Carti in categoria Literature & Biography

Ebenezer Scrooge is a miserly old skinflint. He hates everyone, especially children. But at Christmas three ghosts come to visit him, scare him into mending his ways, and he finds, as he celebrates with Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim and their family, that geniality brings its own reward. This finest of all Christmas stories is beautifully illustrated with Arthur Rackham's superb line drawings. An aparitie: 1998Format: 19,8 X 12,9Numar pagini: 96

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 and returned permanently in 1908. her first book of stories, In a German Pension, appeared in 1911, and she went on to write and 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...

All decent people live beyond their incomes nowadays, and those who aren't respectable live beyond other people's'.Saki (H.H. Munro) stands alongside Anton Chekhov and O Henry as a master of the short story. His extraordinary stories are a mixture of humorous satire, irony and the macabre, in which the stupidities and hypocrisy of conventional society are viciously pilloried. This collection includes Sredni Vastor and The Unrest Cure.We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but ...

Gathered here are the five novels he wrote in his relatively short career, together with a number of the many short stories he wrote between 1922 and his death in 1940. This Side of Paradise catapulted him to fame, its expose of the manners and morals of a post-war generation becoming a cause celebre. The Beautiful and Damned, a semi autobiographical moral parable of a doomed marriage, affirmed Fitzgerald's status as the spokesman for the generation of the 1920s. His third novel, The Great Gatsb...

Interest in supernatural phenomena was high during Charles Dickens' lifetime. He had always loved a good ghost story himself, particularly at Christmas time, and was open-minded, willing to accept, and indeed put to the test, the existence of spirits.His natural inclinations toward drama and the macabre made him a brilliant teller of ghost tales, and in the twenty stories presented here, which include his celebrated A Christmas Carol, the full range of his gothic talents can be seen.Chilling as ...

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat, Calico Pie and The Pobble Who Has No Toes, together with Edward Lear's crazy limericks, have entertained adults and children alike for over 100 years. This edition, illustrated by the author, contains all the verse and stories of the Book of Nonsense, More Nonsense, Nonsense Songs, Nonsense Stories, Nonsense Alphabets and Nonsense Cookery. It has a biographical Preface by Lear himself, and concludes with some delightful 'heraldic' sketches of his cat, Foss. An apariti...

Walter Skeat (1835-1912) was one of the greatest investigators of the roots of the English language, and his remarkable scholarship was instrumental in the revival of the great works of early English Literature. His astonishing detective work into the origins and development of the world's most widely used language provides an unsurpassed guide to its flexibility and richness. An aparitie: 2001Format: 19,4 X 12,6Numar pagini: 656

This work contains the essential elements of "Gray's Anatomy", available in a concise and useable form. It uses original illustrations from this work and distils the text into a "dissecting-room companion". An aparitie: 2001Format: 19,2 X 12,6Numar pagini: 304

In the first part of this famous work, published in 1821 but then revised and expanded in 1856, De Quincey vividly describes a number of experiences during his boyhood which he implies laid the foundations for his later life of helpless drug addiction.The second part consists of his remarkable account of the pleasures and pains of opium, ostensibly offered as a muted apology for the course his life had taken but often reading like a celebration of it.The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is ...

The Coral Island - A Tale of the Pacific Ocean - opens with the shipwreck on a Pacific Island of the young friends Ralph Rover and Jack Martin and Peterkin Gray. Despite the pleasurable presence of delicious breadfruit, coconuts, and succulent oysters, the intrepid trio are not alone and they soon witness a battle between rival bands of cannibals led by 'Bloody Bill'.Their lives are placed in serious peril from which only courage and determined pluck can save them. An enormously popular adventur...

The story of Edmund Dantes, self-styled Count of Monte Cristo, is told with consummate skill. The victim of a miscarriage of justice, Dantes is fired by a desire for retribution and empowered by a stroke of providence. In his campaign of vengeance, he becomes an anonymous agent of fate.The sensational narrative of intrigue, betrayal, escape, and triumphant revenge moves at a cracking pace. Dumas' novel presents a powerful conflict between good and evil embodied in an epic saga of rich diversity ...

The sheer variety and accomplishment of Elizabeth Gaskell's shorter fiction is amazing. This new volume contains six of her finest stories that have been selected specifically to demonstrate this, and to trace the development of her art. As diverse in setting as in subject matter, these tales move from the gentle comedy of life in a small English country town in Dr Harrison's Confessions, to atmospheric horror in far north-west Wales with The Doom of the Griffiths.The story of Cousin Phillis, he...

In this famous story of seduction, two highly intelligent but amoral French aristocrats plot the downfall of a respectable young married woman and a fifteen year old girl who has only just emerged from the convent. The letters these two conspirators exchange are remarkably frank in describing how they manage to achieve their ends and, at the same time, reveal nuances of character which make it impossible to dismiss either of them as simply evil. Those written by their victims are equally revelat...

George Eliot's final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), follows the intertwining lives of the beautiful but spoiled and selfish Gwendolene Harleth and the selfless yet alienated Daniel Deronda, as they search for personal and vocational fulfilment and sympathetic relationship.Set largely in the degenerate English aristocratic society of the 1860s, Daniel Deronda charts their search for meaningful lives against a background of imperialism, the oppression of women, and racial and religious prejudice. G...

De Profundis is Wilde's eloquent and bitter reproach from prison to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. He contrasts his behaviour with that of his close friend Robert Ross who became Wilde's literary executor.The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a deeply moving and characteristically generous poem on the horrors of prison life, which was published anonymously in 1898.This collection also includes the essay The Soul of Man under Socialism and two of his Platonic dialogues, The Decay of Lying and The Critic...

Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) is best known for War and Peace and Anna Karenina, commonly regarded as Russia in the 1840s. There is a stranger in town, and he is behaving oddly. The unctuous Pavel Chichikov goes around the local estates buying up 'dead souls'. These are the papers relating to serfs who have died since the last census, but who remain on the record and still attract a tax demand. Chichikov is willing to relieve their owners of the tax burden by buying the titles for a song. What h...

The Deerslayer is the culmination of James Fenimore Cooper's`Leather-Stocking' novels, featuring Natty Bumppo (the deer-slayingyoung frontiersman) and the Mohican chief, Chingachgook. Cooper portraysthe hubris of the conquest of a vast territory.The action takes place during the American wars of the 1740s. Natty andhis friend Harry attempt to save a trapper and two young women, whosefloating fort on Lake Glimmerglass is besieged by the ruthless Iroquois.The tension steadily increases to the poin...

The young Thomas Hardy, working as an architect, but fired with literary ambition, tried for years to get into print. He finally succeeded with Desperate Remedies, a 'sensation novel' in the mode of Wilkie Collins. Here was a racy specimen of the genre, replete with sudden death, dark mysteries, intriguing clues, fire and storm, flight and pursuit.Anyone who enjoys The Woman in White is likely to enjoy Desperate Remedies. But that is only half the story. Hardy contrived also, in this unlikely co...

In 1869 a young Russian was strangled, shot through the head and thrown into a pond. His crime? A wish to leave a small group of violent revolutionaries, from which he had become alienated. Dostoevsky takes this real-life catastrophe as the subject and culmination of Devils, a title that refers the young radicals themselves and also to the materialistic ideas that possessed the minds of many thinking people Russian society at the time.The satirical portraits of the revolutionaries, with their na...

The Diamond as Big as the Ritz is an ominous fable about the pursuit of great wealth. Readers will be transported to a fabulous fantasy land of such opulence that its very existence has to remain a jealously guarded secret. Fatal consequences lie in store for 'bona fide' guests and uninvited visitors alike, while the sybaritic luxury of the place is evoked in an effortless prose style which is quintessentially F. Scott Fitzgerald.Also featured in this volume are The Cut-Glass Bowl, May Day, The ...