader with his profound grasp of the human condition This is the most comprehensive & authoritative volume of Frost's verse available comprising all eleven volumes of his poems meticulously edited by Edward Connery Lathem ...

With an Introduction & Notes by Dr Sally Minogue Elizabeth Barrett Browning was such an acclaimed poet in her own lifetime that she was suggested as a candidate for the Poet Laureateship when Wordsworth died in 1850 Yet today we have only a limited knowledge of her considerable life's work as a poet in part because of a lack of representative but accessible editions of her work Readers will find here not only her well-known sonnet sequence of love poems Sonnets From the Portuguese but also lesser known sonnets some in praise of the cross-dressing bohemian writer George Sand others to contemporary poets & artists Her religious & spiritual poetry echoes that of the Metaphysical poets A different voice emerges in her social & political protest poems such as The Cry of the Children' & The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point' Her experimental ballads allowed her to develop a distinctive way of writing about women within an apparently conventional form In the outstanding work of her maturity Aurora Leigh the woman's voice takes centre stage This novel-poem' is full of verve & interest with a female poet-hero who casts a caustic eye on life & on her fellow men
- & women We all think we know the story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- the mysterious illness which enclosed her in her room her over-loving but imperious father & her romantic secret marriage to the poet Robert Browning & their life together in Italy But this comprehensive selection of her poetry tells the real story of her sustained creative life as a poet which began with her childhood poetic ambitions & ended only with her death All the major aspects of her poetry are represented in this accessible edition which is well-annotated & contextualised with a wide-ranging introduction which covers Barrett Browning's poetic & intellectual life as well as her personal one Recent critical re-readings including major feminist reassessments of her poetry are covered in the introduction with helpful suggestions for further reading

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George Mackay Brown is recognised as one of Scotland's greatest twentieth-century lyric poets His work is integral to the flowering of Scottish literature over the last fifty years Admired by many fellow poets including Seamus Heaney & Douglas Dunn his poems are deeply individual & unmistakable in their setting 'the small green world' of the Orkney Islands where he lived for most of his life with its elemental forces of sea & sky & Norse & Icelandic ancestry is brought vividly & memorably to life Here his rich resonant poetry is collected in one volume making available again many poems that are otherwise out of print ...

With an Introduction Bibliography & Glossary by Michael Irwin Professor of English Literature University of Kent at Canterbury Thomas Hardy started composing poetry in the heyday of Tennyson & Browning He was still writing with unimpaired power sixty years later when Eliot & Yeats were the leading names in the field His extraordinary stamina & a consistent individuality of style & vision made him a survivor immune to literary fashion At the start of the twenty-first century his reputation stands higher than it ever did even in his own lifetime He is now recognised not only as a great poet but as one who is widely loved He speaks with directness humanity & humour to scholarly or ordinary readers alike ...

With an Introduction by Antonia Till William Wordsworth (1771-1850) is the foremost of the English Romantic poets He was much influenced by the events of the French Revolution in his youth & he deliberately broke away from the artificial diction of the Augustan & neo-classical tradition of the eighteenth century He sought to write in the language of ordinary men & women of ordinary thoughts sights & sounds & his early poetry represents this fresh approach to his art Wordsworth spent most of his adult life in the Lake District with his sister Dorothy & his wife Mary by whom he had four children His remarkable autobiographical poem ' The Prelude' was completed in 1805 but was not published until after his death & it is included in this full edition of Wordsworth's poetry ...

New to Penguin Classics the remarkable devastating collected stories by the author of Wide Sargasso Sea Some of Jean Rhys's most powerful writing is to be found in this rich dark collection of her collected stories Her fictional world is haunted by her own painful memories of cheap hotels & drab Parisian cafes; of devastating love affairs; of her childhood in Dominica; of drifting through European cities always on the periphery & always perilously close to the abyss Rendered in extraordinarily vivid honest prose these stories show Rhys at the height of her literary powers & offer a fascinating counterpoint to her most famous novel Wide Sargasso Sea This volume

Includes:: all the stories from her three collections The Left Bank (1927) Tigers Are Better-Looking (1968) & Sleep It Off Lady (1976)

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With an Introduction & Notes by Professor Stephen Arkin San Francisco State University Katherine Mansfield is widely regarded as a writer who helped create the modern short story Born in Wellington New Zealand in 1888 she came to London in 1903 to attend Queen's College & returned permanently in 1908 her first book of stories In a German Pension appeared in 1911 & she went on to write & publish an extraordinary body of work This edition of The Collected Stories brings together all of the stories that Mansfield had written up until her death in January of 1923 With an introduction & head-notes this volume allows the reader to become familiar with the complete range of Mansfield's work from the early satirical stories set in Bavaria through the luminous recollections of her childhood in New Zealand & through the mature deeply felt stories of her last years Admired by Virginia Woolf in her lifetime & by many writers since her death Katherine Mansfield is one of the great literary artists of the twentieth century ...

All decent people live beyond their incomes nowadays & those who aren't respectable live beyond other people's' Saki (HH Munro) stands alongside Anton Chekhov & O Henry as a master of the short story His extraordinary stories are a mixture of humorous satire irony & the macabre in which the stupidities & hypocrisy of conventional society are viciously pilloried This collection

Includes:: Sredni Vastor & The Unrest Cure We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth but like other married couples they sometimes live apart'

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The new expanded Everyman edition of Pushkin&s prose fiction contains all his mature work In addition to & The Captain&s Daughter& & & The Tales of Belkin& the volume now

Includes:: many more short pieces & & The History of Pugachev& a vivid account of an eighteenth-century Russian rebellion Pushkin&s prose tales are the foundation stones of Russian literature They made possible the great achievements of Dostosvsky Tolstoy & Chekhov But they are also of course brilliant & fascinating in their own right At this volume makes clear Pushkins is one of the world&s great story-tellers& direct dramatic tender with the author &s voices always peruasively present Paul Debreceny&s highly acclaimed translation was first published in 1983 The Everyman edition is published to coincide with the Bicentenary of Pushkin&s birth on 26th May 1999

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