This edition of the poetry of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)

Includes:: all the poems contained in the Definitive

...

The Collected Poems spans fifty years of work from Hawk in the Rain to the bestselling Birthday Letters. It also

Includes::

...

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. ...

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. ...

The third volume of Somerset Maugham's Collected Short Stories" introduced by the author contains the celebrated series about Ashenden a secret service agent in World War I. Based on Maugham's own experiences with the British Intelligence service in Switzerland the stories are vignettes in which he dramatises both the romance & absurdity of espionage as well as its ruthlessness & brutality. Accountable only to 'R' Ashenden travels all over the Continent on assignments which entangle him with such characters as the traitor Grantley Caypor the passionate Guilia Lazzari & the sinister 'hairless Mexican'." ...

The stories in this collection move from Malaya to America & England & include some of Maughams most famous tales; Flotsam & Jetsam the story of an old woman trapped for years in a loveless marriage in the remote rubber plantations; The Man with the Scar & notably the opening story The Vessel of Wrath a tale of the unexpected love that grows between a devout missionary nurse & a drunken reprobate. In this second volume of his collected stories Maugham illustrates his characteristic wry perception of human foibles & his genius for evoking compelling drama from an acute sense of time & place. ...

All decent people live beyond their incomes nowadays & those who aren't respectable live beyond other peoples'. Saki (H.H. 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'

...

These outstanding stories of American award-winning novelist John Cheever show the power & range of one of the finest short story writers of the century. Stories of love & squalor set in a world in which momentary glimpses of brightness contend with time social change & the chaos of history. ...

This is a collection of stunning short stories from the most acclaimed Science Fiction author of any generation. Arthur C Clarke ...

Kafka was an obsessive writer who produced a huge volume of stories novels diaries & letters in his brief lifetime. The present volume

Includes:: all his available shorter fiction in a new collection edited & introduced by Gabriel Josipovici. The stories which range from tiny fragments to substantial narratives have been arranged both to illuminate one another & to illustrate Kafkas evolution as a writer
- which as Professor Josipovici shows is more complex & radical than often thought. The extensive prefatory essay is an introduction not only to the stories but also to Kafkas work as a whole.


...