Vintage books Blank Pages and Other Stories MacLaverty Bernard

The extraordinary new story collection from one of Ireland's greatest writers and bestselling author of Mindwinter Break • Bernard MacLaverty is a consummately gifted short-story writer and novelist whose work - like that of John McGahern, William Trevor, Edna O'Brien or Colm Toibin - is deceptively simple on the surface, but carries a turbulent undertow. Everywhere, the dark currents of violence, persecution and regret pull at his subject matter: family love, the making of art, Catholicism, the Troubles and, latterly, ageing • Blank Pages is a collection of twelve extraordinary new stories that show the emotional range of a master. 'Blackthorns', for instance, tells of a poor out-of-work Catholic man who falls gravely ill in the sectarian Northern Ireland of 1942 but is brought back from the brink by an unlikely saviour

Студенты и журналисты, фермеры и орнитологи, бывшие жены, влюбленные подростки и танцовщицы • Все они – самые обычные люди…или нет? • «Пожирательница грехов» – это сборник коротких рассказов Маргарет Этвуд, автора бестселлеров «Рассказ служанки» и «Заветы». В произведениях канадской писательницы раскрываются все сложности человеческих взаимоотношений, а их персонажи вызывают у читателей широкий спектр эмоций – от смеха и сострадания до страха и уважения • Книга на английском языке • From the international bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale, Dancing Girls and Other Stories showcases Margaret Atwood's masterly skill for storytelling • Students, journalists, farmers, birdwatchers, ex-wives, adolescent lovers - and dancing girls. All ordinary people

Two sisters quarrel over an inheritance and a new baby. A housekeeper caring for a helpless old man uncovers secrets from his past. A young girl accepts a lift in a car with a group of strangers. An old friend brings bad news to a dinner party • In these gripping and unsettling stories, the ordinary is made extraordinary and the real things that happen to people turn out to be every bit as mysterious as their dreams

There is a sequestered glen off the east coast of the Hudson, New York state, which has long continued under the sway of some witching power; the neighbourhood abounds with tales, haunted spots and twilight superstitions. But as hapless schoolmaster Ichabod Crane will discover, the wildest of all stories in this region of shadows relate to one particularly dreadful spectre - the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow • Washington Irving's comic horror story is the best known of this collection of stories, observations and sketches written on his travels around Britain and America in the eighteenth century. Also includes 'Rip Van Winkle' and 'Little Britain'

These are stories of women's lives now. They also happen to be horror stories. In some, women endure the horror. In others, they inflict it • Here are women at work, at home, on dates, at the doctor's, with their families and with their friends. Here are women grappling with desire, punishment, guilt and anger. These are stories to make you feel fascinated but repelled, scared but delighted, revolted but aroused

The breathtaking short story collection from the Costa-shortlisted Irish writer • Three gunshots on the Irish border define the course of a young man's life; a writer clings fast to a star-crossed affair with a woman who has never been fully in his reach; a fisherman accustomed to hard labour rolls up his sleeves to dig a grave for his child; a pair of newly-weds embark on their first adventure, living wild on the deserted Beginish Island • Spanning a century and two continents - from the muddy fields of Ireland to a hotel room in Paris, a dingy bar in Segovia to an aeroplane bound for Taipei - these densely layered tales reveal the quiet heroism and gentle dignity of ordinary life. Ranging from the elegiac to the brutally confrontational, Billy O'Callaghan's stories explore the resilience of the human heart and its ability to keep beating even in the wake of grief, trauma and lost love

A spectacular display of this key European writer's early work • This dazzling collection of stories follows the individual adventures of a varied cast of characters and masterfully illustrates Calvino's unique perspective and narrative gifts. As well as the thirteen tales from his Difficult Loves collection this volume also includes Smog and A Plunge into Real Estate

'Cracking prose - highly inventive, inimitably stylish and funny' The Times • In Martin Amis's short stories whole worlds are created - or inverted. In 'Straight Fiction', everyone is gay, apart from the beleaguered 'straight' community; in 'Career Move', screenplay writers submit their works to little magazines, while poets are flown first-class to Los Angeles; in 'The Janitor of Mars', a sardonic robot gives us some strange news about life in the solar system. In 'Let Me Count the Times' a man has a mad affair with himself. 'Heavy Water', portrays the exhaustion of working-class culture, and 'State of England' its weird resuscitation. And in 'The Coincidence of the Arts' an English baronet becomes entangled with an African-American chess hustler

После смерти отца Вирджиния Вулф устроилась в The Guardian. За время ее работы в газете вышло немало статей и рецензий, которые отражают мнение писательницы по ряду вопросов, связанных с литературой и обществом, а также позволяют отследить ее становление как известной и гениальной романистки. В сборник Street Haunting and Other Essays вошли одни из самых интересных и увлекательных работ Вулф – от эссе о классовой стратификации и ироничных рецензий до описания жизни выдающихся людей и «Долгой прогулки», в которой писательница проводит читателей по своему району в Лондоне • Книга на английском языке • Virginia Woolf began writing reviews for the Guardian 'to make a few pence' from her father's death in 1904, and continued until the last decade of her life

Enter the gas-lit streets of post-war Prague, the steelworks run by singed men, the covered market that smells of new-born babes, the cacophonous open-air dance hall. Mr Kafka is avoiding his landlady’s blueberry wine breath, a stonemason witnesses the destruction of a monument to Stalin he risked his life to build, and factory men strain to catch a glimpse of a beautiful bathing murderess. In these newly discovered stories, Hrabal captures men and women in an eerily beautiful nightmare and their spirit in all its misery and splendour

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author of one of the most poignant and enduringly popular novels of the twentieth century, left only a few other pieces of fiction when he died prematurely at the age of sixty. Childhood Memories and Other Stories, here presented in a new translation by Stephen Parkin and including previously deleted passages and the unpublished fragment ‘Torretta’, collects all of Lampedusa’s extant shorter fiction and provides a revealing glimpse into the writer’s workshop and the background to the composition of his masterpiece • From the atmospheric recollections of the Palazzo Lampedusa and the Palazzo Filangeri Cuto at the turn of the twentieth century in ‘Childhood Memories’ to the delightful fable ‘The Siren’, from the gently humorous, bitter­sweet tones of ‘Joy and the Law’ to ‘The Blind Kittens’ – the first chapter of what was intended to be a sequel to The Leopard – this volume showcases Lampedusa’s unparalleled ob­ser­vational powers and narrative skills

When the young salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning transformed into a monstrous insect, his shock and incomprehension are coupled with the panic of being late for work and having to reveal his appearance to family and colleagues. Although over the following weeks he gradually becomes used to this new existence confined within the bounds of the apartment, and his parents and sister adapt to living with a grotesque bug, Gregor notices that their attitudes towards him are changing and he feels increasingly alienated • One of the masterpieces of twentieth-century world literature, ‘The Metamorphosis’ is accompanied in this volume by a selection of other classic tales and sketches by Kafka – such as ‘The Judgement’, ‘In the Penal Colony’ and ‘A Country Doctor’ – all presented in a lively and meticulous new translation by Christopher Moncrieff