Evelyn Waugh was born in Hampstead in 1903 and educated at Hertford College, Oxford. In 1928 he published his first novel, Decline and Fall, which was soon followed by Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934) and Scoop (1938). During these years he also travelled extensively and converted to Catholicism. In 1939 Waugh was commissioned in the Royal Marines and later transferred to the Royal Horse Guards, experiences which informed his Sword of Honour trilogy (1952-61). His most famous novel, Brideshead Revisited (1945), was written while on leave from the army. Waugh died in 1966.

Evelyn Waugh

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Everyman's Pocket Classics complements highly successful Pocket Poets series, offering the best prose writing in a handy pocket-sized format. Like all Everyman Library books, each title is printed on a cream-wove, acid-free paper with full cloth sewn binding, headbands and silk ribbon marker. Eminently collectable and great gifts.

Momentous parties have long provided dramatic scenes in fiction, from Natasha’s first ball in War and Peace to Lizzie meeting Darcy in Pride and Prejudice to J. Edgar Hoover consorting with Truman Capote in Don DeLillo’s ‘The Black and White Ball’. 
 
Revelry can be revealing of character, as in Jay Gatsby’s extravagant bash in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and the decadent partying of the jaded expats in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. More decorous affairs can conceal profound depths, as in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Garden Party’ and the parties at the centre of two modernist masterpieces, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’. Glamour with a gothic twist makes an appearance here in the fancy dress ball at Manderley from Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca and in Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, at which Death himself is a guest. 
 
But there is room on this dance floor for humour as well, in Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Bella Fleace Gave a Party’, Dorothy Parker’s ‘Arrangement in Black & White’, Saki's ‘A Boar Pig’ and Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Pnin Gives a Party’. All kinds of literary greats consort in this festive gathering, a perfect gift for readers and partygoers alike.

Party Stories

London has the greatest literary tradition of any city in the world. Its roll-call of story-tellers includes cultural giants who changed the way the world thought about writing, like Shakespeare, Defoe and Dickens. But there has also been an innumerable host of writers who have sought to capture the essence of London and what it meant for the people who lived there or were merely passing through. They found a city of boundless wealth and ragged squalor, of moving tragedy and riotous joy; and they faithfully transcribed what they saw and felt in the stories they told of London town. 
They are stories of fact and fiction and occasionally something in between. Some voices will be familiar to many readers and others practically unknown. But all give us insights into these writers’ very varied Londons; and all tell their stories gratifyingly well. 
 
Authors include John Evelyn, Thomas de Quincey, W. M. Thackeray, Henry Mayhew, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, George Gissing, J. B. Priestley, Jean Rhys, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, Maeve Binchy, Doris Lessing, Hanif Kureishi and Shena Mackay.

London Stories

This wide-ranging anthology pays tribute to fathers young and old. At one end of the spectrum, a touching story by Ann Packer tells of a man preparing for the wonder and terror of his first child’s birth, and from Frank O’Connor’s comes a hilarious tale of a small boy’s war against his paternal rival in ‘My Oedipus Complex’. At the other, John Updike’s ‘My Father’s Tears’ and Jim Shepard’s ‘The Mortality of Parents’ bring us face to face with a loss that is like no other. Maupassant, Kakfa, Nabokov, Edith Wharton, Raymond Carver, Graham Swift, Julian Barnes, Helen Simpson …all these and more offer a wonderful assortment of fictional takes on the paternal bond.

Stories of Fatherhood

A Pocket Classics hardcover anthology of stories of Africa from centuries past to the present, selected by the Booker Prize–winning Nigerian novelist Ben Okri. Award-winning writer Ben Okri, author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Famished Road, curates this one-volume overview of classic stories of Africa, past and present. This collection includes stories by contemporary voices like Jamal Mahjoub and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie along with a pantheon of greats from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including Chinua Achebe, Doris Lessing, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head, Ousmane Sembène, J. M. Coetzee, and Abdulrazak Gurnah and many more.

African Stories

This unique collection of medical stories approaches its theme from many eras and perspectives. Some of the authors included were themselves physicians, notably Chekhov, Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham and William Carlos Williams. Bulgakov, too, draws on his own experience as a doctor in rural Russia a century ago, while Anna Kavan's story from Asylum Piece, takes a surreal look inside a Swiss psychiatric clinic, and Lorrie Moore's witty, grief-stricken Mother in 'People Like Us Are the Only People Here' examines the feelings of a parent with a child in the Paediatric Oncology war - 'Peed Onk'. Maupassant, Stevenson, Kipling, Conrad, Graham Greene, O. Henry, J. G. Ballard, Robert Heinlein, Dorothy Parker, Jhumpa Lahiri and Alice Munro all feature. Doctors observe patients; patients observe doctors. Nurses go about their important business, not always appreciated. Not quite everyone is healed. The meaning of illness - does it have any? - and of life itself, is called into question - and all in the most entertaining way imaginable.

The Best Medicine

Stories of Healing

River gods and nymphs frolic in Ovid's mythic telling. The trickster Coyote reroutes a river in a Native American tale. A set of stone steps at the shore of the Ganges bears witness to heartbreak in Rabindranath Tagore's ‘River Stairs,’ and Mark Twain floats his rebellious heroes on a raft to freedom. Kenneth Grahame's Rat and Mole explore their local waterway in a rowboat, and Ernest Hemingway's war-weary veteran finds peace while catching trout. 
From The Wind in the Willows to Huckleberry Finn, from Hemingway's ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ to Alice Munro's ‘The Found Boat’ and Zadie Smith's ‘The Lazy River,’ the tales collected here—by such luminaries as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Guy de Maupassant, E.M. Forster, Hermann Hesse, Zora Neale Hurston, Cormac McCarthy, Elif Shafak, and many more—set moving scenes against the backdrop of moving waters, in testament to the enduring power of rivers in the human imagination.

River Stories

Joyce Cary

From her prison cell, the irrepressible, magnetic Sara Monday looks back on the past half-century of her life in Herself Surprised. Born into a poor family, her employment while still a young girl as a cook in a middle-class household set her on a colourful and picaresque path. In To Be a Pilgrim, Tom Wilcher, a wealthy and disgraced lawyer who has been both Sara’s employer and her lover, has retreated to his estate near the end of his life to wrestle with his tormented conscience. And the centre of The Horse's Mouth, a charming, talented, 
impoverished artist named Gulley Jimson–also a lover of Sara Monday–is a restless, rebellious, and self-serving scoundrel whose antics verge on the appalling and farcical. 
 
Read together, these three vigorous and unforgettable narrative voices offer a sweeping vision of the first half of the twentieth century that is lyrical, profane, tragic, and comic all at once. 
 
Published in 1941, 1942, and 1944, the novels in Cary’s trilogy were designed to reveal three complex characters, not only as they see themselves, but as they are seen by one another, resulting in a work of three-dimensional depth and force. 
 
'Family life just goes on. Toughest thing in the world. But of course it is also the microcosm of a world. You get everything there—birth, life, death, love and jealousy, conflict of wills, of authority and freedom, the new and the old. And I always choose the biggest stage possible for my theme...' Joyce Cary

Herself Surprised, To Be a Pilgrim, The Horse's Mouth

Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Duras was one of the leading intellectuals and novelist of post-war France, but her wartime writings were not published in full until after her death. The Wartime Notebooks trace Duras's formative experiences - including her difficult childhood in Indochina and her harrowing wait for her husband's return from Nazi internment - revealing the personal history behind her bestselling novels. The Lover is the best known of these; set in pre-war Indochina, its haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her wealthy Chinese lover is based on her own life. In spare and luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins in the waning days of France's colonial empire, and the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts. Practicalities is a collection of small and intensely personal pieces Duras dictated near the end of her life. These deceptively simple meditations on motherhood, domesticity, sex, love, alcohol, writing, and more are witty, earthy, outspoken and surprisingly fresh and relevant to the same issues today.

The Lover, Wartime Notebooks, Practicalities

Nella Larsen

Throughout her short but brilliant literary career, Nell Larsen wrote piercing dramas about the black middle class that featured sensitive, spirited heroines struggling to find a place where they belong. Passing is a disturbing story about the unravelling lives of two childhood friends, one of whom turns her back on her past and marries a white racist. Just as disquieting is the portrait in Quicksand of biracial Helga Crane, who is unable to escape her loneliness no matter where and with whom she lives. Race and marriage offer few securities here or in the other stories in this compulsively readable collection, rich in psychological complexities and imbued with a vibrant sense of place - be it 1920s Harlem, Chicago, or Copenhagen.

The Complete Fiction

Passing. Quicksand. And the Stories

Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) is celebrated as a novelist and man of action. He is perhaps most famous for WHOM THE BELL TOLLS and A FAREWELL TO ARMS. But he was equally prolific as a writer of short stories which touch on the same themes as the novels: war, love, the nature of heroism, reunciation, and the writer's life. The present collection includes all Hemingway's shorter fiction arranged chronologically from 'Up in Michigan' (1923) to 'Old Man at the Bridge (1938) and contains stories not currently available in any other UK edition of Hemingway's work's

The Collected Stories

The  stories collected here--including such gems as Stephen Crane's "The  Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," O. Henry's "The Marry Month of May," F.  Scott Fitzgerald's "The Bridal Party," Joy Williams's "The Wedding," and  Lorrie Moore's "Thank You For Having Me", encompass comic wedding  mishaps, engagements broken and mended, honeymoon adventures, and scenes  both heartwarming and heartbreaking. There are glamorous weddings in  Paris and New York, and more eccentric ones in the Wild West and on a  remote island beach. There are nervous brides, forgetful grooms,  meddling guests, interrupted nuptials, second thoughts, and second  chances. Above all, there are all kinds of people - young and old, rich  and poor, divorced and widowed, with or without children - joining  together in the age-old quest for matrimonial happiness.

Wedding Stories

Edgar Allan Poe

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.

Probably the most important single figure in nineteenth century American literature, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) exerted an enormous influence over later writers, especially French Symbolist poets, including Baudelaire and Mallarme, and through them he affected the entire field of modern literature from THE WASTE LAND to LOLITA. Probably best known for his macabre short stories, including THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER, and THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM, Poe's influence was spread primarily through his poems and essays which are here reprinted. The current volume includes all his extant poems and extensive selections from his essays on poetry.

Poe Poems and Prose

The short story flourishes in Ireland. All Irish conditions seem to favour it. With its roots in the fertile soil of the Gaelic folk tradition, it appeared to grow and thrive on the discontinuities of Irish history – the war of independence, civil war, political division. The first Golden Age was in the middle years of the 20th century; an extraordinary flowering of stories from Elizabeth Bowen, Seán Ó Faoláin, Flann O’Brien, Frank O’Connor, Samuel Beckett, Maeve Brennan, Edna O’Brien (the list could go on) came at a time when Ireland was repressed and inward-looking, dominated by the church and enervated by migration. But when the boom times came in the 1990s, it all happened again. The liberal, globalized, ethnically diverse society of 21st century Ireland is still witnessing a vibrant blossoming of short fiction from Anne Enright, Roddy Doyle, Colm Tóibín, Claire Keegan, Sally Rooney, Kevin Barry, Lucy Caldwell, Yan Ge …. Such a bumper crop of talent!

Irish Stories

In this beautifully packaged anthology A. S. Byatt, Alice Munro, Elizabeth Bowen, Sherwood Anderson, Edith Wharton, Anita Desai, Colm Tóibín, Lorrie Moore and many others reflect upon all aspects of motherhood in stories lyrical and satirical, realistic and fantastic, hilarious and heart-breaking. Here at last is a gift-book that is neither sentimental nor 'inspirational', offering instead high-quality literary fiction which will continue to entertain long after the chocolates have been eaten and the flowers thrown away.

Stories of Motherhood

Here are libraries modest, mobile, mystical (Borges of course) and magical (Helen Oyeyemi's enchanting 'Books and Roses'); public and private, provincial and prestigious. Little that happen in Elizabeth McCracken's eccentric library did not happen in real life - even down to the murder; and it is rumoured that on 3 June 1997 the British Museum Reading Room really was visited by the ghost of Max Beerbohm's obscurest of poets, Enoch Soames... 
Fiction and reality merge in Cortazar's 'A Continuity of Parks'. Characters step out of their books in Fay Weldon's 'Lily Bart's Hat Shop', while Jasper Fforde's Jurisfiction operatives enter Wuthering Heights to deliver a Rage-Counselling session. Charles Lamb muses on the annoying book-borrowing habits of Samuel Taylor Coleridge; the teenage Teffi is overawed by Tolstoy; Helene Hanff in Manhattan launches her famous correspondence with a London antiquarian bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road. 
Reading, as the Queen informs an appalled private secretary, is 'untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting'. And also, of course, a lot of fun. Sit comfortably, then, and begin.

Stories of Books and Libraries

Each story captures a slice of life, and together they create a picture of Indian reality in all its fascinating variety. A number of themes predominate: the poverty aggravated by the dominance of landlords and the caste system; the position of women within the family and their desire for shape their own destiny; the lure of the city in a country that was and remains predominantly rural and agricultural. The inspiration and subject matter are Indian, but in their artistry and humanity these powerful and poignant tales are truly universal. 
 
India has a long history of storytelling. To use Salman Rushdie’s phrase, it is ‘an ocean of stories’. So, when British rule brought the Western forms of the novel and the short story to India, they were grafted onto more ancient and varied oral traditions to create something quite unique. Rabindranath Tagore’s short story collections of the 1890s paved the way, but the form swiftly captured the imagination of writers across the subcontinent.

Indian Stories

Spectacular gardens are viewed from the perspective of a snail in Virginia Woolf's 'Kew Gardens' and from that of a sheltered teenage girl in Katherine Mansfield's 'The Garden Party'. The family of Doris Lessing's 'Flavours of Exile' haul succulent vegetables and fruits from the rich African soil, and Colette in 'Bygone Spring' luxuriates in extravagantly blooming flowers. Children discover their own peculiar paradises in Sandra Cisneros's 'The Monkey Garden' and Italo Calvino's 'The Enchanted Garden', while adult gardeners find things that move and haunt them in William Maxwell's 'The French Scarecrow' and Jamaica Kincaid's 'The Garden I Have in Mind'. 
 Gardens of the mind round out the anthology: the beautiful but fatal garden of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'Rappaccini's Daughter', the crystal buds of J. G. Ballard's 'The Garden of Time', ravenous orchids in John Collier's 'Green Thoughts', and Aoko Matsuda's 'Planting', in which a young woman plants each day whatever she has been given - roses and violets, buttons and broken cups, love and fear and sorrow. 
 An entrancing book for everyone who loves gardens and the beauty of nature.

Garden Stories

Love Stories brings together a captivating assortment of short stories inspired by romantic entanglement in its many forms: first love, infatuation, obsession, unrequited love, marriage, adultery, jealousy, and the complicated bonds of those who have spent their lives together. 
An array of writers evoke a variety of moods, from the raw, erotic passion of Lawrence and Colette to the wickedlycynical comedy of Dorothy Parker and Roald Dahl; from the agonizing madness of jealousy in Nabokov's 'That in Aleppo Once ...' to romantic illusions in Scott Fitzgerald's 'Winter Dreams'. Objects of passion range from a glamorous silent-movie star in Elizabeth Bowen's haunting 'Dead Mabelle' to a faithful ghost in Kawabata's 'Immortality' and a successful heart surgeon and serial husband in Margaret Atwood's 'Bluebeard's Egg'. Jhumpa Lahiri plumbs the depths of a couple sundered by tragedy while Lorrie Moore movingly portrays a husband and wife brought together by it. 
Katherine Mansfield, Tobias Wolff and William Trevor explore the intricacies of long-term relationships, while Maupassant, Calvino and T. C. Boyle convey the elemental force of love in extremely different ways. 
Together these nineteen stories make an enticing gift for lovers at any stage of life. Perfect for Valentine's Day.

Love Stories

A perfect gift of timeless erotic stories ranging from ancient Greek myth to modern stories of longing and lust. This beautifully jacketed Everyman's Library Pocket Classics hardcover anthology has a full-cloth binding and silk ribbon marker. Accounts of ardour and transgression also flow from unexpected pens: an astonishingly explicit scene from an unfinished novel by Edith Wharton, and Guy de Maupassant's heated tale of a young peasant woman offering her breast to a starving stranger on a train. Hunger is the fierce undercurrent to these stories: the gnawing lust of one lover for another, or the greedy pursuit of a particular inclination. The elegant depravity of an eighteenth-century French aristocrat, the dreamlike seductions of an Egyptian jinni in the form of a snake, the brutal anonymity of a highway truck-stop encounter--the stories in this richly varied collection reveal that the urge to articulate sexual desire is as inventive as it is timeless.

Erotic Stories

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