Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics

Lawrence is known mainly as a novelist and poet but he was also the author of many superb short stories and novellas. By bringing together all his shorter fiction, this volume makes it possible to survey his entire writing career. Together with many celebrated stories - including THE PRUSSIAN OFFICIER, THE VIRGIN AND THE GYPSY, ST MAWR and ODOUR OF CHRYSANTHEMUMS - there are many lesser known but still magnificent pieces which show the extraordinary diversity of Lawrence's talent and also reveal an often forgotten talent for comedy.

Kafka was an obsessive writer who produced a huge volume of stories, novels, diaries and letters in his brief lifetime. The present volume includes all his available shorter fiction in a new collection edited and introduced by Gabriel Josipovici. The stories, which range from tiny fragments to substantial narratives, have been arranged both to illuminate one another and to illustrate Kafka's evolution as a writer - which, as Professor Josipovici shows, is more complex and radical than often thought. The extensive prefatory essay is an introduction not only to the stories but also to Kafka's work as a whole.

A biting satire on dictatorship written during the Second World War and published in 1945, ANIMAL FARM is perhaps the most celebrated twentieth-century English satire after the same writer's NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR. One of the very few writers to be compared in power, artistry and moral authority with Jonathan Swift, the purity of Orwell's spare prose and the logic of his dark comedy emphasize the stark message of man's inhumanity to man and beast's to beast

FICTIONS is perhaps the single most mysterious and extraordinary collection of short stories written this century. Influenced by writers as disparate as Lewis Carroll, Stevenson and Cervantes, Borges is nethertheless a complete original who can turn dry logical puzzles in to enchanting fables. The Pieces in this volume represent his most accomplished work.

An attack on war which broadens into a satire on the ANCIEN REGIME of the Austro-Hungarian empire, THE GOOD SOLDIER SVEJK recreates the age-old figure of the simple soldier whose sheer determination to survive brings into question the mighty social and political institutions he confronts. Set in a Central Europe which has long since vanished, Hasek's novel is nevertheless a timeless portrait of the 'little man' doughtily waging his own war against authority

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

Hailed as the greatest Japanese novel of the Twentieth century, THE MAKIOKA SISTERS is a subtle tale of domestic oppression worthy of Balzac or Chekhov, In this saga of the once prosperous but now declining Makioka family struggling to marry off one of their daughters, Tanizaki presents the picture of a family and a society striving to preserve their self-respect as they come to terms with disturbing new ways in a classic confrontation of innovasion and tradition. A wonderful portrait of Japanese life in the first half of the twentieth century.

THE TIN DRUM presents Hitler's rise and fall through the eyes of the dwarfish narrator whose magic powers become symbolic of the dark forces dominating the German nation in the period. Like Thomas Mann's DOCTOR FAUSTUS, Grass's novel explores the dark roots of power and creativity. An early advocate of 'magic realism'. Gunter Grass is the most powerful and celebrated novelist to appear in post-war Germany. His home city of Danzig is a powerful presence in this novel.

One of Hemingway's finest novels, A FAREWELL TO ARMS was published in 1929 when the author was at the height of his power, It draws on his own experiences serving with the Italins in World War One when he was severely wounded in action and awarded the Croce de Guerra. This is a vivid portrait of men at war which also explores their deeper responses to the cruetly and heroism of Battle

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 SECOND SEX is a hymn to human freedom and a classic of the existentialist movement. It also has claims to be the most important s ingle book in the history of feminism. In the forty years since its publication De Beauvoir's then revolutionary thesis - that the subordination of women is not a fact of nature but the product of social conditioning has become part of our everyday thinking.

Graham Greene's classic study in the banality of evil is set in the unforgettably evoked underworld of pre-war Brighton where Pinkie, a small-time ganster, meets his nemesis at the hands of Ida, the girl he betrays, Published in 1938, Greene's most celebrated novel signalled the beginning of the long series of masterpieces produced between then and his death in 1991

Tracing a day in the life of society hostess Clarissa Dalloway, Virginia Woolf triumphantly discovers her distinctive style as a novelist. First published in 1925, MRS DALLOWAY is her first complete rendering of what Woolf described as the 'luminous envelope' of consciousness: a dazzling display of the mind's inside as it plays over the brilliant surface and darker depths of reality.

Poet and pervert, Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her, first carnally and then artistically, out of love, 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets'. Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is he all of these? Humbert Humbert's seduction is one of many dimensions in Nabokov's dizzying masterpiece, which is suffused with a savage humour and rich, elaborate verbal textures.

James Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses, tells of the diverse events which befall Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on one day in June 1904. It is considered to be one of the most important works of modernist literature and was hailed as a work of genius by W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway. Scandalously frank, wittily erudite, mercurially eloquent, resourcefully comic and generously humane, Ulysses offers the reader a life-changing experience