Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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James Thurber

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This collection brings together the best of James Thurber's brilliantly funny, eccentric and anarchic writings. It includes his most famous work, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, in which an ordinary man's fantasies have a more powerful hold on him than reality, as well as essays, poetry and cartoons gathered from all of Thurber's collections. Making fun of his own weaknesses and those of other people (and dogs) - the English teacher who looked only at figures of speech, the Airedale who refused to include him in the family, the botany lecturer who despaired of him totally - James Thurber is a true original, whose off-beat imagination shows us everyday life from a different angle.

The Thurber Carnival

This new edition of Brian Aldiss&rsquo;s classic anthology brings together a diverse selection of science fiction spanning over sixty years, from Isaac Asimov&rsquo;s &lsquo;Nightfall&rsquo;, first published in 1941, to the 2006 story &lsquo;Friends in Need&rsquo; by Eliza Blair. Including authors such as Clifford Simak, Harry Harrison, Bruce Sterling, A. E. Van Vogt and Brian Aldiss himself, these stories portray struggles against machines, epic journeys, genetic experiments, time travellers and alien races. From stories set on Earth, to uncanny far distant worlds and ancient burnt-out suns, the one constant is humanity itself, compelled by an often fatal curiosity to explore the boundless frontiers of time, space and probability.

A Science Fiction Omnibus

Italo Calvino

Enchanting stories about the evolution of the universe, with characters that are fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures. They disport themselves among galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms - and have time for a love life. 
 
'Naturally, we were all there, - old Qfwfq said, - where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?'

The Complete Cosmicomics

Saki

Saki is perhaps the most graceful spokesman for England's 'Golden Afternoon' - the slow and peaceful years before the First World War.  Although, like so many of his generation, he died tragically young, in action on the Western Front, his reputation as a writer continued to grow long after his death.  The stories are humorous, satiric, supernatural, and macabre, highly individual, full of eccentric wit and unconventional situations.  With his great gift as a social satirist of his contemporaryupper-class Edwardian world, Saki is one of the few undisputed English masters of the short story.

The Complete Short Stories

Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler created the fast talking, trouble seeking Californian private eye Philip Marlowe for his first great novel The Big Sleep in 1939. Marlowe's entanglement with the Sternwood family - and an attendant cast of colourful underworld figures - is the background to a story reflecting all the tarnished glitter of the great American Dream. The detective's iconic image burns just as brightly in Farewell My Lovely, on the trail of a missing nightclub crooner. And the inimitable Marlowe is able to prove that trouble really is his business in Raymond Chandler's brilliant epitaph, The Long Goodbye.

The Big Sleep and Other Novels

From fabulous enchantments and supernatural horrors to subtler, more psychological terrors, the best of nineteenth-century fantastic literature is collected here by Italo Calvino. These mysterious and macabre tales include Hoffmann's nightmarish 'The Sandman', Poe's terrifying 'The Tell-Tale Heart' and Dickens's chilling ghost story 'The Signal-Man', and relatively unknown works from celebrated writers including Honoré de Balzac, Henry James, Sir Walter Scott, Guy de Maupassant and Robert Louis Stevenson, alongside lesser-known contributors. Each story comes with a fascinating introduction by Calvino.

Fantastic Tales

Visionary And Everyday

J B Priestley

An Inspector Calls, first produced in 1946 when society was undergoing sweeping transformations, has recently enjoyed an enormously successful revival. While holding its audience with the gripping tension of a detective thriller, it is also a philosophical play about social conscience and the crumbling of middle class values. Time and the Conways and I Have Been Here Before belong to Priestley&rsquo;s &lsquo;time&rsquo;plays, in which he explores the idea of precognition and pits fate against free will. The Linden Tree also challenges preconceived ideas of history when Professor Linden comes into conflict with his family about how life should be lived after the war.

An Inspector Calls and Other Plays

George Orwell

His best-known novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, are two of the most famous, well-quoted and influential political satires ever written. The other novels in this volume are also concerned with individuals at odds with repressive institutions: the corrupt imperialism of Burmese Days, disaffection with materialistic society in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, the perils of modern suburban living in Coming Up for Air and the down-and-out girls in A Clergyman's Daughter. 
 
They all display Orwell's deep understanding of human nature, his biting humour and great compassion.

The Complete Novels of George Orwell

Animal Farm, Burmese Days, A Clergyman's Daughter, Coming Up for Air, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Evelyn Waugh

In this unique collection of short stories composed between 1910-62, Evelyn Waugh's early juvenilia are brought together with later pieces, some of which became the inspirations for his novels. 'Mr Loveday's Little Outing' is a blackly comic tale of a mental asylum and its favourite resident; 'Cruise' sees a hilarious series of letters from a naïve young woman as she travels with her family; 'A House of Gentlefolks' observes a group of elderly eccentric aristocrats and their young heir; and in 'The Sympathetic Passenger' a radio-loathing retiree picks up exactly the wrong hitchhiker. These witty and immaculately crafted stories display the finest writing of a master of satire and comic twists.

Truman Capote

'The only four things that interested me were: reading books, going to the movies, tap-dancing and drawing pictures. Then one day I started writing . . .' Truman Capote began writing at the age of eight, and never looked back. A Capote Reader contains much of the author's published work: his brilliant and prolific oeuvre of fiction, travel sketches, portraits, reportage and essays. It includes all twelve of his celebrated short stories, together with The Grass Harp and Breakfast at Tiffany's. There are vivid sketches of places from Tangiers to Brooklyn, and fascinating insights into the lives of his contemporaries, from Jane Bowles and Cecil Beaton to Marilyn Monroe and Tennessee Williams. Generous space is devoted to reportage including 'The Muses Are Heard', on his trip to Communist Europe in the 1950s with the cast of Porgy and Bess. In all, A Capote Reader demonstrates the chameleon talents of one of America's most versatile and gifted writers.

A Capote Reader

A husband forms gruesome plans for his new fridge; a government employee has a haunting experience on his commute home; prisoners serve as entertainment for wealthy party guests; an army officer suffers a monstrous tropical illness. These short stories contain some of the most groundbreaking and innovative writing in Dutch literature from 1915 to the present day, with most pieces appearing here in English for the first time. Blending unforgettable snapshots of the realities of everyday life with surrealism, fantasy and subversion, this collection shows Dutch writing to be an integral part of world literary history.

The Penguin Book of Dutch Short Stories

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