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Joseph Conrad

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.

In a novella which remains highly controversial to this day, Conrad explores the relations between Africa and Europe. On the surface, this is a horrifying tale of colonial exploitation. The narrator, Marlowe journeys on business deep into the heart of Africa. But there he encounters Kurtz, an idealist apparently crazed and depraved by his power over the natives, and the meeting prompts Marlowe to reflect on the darkness at the heart of all men. This short but complex and often ambiguous story, which has been the basis of several films and plays, continues to provoke interpretation and discussion.

Heart Of Darkness

George Eliot

Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, published 1871-2, is set in the imaginary county of Loamshire during the years of unrest preceding the 1832 Reform Bill. With its complex plot, broad canvas and huge cast of characters, it has long been recognized as one of the few truly classic English novels.

Middlemarch

A Study of Provinicial Life

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton's subtle variation on the theme of the eternal triangle features Anna Leath, a rich American widow living in France; her daughter's delightful governess, Sophy Viner; and the first love of Anna's youth, George Darrow, who has come back into her life. Hoping to be reunited with George, Anna finds the path of love does not run smooth. THE REEF first appeared in 1912 when Edith Wharton was just fifty and at the height of her powers as a writer. It is a beautifully written, highly characteristic and eminently readable novel by a writer whose popularity is increasing by the year.

The Reef

Rudyard Kipling

Kipling's masterpiece is perhaps the most remarkable literary product of British India. The story of a half-caste boy, part Indian part Irish who journeys throughout the subcontinent with an aged lama in search of religious enlightenment, the nominal plot revolves around the Great Game: the struggle between Britian and Russia for control of Afghanistan. But the glory of the book lies less in the amusing picaresque adventures than in the unsurpassed panorama of Indian life they evoke: brilliant, moving and intensely alive.

Henry Fielding

Tom Jones is one of the earliest English novels, and was hugely popular when it was first published in 1749. It tells the story of the foundling Tom and his journey towards adulthood and marriage. As might be expected, this journey is a complicated one: Tom falls in love with a neighbour's daughter, discovers that he has a rival for his love in the shape of the unpleasant Master Blifil, and is expelled from Mr Allworthy's house after a series of misadventures.

Tom Jones

Wen-Chin Ouyang

Queen Shahrazad

The Arabian Nights - stories told by Queen Shahrazad over a thousand and one nights, to beguile the Sultan into deferring her execution - first began to appear in the West in the early 18th century, firing in the European imagination an appetite for the mysterious and exotic which has never left it. Collected over centuries from Persia and Arabia and India, and ranging from vivacious erotica, animal fables and adventure fantasies to pointed Sufi teaching tales, they provided the daily entertainment of the medieval Islamic world at the height of its glory. 
 English translations soon proliferated. Early ones were taken from Antoine Galland’s French version, but later scholars went back to the Arabic text and it is on three classic 19th-century translators – Richard Burton, Edward W. Lane and John Payne - that this anthology principally draws. It celebrates their role in bringing these stories to the centre of world literature, for they were subsequently retranslated into many other languages, including Chinese. 
. 
 This collection showcases the richness and artistry of these English translations and to allow them to speak for the cultural context in which they were made. It is of academic importance in that it provides an alternative and more positive history of Orientalism, and reflects the history of Arabic Studies in Europe and North America and the ways in which they have fashioned the debate around Arabic literature and the translation of Arabic literary texts. It will also serve as a textbook for World Literature programmes and courses in the Anglophone world. 
 But above all its timeless tales, its stories within stories, continue to fascinate and enchant, and the variety of translations used can only add to the pleasure of the general reader. The new Everyman edition has been beautifully designed to give something of the flavour of the first editions and includes elegant illustrations by the popular early Victorian engraver and designer, William Harvey.

The Arabian Nights

Leo Tolstoy

A brilliant short novel based on Tolstoy's early life as a soldier in the Caucusus, THE COSSACKS has all the energy and poetry of youth while at the same time foreshadowing the great themes of Tolstoy's later years. A young officer finds himself living among tribesmen on the borders of southern Russia. In depicting his experience, Tolstoy explores the birth and death of love, the transience of life, the love of honour and the pain of war, all portrayed amidst the wild and magnificent landscape of the mountains and described in exquisite detail.

The Cossacks

This novel is considered to be one of Conrad's major works and is close in subject matter to The Secret Agent. It is full of cynicism and conflict about the historical failures of revolutionary movements and ideals.

Under Western Eyes

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

This study of natural goodness is Dostoevsky’s most touching novel. Prince Myshkin, the last, poverty-stricken member of a once great family and regarded by many as an idiot, returns to Russia from a sanatorium in Switzerland in order to collect an inheritance. Before he has even arrived home he becomes involved with Rogozhin, a rich merchant’s son whose obsession with the fascinating Nastasya Filippovna eventually draws all three of them into a tragic denouement. But this is only the main thread of a rich and complex book in which a dazzling host of characters, from generals to street urchins, present the picture of an entire society on the verge of dissolution. A tragicomic masterpiece.

The Idiot

Michel de Montaigne

Describing his collection of Essays as ‘a book consubstantial with its author’, Montaigne identified both the power and the charm of a work which introduces us to one of the most attractive figures in European literature. A humanist, a sceptic, an acute observer of himself and others, he reflects the great themes of existence through the prism of his own self-consciousness. Apparent in every line he wrote, his virtues of tolerance, moderation and disinterested inquiry amount to an undeclared manifesto for the Enlightenment, whose prophet he is. This complete edition of his works supplements the Essays with travel diaries and letters, thereby completing the portrait of a true Renaissance man.

The Complete Works

Essays, Travel Journal, Letters

Samuel Johnson

Boswell James

When James Boswell persuaded Samuel Johnson to embark on a tour of Boswell’s native Scotland in 1773, the adventure resulted in two magnificent books, Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Boswell’sJournal of a Tour to the Hebrides. Johnson offers a magisterial account of what was then a remote and rugged land, while Boswell throws further light on the friend and mentor whom he immortalized in his biography. Together, they make up a brilliant portrait of two very different and very remarkable men exploring a feudal world which was soon to pass away for ever.

A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland & The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides

Jane Austen

Adultery is not a typical Jane Austen theme, but when it disturbs the relatively peaceful household at Mansfield Park, it has quite unexpected results.The diffident and much put-upon heroine Fanny Price has to struggle to cope with the results, re-examining her own feelings while enduring the cheerful amorality, old-fashioned indifference and priggish disapproval of those around her.

Mansfield Park

Anton Chekov

Chekhov, widely hailed as the supreme master of the short story, also wrote five works long enough to be called short novels. The Steppe-the most lyrical of the five-is an account of a nine-year-old boy's frightening journey by wagon train across the steppe of southern Russia to enroll in a distant school. The Duel sets two decadent figures-a fanatical rationalist and a man of literary sensibility-on a collision course that ends in a series of surprising reversals. In The Story of an Unknown Man, a political radical plans to spy on an important official by serving as valet to his son, however, as he gradually becomes involved as a silent witness in the intimate life of his young employer, he finds that his own terminal illness has changed his long-held priorities in startling ways. Three Years recounts a complex series of ironies in the personal life of a rich but passive Moscow merchant, engaging time as a narrative element in a way unusual in Chekhov's fiction. In My Life, a man renounces wealth and social position for a life of manual labour, and the resulting conflict between the moral simplicity of his ideals and the complex realities of human nature culminates in an apocalyptic vision that is unique in Chekhov's work.

The Complete Short Novels

Anne Brontë

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is Anne Bronte's second and most celebrated novel. Set in the dramatic northern landscape made familiar by the author's more famous sisters, it tells the story of Helen Graham, a mysterious single woman who rents the semi-ruinous Hall of the title. With a child but no husband, Helen divides the community between those who admire her charm and spirit and those who suspect her morals. Chief among her supporters is a local farmer, Gilbert Markham, who tells her story. 
 
Written before The Tenant, Agnes Grey, based on the author's own experience, explores the position of women in Victorian society through the story of a young woman forced to work as a governess when her father is ruined financially.

Agnes Grey/The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Henry James

When a beautiful, spoilt, aristocratic woman with revolutionary ambitions meets an idealistic young proletarian conspirator who dreams of a better life, the stage is set for The Princess Casamassima in which Henry James explores the London underworld and the political unrest seething there in the later nineteenth century. In the end, Christina Light’s waywardness proves fatal for the fancifully named Hyacinth Robinson, but not before the typically Jamesian encounter of instinct and intelligence has been explored in all its tragi-comic potential.

The Princess Casamassima

Anthony Trollope

Anthony Trollope was well aware that the seemingly parochial power struggles that determine the action of Barchester Towers – struggles whose comic possibilities he exploits to hilarious effect – actually went to the heart of mid-Victorian English society, and had, in other times and other guises, led to civil war and constitutional upheaval. 
 
That awareness heightens the comedy and intensifies the drama in this magnificent novel and it transforms the story of a fight for ascendency among the clergy and dependants of a great English cathedral into something fundamental and universal. Barchester Towers is the second of Trollope's six Barchester Novels, all published by Everyman's Library.

Barchester Towers

Volume 2 Takes us from A private Life of 1892 to James's last story, A Round of Visits, published in 1910. These are the magnificient works of James' maturity - The Death of the Lion, The Altar of the Dead, The Figyre in the Carpet, The Turn of the Screw, In the Cage, The Beast in the Jungle and many others - in which the deepening darkness of the author's own life casts a tragic but heroic shadow on the themes of his youth.

Henry James Collected Stories Vol 2

Samuel Pepys

When Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) began writing in 1660 he was a young clerk living in London, struggling to pay his rent. Over the next nine years as he kept his journal, he rose to be a powerful naval administrator. He became eyewitness to some of the most significant events in seventeenth-century English history, among them, the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 (he was in the ship that brought back Charles II from exile), the plague that ravaged the capital in 1665, and the Great Fire of 1666, described with poetry and horror. 
 Pepys's diary gives vivid descriptions of spectacular events, but much of the richness of the diary lies in the details it provides about the minor dramas of daily life. While Pepys was keen to hear the King's views, he was also ready to talk with a soldier, a housekeeper, or a child rag-picker. He records with searing frankness his tumultuous personal and professional life: the pleasures and frustrations of his marriage, together with his infidelities, his ambitions, and his power schemes. All of this was set down in shorthand, to protect it from prying eyes. The result is a lively, often astonishing, diary and an unrivalled account of life in seventeenth-century London.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys

Edward Gibbon

The first three volumes of Gibbon's DECLINE AND FALL (the western empire) were published by Everyman in 1993. Volumes 4-6 complete the set which is now available for the first time in many years. This year is the bicentenary of Gibbon's death, which has been widely noticed in the press, but even after two hundred years his book is still an authoritative work on Roman history. What is more, it remains wonderfully readable: witty, elegant and intriguing, full of the author's own personality. The six-volume Everyman edition - the only complete one now available-prints the entire text of the book with all Gibbon's own notes, later editorial commentaries, maps, tables, descriptive tables of contents, indices, appendices and two magisterial essays on the author and his work by Hugh Trevor-Roper.

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Vols 4-6

Volumes 4,5,6 The Eastern Empire

Mark Twain

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

William Shakespeare

The everyman Signet Shakespeare series continues with the first volume of Comedies containing THE COMEDY OF ERRORS, THE TAMING OF THE SHREW, THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA. LOVES LABOUR'S LOST, ROMEO AND JULIET (sic) and A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM

Comedies Volume 1

Homer

One of the foremost achievements in Western literature, Homer's Iliad tells the story of the darkest episode of the Trojan War. At its center is Achilles, the greatest warrior-champion of the Greeks, and his conflict with his leader Agamemnon. Interwoven in the tragic sequence of events are powerfully moving descriptions of the ebb and flow of battle, the besieged city of Ilium, the feud between the gods, and the fate of mortals.

The Iliad

Two small masterpieces in one volume. First, The Double, a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare that foreshadows Kafka and Sartre. A minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelganger - a man who has his name and his face and who gradually and relentlessly begins to displace him with his friends and colleagues. In the dilemma of his increasingly paranoid hero, Dostoevsky makes vividly concrete the inner plurality of consciousness that would become a major theme of his work. Second, The Gambler, a stunning psychological portrait of a young man's exhilarating and destructive addiction, a compulsion that Dostoevsky - who once gambled away his wife's wedding ring- knew intimately from his own experience. In the disastrous love affairs and gambling adventures of Alexei Ivanovich, Dostoevsky explores the irresistible temptation to look into the abyss of ultimate risk that he believed was an essential part of the Russian national character.

The Double and The Gambler

George Eliot’s last novel, published in 1876, weaves together two stories, one about Gwendolen Harleth, the spoilt beauty who marries for money, the other concerning the mysterious hero of the title whose search for his true destiny leads him towards Zionism. All Eliot’s great themes – moral choice, the role of chance, the interaction of characters with their environment – are worked out with her incomparable power, and many readers have agreed with F. R. Leavis that the first section of the novel is the greatest achievement in English fiction.

Daniel Deronda

Charlotte Brontë

Jane Eyre (1847) has enjoyed huge popularity since first publication, and its success owes much to its exceptional emotional power. Jane Eyre, a penniless orphan, is engaged as governess at Thornfield Hall by the mysterious Mr Rochester. Her integrity and independence are tested to the limit as their love for each other grows, and the secrets of Mr Rochester's past are revealed.

Jane Eyre

Mark Twain’s famous novels, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (available in Everyman) have long been hailed as major masterpieces, but it is less well known that the father of American literature also made his mark as a master of the short story. This is the only edition in hardcover of his complete shorter fiction: sixty tales spanning a long career – many rollicking and uproarious, some sombre and even shocking. Included, of course, are such immortal classics as ‘The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County’ (1865), a humorous piece set in Gold-Rush California, which helped establish the young author’s reputation, and ‘The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg’ (1899), a satirical novella in which a self-righteously respectable American small town is exposed as a fraud.

The Complete Short Stories Of Mark Twain

Oscar Wilde

Effortlessly achieved, each revealing a different aspect of his brilliance, all of the plays, prose writings, and poems gathered here support Wilde's belief that entertainment provides the best kind of edification. The works include Wilde's once-controversial and now classic novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, the riotously comic plays &quot;The Importance of Being Earnest&quot; and &quot;Lady Windermere's Fan,&quot; and the famous poem he wrote after being released from prison, &quot;The Ballad of Reading Gaol.&quot; This expanded new edition now includes the complete version of Wilde's moving letter from prison, De Profundis, and his teasing parable about Shakespeare, &quot;The Portrait of Mr. W. H.&quot; Other notable included writings are the semi-comic mystery story &quot;Lord Arthur's Savile's Crime&quot; and the essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism.

Plays, Prose Writings And Poems

Wilkie Collins

'In one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop .. There, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth .. stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white' 
 
The Woman in White famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, The Woman in White is the first and most influential of the Victorian genre that combined Gothic horror with psychological realism.

The Woman In White

The Warden is a novel by English author Anthony Trollope published by Longman in 1855. It is the first book in the Chronicles of Barsetshire series, followed by Barchester Towers. 
 
Church of England, The Warden is also a subtle exploration of the rights and wrongs of moral crusades and, in its account of Harding's intensely felt personal drama, a moving depiction of the private impact of public affairs.

The Warden

Giovanni Boccaccio

The Decameron (subtitle: Prencipe Galeotto) is a collection of 100 novellas by Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio, probably begun in 1350 and finished in 1353. It is a medieval allegorical work best known for its bawdy tales of love, appearing in all its possibilities from the erotic to the tragic. Some believe many parts of the tales are indebted to the influence of The Book of Good Love. Many notable writers such as Chaucer are said to have drawn inspiration from The Decameron

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