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'." ...

This classic collection of stories moves from England France & Spain to the silver sands of the South Pacific. It

Includes::

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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. ...

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.


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The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is the complete collection of short fiction from the world-renowned Lydia Davis. It is the 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' 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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Collected here are Gogols finest tales
- from the demon-haunted St Johns Eve to the strange surrealism of The Nose from the heart-rending
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