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D. H. Lawrence

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For D. H. Lawrence the novel was the pinnacle, 'the one bright book of life', yet his non-fiction shows him at his most freewheeling and playful. This is a selection of his brilliantly varied essays, on subjects including art, morality, obscenity, songbirds, Italy, Thomas Hardy, the death of a porcupine in the Rocky Mountains and the narcissism of photographing ourselves. Arranged chronologically to illuminate the patterns of Lawrence's thought over time, and including many little-known pieces, they reveal a writer of enduring freshness and force.

Life with a Capital L

Essays Chosen and Introduced by Geoff Dyer

John Updike

John Updike's fictional antihero, Henry Bech, could not be more different from his creator. A self-confessed composite of Norman Mailer and J.D. Salinger, he cannot help but flatter himself. In this 'foreword' Updike presents us with a conceited and satirical manifestation of what it means to be an American and a writer.

Foreword

Franz Kafka

'The condemned man looked so doggishly submissive, it really seemed as if one might allow him to roam the slopes freely, and only needed to whistle when it was time for the execution, and he would come.' 
 
Kafka transformed the possibilities of the short story, his unique imagination giving his dark tales a sense of dream-like logic and unreality, in which their horrors are humorous and unease pervades. In these two stories, a traveller is shown the workings of an elaborate machine with a bloody purpose, and a son awakens unimagined resentments in his father. 
 
This book includes In the Penal Colony and The Judgement.

In the Penal Colony

Tove Ditlevsen

Life in Tove's neighbourhood in Copenhagen is confusing and difficult: her father can't find work, her mother is angry and remote, and Tove herself sometimes thinks she's been exchanged at birth. But 'inside of me long, mysterious words began to crawl across my soul' and she soon realizes that she has a vocation, something unknowable and secret within, and that if she can only find the right words, she will one day succeed in forging a true life of her own - somewhere beyond the narrow streets of her childhood. 
 
The first volume in Ditlvesen's autobiographical trilogy, Childhood captures the triumphs and tragedies of girlhood with intense vividness and a poet's clarity of vision.

Childhood

John Mortimer

The Right Honourable Leslie Titmuss has clawed his way up the Tory government ranks and is now Secretary of State at the Ministry of Housing, Ecological Affairs and Planning (H.E.A.P.), and in pursuit of beautiful widow Jenny Sidonia. But seismic changes are afoot in the beautiful countryside where a new town threatens to engulf his own back garden. Will Leslie bow to market forces? Or will he join the fight against the multi-storey car parks, shopping precincts and office blocks that could sweep away Rapstone Valley? 
 
The sequel to John Mortimer's stunning novel Paradise Postponed, Titmuss Regained is a panoramic satire on the machinations of politics and an affectionate elegy to a disappearing world.

Titmuss Regained

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Born an old man, Benjamin Button lived a very curious life, backwards 
 
When Benjamin Button's father arrives at hospital he is surprised and ashamed to find his new baby boy is a weathered, aged man, for all appearances no younger than seventy years old. As time goes by, young Benjamin comes to no longer require a cane, his hair ceases to be grey, his limbs become less frail, his wrinkles less deep, but still the world around him fails to come to terms with his oddness, as he ages towards infancy and beyond ... 
 
This remarkable, imaginative tale is here accompanied by a story of the desperate measures required by limitless wealth, and another about the lengths (and cuts) a girl is willing to go to for popularity. 
 
Includes A Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Bernice Bobs Her Hair.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

And Two Other Stories

'There, in Russia five years ago, when Cuba had been taken out of the oven to cool and Vietnam was still coming to a simmer, Bech did find a quality of life - impoverished yet ceremonial, shabby yet ornate, sentimental, embattled, and avuncular-reminiscent of his neglected Jewish past.' 
 
In these two short stories, Updike's brilliant observational acuity is matched by a light, comic touch. The writer Henry Bech travels to Europe on a hapless cultural exchange, first to Russia, where he struggles to spend his money when everything - from his meals to his bugged hotel room - is already paid for, and then to Rumania. 
 
This book includes Rich In Russia, Foreword, Bech in Rumania, Appendix A and Appendix B.

Rich in Russia

Eudora Welty

'"Watch out for the mosquitoes," they called to one another, lyrically because warning wasn't any use anyway, as they walked out of their kimonos and dropped them like the petals of one big scattered flower on the bank behind them, and exposing themselves felt in a hundred places at once the little pangs.' 
 
Moon Lake is the story of a summer camp in Mississippi, a surly lifeguard, a rebellious orphan girl, and the fateful day when they learn the secrets of life and death. Pulitzer Prize-winner Eudora Welty's extraordinary short story is a lushly atmospheric and acutely observed portrayal of the strange, surreal time between childhood and adulthood.

Moon Lake

Vladimir Nabokov

'The woods were gradually thinning. I was tormented by strange hallucinations.I gazed at the weird tree trunks, around some of which were coiled thick, flesh-coloured snakes; suddenly I thought I saw, between the trunks, as though through my fingers, the mirror of a half-open wardrobe...' 
 
These three stories of menace, magic and melancholy display Vladimir Nabokov's astonishing range and inventiveness. Whether describing an escape across a surreal tropical landscape, a fateful meeting or an unexpected - and threatening - return, each tale shows his dazzling sleight of hand, intellectual playfulness and fantastical imagination. 
 
This book includes Terra Incognita, Spring in Fialta and The Doorbell.

Terra Incognita

Donald Barthelme

"I Bought a Little City [is] a take on the role that a writer has in writing a story - playing god, in a certain way." Donald Antrim, novelist. 
 'Got a little city, ain't it pretty'. 
 Galveston, Texas, has been bought. It suits its new owner just fine. So he starts to change it. He creates a new residential area in the shape of a Mona Lisa jigsaw puzzle, shoots six thousand dogs, and reminds those who complain that he controls the jail, the police and the local chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. But, playing God has its limitations, which he soon discovers when he starts to covet Sam Hong's wife. With Donald Barthelme's unmistakeable ability to blend absurdity and the recognisable details of ordinary life, this is an uncanny tale about urban planning, capitalism and God.

I Bought a Little City

Isak Dinesen

These five rich, witty and magical stories from the author of Out of Africa include one of her most well known tales, &lsquo;Babette&rsquo;s Feast&rsquo;, which was made into the classic film. It tells the story of a French cook working in a puritanical Norwegian community, who treats her employers to the decadent feast of a lifetime. There is also a real-life Prospero and his Ariel in &lsquo;Tempests&rsquo;, a mysterious pearl-fisher in &lsquo;The Diver&rsquo; and a brief, tragic encounter in &lsquo;The Ring&rsquo;. All the stories have a mystic, fairy-tale quality, linked by themes of angels, the sea, dreams and fate. They were among the last to be written by Isak Dinesen, and show her as a master of short fiction.

Anecdotes of Destiny

Ronald Searle

Ronald Searle takes us back to the world of the Gothic Public School in The Terror of St Trinian's. In this gloriously anarchic academy for young ladies we witness shootings, knifings, torture and witchcraft, as well as many maidenly arts. The subject of many evergreen films, St Trinian's is synonymous with the sort of outrageous behaviour that would make a convict blench. This book also contains a selection of Ronald Searle's work from the non-school books, including The Rake's Progress, Souls in Torment and Merry England, etc. and their publication in one volumes stakes Searle's claim to be the greatest and most influential English satirist since the war.

The Terror of St Trinian's and Other Drawings

Shirley Jackson

A four-year-old boy sits on a train with his mother and his baby sister. The mother attends to the baby. The little boy daydreams. An elderly man with a pleasant face joins the carriage. He asks, "Do you love your sister?" An ordinary question asked by an ordinary man. He continues, "I had a little sister... I took her and put my hands around her neck and I pinched her and I pinched her until she was dead." 
 Playing with the line between fact and fiction, Shirley Jackson's short story is disruptive and shocking, yet oddly familiar and reminiscent. It disturbs the commonplace, probing the façade of the everyday to question exactly just of what people are capable.

The Witch

6 of the Roaring Twenties chronicler&rsquo;s most scintillating short stories, chosen from Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922). This inexpensive volume comprises &quot;The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,&quot; &quot;The Ice Palace,&quot; &quot;Bernice Bobs Her Hair,&quot; &quot;May Day,&quot; &quot;The Jelly-Bean,&quot; and &quot;The Offshore Pirate.&quot;

The Diamond As Big As the Ritz And Other Stories

The Diamond As Big As the Ritz; Bernice Bobs Her Hair; the Ice Palace; May Day; the Bowl

Albert Camus

Stuart Gilbert

Caligula reveals some aspects of the existential notion of 'the absurd' by portraying an emperor so mighty and so desperate in his search for freedom that he inevitably destroys gods, men and himself. The dramatic impetus of Cross Purpose, however, comes from the tension between consent to and refusal of man's absurdity; it is the tragedy of a man who returns home to his mother and sister without revealing his identity to them. By the time of The Just and The Possessed, refusal and rebellion have taken over, and in these overtly political plays (the latter based on Dostoyevsky's The Devils) Camus dramatizes action and revolt in the name of liberty. 
 
Albert Camus was born in Algeria in 1913. His play, Caligula, appeared in 1939. His first two important books, L'Etranger (The Outsider) and the long essay Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), were published when he returned to Paris. After the war he devoted himself to writing and established an international reputation with such books as La Peste (The Plague 1947), Les Justes (The Just 1949) and La Chute (The Fall; 1956). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. He was killed in a road accident in 1960.

Caligula and Other Plays

Paul Bowles

In the Circular Valley lives a spirit, a mute presence: Atlajala. Thirsting for sensation, this spirit enters a moth, a panther, an eel, and feels what they feel - the cool darkness of water, the pleasure of a kill. Centuries old and indifferent to time, it enters man and discovers obsession for the first time. Yearning to be incarnate as man, it enters priests, soldiers and bandits. When an adulterous couple arrives in the valley, it slips into a woman. Finally, it feels complete. But as it possesses her, she grows restless and extreme, and her affair takes a darker, more sinister turn.

The Circular Valley

H. R. F. Keating

Some crooks have tried to snatch the plump son of a business tycoon, and have accidentally made off with his playmate instead. But they're not changing their plan: a payment is to be delivered to them or a small corpse is to be delivered to Inspector Ghote. 
 
But what kind of ransom can a mere tailor's boy demand? And, as something more unpleasant than just a ransom note arrives from the kidnappers, are the police helping keep the boy in one piece?

Inspector Ghote Trusts the Heart

Joseph Conrad

'It is a mighty force that of mere chance, absolutely irresistible yet manifesting itself often in delicate forms such for instance as the charm, true or illusory, of a human being' In Flora de Barral, the slender, dreamy, morbidly charming daughter of a parvenu financier, Conrad creates his most complex heroine and one of his most unrelenting, but not unhopeful, novels of emotional isolation. Neglected by her bankrupt father and rejected by her governess, drifting into abstraction and despair, Flora takes refuge at sea on Captain Anthony's ship, where tragedy and her transformation begin. When published in 1913, Chance was an immediate success. Arnold Bennett wrote that 'this is a discouraging book for a writer because he damn well knows he can't write as well as this'; while an anonymous reviewer in Punch declared that 'the whole thing is much nearer wizardry than workmanship'.

Chance

'Spring in Fialta is cloudy and dull'. With his senses wide open, Victor wanders the streets. He meets Nina. Again. For fifteen years, their fleeting, chance encounters have made Nina a faint but constant presence in the margins of his life. As they happen upon one another once again, his mind wanders back into the past and relives each brief memory: their kiss in Russia, when she met his wife, when he met her husband, their affair in Paris. Each time she captivated him, each time she seemed to almost forget him, each time he noticed a lurking sense of apprehension that began to grow.

Spring in Fialta

Drawing directly on original manuscripts, this collection comprises the major short stories published after Kafka&rsquo;s death. It includes The Great Wall of China, Blumfeld, An Elderly Bachelor, Investigations of a Dog and his great sequences of aphorisms, with fables and parables on subjects ranging from the legend of Prometheus to the Tower of Babel. Allegorical, disturbing and possessing a dream-like clarity, these writings are quintessential Kafka.

The Great Wall of China

Robert Graves

"There was no patriotism in the trenches. It was too remote a sentiment, and rejected as fit only for civilians. A new arrival who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it out. As Blighty, Great Britain was a quiet, easy place to get back to out of the present foreign misery, but as a nation it was nothing." 
 
This is the original version of Robert Graves's intense memoir of the First World War, restoring this raw, emotionally truthful, darkly comic work to the way it was first written, by a young man still reeling from the trenches. 
 
 'We see the dark heart of the book even more clearly, and hear it beating even more loudly, in this original edition than we do in the comparatively careful and considered terms of the later one' Andrew Motion 
 
 
'One of the most candid self-portraits, warts and all, ever painted' TLS

Good-bye to All That

An Autobiography

H. P. Lovecraft

'It was a monstrous constellation of unnatural light, like a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed marsh (...)' 
 
H.P. Lovecraft was perhaps the greatest twentieth century practitioner of the horror story, introducing to the genre a new evil, monstrous, pervasive and unconquerable. At the heart of these three stories are terrors unthinkable and strange: a crash-landing meteorite, the wretched inhabitant of an ancient castle and a grave-robber's curse. 
 
This book includes The Colour Out Of Space, The Outsider and The Hound.

The Colour Out of Space

George Orwell

This is the essential edition of the essential book of modern times, 1984, now annotated for students with an introduction by D. J. Taylor. 
 
Ever since its publication in 1948, George Orwell's terrifying vision of a totalitarian regime where Big Brother controls its citizens like 'a boot stamping on a human face' has become a touchstone for human freedom, and one of the most widely-read books in the world. In this new annotated edition Orwell's biographer D. J. Taylor elucidates the full meaning of this timeless satire, explaining contemporary references in the novel, placing it in the context of Orwell's life, elaborating on his extraordinary use of language and explaining the terms such as Newspeak, Doublethink and Room 101 that have become familiar phrases today.

Nineteen Eighty-Four

The Annotated Edition

Georges Simenon

A new translation of Simenon's gripping novel about lives transformed by deceit and the destructive power of lust. 
 
It was all real: himself, the room, Andrée still lying on the ravaged bed. 
 
For Tony and Andrée, there are no rules when they meet in the blue room at the Hôtel des Voyageurs. Their adulterous affair is intoxicating, passionate - and dangerous. Soon it turns into a nightmare from which there can be no escape. Simenon's stylish and sensual psychological thriller weaves a story of cruelty, reckless lust and relentless guilt. 
 
'A wondrous achievement, brief, inexorable, pared to, and agonisingly close to, the bone, and utterly compelling; in short, a true and luminous work of art.' John Banville 
 
'A double crime, a dark provincial scandal, and a dreadful sort of triumph . . . presented with shattering power' San Francisco Chronicle 
 
'One of the greatest writers of the twentieth century . . . Simenon was unequaled at making us look inside, though the ability was masked by his brilliance at absorbing us obsessively in his stories' Guardian 
 
'A supreme writer . . . unforgettable vividness' Independent

The Blue Room

Collected with a dozen wonderful stories, all set in classic Updike territory, the short novel 'RABBIT REMEMBERED' is a major work in its own right - a riveting return to Updike's most celebrated fictional world. Janice and Nelson Angstrom, plus several other survivors of the irreducible Rabbit, fitfully entertain his memory while pursuing their own happiness over the edge of the millennium, as a number of old strands come together in entirely unexpected ways.

Licks of Love

Short Stories And a Sequel, 'Rabbit Remembered'

Robert Coover

'Paul stepped off the curb and got hit by a truck. He didn't know what it was that hit him at first, but now, here on his back, under the truck, there could be no doubt.' 
 
One of 50 original and exciting books of short stories, publishing in February to celebrate half a century of Penguin Modern Classics. 
 
This book contains Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady, The Babysitter, and A Pedestrian Accident.

Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady

Primo Levi

'He was blamed for endless disasters, from failed exams to a bridge collapse, an avalanche, even a shipwreck: all due, in the stupid opinion of, first, his fellow-students and, later, his colleagues, to the penetrating power of his evil eye...' 
 
Profound and compassionate, Primo Levi was one of the most astonishing literary voices to emerge from the twentieth century. Whether describing the most beautiful poem ever composed or an invention gone horribly wrong, these eight exquisitely wrought stories open up a rich, fantastical world of wonder, adventure and cruel twists of fate, where nothing is as it seems. 
 
This book contains The Magic Paint, The Death of Marinese, Censorship in Bitinia, Knall, Gladiators, The Fugitive, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Buffet Dinner

The Magic Paint

Hans Fallada

'...I stare at the coffee I poured myself, and I think: caffeine is a poison that stimulates the heart. There are plenty of instances of people killing themselves with coffee, hundreds and thousands of them. Caffeine is a deadly poison, maybe almost as deadly as morphine. Why didn't it ever occur to me before: coffee is my friend!' 
 
Drawing on Hans Fallada's own history of addiction, these two stories and are written with a remarkable, tough, spartan clarity. As a man desperately, haplessly tries to get enough morphine to make it through the day and a drunk embezzler struggles to get himself arrested, they are at one second crushing, the next darkly comic. 
 
This book includes A Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism and Three Years of Life.

Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism

Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino was due to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1985-86, but they were left unfinished at his death. The surviving drafts explore of the concepts of Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude and Visibility (Constancy was to be the sixth) in serious yet playful essays that reveal Calvino's debt to the comic strip and the folktale. With his customary imagination and grace, he sought to define the virtues of the great literature of the past in order to shape the values of the future. This collection is a brilliant précis of the work of a great writer whose legacy will endure through the millennium he addressed. 
 
Italo Calvino, one of Italy's finest postwar writers, has delighted readers around the world with his deceptively simple, fable-like stories. Calvino was born in Cuba in 1923 and raised in San Remo, Italy; he fought for the Italian Resistance from 1943-45. His major works include Cosmicomics (1968), Invisible Cities (1972), and If on a winter's night a traveler (1979). He died in Siena in1985, of a brain hemorrhage.

Six Memos for the Next Millennium

'And then one day a solitary figure appeared, moving toward them across the lifeless plain from the west.One man on a camel... ' 
 
Paul Bowles's unforgettable short stories portray people facing hostile environments and the innate savagery of humanity. These three unbearably tense tales from sun-drenched and brutal climes tell of vengeance, abandonment, violence and cruelty enjoyed and suffered, in a surreal realm of horror. 
 
This book includes The Delicate Prey, A Distant Episode and The Circular Ruins.

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