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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Mark Twain

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

Politics, religion, culture, travel, science and technology, family life: nothing escaped the eye and pen of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, nineteenth-century America's most famous writer and a legend in his own lifetime. Though chiefly known today for his classic novels of childhood, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and for his short stories, he produced even more nonfiction of an impressive quality. 
 
Twain lived a life as exciting as his fiction, and in his Autobiography we find him running wild, like the heroes of his novels, in the countryside around his childhood home in Missouri and navigating the treacherous waters of the Mississippi River as a trained steamboat pilot, while his letters show him travelling thousands of miles over the United States on hectic lecture tours (he was a great showman, raconteur and performer of his own works), hobnobbing with princes and presidents and being lionized in the capitals of Europe. 
 
His trademark wit, candour, sarcasm and irrepressible humour shine through on every page of this selection, but here too, beyond the entertainer, we discover in his speeches and essays the social and moral issues - slavery, imperialism - which concerned him, and meet the private man behind that towering public figure, whose long marriage never lost its romance, but who bore the sorrow of losing two of his three daughters while still in their twenties. 
 
A sometimes moving, sometimes hilarious and always riveting read.

Collected Nonfiction Volume 1

Selections from the Autobiography, Letters, Essays, and Speeches

James Baldwin

Novelist, essayist, and public intellectual - James Baldwin is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. This Everyman's Library collection includes his bestselling, galvanizing essay The Fire Next Time—which gave voice to the emerging civil rights movement of the 1960s and still lights the way to understanding race in America today—along with three additional brilliant works of nonfiction by this seminal chronicler and analyst of culture. From No Name In the Street's extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies to the "passionate, probing, controversial" (The Atlantic) Nobody Knows My Name and the incisive criticism of American movies in The Devil Finds Work, Baldwin's stunning prose over and over proves relevant to our contemporary struggle for equality, justice, and social change.

The Fire Next Time; Nobody Knows My Name; No Name In The Street; The Devil Finds Work

Robert Browning

Elizabeth Browning Barrett

Pocket clothbound volumes from the world's greatest poets, and with a stunning range of anthologies. Each volume has an elegant jacket, full cloth sewn binding, silk ribbon marker and headbands, with gold stamping on front and spine and decorative endpapers. In size, price and presentation they make ideal gifts and are a joy to read and collect. More than eighty titles in print.

Celebrated in their time and still popular over a century after their deaths, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett had a unique relationship which is reflected in their work. Both were distinguished as poets before they met, and they learnt from one another without ever sacrificing their individuality. If Elizabeth recognized that Robert’s talent was the greater of the two, Robert understood that his wife’s voice was unique. All the great themes they shared are represented in this collection of their shorter poems – love, marriage, poetry, religion, England and Italy, the natural world – and the poems are accompanied by a selection from the marvellous letters they wrote to one another, especially in the years of their courtship. Among the items included are extracts from Aurora Leigh and Pauline, and the whole of Sonnets from the Portuguese, together with many lyrics and narrative poems by both poets.

Robert And Elizabeth Barrett Browning Poems

P.G. Wodehouse

P G Wodehouse is widely recognized as the greatest English comic writer of the twentieth century. 
 
His characters and settings have entered our language and our mythology. The first ever collected edition (Wodehouse had many publishers in his lifetime), the Everyman Wodehouse, will contain all the novels and stories, newly edited and reset from the first British edition. 
 
Printed on cream-wove, acid-free paper, sewn and bound in cloth, each Everyman volume is already recognized as the finest edition of the master ever published.

In this series of letters to William Townend, a fellow-writer and friend since their schooldays at Dulwich College, Wodehouse discusses in some detail his literary outlook, writing methods and constant hunt for new plots. Characteristically modest and lightly humorous in tone, the letters are nevertheless revealing of a dedicated, practical and scrupulous craftsman whose most brilliant inspirations were grounded in decades of unremitting hard work. 
The letters are introduced and annotated by the editor, who provided Wodehouse with the idea for one of his most famous characters, Ukridge.

Performing Flea

Virginia Woolf

A Contemporary Classics hardcover edition of Virginia Woolf’s classic plea for a 
world in which women are free to use their gifts. In this influential extended essay and using powerful images and memorable thought experiments -such as a fictional sister of William Shakespeare, who is as talented as her brother but limited in ways he was not -Woolf analyses the many ways in which women have been held back throughout history and still are in her own time.

A Room of One’s Own

Cynthia Ozick

Selected by Cynthia Ozick from a dozen books written across more than fifty years, the essays and short stories gathered here constitute a summing-up of her remarkable literary career. In such classic essays as “Who Owns Anne Frank?,” “What Helen Keller Saw,” “Dostoevsky’s Unabomber,” and “Transcending the Kafkaesque,” Ozick examines some of the world's most illustrious writers and their work, tackles compelling contemporary literary and moral issues, and looks into the wellsprings of her own lifelong engagement with literature. In her short stories, including “A Hebrew Sibyl,” “What Happened to the Baby?,” “Dictation,” “The Biographer’s Hat,” and “The Conversion of the Jews,” Ozick demonstrates again and again her stylistic brilliance and the originality of her distinctive interweaving of the strands of history and myth.

In a Yellow Wood

Selected Stories and Essays

W A Mozart

The 1200 or so letters of Mozart and his family form the most fascinating correspondence by any artist of the eighteenth century or earlier, and Mozart himself ranks high among letter writers of any age or occupation. A vivd and amzingly detailed picture emerges of Mozart's career as performer, teacher and composer, as well as a lively account of contemporary musical politics in the courts and opera houses of Europe. The inclusion of letters from his father, a dominant but loving parent determined to supervise his son's career evern after he had grown up, highlights the problems which Mozart encountered in breaking with his provincial background, as well as providing a glimpse of the social and domestic details that tell us so much about the kind of person Mozart was and how he lived. The correspondence ends with the pathetic begging letters of his last years and the touching, adoring yet protective letters to his wife. This edition is being published in May 2006 to coincide with the 250th anniversay of Mozart's birth. The selection has been made from the classic translation by Emily Anderson.

Mozart's Letters

John Evelyn

Sometimes overshadowed by his friend and contemporary, Samuel Pepys, Evelyn is the other great English diarist. He was a scholar, a scientific amateur, a garden designer and architect, and a founder member of the Royal Society who published a magisterial book about trees, Sylva, and many pamphlets on assorted subjects. 
His great interest as a diarist is that he was privy to all the great men and events of his very long life, from the execution of Charles I to the accession of Queen Anne, whereas Pepys writes of a relatively short period. A personal friend of Charles II, he observed at close quarters- and with some disapproval- that monarch's amorous life, and the diaries contain vivid portraits of Nell Gwynn, other royal mistresses and their children. The personalities of James II, the Dukes of Monmouth and Marlborough, and Judge Jeffreys, also figure largely. 
But this is more than a social record. As a valued administrator, Evelyn was also involved with many serious projects, such as combating the Plague, and rebuilding London after the Great Fire - an enterprise which brought him close to Christopher Wren. 
In all, a vivid portrait of the social, personal and political life of a society in ferment by one of its major players.

The Diary of John Evelyn

Joan Didion

This hardcover omnibus edition of Didion's collected nonfiction contains her final four books: Blue Nights, South and West, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, and her bestselling and most famous work, The Year of Magical Thinking In her essay “Why I Write” (included in this volume), Joan Didion explained what lies behind her iconic nonfiction writing: "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” Across her long and prolific career, readers have been blessed time and again by her brilliance as a prose stylist and a social commentator. Form her unforgettable reckonings with grief (for her husband in The Year of Magical Thinking and for her daughter in Blue Nights), to her exploration of two iconic regions of America in South and West, through the indelible pieces of reporting collected from across her career in Let Me Tell You What I Mean, the books collected here show Didion at her best: bearing witness to our history, illuminating our culture, and shedding light on the human condition.

I Write to Find Out What I am Thinking

Collected Non Fiction

John Muir

This volume of John Muir's selected writings chronicles the key turning points in his life and study of the American wilderness. The Story of My Boyhood and Youth is Muir's account of his childhood on a Wisconsin farm, where his interest in nature was first piqued; in The Mountains of California, The Yosemite, and Travels in Alaska we follow him on long journeys into stunning mountain ranges and valleys, where he records native flora and fauna and finds proof of his theories of the effect of glaciers on landscape formation. These four full-length works--along with a selection of important essays also included here--helped galvanize American naturalists, leading to the founding of the Sierra Club and several national parks. In these pages, written with meticulous thoroughness and an impassioned lyricism, we witness Muir's awakening to the incredible beauty of our planet, and the honing of an eye turned as acutely toward the scientific as the spiritual.

Selected Writings

Emily Dickinson

The same inimitable voice and dazzling insights that make Emily Dickinson's poems immortal can be found in the whimsical, humorous, and often deeply moving letters she wrote to her family and friends throughout her life. The selection of letters presented here provides a fuller picture of the eccentric recluse of legend, showing how immersed in life she was: we see her tending her garden; baking bread; marking the marriages, births, and deaths of those she loved; reaching out for intellectual companionship; and confessing her personal joys and sorrows. These letters, invaluable for the light they shed on their author, are, as well, a pure pleasure to read.

Letters of Emily Dickinson

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