In this novel, set in the 15th century during the Hundred Years War between France and England, Hella Haasse brilliantly captures all the drama of one of the great ages of history.
This, the first in the splendid series of Jack Aubrey novels, establishes the friendship between Captain Aubrey, R.N., and Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon and intelligence agent, against a thrilling backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Details of a life aboard a man-of-war in Nelson's navy are faultlessly rendered: the conversational idiom of the officers in the ward room and the men on the lower deck, the food, the floggings, the mysteries of the wind and the rigging, and the roar of broadsides as the great ships close in battle.
If Stephen King could write with murderous concision, he might have come up with The Landlady, the story of a boarding house with an oddly talented proprietress and a small but permanent clientele. If Clive Barker had a sense of humor, he might have written Pig, a brutally funny look at cooks and vegetarianism. And a more bloodthirsty Jorge Luis Borges might have imagined the fanatical little gambler in Man From the South, who does his betting with a hammer, nails, and a butcher knife.
But all these stories in this volume were written by Roald Dahl, whose genius for the horrific and grotesque is unparalleled and entirely his own. Dahl has the mastery of plot and characters possessed by great writers of the past, along with a wildness and wryness of his own. One of his trademarks is writing beautifully about the ugly, even the horrible.--Los Angeles Times An ingenious imagination, a fascination with odd and ordinary detail, and a lust for its thorough exploitation are the...strengths of Dahl's storytelling.--New York Times Book Review
The collected tales of America's foremost master of mystery and the macabre in one handsome volume - - 67 tales and 30 poems in all. You'll find such classic tales as "The Fall of the House of Usher, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Masque of the Red Death, The Pit and the Pendulum" and many, many more. What collection would be complete without the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe which includes "The Raven, Annabel Lee, A Dream Within a Dream, The Haunted Palace" just to name a few of the 30 poems include in this Library of Literary Classics edition. Other titles in this series include: Charlotte & Emily Bronte: The Complete Novels; Charles Dickens: Four Complete Novels; Mark Twain: Selected Works; Jane Austen: The Complete Novels: Lewis Carroll: The Complete, Fully Illustrated Works; and William Shakespeare: The Complete Works. This Library of Literary Classics edition is bound in padded leather with luxurious gold-stamping on the front and spine, satin ribbon marker and gilded edges.
In his second collection, including the iconic and much-referenced title story featured in the Academy Award-winning film Birdman, Carver establishes his reputation as one of the most celebrated short-story writers in American literature--a haunting meditation on love, loss, and companionship, and finding one's way through the dark.
"It takes skill to depict, as Miss Renault has done, this half-man, half Courtesan who is so deeply in love with the warrior."-The Atlantic Monthly
The Persian Boy traces the last years of Alexander's life through the eyes of his lover, Bagoas. Abducted and gelded as a boy, Bagoas was sold as a courtesan to King Darius of Persia, but found freedom with Alexander after the Macedon army conquered his homeland. Their relationship sustains Alexander as he weathers assassination plots, the demands of two foreign wives, a sometimes-mutinous army, and his own ferocious temper. After Alexander's mysterious death, we are left wondering if this Persian boy understood the great warrior and his ambitions better than anyone.
Here are the original Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle as they first appeared in the famed British magazine The Strand. This periodical was the literary sensation of its time, especially with the publication of the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles (which appears in its entirety in this volume), when eager readers lined up outside the magazine's London offices, waiting for each installment as it came off press.This edition contains 37 short stories, reproduced in complete facsimile (published in individual volumes as "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes", The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes", and "The Return of Sherlock Holmes"), plus the complete novel The Hound of the Baskervilles. Today, the collection of the original issues of The Strand containing the Holmes stories is a rare collector's piece. It is brought to you now, complete and unabridged, comprising a total of well over 600 pages, providing the undying excitement and fascination of each and every Sherlock Holmes Adventure. The drawings of Sidney Paget illustrate the stories--illustrations as immortal as the stories themselves. Paget produced more than 350 Sherlock Holmes illustrations, and it was his depictions which gave Holmes visual reality for everyone, which projected him throughout the world, and which today still provide the mold of the original hero in production on stage, screen and television.
