Vintage books The Complete Stories Кафка Франц

The complete novels of one of the greatest German writers of all time, collected together in one literary masterpiece • Kafka’s characters are victims of forces beyond their control, estranged and rootless citizens deceived by authoritarian power. Filled with claustrophobic description and existential profundity, Kafka has been compared to a literary Woody Allen • In The Trial Joseph K is relentlessly hunted for a crime that remains nameless • The Castle follows K in his ceaseless attempts to enter the castle and to belong somewhere • In Amerika Karl Rossmann also finds himself isolated and confused when he is 'packed off to America by his parents'. Here, ordinary immigrants are also strange, and 'America' is never quite as real as it seems

The Complete Stories gathers together Anita Desai's short story collections Diamond Dust and Games at Twilight and the novellas of The Artist of Disappearance, with a new preface from the author. From the icy suburbs of Canada to the overcrowded B&Bs of Cornwall, via the hill towns and cities of India, Anita Desai observes human behaviour unflinchingly but not unkindly, recognising our ordinariness and our strangeness, and capturing both with quiet precision

Franz Kafka's letters to his one-time muse, Milena Jesenska - an intimate window into the desires and hopes of the twentieth-century's most prophetic and important writer • Kafka first made the acquaintance of Milena Jesenska in 1920 when she was translating his early short prose into Czech, and their relationship quickly developed into a deep attachment. Such was his feeling for her that Kafka showed her his diaries and, in doing so, laid bare his heart and his conscience. While at times Milena's 'genius for living' gave Kafka new life, it ultimately exhausted him, and their relationship was to last little over two years. In 1924 Kafka died in a sanatorium near Vienna, and Milena died in 1944 at the hands of the Nazis, leaving these letters as a moving record of their relationship

Your favourite fantastic Grimm fairy tales and bedtime stories in the only complete edition of this classic collection • Wolves and grandmothers, ugly sisters, a house made of bread, a goose made of gold...the folk tales collected by the Grimm brothers created an astonishingly influential imaginative world. However, this is also a world where a woman serves her stepson up in a stew, a man marries a snake, a princess sleeps with a frog, and an evil queen dances to death in a pair of burning shoes. Violent, funny, disturbing, wise and sometimes beautiful, these stories have intrigued children, adults, scholars, psychologists and artists for centuries • The only complete edition available of the most famous collection of fairy tales ever published, this collection features the 279 stories in an acclaimed, modern, unexpurgated translation

Two men meet for a pint in a Dublin pub • In 2012, Roddy Doyle showed us the world anew: through the back-and-forth of two Dublin pub-dwellers. They chewed the fat, set the world to rights, slagged each other unmercifully. And along the way, they chased the ebb and flow and stupidity of the year right to the bottom of their pints • Today, they're still at it - even over Zoom, if needs be. Collected for the first time, here is almost a decade's worth of elections and referendums, births and deaths, football, financial crashes, pandemics and the philosophical questions of life, as told through the wit and warmth of Roddy Doyle's comic genius • Includes: Two Pints, Two More Pints, Two for the Road - and, for the first time in print, Two Pints: The Play and The Zoom Pints

Discover a powerful collection of the hardships, hairbreadth escapes, and mortal struggles of enslaved people seeking freedom: These are the true stories of the Underground Railroad • A secret network of safe houses, committees and guides that stretched well below the Mason-Dixon Line into the brutal slave states of the American South, the Underground Railroad remains one of the most impressive and well-organised resistance movements in modern history. It facilitated the escape of over 30,000 slave 'passengers' through America and into Canada during its peak years of 1850-60, and, in total, an estimated 100,000 slaves found their freedom through the network • Abridged from William Still's The Underground Railroad Records - an epic historical document that chronicles the first-hand stories of American slaves who escaped to freedom via the Underground Railroad - Passengers tells of the secret methods, risks and covert sacrifices that were made to liberate so many from slavery

The Essential Hemingway brings together a wide selection of Hemingway's works, providing the perfect introduction to his extensive writing. The collection includes the full text of Fiesta, Hemingway's first major novel; long extracts from his three greatest works of fiction, A Farewell to Arms, To Have and Have Not and For Whom the Bell Tolls; twenty-five complete short stories; and the breathtaking epilogue to Death in the Afternoon

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

The text message arrives in the small hours of the morning: I need you • Isa drops everything, takes her baby daughter and heads straight to Salten. She spent the most significant days of her life at boarding school on the marshes there, days which still cast their shadow over her • Isa and her three best friends used to play the Lying Game, competing to convince people of outrageous stories. Now, after seventeen years of hiding the truth, something terrible has been found on the beach. The friends' darkest secret is about to come to light

The Hill of Evil Counsel is a fusion of history and imaginative narrative, re-creating the twilight world of Jerusalem during the fading days of the British Mandate. In these three closely linked stories, Oz vividly evokes the stifling atmosphere of impending crisis as real personalities rub shoulders with fictional characters whose hopes and fears are hauntingly portrayed

The Ds can't wait to go and stay with Nancy and Peggy in the Lake District during the summer holidays. But when the Amazons’ dreadful Great Aunt invites herself to stay too, the summer is threatened with dullness. Staying indoors and reading poetry is not what anyone had in mind. To save the Ds from total boredom, the Amazons arrange for their friends to stay in a tumble-down hut in the woods. And as long as no one discovers they're there they can sail all summer long • In the Backstory you can learn how to make a campfire! • Vintage Children’s Classics is a twenty-first century classics list aimed at 8-12 year olds and the adults in their lives

'The Anatomy Lesson is a ferocious, heartfelt book - lavish with laughs and flamboyant inventions' John Updike • With his fortieth birthday receding into the distance, along with his hairline and his most successful novel, the writer Nathan Zuckerman comes down with a mysterious affliction – pure pain, beginning in his neck and shoulders, invading his torso, and taking possession of his spirit. Zuckerman, whose work was his life, finds himself physically unable to write a line • He treks from one doctor to another, but none can find a cause for the pain and nobody can assuage it. Could it be, he wonders to himself, that the cause of the pain is nothing less than the books he has written? • As he grapples with this possibility, he tries an onslaught of painkillers, then vodka, and finally marijuana