Steve Roud was Local Studies Librarian for the London Borough of Croydon and served as Honorary Librarian of the Folklore Society for over fifteen years. He has been researching British folklore for over thirty years and is the joint author of the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore, plus other books on traditional drama and folk song, and the Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland, which won the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award in 2004. His publications include London Lore (2008) and The Lore of the Playground (2010). He also compiles the Folk Song Index and the Broadside Index, two internationally acclaimed computer databases of traditional folk and popular song. He lives in Sussex.

Steve Roud

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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.

Variations on a musical theme by a striking range of authors, among them Flaubert, Turgenev, Proust, Nabokov, Katherine Mansfield, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Amit Chaudhuri, Bernard MacLaverty and Maya Angelou. Wesley Stace's attractive medley embraces musical genres from Virginia Woolf's 'A String Quartet' to Langston Hughes's 'The Blues I'm Playing'. Short stories are interspersed with interludes from longer works - E. M. Forster's Howards End, Ann Patchett's Bel Canto and Vikram Seth's An Equal Music. Here are music lessons, solos and duets, rehearsals and performances - and a whole suite of stories demonstrating that music is indeed the food of love. The perfect marriage of the musical and the literary.

Music Stories

In this lively collection, wine snobs receive their comeuppance at the hands of Roald Dahl and Edgar Allan Poe; innocents over-imbibe in tales by Jack London and Alice Munro; riotous partying exacts a comic price in stories by P. G. Wodehouse and Kingsley Amis; Charles Jackson and Jean Rhys chronicle liquor-soaked epiphanies; while John Cheever, Vladimir Nabokov and Robert Coover set their characters afloat on surreal, soul-revealing adventures. Here, too, are well-lubricated tales by Dickens, Twain, Beckett, Colette, Dorothy Parker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing, Frank O'Connor, Penelope Lively, and many more. 
 
The settings include hotels and restaurants, a wine cellar in Italy, a café in Paris, a bar in Dublin, a New York nightclub, Jazz Age speakeasies, suburban lawn parties and the occasional gaol cell, and are peopled by lovers and loners, barmen and chorus girls, youths taking their first sips and experienced tipplers nursing hangovers. 
 
Whether living it up or drowning their sorrows, the vividly drawn characters in these sparkling pages will leave you shaken and stirred.

Shaken and Stirred

Intoxicating Stories

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

Playful kittens and ruthless predators, beloved pets and witches' familiars - cats of all kinds come alive in these stories. Maeve Brennan and Alice Adams movingly explore what cats can mean to their humans, while writers as varied as Patricia Highsmith and Fritz Leiber imagine the intriguingly alien feline point of view. Cats flaunt their undeniable superiority in Angela Carter's bawdy retelling of 'Puss-in-Boots' and Stephen Vincent Benét's uncanny 'The King of the Cats', while humour abounds in tales by comic masters P. G. Wodehouse and Saki. The essential unknowableness of cats inspires the most exotic flights of fancy: Calvino's secret city of cats in 'The Garden of Stubborn Cats', the disappearing animal in Ursula K. LeGuin's brain-teasing 'Schrödinger's Cat', the cartoon rodent and his cartoon nemesis in Steven Millhauser's 'Cat 'n' Mouse'. In these and other stories, this delightful anthology offers cat lovers a many-faceted tribute to the beguilingly mysterious objects of their affection.

Cat 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

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

In an interview, Updike once said, "If I had to give anybody one book of me, it would be the Olinger Stories." These stories were originally published in The New Yorker and then in various collections before Vintage first put them together in one volume in 1964, as a paperback original. They follow the life of one character from the age of ten through manhood, in the small Pennsylvania town of Olinger (pronounced, according to Updike, with a long O and a hard G), which was loosely based on Updike's own hometown. "All the stories draw from the same autobiographical well," Updike explained, "the only child, the small town, the grandparental home, the move in adolescence to a farm." The selection was made and arranged by Updike himself, and was prefaced by a lovely 1,400-word essay by the author that has never been reprinted in full elsewhere until now.

Olinger Stories

The unforgettable canines gathered here include Kipling's heroically faithful 'Garm', Bret Harte's irrepressible scoundrel of a 'yaller dog' and the aggressively affectionate three-legged pit bull who lives in a block of flats for dogs in Jonathan Lethem's 'Ava's Apartment'. Here are stories which touchingly illuminate the dog's role in the emotional lives of humans, such as Tobias Wolff's 'Her Dog', where a widower shares his grief for his wife with her grieving pet. Here, too, are humorous glimpses of the canine point of view, from O. Henry's tale of a dissatisfied lapdog's escape to P. G. Wodehouse's cheerfully naïve watchdog who simply wants everybody to get along. These writers and others - Ray Bradbury, JamesThurber and Penelope Lively among them - offer imaginative, lyrical and empathetic portraits of man and woman's most devoted companion

Dog Stories

Saki

Saki's dazzling tales manage the remarkable feat of being anarchic and urbane at the same time. Studded with Wildean epigrams and featuring well-contrived plots and surprise endings, his stories gleefully skewer the pompous hypocrisies of upper-class Edwardian society. But they go beyond mere satire, raising dark humour to extremes of entertaining outrageousness that have rarely since been matched. Saki's elegantly mischievous young heroes sow chaos in their wake without breaking a sweat, occasionally assisted by werewolves, tigers, eavesdropping house pets and casually murderous children. This selection of over fifty stories includes such favourites as 'Tobermory', 'The Open Window', 'Sredni Vashtar', 'Mrs Packletide's Tiger', 'The Schartz-Metterklume Method', and many more.

Selected 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

The sublime city of Venice has long offered inspiration to the world's storytellers. This anthology gathers a dazzling variety of stories with Venetian settings, including Daphne du Maurier's haunting "Don't Look Now," Anthony Trollope's wartime romance "The Last Austrian Who Left Venice," Vernon Lee's spine-chilling "A Wicked Voice," and a scene from The Wings of the Dove, Henry James's tale of passion and betrayal in a Gothic palazzo on the Grand Canal. The famed Venetian adventurer Giacomo Casanova weighs in with escapades from his notorious Memoirs, alongside enthralling selections by Baron Corvo, Marcel Proust, Camillo Boito, and Jeanette Winterson. In its multifaceted portrait of La Serenissima, Venice Stories showcases a lineup of literary classics worthy of the magnificent city they celebrate.

Venice Stories

Here are literary classics by such golf-loving writers as P. G. Wodehouse, Ring Lardner, and John Updike, mixed with surprises like an appearance by Ian Fleming's James Bond and a little crime on the links from mystery master Ian Rankin. Humorists and sportswriters ranging from E. C. Bentley to Dan Jenkins and Rick Reilly weigh in as well, alongside a tale of romance on the greens from F. Scott Fitzgerald, a little-known gem by famous golf architect A. W. Tillinghast, and a story by Rex Lardner (Ring's nephew) that just may be the single funniest thing ever written about golf. The resulting anthology is as enticing, provocative, and entertaining as the game of golf itself.

Golf Stories

Writers have always been uniquely inspired by New York City, and the classic stories collected here provide a kaleidoscopic vision of the metropolis in all its grittiness and glamour.  Acclaimed writers past and present, ranging from Truman Capote, Bernard Malamud, John Cheever and Shirley Jackson to Jay McInerney, Edwidge Danticat and Junot Diaz, introduce us to starry-eyed tourists and ambitious immigrants, starving artists and hedonistic yuppies, Jewish matchmakers in the Bronx and Haitian nannies in Central Park. Colourful characters of all kinds come alive in these pages, nursing their dreams in the tiny apartments, the lonely cafés, and the bustling streets of the city that never sleeps.

New York Stories

Horse Stories corrals two centuries of short fiction about the most majestic of domesticated animals. From writers old and new come stories of magnificent stallions, broken-down nags, racehorses, ponies, cowboy's steeds, workhorses, and beloved companions, in a wide variety of literary styles. Rudyard Kipling transports us the polo fields of India, Bret Harte to the ranches of the Wild West. Arthur Conan Doyle makes a famous thoroughbred disappear (or does he?), while Saki spins an amusing yarn about a notorious bolter. Isaac Babel tells of the horrors of war; Raymond Carver has a vision of runaway horses in the mist; Ted Hughes, Margaret Atwood and Jane Smiley explore the human passions horses can unleash. From the rollicking racetrack humour of Damon Runyon to the poignant lyricism of John Steinbeck, these stories testify to our varied and timeless fascination with the noblest of animals. A perfect gift.

Horse Stories

As Scheherazade proved long ago, good stories make the best bedtime entertainment. The tales collected here represent the essence of the storyteller's art, with its ancient roots in fantastical legends and tales told around a fire.  From the surreal night visions of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown' to the unspeakable horror that haunts two little girls in A. S. Byatt's 'The Thing in the Forest', from Washington Irving's comical 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' to Ursula K. LeGuin's sly perspective on Sleeping Beauty in 'The Poacher', these spellbinding stories transform the stuff of fables and fairy tales into high art. Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Isak Dinesen, Vladimir Nabokov, Angela Carter, Haruki Murakami and many more mingle their voices in this one-volume gateway to dreams - the perfect bedside companion for fiction lovers everywhere

Bedtime 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

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

Stories from the Kitchen is a mouth-watering smorgasbord of stories with food in the starring role, by a rich variety of authors from Dickens, Chekhov and Saki to Isak Dinesen, Jim Crace and Amy Tan. The menu includes choice titbits from famous novels: the triumphant boeuf en daube served in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Proust's rhapsodic memories of watching the family cook prepare asparagus in Remembrance of Things Past, Zola's extravagant 'cheese symphony' scene from The Belly of Paris. 
 
Here are over-the-top amuse-bouches by Gerald Durrell, Nora Ephron and T. C. Boyle; a short story by famous food writer M. F. K. Fisher; and a delightful account of the perfect meal by eighteenth-century epicure Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who famously said 'Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.'

Stories from the Kitchen

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

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

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

Trees have starred in stories ever since Ovid described the nymph Daphne's metamorphosis into a laurel, and the landscape of literature has long been enlivened by wild woodlands, sacred groves, and fertile orchards. This delightful collection ranges from Ovid to Austen and from Robin Hood's Sherwood Forest (via Thomas Love Peacock's Maid Marian) to Washington Irving's 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow'. Here are forest-haunted fairy tales both classic (the Brothers Grimm) and inventively retold (Angela Carter). There is room in these woods for comedy as well as terror, in Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm, and Alexander McCall Smith's 'Head Tree'. Notable writers from around the world contribute arboreal fiction-from South Africa, Finland, France, Zimbabwe, Russia, Martinique, and India, as well as Britain, Ireland, Canada and America. From Daphne du Maurier's 'The Apple Tree' to R. K. Narayan's 'Under the Banyan Tree', the sheer range of stories in these pages will leave readers refreshed and dazzled.

Stories of Trees, Woods, and Forests

Fishing Stories nets an abundant catch of wonderful writing in a wide variety of genres and styles. The moods range from the rollicking humour of Rudyard Kipling’s “On Dry-Cow Fishing as a Fine Art” and the rural gothic of Annie Proulx’s “The Wer-Trout” to the haunting elegy of Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It.” 
 
Many of these tales celebrate human bonds forged over a rod, including Guy de Maupassant’s “Two Friends,” Jimmy Carter’s “Fishing with My Daddy,” and Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden. Some deal in reverence and romance, as in Roland Pertwee’s “The River God,” and some in adventure and the stuff of legend, as in Zane Grey’s “The First Thousand-Pounder” and Ron Rash’s “Their Ancient Glittering Eyes.” There are works that confront head-on the heartbreaks and frustrations of the sport, from Thomas McGuane’s meditation on long spells of inaction as the essence of fishing in “The Longest Silence” to Raymond Carver on a boy’s deflated triumph in the gut-wrenching masterpiece “Nobody Said Anything.” And alongside the works of literary giants are the memories of people both great and humble who have found meaning and fulfillment in fishing, from a former American president to a Scottish gamekeeper’s daughter. 
 
Whether set against the open ocean or tiny mountain streams, in ancient China, tropical Tahiti, Paris under siege, or the vast Canadian wilderness, these stories cast wide and strike deep into the universal joys, absurdities, insights, and tragedies of life.

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