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Francois Rabelais

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.

Rabelais's hilarious, scabrous and often scatological fantasy of life amonth the monks and friars of sixteenth-century France remains a satirical and comic classic. A great broth of a book in which every conceivable literary form is parodied and every human desire satirized. But under the comedy there is a serious purpose, for Rabelais also enspouses a positive view of life in which tolerance, goodness, understanding and wisdom are opposed to dogmatism, pride and cruelty. The book is here presented in the classic translation by Urquhart and Motteux.

Gargantua and Pantagruel

John Steinbeck

An epic story of the nineteen-thirties' Depression which traces the story of one destitute family among the thousands who fled the Dust Bowl to the promise of California, THE GRAPES OF WRATH awakened the conscience of a nation. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize on its appearance in 1939, Steinbeck's novel has been compared in its impact and influence with UNCLE TOM'S CABIN.

The Grapes Of Wrath

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 comic novel - dedicated to Douglas Fairbanks, who starred in the stage version - Jimmy Pitt, man-about-town and former newspaper hound, takes a bet that he cannot commit burglary. He finds breaking and entering easy enough, but then discovers that he has forced his way into the home of a tough New York policeman. Naturally, Captain McEachern has a beautiful daughter and problems of his own. The complications which ensue from their meeting, involving a rich cast of Wodehousean characters from both sides of the Atlantic, create one of his most amusing and light-hearted early novels.

A Gentleman Of Leisure

Saul Bellow

The fictional autobiography of a rumbustious adventurer and poker-player who sets off his native Chicago in the spirit of a latter-day Columbus to rediscover the world-and more especially, twentieth-century America. This expansive comedy of American manners in the tradition of Twain's 'innocent abroad' is a major classic of twentieth-century American literature.

The Adventures of Augie March

William Faulkner

Ever since the first furore was created on its publication in 1929, The Sound and the Fury has been considered one of the key novels of this century. Depicting the gradual disintegration of the Compson family through four fractured narratives, the novel explores intense, passionate family relationships where there is no love, only self-centredness. At its heart, this is a novel about lovelessness

The Sound And The Fury

D H Lawrence

The novel is set in post-World War I England and explores themes of love, relationships, sexuality, and gender roles. Ursula and Gudrun are both independent-minded and intelligent women who struggle to find fulfillment in their romantic relationships with Rupert and Gerald, respectively. The men, too, are complex characters who grapple with their own desires and insecurities.As the novel progresses, the characters become embroiled in a web of emotional and sexual tension, leading to tragic consequences. Lawrence's prose is vivid and poetic, and his exploration of human relationships is both profound and thought-provokingThis novel, considered by Lawrence to be his best, centres on the characters of Birkin (a self portrait), Gerald, the son of a colliery owner, and the two women, Gudrun and Ursula

Women In Love

Laurence Sterne

Laurence Sterne's great masterpiece of bawdy humour and rich satire defies any attempt to categorize it, with a rich metafictional narrative that might classify it as the first 'postmodern' novel. Part novel, part digression, its gloriously disordered narrative interweaves the birth and life of the unfortunate 'hero' Tristram Shandy, the eccentric philosophy of his father Walter, the amours and military obsessions of Uncle Toby, and a host of other characters, including Dr Slop, Corporal Trim and the parson Yorick.

Tristram Shandy

Ivan Turgenev

"So ... you were convinced of all this and decided not to do anything serious yourselves." 
"And decided not to do anything serious," Bazarov repeated grimly. ... 
"But to confine yourselves to abuse?" 
"To confine ourselves to abuse." 
"And that is called nihilism?" 
"And that is called nihilism," Bazarov repeated again, this time with marked insolence. 
 
The book examines the conflict of attitudes in mid-19th-century Russia, as distant pre-echoes of the Revolution continue to rumble through the remote rural landscape. The story follows the Kirsanov family, representatives of the old regime, and the violent character of the anti-hero Bazarov. 
 
Introduced by Michael R Katz who was born in New York City and educated at Horace Mann School, Williams College, and Oxford University. He is the author of two books and over fifteen translations of Russian novels into English, including works by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy.

Fathers And Children

Charles Dickens

Dicken's third novel, published in 1839, is a brilliant and vivid melodrama of honest youth triumphing over vice and injustice. Bursting with energy and populated by a whole world of inimitable and memorable characters - including especially the theatrical troupe with whom Nicholas performs - the book is both a griping story and a series of magnificent scenes. It is also indignant protest against cruelty and oppression, most memorably encapsulated in Dickens's powerful portrayal of Mr Squeers and his wicked boarding school - a passage which was to be instrumental in helping to reform the Victorian education system. The novel has been adapted for television stage and screen.

Nicholas Nickleby

Take a pig, a fat-headed earl, a country house, several pairs of frustrated lovers, some scheming outsiders, and all sorts of people who aren’t who they say they are. Mix thoroughly and apply the Wodehouse magic. The result is the lightest of literary soufflées, another instalment in the long-running saga of the Threepwood family, including the head of the clan, Lord Emsworth, his virago sister, Lady Constance, and his debonair brother, the Honourable Galahad Threepwood, ex-boulevardier and solver of romantic problems.

Blandings Castle

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.

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

This volume pairs two novels, one early, one late, by Ivan Turgenev, master chronicler of nineteenth-century Russia. 
 
Nest of the Gentry (1859) was his most popular work in his lifetime, and with good reason. An elegiac story of love and loss, it is both universal and particularly Russian. The hero Fyodor Lavretsky, son of a wealthy landowner and educated in the Western style, falls romantically in love with a woman he meets at the Moscow opera; they settle in Paris. When the marriage fails, he returns to Russia, a rootless cosmopolitan or ‘superfluous man’. Back on his country estate, can he make a new start, reconcile himself to his responsibilities to the land and the people, and achieve an almost spiritual fulfilment in his love for his young cousin Liza? 
 
In Virgin Soil (1877), an older Turgenev boldly tackles the new radical politics of his era. The Tsarist regime is increasingly under challenge. Young people are flocking to the countryside to live side by side with the peasants, both to learn from them and to radicalise them. Poet Alexey Nezhdanov is an unlikely revolutionary, an over-thinking Hamlet figure, and a tragedy waiting to happen. While working as a tutor on a country estate, he is attracted to the self-assured and politically committed Marianna – an ardent idealist determined to sacrifice herself for the revolutionary cause. Turgenev, himself a liberal, deals sympathetically with his characters, respecting the seriousness of purpose of this new generation whose methods he could not endorse. Virgin Soil turned Turgenev into an international figure, and explicator of the perplexing Russian political scene (in its year of publication hundreds of young Populists were brought to trial, many receiving heavy sentences); in Russia it was roundly condemned on all sides. 
 
Turgenev was a supreme artist; in both these novels his profound humanity, his love for nature and for the Russian countryside, shine through the lyrical elegance of his prose.

Nest of the Gentry & Virgin Soil

Henry Fielding

Fielding's satire on Richardsons's Pamela has survived its model in popularity for obvious reasons: the combination of breezy comedy, knockabout farce, lively narrative and vigorous satire is irresistible. But above all, it is the character of Parson Adams who continues to breathe life into the story, imbued as he is with so much of Fielding's own generosity, humanity and warm-heartedness. Conceived as a literary parody, Joseph Andrews (1742) rises triumphantly above its original purpose as a great novel in its own right. It is paired with the splendidly bawdy (Shamela 1741), another skit on Pamela. The explanatory notes are by Professor A. R. Humphreys. The Everyman edition is recognised as the definitive edition.

Joseph Andrews And Shamela

"Deep down in his heart the genuine Englishman has a rugged distaste for seeing his country invaded by a foreign army. People were asking themselves by what right these aliens had overrun British soil. An ever-growing feeling of annoyance had begun to lay hold of the nation.” 
 
Clarence Chugwater is not a Boy Scout for nothing. It is summer 1909 and everyone is too interested in the Test Match to notice that England has been invaded by the Germans. And the Russians. And the Chinese. Not to mention a ‘boisterous band of the Young Turks’, a mad Mullah, and a brace of North African pirates. The government has recently abolished the army so there is nothing to be done about it anyway, except give a masterly display of polite indifference. But this would be to reckon without patriotic Clarence, ‘Boy of Destiny’, who alone is prepared to stand up to the foe, and who devises a highly unorthodox plan to restore his country to freedom… 
 
The Swoop! Or, How Clarence Saved England reprints the 33 black and white drawings by C. Harrison that accompanied the first edition. It is supplemented by The Military Invasion of America, in which Clarence’s story is humorously transplanted across the Atlantic.

The Swoop! & The Military Invasion of America

John Updike

Newly revised by the author for this edition, and printed together in one volume for the first time, Updike's four Rabbit novels chronicle the history of a man and a nation from the 1950s to the 1980s. Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, athlete, is Mr Middle America. Dazzling in style, tender in feeling, often erotic in description and coruscating with realistic details which recreate a world in each novel, these books give a complete picture of their age.

Rabbit Angstrom A Tetralogy

(Rabbit Run,Rabbit Redux,Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest)

It is the general view at Eckleton school that there never was such a house of slackers as Kay's. Fenn, head of house and county cricketer, does his best to impose some discipline but is continually undermined by his house-master, the meddlesome and ineffectual Mr Kay. After the Summer Concert fiasco, Mr Kay resolves to remove Fenn from office and puts his house into special measures, co-opting Kennedy, second prefect of Blackburn's, as reluctant troubleshooter with a brief to turn the place around. But without the backing of Fenn, and the whole house hostile towards him, how can he achieve the impossible ...?

The Head Of Kay's

A collection of stories featuring familiar Wodehouse characters includes Jeeves and Wooster, Ukridge and his fearsome Aunt Julia, Bingo Little and his wife, romantic novelist Rosie M. Banks, twin Mulliner brothers George (the screenwriter) and Alfred (the conjuror),Galahad Threepwood, dotty Lord Emsworth and his younger son Freddie, the dog-biscuit salesman. In between stories, their creator explores some of the more extraordinary items in the American news of his day.

Plum Pie

Anton Chekhov

Primarily known as a dramatist, Chekhov also wrote short stories. This selection of his work includes &quot;The Swedish Match&quot;, &quot;Easter Eve&quot;, &quot;Mire&quot;, &quot;On the Road&quot;, &quot;Verotchka&quot;, &quot;Volodya&quot;, &quot;The Kiss&quot;, &quot;Sleepy&quot; and &quot;The Steppe&quot;.

The Steppe And Other Stories

This early novel, written in collaboration with a friend, is a fascinating curiosity which suggests that Wodehouse might have become a very different, experimental sort of writer, had he continued to write in the same vein. 
 
Using multiple narrators, playing with literary stereotypes and identities, it tells the story of an aspiring young writer, James Orlebar Cloyster, prepared to do almost anything, first for success and then for gratification. By making Cloyster a mild, affable young man of the sort so familiar in his later novels, Wodehouse creates a comic disparity between the character’s lofty professions of virtue and his unscrupulous behaviour. As the story progresses, we realise that he is not unusual: all the main characters are unscrupulous in one way or another, ready to cheat and lie in pursuit of their ends, hence the title of the book. 
 
Not George Washington contains many fine scenes, and Cloyster’s narrative displays the calm mastery of story-telling Wodehouse had already made his own. If awkwardly executed, it is cleverly plotted, springing several surprises along the way. Clearly autobiographical in origin, it also invites readers to reflect on the nature of talent, fame, failure and success, villainy and honour - themes which continued to recur in the author’s work for another sixty years.

Not George Washington

Considered by many readers, including Shaw, Chesterton, Conrad and Trilling, as one of Dickens's finest achievements, Bleak House tells the complex story of a notorious lawsuit in which love and inheritance are set against the classic urban background of nineteenth-century London, where fog on the river, seeping into the very bones of the characters, symbolizes the pervasive corruption of the legal system and the society which supports it. Displaying the writer's familiar panoramic sweep and enormous cast of brilliant characters, the novel is also a bold experimental narrative in which public and private worlds are brought into sharp focus. It was first published in monthly parts, 1852-3, accompanied by the illustrations by 'Phiz' reproduced in this volume. This edition also reprints the original Everyman preface by G. K. Chesterton.

Bleak House

Italo Calvino

Calvino's dazzling post-modernist masterpiece combines a love story, a detective story and a sardonic dissection of the publishing industry in a scintillating allegory of reading. Based on a witty anaolgy between the reader's desire to finish the story and the lover's desire to consummate his or her passion, IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT is the tale of two bemused readers whose attempts to reach the end of same book - IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT by Italo Calvino - are constantly and comically frustrated. THE ARABIAN NIGHTS of our day

If On A Winter's Night A Traveller

An early Wodehouse novel, this is both a sporting story and a tale of friendship between two boys at boarding school. Mike (introduced in the novel Mike at Wrykyn) is a seriously good cricketer who forms an unlikely alliance with old Etonian Psmith (‘the P is silent’) after they both find themselves fish out of water at a new school, Sedleigh, where they eventually overcome the hostility of others and their own prejudices to become stars 
 
Even readers uninterested in cricket are likely to be gripped by descriptions of matches, and the plot, though slight, reaches a satisfying conclusion. But the real meat of the book is to be found in the characters, especially the elegant Psmith, one of Wodehouse’s immortal creations, who features in three of his later novels (Psmith in the City, Psmith Journalist, Leave it to Psmith).

Mike and Psmith

It is an intriguing collection, where most of the stories concern relationships, sports and household pets, and interestingly does not feature any of Wodehouse's regular characters; one however, "Extricating Young Gussie", is remarkable as the first appearance of some of Wodehouse's most well-known and beloved characters, Jeeves and his master Bertie Wooster (although here Bertie's surname appears to be Mannering-Phipps, and Jeeves' role is very small), along with Bertie's fearsome Aunt Agatha.

The Man With Two Left Feet

A collection of stories in which familiar characters and places are reintroduced in unfamiliar circumstances, reminding us – if we need reminding – of their author's limitless powers of comic invention. In the title story – one of Wodehouse's longest and best shorter fictions – Lord Emsworth takes his revenge on his ghastly secretary, the Efficient Baxter, setting off a wave of similar reprisals at Blandings Castle with amazing results. In other tales we meet several members of the Drones Club, while the final three reunite us with the ineffable Ukridge, more of whose ever-optimistic schemes for making easy money come to grief. A delightful meeting with old friends for some readers, a superb introduction to the world of Wodehouse for others.

Lord Emsworth And Others

This is the classic book that put Turgenev on the literary map--both in his own time and for all of history. The strength of this, his first book, was such that, even if Turgenev had never written another book, he would still be recognized as the father of the modern short story. Indeed, A Sportsman's Notebook was Hemmingway's favorite book, and it is not hard to see traces of Turgenevs influence in the work of Hemmingway and other later-day masters of the short story. 
 
Notebook contains twenty-five stories in which Turgenev shares shares memories from the hunting expeditions that lead him throughout the Russian countryside. His writing is strong because there is real life in his people and real beauty in his landscapes.

A Sportsman's Notebook

LORD BISKERTON, son and heir of the sixth Earl of Hoddesdon, and known to his friends as Biscuit, had red hair, a preliminary scenario for a moustache and a noble determination to escape the disgrace of work. His friend Berry Conway, however, had succumbed to economic pressure and become the secretary to T. Paterson Frisby, a dyspeptic American who had twenty million and loved every cent of it. When Biscuit and Berry pooled ideas for their mutual betterment, and one idea concerned Ann Moon, Frisby's beautiful niece and heiress, they had to lean heavily on Aunt Vera, an old campaigner in the field of love. How Uncle Paterson was caught short and rushed to cover, while Aunt Vera hedged the market with a double play and salted down two money-making engagements for the House of Hoddesdon, is one of the most irresistible tales of the one and only P. G.

Big Money

When Bertie Wooster goes to stay with his Aunt Dahlia at Brinkley Court and find himself engaged to the imperious Lady Florence Craye, disaster treatens from all sides. While Florence tries to cultivate his mind, her former fiance, hefty policeman Stilton Cheesewright, threatens to beat his body to a pulp, and her new admirer, the bleating poet percy Gorringe, tries to borrow a thousand pounds. To cap it all, Bertie has incurred the disapproval of Jeeves by growing a moustach, thus alienating the only man who can save him from his trip to the altar. Throw in a disappearing pearl necklace, Aunt Dahlia's magazine Milady's Boudir, her cook Anatole, the Drones' dart match, and Mr and Mrs L. G. Trotter from Liverpool, and you have all the ingredients for a classic Wodehouse farce.

Jeeves And The Feudal Spirit

Emily Brontë

The title of the novel comes from the Yorkshire manor on the moors of the story. The narrative centres on the all-encompassing, passionate, but ultimately doomed love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, and how this unresolved passion eventually destroys them and the people around them

Wuthering Heights

Jane Austen

Jane Austen seems to have been born with the comic precision and other-worldly insight she everywhere displays in Sense and Sensibility, her first published novel (1811), which, though revised later, was completed in 1797 at the age of twenty-two. This meticulously constructed story of two sisters with opposing temperaments and romantic inclinations exemplifies the distilled spirit of classicism in English literature.

Sense And Sensibility

Typical. Just when Bertie thinks that God's in his heaven and all's right with the world, things start to go wrong again... 
There's young Bingo Little, who's in love for the umpteenth time and needs Bertie to put in a good word for him with his uncle; Aunt Agatha, who forces Bertie to get engaged to the formidable Honoria Glossop; and the troublesome twins, Claude and Eustace, whose antics when let loose in London know no bounds. 
Add to that some friction in the Wooster home over a red cummerbund, purple socks and some snazzy old Etonian spats, and poor Bertie's really in the soup... 
Only one man can save the day - the inimitable Jeeves. 
 
Characters Bertie Wooster - Narrator who went to school with Bingo. Won a prize at his first school for the best collection of wild flowers. 
Jeeves - Bertie's valet who has an aunt who loves the romantic novels of Rosie M. Banks 
Bingo Little - Mortimer's nephew who loves Mabel. Tells his uncle that Bertie is really Rosie M. Banks. 
Mabel - Waitress in a tea shop 
Mortimer Little - Retired fat businessman who owned Little's Liniment - "It Limbers Up the Legs." He is a gourmet. 
Jane Watson - Mortimer's cook engaged to Jeeves, but not for long

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