Alma Books Sepulchres and Other Poems Foscolo Ugo

Dual-Language Edition • Translated for the first time into English • One of the pillars of nineteenth-century Russian prose fiction alongside towering figures such as Gogol, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev started his writing career as a poet, gaining much critical acclaim and renown in that field. The title piece of this collection, Parasha, which brought the young author to the attention of the influential critic Vissarion Belinsky and established his reputation, is a humorous narrative poem in the vein of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin or Lermontov's Sashka, telling the story of a young woman's marriage to her dull, unromantic neighbour and the couple's humdrum and more or less happy life ever after • Also contained in this volume are four other narrative poems by Turgenev - Andrei, A Conversation, The Landowner and The Village Priest - all showing the author's early interest in ordinary stories of Russian life and all displaying the wit and stylistic versatility that we have come to associate with his more famous prose works

«Тобермори» – заглавный рассказ сборника – считается одним из лучших произведений Саки. Один из гостей званого ужина решает представить остальным говорящего кота по кличке Тобермори. Кот начинает раскрывать все грязные тайны представителей высшего общества, заставляя их показать свое истинное лицо • В этот сборник вошли самые известные рассказы Саки, от первых литературных успехов вроде «Габриэля-Эрнеста», «Ягдташа» и «Хроник Кловиса», истории о молодом человеке с необычным чувством юмора, до более поздних шедевров – одновременно смешного и странного «Борова» и опубликованных посмертно «Игрушек мира». Творчество Саки охватывает самые разные темы, от реинкарнации до психологической войны, а характерное для его произведений остроумие успело очаровать несколько поколений читателей

“Day after day, day after day, • We stuck, nor breath nor motion • As idle as a painted ship • Upon a painted ocean.” • Described by his friend Charles Lamb as “an archangel slightly damaged”, Coleridge was deemed a towering genius by many of his contemporaries, and one who, in conversation, had no equal. Fascinated by, among other subjects, psychology, philosophy and chemistry, his mind roamed extravagantly and without restraint, leading Hazlitt to opine that “there is no subject on which he has not touched, none on which he has rested”. Yet, while this literary itinerancy left some to lament his refusal to devote himself to verse, Coleridge remains one of English literature’s most enduringly popular poets • From sonnets and ballads to elegies and intimate blank verse, this collection brings together poetry written throughout Coleridge’s life, particularly his prolific early years, which saw the composition of poems such as ‘Christabel’, ‘The Eolian Harp’ and ‘Frost at Midnight’

Basil and Josephine charts the coming of age of two privileged youths from quiet Midwestern towns, Basil Duke Lee and Josephine Perry - based on Fitzgerald himself and a combination of his first love Ginevra King and his wife Zelda. As one struggles to gain the acceptance of his peers and becomes consumed by ambition, the other finds herself obsessed by teenage crushes and has to confront the pitfalls of popularity • Written for the Saturday Evening Post while the author was working on Tender Is the Night, these stories form a realistic and entertaining portrait of two young adults in the 1910s, fascinating both for the autobiographical insights they provide and the timeless satire that Fitzgerald's fiction has become synonymous with

Having grown up in London and rural southern England, Margaret Hale moves with her father to the northern industrial city of Milton. She is shocked by the poverty she encounters and dismayed by the unsympathetic attitude of the textile-mill owner John Thornton, whose factory workers are engaged in an acrimonious strike. Against this backdrop of social unrest, the relationship between the two is tumultuous, and it takes further upheaval and tragedy for them to see each other in a different light • First serialized in Dickens’s magazine Household Words in the same period as Hard Times, North and South shares its famous counterpart’s concern with the inequality and hardship generated by the Industrial Revolution in northern England, while at the same time creating one of the nineteenth century’s most memorable and engaging female protagonists in Margaret Hale

Proust's only other work of fiction published in his lifetime apart from the monumental novel cycle In Search of Lost Time, Pleasures and Days takes the reader on a journey through the high-society circles of fin-de-siecle Paris, presenting the lives, loves and attitudes of a host of unforgettable characters • Contains: 'To My Friend Willie Heath', 'The Death of Baldassare Silvande', 'Violante, Or High Society', 'Fragments From Italian Comedy', 'Bouvard and Pecuchet on Society and Music', Mme de Breyves's Melancholy Summer Vacation', 'Portraits of Painters and Musicians', 'The Confession of a Young Woman', 'A Dinner in Town', 'Nostalgia - Daydreams under Changing Skies', 'The End of Jealousy'

These inventive and entertaining pieces display the early sparkles of wit and imagination of Jane Austen’s mature fiction. Written when she was only in her teens, they are by turns amusing, acerbic and occasionally downright silly • ‘Love and Friendship’ and ‘Lesley Castle’ provide parodies of the gentry and the fashionable idea of sensibility of the time. ‘A History of England’ supplies us with a lively chronicle of English monarchic history. Also included in this collection are ‘The Three Sisters’, ‘Catharine’, the series of vignettes known as ‘A Collection of Letters’ and ‘Lady Susan’, an epistolary story which was recently adapted for the cinema. Taken together, these pieces display all the wry humour, shrewd observation and satirical insight of Emma or Pride and Prejudice

As the sensitive and delicate Gertrude Morel begins to shrink from her drunken and violent husband, their marriage becomes a battleground. Gertrude turns increasingly towards her two eldest sons, William and Paul, and determines that they will not grow up to be coal miners living in poverty like their father. Yet soon William falls ill, and Paul seeks to escape his mother’s suffocating influence through a series of relationships • Closely autobiographical, and widely regarded as Lawrence’s finest achievement, Sons and Lovers is the affecting portrait of a mining family torn apart by class divisions and the conflict between filial love and the urge to follow one’s own desires

This volume brings together twenty of the best stories written by Dino Buzzati – author of the celebrated novel The Tartar Steppe and one of the most original voices in twentieth-century literature – stories which show the Italian master’s taste for the bizarre and the humorous, and for exploring the darker recesses of the human psyche • From ‘The Collapse of the Baliverna’, where a man is racked with guilt at the thought that he might have been responsible for the loss of many lives, to ‘The Epidemic’, which describes the spread of a “state influenza” contracted only by people who don’t step into line with the government, and ‘Terror at the Scala’, where the higher echelons of Milan society are gripped with the fear of an impending revolution – these stories show how strange and unexpected events can creep into everyday life and draw ordinary people towards mystery, disquiet and, ultimately, catastrophe

Published soon after Fitzgerald’s debut novel This Side of Paradise, Flappers and Philosophers was the author’s first collection of short fiction, a form through which he had gained notoriety in newspapers and magazines. The familiar themes of aspiration and social satire already permeate his writing: in ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair’ the fashionable Marjorie attempts to turn her dowdy cousin into a debutante, before betraying her out of jealousy, while ‘The Ice Palace’ features a Southern belle whose engagement to a Northerner finds her confronted with a cultural clash between tradition and modernity • Also containing ‘The Offshore Pirate’, ‘Head and Shoulders’, ‘The Cut-Glass Bowl’, ‘Benediction’, ‘Dalyrimple Goes Wrong’ and ‘The Four Fists’, this volume of stories illustrates the early stages of Fitzgerald’s development as a writer and provides an entertaining chronicle of America in the 1910s

The career of Mikhail Bulgakov, the author of Master and Margarita - now regarded as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century literature - was characterized by a constant and largely unsuccessful struggle against state censorship. This suppression did not only apply to his art: in 1926 his personal diary was seized by the authorities. From then on he confined his thoughts to letters to his friends and family, as well as to public figures such as Stalin and his fellow Soviet writer Gorky, while also encouraging his wife Yelena to keep a diary, with many entries influenced or even dictated by him • This ample selection from the diaries and letters of the Bulgakovs, mostly translated for the first time into English, provides an insightful glimpse into a fascinating period of Russian history and literature, telling the tragic tale of the fate of an artist under a totalitarian regime

First published in 1861, Humiliated and Insulted plunges the reader into a world of moral degradation, childhood trauma, unrequited love and irreconcil­able relationships. At the centre of the story are a young struggling author, an orphaned teenager and a depraved aristocrat, who not only foreshadows the great figures of evil in Dostoevsky's later fiction, but is a powerful and original presence in his own right • This new translation catches the verve and tumult of the original, which – in concept and execution – affords a refreshingly unfamiliar glimpse of the author