20 Literature


Reading and writing letters punctuated the rhythms of his day, and he threw himself into creating epistles as energetically as he did into everything else. ‘I walk about brimful of letters’, he told a friend, and claimed to write ‘at the least a dozen a day’. This eagerly awaited selection takes us straight to the heart of his life - the nearest we can get to an autobiography containing close- up snapshots of a life lived at maximum intensity. Here he is writing out of the heat of the moment, not only as a novelist, journalist, magazine editor, social campaigner and traveller in Europe and America, but also as friend, lover, husband and father. Just sometimes it was a bit of a chore, but more often a delight, an outlet for high spirits, sparkling wit and caustic commentary. Whether you dip in or read straight through, this selection of his letters creates afresh the brilliance of being Dickens, and the sheer pleasure of being in his company. 458 pages with a chronology of Charles Dickens and a list of abbreviations and symbols. £20 NOW £11


76524 THE SPELL by Charlotte Brontë


When the infant Marquis of Almeida is pronounced dead, the kingdoms of Wellingtonsland and Angria are deprived of their heir. Anxious to secure the nations’ future security, King Zamorna’s advisors entreat him to name his successor. When Zamorna himself succumbs to a mysterious and life-threatening sickness, the need becomes more crucial. Confusion turns to political


intrigue as those closest to Zamorna wonder exactly what it is he knows and who precisely are the mysterious characters that surround him. An ingenious and highly imaginative early novella and a remarkable tale of love and jealousy, rivalry and thwarted ambition. With a foreword by Nicola Barker. 136pp in paperback. £6.99 NOW £3


76532 MEMOIRS OF A


NOVELIST by Virginia Woolf From Victorian England to 15th century Norfolk, and pre-war London to Mount Pentelicus, Virginia Woolf offers a series of fictional impressions of women finding their place in the world around them. This collection of five early stories explores the role of women in society. At once exquisitely drawn and brilliantly


haunting, these snapshots are a remarkable testament to the powers of her writing and an insight into her perennial interests, namely her fascination with the role of the biographer, the literature of Greece, and the loneliness of early 20th century London. 96 page paperback.


£7.99 NOW £3


76534 WINTRY PEACOCK by D. H. Lawrence


Wounded while fighting in WW1, Alfred returns to his wife and family in their rural England home. Yet days before his arrival, his wife opens a letter that betrays his elicit relationship with a young Belgian girl. So begins the first of a series of stories in which men and women struggle to reconcile the demands of family and freedom in the midst of the injuries and deaths, infidelities and absences bought on by the


war. Including England, My England, The Blind Man and You Touched Me, this early selection of stories from one of the 20th century’s foremost writers explores themes that were dear to D. H. Lawrence. 110pp in paperback.


£7.99 NOW £3


76629 TALE OF THE HEIKE translated by Royall Tyler Here is the original Samurai saga of pride, romance and warfare from medieval Japan. An epic story from the 14th century about the 12th century wars between the Heike and Genji clans, it is a masterpiece of Japanese culture. We meet the ruthless warlord Kiyomori who dies burning with such rage that water poured on him boils; Hotoke, the beautiful young


dancer who renounces wealth and fame to follow her conscience; Shigemori, the tyrant’s righteous son, who struggles against all odds to uphold fairness and justice; and Yoshitsune, the daring commander who defeats the enemy in battle after battle, only to be condemned by his jealous, powerful brother. Rich in scenes of battle and warfare, the tale evokes human drama, suffering, separation, love, loss and loyalty and no other single work of literature has influenced subsequence theatre, literature and music in Japan as this. Here is the landmark translation in an edition to be treasured. With genealogies, many maps and an explanation of hours, eras and emperors. 734pp. £30 NOW £8


74293 ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, Jnr, JOURNALS 1952-2000


edited by Andrew and Stephen Schlesinger ‘Nixon doesn’t lie. He invents his own truths,’ remarked Henry Kissinger to Arthur Schlesinger, just one among hundreds of witticisms recorded by this great political diarist. A Harvard academic who dined with celebrities from Bogart and Bacall to Igor Stravinsky, Arthur M. Schlesinger became a special adviser and speechwriter to J. F. Kennedy and was a minority voice urging caution during the Cuban crisis. Although a political disaster, Cuba unexpectedly improved Kennedy’s popularity. Schlesinger hears the terrible news of Kennedy’s assassination. He works all night on the funeral arrangements. Schlesinger remained at the centre of Democratic politics and his acerbity does not diminish with age. 894pp, paperback. £15.99 NOW £3


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76322 TALES FROM SHAKESPEARE by Charles and Mary Lamb


You cannot prise this volume out of our Annie’s hands! Shakespeare’s favourite plays are all here starting with The Tempest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Cymbeline, King Lear, The Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet and ending with Pericles Prince of Tyre among the 20 chosen and abridged in this Charles and Mary Lamb text from the first US edition published in 1907. Black and white head and tale pieces in beautiful woodcuts are by Frank Papé and 50 colour illustrations by various artists like W. Heath Robinson, Charles Folkard, Edmund Dulac, Norman Price and Arthur Rackham appear in full page colour plates. These abridgements are universally popular and this is one to replace your battered copy or pass down to the next generation. It is certainly one for every household’s bookcase. Unjacketed hardback, 7" x 10" on heavy premium 150gsm paper, 360pp with Folkard endpapers. £37.99 NOW £12.50


75308 SCARLET LETTER by Nathanial Hawthorne


‘The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread.’ With watermarked endpapers, black bonded leather, decorated spine and satin bookmark, this classic novel will remind you about with the following few chapter headings - The Prison Door, The Interview, Hester at her Needle, The Elf- Child and the Minister and The Leech and His Patient. 233pp in most elegant hardback. $18 NOW £4


73939 CHARLES DICKENS by Michael Slater The main focus of this magisterial biography is on Dickens’s career as writer and editor, involving letters, journalism, shorter fiction, essays, satirical verses, writings for children, travel books and so on, as well as the celebrated after-dinner speeches and a script prepared for his readings. The book highlights his boundless energy, fascination with disorder, organisational genius, the ruling classes’ indifference towards the plight of the poor, his love of fairy tales and of the theatre as great nourishers of the human imagination, and his hatred of tyranny. Many unfamiliar images and 32 pages of plates. 696pp. £28 NOW £7


74506 NO WAY BACK by Theodor Fontane Set in Copenhagen and Schleswig-Holstein on the eve of the Prussian takeover of the territory in 1864, affable but unsophisticated Count Holk of an ancient family is inspired by a romantic ballad to leave the modest but comfortable ancestral Schloss where he and his wife Christine have spent an idyllic early married life. He plans to build a new, architecturally ambitious castle by the sea, yet is unaware how the ballad ends. As a gentleman-in-waiting to a Danish royal princess, he is summoned to a six month spell of duty in Copenhagen where the rural Count falls into beguiling company, and his life begins to spiral out of control. 256pp. Paperback.


£11.95 NOW £1.50 46366 THE WORDSWORTH


BOOK OF HORROR STORIES Many classics and lesser-known gems unearthed from this vintage era of the supernatural. From time immemorial, man the world over has drawn upon the worst fears of his conscious and subconscious mind to furnish legends of terrror. In this volume authors such as M.R.James, Le Fanu, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Bierce,


Balzac, Gaskell, and many others invite you to close the curtains, lock the doors, draw the armchair closer to the blazing fire and settle down to a spine-chilling read. 1216 page paperback. ONLY £6


59993 WINGS OF THE DOVE by Henry James A tale of desire and possession, of love and death. An unspeakable subtext lies beneath the silence. It centres on ‘the dying girl who wants to live - to live and love.’ But those closest to her are in competition for what she can leave behind. Milly Theale, ‘the heiress of all the ages’, is imaged as a dove, a princess, a Renaissance beauty, but these symbols come at a dreadful cost. By the end of the novel we know, ‘We shall never be again as we were!’ With an introduction by Nicola Bradbury and Notes. 431pp in paperback. ONLY £2


75237 ARROW OF GOLD: A Story Between Two Notes


by Joseph Conrad


During the Carlist war of the early 1870s, a young sailor, the unnamed protagonist, joins the champions of Don Carlos de Bourbon, pretender to the throne of Spain. The Carlists use the eager youth’s intense attraction to the sea to persuade him to run perilous enterprises for their cause after he had hinted at being involved in vaguely illegal enterprises in the Gulf of Mexico. He later learns that he has been financed by the beautiful mistress and heiress of a rich man’s fortune, Donã Rita. When he falls in love with her, he finds himself moved absolutely by this discovery, despite the fact that this love is unrequited. In the end he is left alone with his first love, the sea. 385pp in facsimile reprinted paperback of the 1919 original. $19.95 NOW £3


62725 A TO Z OF ENGLISH LITERATURE by David Rothwell


David Rothwell’s book is an idiosyncratic and light- hearted review of all that is great (and not so great) about the major figures of English Literature, and provides lucid and entertaining explanations of every literary form and technique. It concentrates on providing examples of prose and poetry that help to understand the essence of the work. With their total lack of any pretence of neutrality, you may not always agree but you can hardly fail to be informed and entertained by his views. 384pp, paperback. ONLY £2.50


73735 RESURRECTION by Leo Tolstoy With an introduction by Anthony Briggs. This powerful novel, Tolstoy’s third major masterpiece, after War and Peace and Anna Karenina, begins with a courtroom drama (the finest in Russian literature) based on a real- life event. Dmitri Nekhlyudov, called to jury service, is astonished to see in the dock, charged with murder, a young woman whom he once seduced, propelling her into prostitution. She is found guilty on a technicality, and he determines to overturn the verdict. This pitches him into a hellish labyrinth of Russian courts, prisons and bureaucracy. Proceeds from brothel to court-room, stinking cells to offices of state, luxury apartments to filthy life in Siberia. Paperback, 466pp. ONLY £2


74726 SO LONG AS MEN CAN BREATHE: The Untold Story of Shakespeare’s Sonnets by Clinton Heylin


Depicts the monopolising grip that the Stationers’ Company had on English publishing, and the ‘unholy alliance’ of Thomas Thorpe - publisher, George Eld - ‘booklegger’ extraordinaire and William Aspley - mysterious bookseller. The result is not only a fascinating look into the world of Elizabethan publishing but also the revelation that Shakespeare neither authorized nor knew about the first publication of the Sonnets. But that is not all. Also on this entertaining menu are an adversarial debate on the autobiographical nature of the poems and a chart of their many editions. 280 pages with all of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets. $24 NOW £4.50


74973 MARK TWAIN’S MEDIEVAL ROMANCE edited by Otto Penzler


This premier anthology includes tales from Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl, Aldous Huxley, Frank Stockton, O. Henry and more. Here is Frank Stockton’s famous and unforgettable ‘The Lady, or the Tiger?’ and which of the two brothers in Stanley Ellin’s ‘Unreasonable Doubt’ shoots a bullet square in the middle of their rich uncle’s forehead? Read the chilling tale that seals an escape artist inside an airless stone cell with a heavy wooden door. These devious, classic stories leave you, the reader, to determine how they each end. 301pp. £18.99 NOW £3


74986 RICHARD LEDERER’S CLASSIC


LITERARY TRIVIA by Richard Lederer Grouped into three: The Bible, Mythology and Shakespeare. Good words from the good book, holy Moses, test your mythology IQ, mythic headlines, and the world of Shakespeare, living Will, bomb-Bard-ment, a man of many titles and not a passing phrase. All for one, one for all, to the manor born, more in sorrow than in anger, cudgel thy brains to complete the expressions that first saw the light in the other plays of William Shakespeare. Full of games, facts, riddles and jokes. 112pp in paperback, illus. £4.99 NOW £1.75


75001 DALKEY ARCHIVE by Flann O’Brien James Joyce turns up alive and well, serving drinks in an Irish pub and claiming that Ulysses was only a practical joke. St. Augustine is interrogated in an underwater cave where he announces: ‘I was a man that was very easily sunburnt.’ Though a mad scientist named De Selby is bent on destroyIng the human race, Mick and Hackett, the only men who can save us, are too preoccupied with the lovely Mary to concentrate on foiling him. Deriding and skewering everyone - scientists, philosophers, writers, drunkards, and priests to name only a few, Flann O’Brien’s last novel is both sublime and ridiculous. 204pp in facsimile reprinted paperback of the 1964 original. $12.95 NOW £3


75055 THE HUNDRED DAYS by Joseph Roth By the author of ‘The Antichrist’ and ‘The Radetzky March’ this is Roth’s story of Bonaparte’s last snatch at glory. It is framed both through the eyes of Bonaparte himself and those of his long-infatuated Corsican laundress, Angelina, with rather more said by her about the Emperor’s dirty handkerchiefs than the Duke of Wellington. The novel provides an arch and moving look at Napoleon’s seemingly triumphant return to Paris from exile in March 1815. Before one hundred days have elapsed however, fate and war have squashed his ambitions and shattered the life of his laundress. 219pp, paperback.


£9.99 NOW £3


75271 GAP IN THE CURTAIN by John Buchan What begins as a welcome if slightly dull weekend at his friend Lady Flambard’s house in the Cotswolds, becomes for Sir Edward Leithen something altogether more intriguing. A fellow guest, the brilliant Professor Moe, enlists his help in an experiment. If they do as he says, each participant will get a glimpse a year into the future in the pages of The Times. One of John Buchan’s most unusual novels, this is a tense tale of the unexpected. 219pp in paperback with new introduction. £7.99 NOW £4


75754 SPOKEN WORD: Poems and Short


Stories: Two CDs by Ted Hughes Produced in association with The British Library, these radio broadcasts of the poet Ted Hughes introducing and reading selections from his poems and short stories include The Harvesting, Snow, Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, Remains of Elmet, Moortown Diary, Earth-numb, Adam and the Sacred Nine. With running time 143 minutes on two compact discs, the collection includes previously unreleased recordings. $24.95 NOW £7


Virago Modern Classics


76590 THE RIVER by Rumer Godden Born in Sussex but raised in India where Rumer Godden ran a dance school from 1925, she went to live on a houseboat in Kashmir in 1942. She was the acclaimed author of over 60 works of fiction and non-fiction. Here is her classic coming-of-age story. Harriet’s older sister is no longer a playmate, her brother is still a little boy, the comforting rhythm of her Indian childhood, the sounds of the Jute factory, the


colourful festivals and the eternal ebb and flow of the river on its journey to the Bay of Bengal, is about to be shattered by a tragic event. Intense, vivid and with a dark undertow, the novel is a poignant portrait of three siblings on the cusp of adulthood. A book to make you laugh, cry and change you forever. 204pp. £12.99 NOW £5


76598 TIPPING THE VELVET by Sarah Waters


‘Have you ever tasted a Whitstable oyster? If you have, you will remember it.’ ‘I was raised an oyster- girl, and steeped in all the flavours of the trade. My first few childish steps I took around vats of sleeping natives and barrels of ice.’ Another classic coming-of- age story by the Sunday Times bestselling author, and an unstoppable read. ‘Piercing the shadows of the naked stage was a single shaft or rosy limelight, and in the centre of this was a girl; the most marvellous girl - I knew it at once! - that I had ever seen.’ A saucy, sensuous and multi-layered historical romance set in the ‘roaring’ 1890s, the novel follows Nan King on her journey from Whitstable to the star of the music hall, to cross-dressing rent boy to East End ‘tom’. Well known for its lesbian content. 473pp. £12.99 NOW £5


76565 GOOD BEHAVIOUR by Molly Keane Another Virago Modern Classic with a cover design entitled Bunny Dance by Eley Kishimoto in a bold and appealing black and white graphic. Molly Keane (1904- 1996) was born in Ireland and was interested in ‘horses and having a good time.’ She became well known for her acuteness and good-tempered satire of the portrayals of ramshackle Anglo-Irish way of life. This novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and is here introduced by Maggie O’Farrell. It was the actress Peggy Ashcroft who chanced upon the manuscript of this novel languishing in a drawer and urged Keane to submit it for publication. The characters are glass-clear, the dialogue piercingly accurate, the pacing leisurely, the prose deceptively delicate with the sting of a scorpion. The novel begins with a murder. Aroon St Charles is struggling for supremacy over her mother’s lunch try with the servant, Rose. She has prepared a rabbit mousse for Mummie but Rose objects, saying that ‘rabbit sickens her’. She serves her mother the mousse at which point Mummie protests, vomits and dies. But worse is to come. Boys are beaten for reading poetry, dogs are fed chicken while the servants are forced to eat laundry starch to stave off hunger, terrified children are put on horses at a remarkably young age and a nanny is dismissed for drunkenness. Papa has affairs with the staff right under Mummie’s nose but nothing is said. A beloved governess commits suicide but nothing is said. The son of the house is killed but nothing is said. ‘We exchanged cool, warning looks.’ The unspoken hangs like smoke in the rooms and corridors of Temple Alice. 291pp. £12.99 NOW £5


76574 INVITATION TO THE WALTZ by Rosamond Lehmann


Rosamond Lehmann (1901-90) had her writing reputation firmly established with the publication of A Note In Music in 1930 and this coming-of-age classic. On her 17th birthday, Olivia Curtis receives a diary for her innermost thoughts, a ten shilling note and a role of flame-coloured silk for her first ball dress. She anticipates the dance, the greatest and most terrifying event of her life so far, with uncertainty and excitement. For her pretty sister Kate, it is sure to be a triumph, but what will it be for shy, awkward Olivia? Lehmann always wrote brilliantly of women in love, of mothers and daughters. 232pp. £12.99 NOW £5


76759 VIRAGO MODERN CLASSICS: Set of 4 Buy the set at an extra special discounted price. £51.96 NOW £16.50


76064 BOOK OF HORRORS edited by Stephen Jones


An original anthology of all-new horror and dark fantasy fiction in all its magnificent guises by those devoted to the Dark Side. Stephen King’s The Little Green God of Agony, Peter Crowther’s Ghosts with Teeth, Angela Slatter’s The Coffin-Maker’s Daughter, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s The Music of Bengt Karlsson, Murderer and Lisa Tuttle’s The Man in the Ditch are among the 14 spine-chilling short stories. From classic pulp style to more contemporary psychological tales, one to keep by the bedside if you don’t want to sleep at night! 430pp. £18.99 NOW £6


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