Vintage books Street Haunting and Other Essays Woolf Virginia

По мнению Вирджинии Вулф, обыкновенный читатель – это человек, который читает «в свое удовольствие, а не ради того чтобы поделиться знаниями или уличить собратьев в неправильном суждении». Во второй том сборника «Обыкновенный читатель» вошли эссе, посвященные произведениям Джона Донна, Кристины Россетти и Мэри Уолстонкрафт, а также многих других поэтов и писателей. Сборник станет отличным подарком для поклонников творчества писательницы • Книга на английском языке • 'He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others' • So Virginia Woolf described the 'common reader' for whom she wrote her second series of essays. Here she turns her brilliant eye on novels and poetry from John Donne to Christina Rossetti and Mary Wollstonecraft as well as many others

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

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

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

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'

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

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

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

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

A great thinker's final testament: a characteristically wise and forthright collection of essays from the author of Postwar and Thinking the Twentieth Century that feels all the more potent and important in today’s political climate • Edited and introduced by Jennifer Homans • Tony Judt’s widow and fellow historian, Jennifer Homans, has gathered together important essays from the span of Judt’s career that chronicle both the evolution of his thought and the remarkable consistency of his passionate engagement and intellectual elan • Whether the subject is the scholarly poverty of the new social history, the willful blindness of French collective memory about what happened to the country’s Jews during World War II, or the moral challenge to Israel of the so-called Palestinian problem, the majesty of Tony Judt’s work lies in his combination of unsparing honesty, intellectual brilliance, and ethical clarity

Philip Roth's writing career spans a remarkable five decades, a period that has seen him rise to become one of the greatest chroniclers of post-war American life. Collected here are some of the finest interviews, essays and articles discussing his own fiction and the range of controversies that it sparked, including his long interview with the Paris Review. Here too are Roth's writings on American fiction, Milan Kundera, baseball, and his deep admiration for Franz Kafka. Coursing through each of these pieces is the Sheer Playfulness and Deadly Seriousness that have defined Roth's writing for half a century