Everyman Scottish Stories Buchan John, Scott Walter, Hogg James

This collection of Scottish short stories has been chosen to give as wide as possible a picture of Scottish fiction of the nineteenth century. Authors such as Walter Scott, James Hogg, John Galt, Margaret Oliphant and Robert Louis Stevenson are widely known as major figures outside Scotland, and this collection - which also includes stories from lesser-known authors such as W.E. Aytoun, James Grant, George McDonald, William Black and William Alexander - places them within the context and tradition of Scottish literature • This volume has been compiled and annotated by Douglas Gifford (former senior lecturer in English studies at the University of Strathclyde) for use in schools and universities as well as for general reading • Edited by Douglas Gifford

Генерал-майор сэр Ричард Ханней - вымышленный секретный агент, созданный писателем и дипломатом Джоном Бьюкеном, который сам был офицером разведки во время Первой мировой войны. Сильный и молчаливый тип, сочетающий суровый темперамент шотландца с упрямством англичанина, Ханней выделяется среди ранних героев шпионских триллеров. Оказавшись втянутым в первое из этих пяти захватывающих приключений незадолго до начала войны в 1914 году, ему удается сорвать коварный план врага и разгадать тайну Тридцати девяти ступеней. В Гринмантле он выполняет жизненно важную миссию по предотвращению джихада на исламском Ближнем Востоке. "Мистер Стэндфаст", действие которого происходит в решающие месяцы 1917-18 годов, - это роман, в котором Ханней, прожив жизнь "полностью среди людей", наконец влюбляется; позже, в "Трех заложниках", он обнаруживает, что с помощью своей жены распутывает тайну похищения

The sublime city of Venice has long offered inspiration to the world’s storytellers. This anthology gathers an array of dazzling stories with Venetian settings, including Daphne Du Maurier’s haunting 'Don’t Look Now', Anthony Trollope’s wartime romance 'The Last Austrian Who Left Venice' and Vernon Lee’s spine-chilling 'A Wicked Voice', together with scenes from Proust's In Search of Lost Time and from The Wings of the Dove, Henry James’s tale of passion and betrayal in a Venetian palazzo. The Venetian adventurer and diarist Giacomo Casanova describes his escape from the Doge’s prison in his amazing Memoirs, and there are enthralling contributions from Camillo Boito, Baron Corvo and Jeannette Winterson.In its multi-faceted portrait of La Serenissima,Venice Stories showcases a line-up of literary classics worthy of the magnificent city they celebrate

Love Stories brings together a captivating assortment of short stories inspired by romantic entanglement in its many forms: first love, infatuation, obsession, unrequited love, marriage, adultery, jealousy, and the complicated bonds of those who have spent their lives together. A tremendous array of writers evoke a variety of moods, from the raw, erotic passion of D. H. Lawrence and Colette to the wickedly cynical comedy of Dorothy Parker and Roald Dahl; from the agonizing madness of jealousy in Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘That in Aleppo Once . . .’ to the yearning romantic illusions in Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Winter Dreams’. Objects of passion include a glamorous silent-movie starlet in Elizabeth Bowen’s haunting ‘Dead Mabelle’, a faithful ghost in Yasunari Kawabata’s ‘Immortality’, and in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Bluebeard’s Egg’ a heart surgeon who spends his days penetrating the mysteries of the human heart but who seems oddly emotionally opaque himself

Horse Stories corrals two centuries of short fiction about the most majestic of domesticated animals. From writers old and new come stories of magnificent stallions, broken-down old nags, racehorses, ponies, cowboy's steeds, workhorses and beloved companions in a wide variety of literary styles. Rudyard Kipling transports us to the polo fields of India, Bret Harte to the ranches of the Wild West. Arthur Conan Doyle makes a famous thoroughbred disappear (or does he?), while Saki spins an amusing yarn about a notorious bolter. Isaac Babel tells of the horrors of war; Raymond Carver has a vision of runaway horses in the mist; Ted Hughes, Margaret Atwood and Jane Smiley explore the human passions horses can unleash. From the rollicking racetrack humour of Damon Runyon to the poignant lyricism of John Steinbeck, these stories testify to our varied and timeless fascination with the noble beast

The stories collected here--including such gems as Stephen Crane's "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," O. Henry's "The Marry Month of May," F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Bridal Party," Joy Williams's "The Wedding," and Lorrie Moore's "Thank You For Having Me", encompass comic wedding mishaps, engagements broken and mended, honeymoon adventures, and scenes both heartwarming and heartbreaking. There are glamorous weddings in Paris and New York, and more eccentric ones in the Wild West and on a remote island beach. There are nervous brides, forgetful grooms, meddling guests, interrupted nuptials, second thoughts, and second chances. Above all, there are all kinds of people - young and old, rich and poor, divorced and widowed, with or without children - joining together in the age-old quest for matrimonial happiness

These autobiographical stories about growing up in small-town Pennsylvania are among John Updike’s best, and were the closest to his heart • Selected by the author from his first eight years of work for The New Yorker, these tales set in the fictional town of Olinger were first gathered in one volume in 1964, in a paperback edition that has long been out of print. They are brought together again now - for the first time ever in hardcover - in a fiftieth-anniversary edition • The eleven stories include ‘Pigeon Feathers’ in which a farm boy’s innocent faith is tested by the seeming faithlessness of parents and clergy; ‘The Happiest I’ve Been’, a timeless tale of leaving home and taking the first steps towards adulthood; and ‘Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, A Dying Cat, A Traded Car’, a reverie on the everyday that is, magically, as detailed and eventful as any novel

Florence’s world-famous Renaissance is brought to life in this anthology through the eyes of its most illustrious chroniclers. Beginning with Dante’s vision of Inferno, teeming with his Florentine enemies, to the artist Cellini’s swashbuckling adventures in High Renaissance Italy, and including the pioneering writings of Boccaccio, Ficino, Guicciardini and Vasari, this selection shows that in literature, as in art, Florence was a trailblazer • The city’s long tradition of mesmerizing foreigners is celebrated in selections from Tobias Smollet, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence and Stendhal (whose rapturous impressions gave name to ‘Stendhal syndrome’), while indigenous writers such as Curzio Malaparte and Vasco Pratolini paint a far grittier portrait of Florence under the looming cloud of Fascism and World War II

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

The Golden City of Prague has long been an intellectual centre of the western world. The writers collected here range from the early nineteenth century to the present and include both Prague natives and visitors from elsewhere. Here are stories, legends, and scenes from the city's past and present, from the Jewish fable of the golem, a creature conjured from clay, to tales of German and Soviet invasions. The international array of writers ranges from Franz Kafka to Ivan Klнma to Bruce Chatwin, and includes the award-winning British playwright Tom Stoppard and former American Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, both of whom have Czech roots. Covering the city's venerable Jewish heritage, the glamour of the belle-йpoque period, World War II, Communist rule, the Prague Spring, the Velvet Revolution, and beyond, Prague Stories weaves a remarkable selection of fiction and nonfiction into a literary portrait of a fascinating city

During his most productive decade, the 1880s, Maupassant wrote more than 300 stories, including ‘Boule de Suif’, ‘The Necklace’, ‘The House of Madame Tellier’, ‘The Hand’, ‘The Horla’ and ‘Mademoiselle Fifi’. Marked by the psychological realism that he famously pioneered, the tales in this selection lead us on a tour of the human experience—lust and love, revenge and ridicule, terror and madness. Many take place in the author’s native Normandy, but the settings range farther abroad as well, from Brittany and Paris to Corsica and the Mediterranean coast, and even to North Africa and India. Maupassant’s remarkable range and ability to evoke an entire world in a few pages have ensured that his fiction has retained its power to entertain through generations of readers

Fishing Stories nets an abundant catch of wonderful writing in a wide variety of genres and styles. The moods range from the comedy of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘On Dry-Cow Fishing as a Fine Art’ and Jerome K. Jerome’s ‘Fishy’ to the rural gothic of Annie Proulx’s ‘The Wer-Trout’ and the haunting elegy of Norman Maclean’s ‘A River Runs Through It’ • Many of these tales celebrate human bonds forged over a rod, including Guy de Maupassant’s ‘Two Friends’, Jimmy Carter’s ‘Fishing with My Daddy’ and Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden. Some deal in reverence and romance, as in Roland Pertwee’s ‘The River God’, and some in adventure and the stuff of legend, as in Zane Grey’s ‘The First Thousand-Pounder’ and Ron Rash’s ‘Their Ancient, Glittering Eyes’. There are narratives that confront the heartbreaks and frustrations of the sport, from Thomas McGuane’s ‘The Longest Silence’, a meditation on long spells of inaction as the essence of fishing, to Raymond Carver’s masterpiece about a boy’s deflated triumph in ‘Nobody Said Anything’