The bones were still warm; but they were picked clean. They had even eaten their own deadThis spine-chilling collection from Dracula creator Bram Stoker showcases five haunting tales, including the newly discovered 'Gibbet Hill'. From 'Dracula's Guest', thought by many to be the original excised opening of Dracula itself, to the sinister 'The Judge's House,' each gripping story will leave you breathless, perhaps afraid to turn out the lights. Dare you explore the darkness?
'What does love fear? Limitation.'Johannes stealthily pursues Cordelia through the streets of Copenhagen, and through an intricate, manipulative courtship contrives to possess her. Motivated not by love or sex but by sensation and experiment, he seeks to make the object of his desire desire him - and then to retreat. At once a captivating story and philosophical exploration of existence's entanglements, The Seducer's Diary is also an excoriating reconstruction of Kierkegaard's own romantic failures.
Lay down all hope, you that go in by me . . . Through the gates of Hell, past whirling hurricanes, leering devils and rivers of blood, lies the ultimate evil: Satan himself. Masterfully translated by Dorothy L. Sayers, this first instalment of The Divine Comedy tells the captivating tale of Dante and Virgil's arduous journey through the nine circles of the underworld, and remains one of the most influential works in literary history.
90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin BooksRabindranath Tagore was one of the greatest authors to ever live. In these two short stories - 'The Broken Nest' and 'Dead or Alive' - he is at his devastating best, charting the slow, then fast, implosion of two perfect Bengali households. No-one understands each other; everything is misconstrued; all is lost.
How light and alive she was! Like a bird caught in a net . . . Marian Forrester enchants everyone around her: her husband, an elderly railroad pioneer; the small town of Sweet Water; and Niel Herbert, her unwavering confidant. Yet, her irresistible charm and dazzling wit conceal a dangerous vulnerability - and her greatest secret. A significant inspiration for The Great Gatsby, this exquisite novella is a poignant elegy for a bygone era, fading into history.
During his reign, Lord Cobham was burnt alive, but I forget what for.In Jane Austen's breezy and entirely biased telling of English history, Mary, Queen of Scots is a scandalously wronged victim, Elizabeth I is a wicked villain and most historical facts and dates are cheerfully disregarded. It is accompanied here by other riotous early pieces in which young women steal money, escape from prison, agree to marry two men at once, faint and repeatedly 'run mad'.
One of the finest poets of the Victorian age, Christina Rosetti is known today for the directness, clarity and unmatched lyricism of her works. This selection brings together some of her finest verses, love lyrics and sonnets for the contemporary reader. Spanning themes like love, death, loss, womanhood and devotion to pleasures both earthly and divine, these are poems of startling beauty, as evocative and relevant today as when they were first published.
On the fields of Troy, war is raging. At its centre is Achilles: godlike, swift-footed, the greatest champion of the Greeks. But when his pride is wounded and he refuses to fight, the thread of fate begins to spin . . . From frenzied rampages to intimate moments of grief, this selection from Homer's Iliad traces the tale of a warrior whose name echoes through the ages, and whose story remains as powerful as ever.
Few artists' letters are as self-revelatory as Vincent van Gogh's. From the humanistic inspiration behind The Potato Eaters to his long-time obsession with painting the vision that eventually became The Starry Night, the letters in this selection paint an intense personal narrative of his artistic development and creative process across the years. They reveal a man of great spiritual and emotional depths who - in his own words - did everything 'for art and for life itself'.
Rumi's verses have been a balm for readers' souls for over eight centuries. This exquisite selection brings together some of the Persian mystic's most profound, evocative and transcendent works. Exploring passion, heartbreak, friendship, faith and the myriad ways in which we move through the world, these strikingly modern poems are perfect for those looking for inspiration, guidance, or endless delight.
A guided journal from psychotherapist Anna Mathur that takes the reader through 35 days of reflection and observation to make better decisions in all areas of life.Anna shares her own experience of making unsustainable promises to herself ('I'll never eat sugar again!' 'I'll work out every morning!') and then repeatedly breaking them, and the journey she took to a more compassionate approach to personal change.Then she gently guides the reader through a daily practice of questioning our own behaviours, challenging our assumptions and beliefs about change, and identifying patterns of self-sabotage. Her compassionate approach is one that recognises a decision which is sustaining one day can be sabotaging the next - and she shows us how to tell the difference in the moment.The Good Decision diary will help you make better decisions, not all of the time, but more of the time.
Vienna, 1939. Count Wallmoden, an officer and veteran of the First World War, is preparing to take part in a mysterious 'military exercise'. One evening, while off duty, he meets the austere and beautiful Baroness Pistohlkors, whose secretive nature and elusive circle of acquaintances suggest that things - including the 'military exercise' - are not quite what they seem. Forced to leave the Baroness, Wallmoden promises to return for a tryst once his tour of duty is over, only to discover his unit has been mobilised for war. He finds himself over the border, marching across Europe - and, more seductively, stumbling to and fro over the border that separates the living from the dead. One constant remains: in this world or the next, he must keep his tryst with Baroness Pistohlkors.Simultaneously a ghost story drawing on the phantasms of the unconscious mind, a thriller where the erotic and the supernatural converge, and a shockingly realist account of the German Wehrmacht's invasion of Poland, the novel Mars in Aries was refused a publishing permit by the Nazis, hinting as it did at the existence of an Austrian resistance. The book's entire print run was put into storage and subsequently destroyed by an Allied air raid. Reprinted from the author's proofs after the war, Mars in Aries is one of Alexander Lernet-Holenia's finest and most celebrated novels.
Based on historical characters of the seventh-century Iranian court and written 850 years ago, the narrative poem about Khosrow and Shirin shares a shelf with the most intensely romantic classic stories readers love, from Tristan and Isolde to Layla and Majnun to Romeo and Juliet to Gatsby and Daisy.The love between an Iranian prince (Khosrow) and an Armenian princess (Shirin) is at the centre of this tumultuous tale in which the powers of politics and warfare intertwine with no less powerful forces of erotic desire and the quest for personal and spiritual fulfilment.Davis has captured the energy and poetry of Nezami's original in modern verse. Khosrow and Shirin will enchant both the classicist and the general reader, to captivate a new audience for Nezami's masterpiece.
A couple on an epicurean journey across Mexico are excited by the idea of a particular ingredient, suggested by ancient rituals of human sacrifice. Precariously balanced on his throne, a king is able only to listen to the sounds around him - sure that any deviation from their normal progression would mean the uprising of the conspirators that surround him. And three different men search desperately for the beguiling scents of lost women, from a Count visiting Madame Odile's perfumery, to a London drummer stepping over spent, naked bodies.
How I Came to Know Fish (1974) is Ota Pavel's magical memoir of his childhood in Czechoslovakia. Fishing with his father and his Uncle Prosek - the two finest fishermen in the world - he takes a peaceful pleasure from the rivers and ponds of his country. But when the Nazis invade, his father and two older brothers are sent to concentration camps and Pavel must steal their confiscated fish back from under the noses of the SS to feed his family. With tales of his father's battle to provide for his family both in wealthy freedom and in terrifying persecution, this is one boy's passionate and affecting tale of life, love and fishing.
'Then she would feel exposed and cry, as if her life and happiness were ruined for all time, even though she could still hide it from those she only came in contact with by chance or infrequently.'Longing shimmers from these spare but profoundly moving short stories by one of Denmark's most fearless and sharp-eyed authors. In these tales of inarticulate desire and repression, Ditlevsen pulls to the surface our deepest interiorities in devastating, exacting prose.
In this emblematic selection of her stories, Oh Jung-hee probes beneath the surface of seemingly quotidian lives to expose nightmarish family configurations warped by desertion, psychosis, and death. In 'Chinatown' a young girl living on the edge of the city's Chinese community comes of age among mundane violences, collisions with adult sexuality and the American occupation; in 'The Garden Party' a woman grapples with her conflicting identities of wife, mother and writer at an alcohol-fuelled gathering. Throughout a career spanning six decades, Oh Jung-hee has drawn comparisons to Alice Munro, Virginia Woolf, and Joyce Carol Oates, and is assuredly a trailblazing writer.
'A funny, sad novella about how we got here from there, and how, in our youth, "e;our eyes saw things differently"e;' The TimesA private meeting, chance encounters and a mysterious tour of Lisbon haunt this moving homage to Tabucchi's adopted cityIn the city of Lisbon, Requiem's narrator has an appointment to meet someone on a quay by the Tagus at twelve. Misunderstanding twelve to mean noon as opposed to midnight, he is left to wait. As the day unfolds he has many unexpected encounters - with a young drug addict, a disorientated taxi driver, a cemetery keeper, the mysterious Isabel and the ghost of the late great poet Fernando Pessoa - each meeting travelling between the real and illusionary. Part travelogue, part autobiography, part fiction, Requiem becomes an homage to a country and its people, and a farewell to the past as the narrator lays claim to a literary forebear who, like himself, is an evasive and many-sided personality.'Tabucchi is a master of illusion and allusion, and this is a literary puzzle that teases, amuses and provokes' Sunday Telegraph
'I decided that my trip had evidently been in vain, since nothing of interest could possibly occur on this visit. I was mistaken.'Condemned to sleeplessness by the chatter permeating his guesthouse room, a forlorn traveller turns his ear to the riotous tale spun by the garrulous, meddlesome, inane and utterly unprincipled Márya Martýnovna next door. Her exuberant deformations of morality and language scandalized Tsarist society, and she remains one of Russian literature's most uproarious anti-heroes.
Kikuji has been invited to a tea ceremony by a mistress of his dead father. He is shocked to find there the mistress's rival and successor, Mrs. Ota, and that the ceremony has been awkwardly arranged for him to meet his potential future bride. But he is most shocked to be drawn into a relationship with Mrs. Ota - a relationship that will bring only suffering and destruction to all of them. Thousand Cranes reflects the tea ceremony's poetic precision with understated, lyrical style and beautiful prose.
All moonlight is moving, wherever it may be...Japanese gentlewoman Sei Shonagon invites us to look behind the painted screens in the Emperor's palace and discover a lost world, in which games of poetry are the highest form of wit, lovers send each other elegant morning-after letters, and appreciation of the natural world - wild geese in autumn, the pure white frost of winter - is one of life's most exquisite pleasures.
McCullers' second novel, REFLECTIONS IN A GOLDEN EYE, is set on a Southern army base in the 1930s, REFLECTIONS tells the story of Captain Penderton, a bisexual whose life is upset by the arrival of Major Langdon, a charming womanizer who has an affair with Penderton's tempestuous and flirtatious wife, Leonora.
'As for me I have one ambition only: to invent stories, very beautiful stories'Gothic, expansive and truly spellbinding, Karen Blixen's short stories offer incisive psychological portraits and imaginative visions of war, longing and tender love. Here, an orphan boy creates an elaborate fantasy of a life of grandeur, a feudal lord sets a peasant woman a deadly task, and a young woman resists against her captors, in the midst of conflict.
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