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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The definitive collection of short stories from the century's greatest science fiction writer All of Arthur C Clarke's short stories collected in one volume beginning with TRAVEL BY WIRE
- Clarke's first ever published short story A volume which showcases his range & variety each story a classic example of the unique mixture of speculation & fiction which has made Clarke a household name
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Here are all Grace Paley's classic stories in one volume From her first book THE LITTLE DISTURBANCES OF MAN (1959) to ENORMOUS CHANGES AT THE LAST MINUTE (1974) & LATER THE SAME DAY (1985) Grace Paley's quirky boisterous characters & rich use of language have won her readers' hearts & secured her place as one of America's most accomplished short story writers Her stories are united by her signature interweaving of personal & political truths her extraordinary capacity for empathy & her pointed depiction of the small & large events that make up daily life ...

Katherine Mansfield's clear & perceptive short stories revolutionized the genre This collection represents the whole range of her writing from short sharp studies to longer richer tales encompassing her three major volumes Bliss The Garden Party & In a German Pension along with fifteen unfinished stories published after her death 816 pages Mansfield Katherine ...

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is the complete collection of short fiction from the world-renowned Lydia Davis WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2013' Big rejoicing Lydia Davis has won the Man Booker International prize Never did a book award deliver such a true match-winning punch Best of all a new audience will read her now & find her wit her vigour & rigour her funniness her thoughtfulness & the precision of form which mark Davis out as unique Daring excitingly intelligent & often wildly comic she reminds you in a world that likes to bandy its words about what words such as economy precision & originality really mean This is a writer as mighty as Kafka as subtle as Flaubert & as epoch-making in her own way as Proust A two-liner from Davis or a seemingly throwaway paragraph will haunt What looks like a game will open to deep seriousness; what looks like philosophy will reveal playfulness tragicomedy ordinariness; what looks like ordinariness will ask you to look again at Davis's writing In its acuteness it always asks attentiveness & it repays this by opening up to its reader like possibility or like a bush covered in flowerheads She's a joy There's no writer quite like her' Ali Smith' What stories Precise & piercing extremely funny Nearly all are unlike anything you've ever read' Metro'I loved these stories They are so well-written with such clarity of thought & precision of language Excellent' William Leith Evening Standard' Remarkable Some of the most moving fiction
- on death marriage children
- of recent years To read Collected Stories is to be reminded of the grand echoing mind-chambers created by Sebald or recent Coetzee A writer of vast intelligence & originality' Independent on Sunday'A body of work probably unique in American writing in its combination of lucidity aphoristic brevity formal originality sly comedy metaphysical bleakness philosophical pressure & human wisdom' New Yorker' Davis is a high priestess of the startling telling detail She can make the most ordinary things such as couples talking or someone watching television bizarre almost mythical I felt I had encountered a most original & daring mind' Colm Toibin Daily Telegraph Lydia Davis is the author of one novel & seven story collections the most recent of which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award She is the recipient of a Mac Arthur Fellowship & was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts & Letters by the French government for her fiction & her translations of modern writers including Maurice Blanchot Michel Leiris & Marcel Proust

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Edgar Poe was born the son of itinerant actors on January 19th 1809 in Boston Massachusets Abandoned by his father & the later death of his mother he was taken into the foster care of John Allan a Virginia tobacco farmer Now styled as Edgar Allan Poe he distinguished himself at the University of Virginia but was equally adept at collecting debts from his assiduous gambling His stepfather's disapproval shattered their fragile relationship & Poe left home to seek his fortune In 1836 he married his cousin Virginia but despite his prolific activities
- journalism poetry lecturing short stories publishing criticism & experimentation with fictional genres including the detective novel which he virtually invented with the publication of The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)
- he received scant recognition for his efforts until the publication of The Raven in 1845 The poem's instant popularity gave him a new visibility in literary circles but his personal situation remained desperate poverty illness drink & the physical decline & ultimate death of Virginia in 1847 led to his untimely & premature decline In 1849 he was found sick injured & semi-conscious in a Baltimore tavern Taken to hospital he lingered on for four days but never recovered & on October 7th Edgar Allan Poe died at the age of 40 He was one of the most original writers in the history of American letters
- a genius who thanks to his dire reputation was tragically misunderstood during his lifetime It was not until Baudelaire enthusiastically translated his work that he found a wider audience in Europe & became not only an enormous influence on modern French literature but also on the acclaimed work of writers such as Dostoevsky Conan Doyle & Jules Verne


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