Everyman's Library CLASSICS

A Contemporary Classics hardcover edition of Virginia Woolf’s classic plea for a
world in which women are free to use their gifts. In this influential extended essay and using powerful images and memorable thought experiments -such as a fictional sister of William Shakespeare, who is as talented as her brother but limited in ways he was not -Woolf analyses the many ways in which women have been held back throughout history and still are in her own time.

The Patrick Melrose Novels hilariously dissect the English upper class, conjuring a world of decadence, amorality, greed, snobbery, and cruelty, but never without the possibility of grace. Taken together, they are one of the most thrilling reading experiences in contemporary fiction.

Edward St. Aubyn chronicled the life of Patrick Melrose across five short novels, painting an acrid portrait of a beleaguered and self-loathing world of privilege. Never Mind unfolds over a day and an evening at the family’s chateau in the south of France, where the sadistic and terrifying figure of David Melrose dominates the lives of his rich and unhappy American wife, Eleanor, and their five-year-old son, Patrick.
Bad News opens as Patrick, now twenty-two years old, sets off to collect his father’s ashes from New York, where he will spend a drug-crazed twenty-four hours.
Back in England, Some Hope offers Patrick the possibility of recovery (and the most debauched and riotous dinner party in contemporary fiction).
The Booker-shortlisted Mother’s Milk returns to the family chateau, where Patrick, now married and a father himself, struggles with child rearing, adultery, his mother’s desire for assisted suicide, and the loss of the family home.
At Last, set over the single day of a funeral, is the stunning final volume.

Novelist, essayist, and public intellectual - James Baldwin is widely regarded as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. This Everyman's Library collection includes his bestselling, galvanizing essay The Fire Next Time—which gave voice to the emerging civil rights movement of the 1960s and still lights the way to understanding race in America today—along with three additional brilliant works of nonfiction by this seminal chronicler and analyst of culture. From No Name In the Street's extraordinary history of the turbulent sixties and early seventies to the "passionate, probing, controversial" (The Atlantic) Nobody Knows My Name and the incisive criticism of American movies in The Devil Finds Work, Baldwin's stunning prose over and over proves relevant to our contemporary struggle for equality, justice, and social change.

The demands of human longing contend with the weight of centuries of custom in
acclaimed author Ha Jin’s Waiting, a novel of unexpected richness and universal resonance. Every summer Lin Kong, a doctor in the Chinese Army, returns to his village to end his loveless arranged marriage with the humble and touchingly loyal Shuyu. Each time, Lin must return to the city to tell Manna Wu, the educated, modern nurse he loves, that they will have to postpone their engagement once again. Caught between the conflicting claims of these two very different women and trapped by a culture in which adultery can ruin lives and careers, Lin has been waiting for eighteen years. This year, he promises will be different

Motherless Brooklyn is a compulsively readable riff on the classic noir detective novel. Brooklyn's self-appointed Human Freakshow, Lionel Essrog is an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to rip apart our language in startling and original ways. Together with three other veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. But when Frank is fatally stabbed, Lionel's world is suddenly topsy-turvy, and he must untangle the threads of the case while trying to keep the words straight in his head.

The Fortress of Solitude is the vividly told story of Dylan Ebdus growing up white and motherless in Brooklyn in the 1970s. In a neighbourhood where the entertainments include muggings and games of stoopball, Dylan has one friend, a black teenager, also motherless, named Mingus Rude. Through the knitting and unravelling of the boys' friendship, Lethem creates an overwhelmingly rich and emotionally gripping canvas of race and class, superheroes, gentrification, funk, hip-hop, graffiti tagging, loyalty, and memory.
From the prize-winning author of Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude is a daring, riotous, sweeping novel that spins the tale of two friends and their adventures in late 20th-century America.

In the bleak aftermath of World War I, Constance, Lady Chatterley, is a young woman trapped in an unfulfilling marriage to an aristocrat whose war wounds have left him paralysed. With her husband's encouragement, she enters into a liaison with Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper on their country estate in Nottinghamshire. As this illicit relationship grows into tenderness, mutual respect and sensual passion, Constance discovers that true fulfilment requires a real connection of both mind and body. Lady Chatterley's Lover shocked its original audience with its vindication of adulterous love across the class divide as well as its explicit descriptions of sex. It retains its power today as a hymn to erotic love and as an impassioned treatise on 'tender-hearted fucking' as a means to salvation from the horrors of war and the sterility of modern life. It is all the more poignant that Lawrence wrote this book - three times over - while he was dying from tuberculosis.
The modern world was not interested in its salvation. Lawrence had Lady Chatterley privately printed in Italy in 1928, but strict obscenity laws in the UK rendered it unpublishable there for more than thirty years.

The House on Mango Street is one of the most cherished novels of the last fifty
years. Readers from all walks of life have fallen for the voice of Esperanza
Cordero, growing up in Chicago and inventing for herself who and what she will
become. “In English my name means hope,” she says. “In Spanish it means too
many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting."

Told in a series of vignettes—sometimes heart breaking, sometimes
joyous—Cisneros’s masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and
self-discovery. It is also one of the greatest neighbourhood novels of all time.
Like Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street or Toni Morrison’s Sula, it makes a world
through people and their voices, and it does so in language that is poetic and
direct. Acclaimed by critics, a staple in schools, translated into dozens of
languages, this gorgeous coming-of-age novel is a celebration of the power of
telling one’s story and of being proud of where you come from.

In Lord Byron's lifetime, details of his travels were widely known through poems set in different countries, ranging from his homes in Scotland and England, through Europe and the Middle East, to the South Pacific and into extra-terrestrial realms. At the same time, a much more personal story was being shared with friends and family. Even when divided from those whose company he most enjoyed, Byron continued to share his thoughts and feelings about wherever he happened to be. His compulsive letter-writing reveals a strong desire to reach across space, to connect and reconnect with those elsewhere. While his memoirs did not survive the ceremonial posthumous bonfire at 50 Albemarle Street, many of Byron's correspondents treasured every word in their possession. This means a remarkable legacy has been preserved in letters that still seem as alive with conversational energy as when they were dashed off more than two hundred years ago. Through Byron's letters and journals, we are still able to become mental travellers, transported across time and space by this brilliant, mercurial, magnificent and often maddening writer.

The archetypal Romantic, killed in a duel in 1837 at the age of 37, Alexander Pushkin was effectively the founder of modern Russian literature. Though famous as a poet, he was equally at home in prose, and this volume includes all his short fiction, as well as unfinished sketches and fragments. Here of course are his masterpieces, 'The Queen of Spades', Pushkin's ironic take on both the supernatural and the society tale, the terse, deadpan Tales of Belkin, often humorous yet imbued with deep understanding of human nature, and his unsurpassable novella, The Captain's Daughter, which, informed by his meticulous research into the Pugachev Rebellion against Catherine the Great, is a perfect combination of folk epic, historical narrative and romance. Other works include the richly comic 'A History of the Village of Goriukhino', the imaginative historical fiction 'The Moor of Peter the Great' (based on the life of the author's own great-grandfather. Pushkin was particularly proud of his African ancestry), and 'Journey to Arzrum', the fascinating autobiographical account of his (unauthorized, and greatly displeasing to the Tsar) travels in the Caucasus at the time of the 1828-9 Russo-Turkish war.

A friend and contemporary of Richard Wright and James Baldwin - and every bit their equal - Chester Himes was the acclaimed author of literary novels, stories and essays, as well as the classic crime fiction series for which he is best known, featuring detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones.
Himes wrote nine novels in the Harlem Detectives series, and in these four popular, accomplished instalments, his cold, wise-cracking sleuths are thrown into a brutal, murderous world peopled with conniving con men, gut-toting gangsters and opium-smoking preachers. Himes's vision of Harlem's criminal underground, enriched by deft plotting and scintillating dialogue, is both riotous entertainment and penetrating enquiry into the fraught tensions of race in postwar America.

Kiev - Kyiv - is in chaos. Russia has withdrawn from World War I but the Germans have set up a puppet government in Ukraine. Civil war rages: the Bolsheviks have seized power in Russia, but the anti-revolutionary White Guard who have fled to Ukraine, are rallying to resist. In the meantime, Ukrainian nationalists are camped outside the capital, and a Red army is on its way to bring everyone to heel. While all this is going on, the Turbin family try to eke out their existence in Kyiv and discuss what they should do. They are exactly the sort of family - monarchist intelligentsia - for whom the future looks particularly menacing.
Bulgakov's brilliant and evocative prose brings the city and the moment unforgettably to life and sheds some fascinating light on the complex interwoven histories of Ukraine and Russia.

The beautiful Everyman gift edition in hardback.

The Lord Orlando's country seat has 365 rooms. An exquisitely beautiful youth, he is a favourite of the ageing Queen Elizabeth and enjoys all that Court and tavern have to offer. He falls passionately in love with the intriguing Sasha, an androgynous Russian princess, who jilts him. Stricken, he takes up Literature, penning huge quantities of poems and plays, 'all romantic, and all long'. A few decades later a still youthful Orlando is appointed ambassador to Constantinople by Charles II. Here he wakes up one day and finds he has the body of a woman. "Different sex, same person", she observes, unphased.
In London, it is the eighteenth century, and she can hobnob with "men of genius" Pope and Swift, Johnson and Boswell. She has affairs with both women and men, but before long it is the nineteenth century, oppressively gloomy and moral and probably time to find a husband. Fortunately, in a Brontësque moment on a moor, the gender- nonconforming Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, newly back from Cape Horn, gallops past and scoops her up into bliss.

Woolf's most unusual and joyous novel was inspired by her affair with the dashing author and aristocrat, Vita Sackville West.

'A thrilling blend of noir and fantasy.'Guardian.
In an unnamed city - a hardboiled pre-Civil Rights New York sort of city -heroine Lila Mae has succeeded in becoming the very first Black female elevator inspector. In Whitehead's darkly comic otherworld, this is a job imbued with an almost mystical significance. But the illustrious Department of Elevator Inspectors is in crisis, bitterly divided between the Empiricists (check the machinery) and the Intuitionists (tune in to the vibes). Lila is an Intuitionist and so much better at her job than anyone else that surely it must be those 'good-old-boy' Empiricists who have set up the serious accident which occurs on her watch - and just before the Departmental elections, too. Lila sets out to clear her name (and discover the secret formula of the Perfect Elevator at the same time), and the author keeps us on our toes guessing the outcome as he cleverly tweaks and twists his plot, catching everybody out. At the same time the story is almost certainly an allegory but of what, exactly, readers may work out for themselves. A teasing, challenging and entertaining read.

A harrowing yet uplifting account of Stalin's persecution of the Russian intelligentsia in the 1930s, and of one man - Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), whose poetry, in spite of the unfolding tragedy of his life, preserved its unique creative gaiety. Nadezhda and Osip Mandelstam married in 1922. Nadezhda's memoir covers their last four years together. She begins in Moscow in May 1934 with the knock on the door at one o'clock in the morning, and her husband's arrest by the secret police for composing a satire of Stalin. She tells of his imprisonment, interrogation and exile to the Urals, where she accompanied him, and where he wrote his last great poems; his release and return to Moscow, only to be entrapped, rearrested and sentenced to hard labour in Siberia; of her own efforts to secure his release and to save his manuscripts (and to memorize all his poems in case she could not); of her discovery of the truth about his death in a transit camp near Vladivostock. For all its grim subject matter, it is a story of courage in adversity, and even humour finds a place.
Nadezhda means 'hope' in Russian, and Hope against Hope is one of the greatest testaments to the value of literature and imaginative freedom ever written. It is also a love story that relates the daily struggle to keep both love and art alive in the most desperate circumstances. After years of circulating secretly in the Soviet Union it was published in the West in 1970, and has since achieved the status of a classic.

Rabindranath Tagore published his first volume of poetry at the age of thirteen. He went on to become a towering figure in Bengali and world literature.

Tagore was remarkably productive over his long life; his complete works fill 32 large volumes and include 60 collections of verse and more than 2,000 songs, two of which have become the national anthems of India and of Bangladesh. In both his poetry and prose he was a great innovator, continually breaking with tradition, endlessly changing his own style, so this volume is full of variety and surprise. If lyric poetry was the anchor of Tagore's creativity, he also wrote devotional, satirical, humorous and even nonsense verse.

His themes were as varied as his forms - love, the beauty of nature; philosophy, politics, his hopes and fears for his country, and for the future of mankind. In his fiction he showed profound sympathy for the perspectives of women, children and the poor. This selection - a substantial 900+ pages - offers a representative overview of his work, including his best-known novel, The Home and the World, and his best-known play, Red Oleander, as well as many short stories, novellas, essays, poems and songs.

Rudrangshu Mukherjee has drawn on the work of various translators, from early renderings by Surendranath Tagore, the author's nephew, to modern ones by William Radice, Kaiser Haq and Madhuchchhanda Karlekar. Tagore translated some of his work himself, and all the essays and lectures were composed in English

Neurologist Oliver Sacks investigates the complex relationship between the brain and the mind and, almost impossibly, manages to make his subject matter not only accessible to the general reader, but utterly absorbing. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals suffering from perceptual and intellectual disorders: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; whose limbs seem alien to them; who lack some skills yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. Their struggles are recounted with sympathy and respect. A great healer, Sacks never loses sight of medicine's ultimate responsibility to assist 'the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject'.
A work of profound humanity.