Picador

The drama begins with a Yuletide gathering in an eerie country retreat that's rumored to be haunted. There, Dickens and his friends, including acclaimed authors Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins, take on the task of finding evidence of a supernatural presence in the house. When they reconvene at a Twelfth Night feast to review their findings, what will their stories reveal?

Dazzling and unmistakable in style, resonant in meaning, Jorge Luis Borges' 'The Aleph and Other Stories' contains the best of Borges' fiction. Included also is a lengthy autobiographical essay written especially for this volume. The twenty stories in this book cover the whole span and all the various facets of Borges' forty-year career as a short story writer.

A curse laid on the inhabitants of Hoot Owl Holler follows each succeeding generation for a century, in a tale of love, murder, obsession, and betrayal set in Appalachia.

The last uncollected Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The marriage was the talk of London. She had risen from serving girl to mistress of the manor. It appeared to be the Cinderella story come to life --but none knew that Sabine was with child.

Contains: Before dark (1893) / by Marcel Proust ; translated by Richard Howard -- Mabel Neathe (1903) / by Gertrude Stein -- Prologue to Women in love (1921) / by D.H. Lawrence -- Miss Ogilvy finds herself (1926) / by Radclyffe Hall -- Arthur Snatchfold (1928) / by E.M. Forster -- Divorce in Naples (1931) / by William Faulkner -- Just boys (1931-1934) / by James T. Farrell -- The knife of the times (1932) / by William Carlos Williams -- The sea change / by Ernest Hemingway -- Momma (1947) / by John Horne Burns -- Pages from Cold Point (1950) / by Paul Bowles -- Letters and life (1952) / by Christopher Isherwood -- My brother writes poetry for an Englishman (1953) / by Marris Murray -- Two on a party (1954) / by Tennessee Williams -- You may safely gaze (1956) / by James Purdy -- Pages from an abandoned journal (1956) / by Gore Vidal -- Johnnie (1958) / by Joan O'Donovan -- The threesome (1961) / by Helen Essary Ansell -- A step towards Gomorrah (1961) / by Ingeborg Bachmann ; translated by Michael Bullock -- Jurge Dulrumple (1962) / by John O'Hara -- The wreck (1962) / by Maude Hutchins -- The beautiful room is empty (1966) / by Edmund White -- Chagrin in three parts (1967) / by Graham Greene -- Miss A. and Miss M. (1972) / by Elizabeth Taylor -- Burning th bed (1973) / by Doris Betts -- Middle children (1975) / by Jane Rule.

A major new work from Germany's greatest modern writer, this wildly imaginative yet superbly told novel revives some of Grass's most famous characters from his novels The Tin Drum, Headbirths, and The Flounder, as it tells the story of a female rat who engages the narrator in a series of dialogues convincingly demonstrating that the rats will inherit a devastated earth.

Bruce Chatwin's bestselling novel traces the fortunes of Kaspar Utz, an enigmatic collector of Meissen porcelain living in Cold War Czechoslovakia. Although Utz is allowed to leave the country each year, and considers defecting each time, he always returns to his Czech home, a prisoner of the Communist state and of his precious collection.

Life in a city can be atomizing, isolating. And it certainly is for William G. and Neaera H., the strangers at the center of Russell Hoban's surprisingly heartwarming novel Turtle Diary.

The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western is a novel by Richard Brautigan first published in 1974. The novel is his fifth published novel, and a parody of Western and Gothic novels.

At the outset of the 1870s, the British aristocracy could rightly consider themselves the most fortunate people on earth: they held the lion's share of land, wealth, and power in the world's greatest empire. By the end of the 1930s they had lost not only a generation of sons in the First World War, but also much of their prosperity, prestige, and political significance. Deftly orchestrating an enormous array of documents and letters, facts, and statistics, David Cannadine shows how this shift came about--and how it was reinforced in the aftermath of the Second World War. Astonishingly learned, lucidly written, and sparkling with wit, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy is a landmark study that dramatically changes our understanding of British social history.

Considered the most important work of modern Iranian literature, The Blind Owl is a haunting tale of loss and spiritual degradation. Replete with potent symbolism and terrifying surrealistic imagery, Sadegh Hedayat's masterpice details a young man's despair after losing a mysterious lover. And as the author gradually drifts into frenzy and madness, the reader becomes caught in the sandstorm of Hedayat's bleak vision of the human condition. The Blind Owl, which has been translated into many foreign languages, has often been compared to the writing of Edgar Allan Poe.

Study of the power of Ethiopian emperor Hailie Selassie, as he created informants, rivalries, and his image as sole benefactor. Describes the strengths and flaws of autocracy. A firsthand account of how he governed his country and why he fell from power in 1974.

I changed the Publication year from 1973 to 1980. This digital edition is a scan copy of the 9th printing edition of this book (1980) not the first printing(1973)

Selections from Rex Reed, Gay Talese, Richard Goldstein, Michael Herr, Truman Capote, Joe Eszterhas, Terry Southern, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer, Nicholas Tomalin, Tom Wolfe, Barbara L. Goldsmith, Joe McGinniss, George Plimpton, James Mills, John Gregory Dunne, John Sack, Joan Didion, "Adam Smith," Robert Christgau, and Garry Wills.

Presents a collection of seven short stories written between 1957 and 1968 by twentieth-century Colombian-born author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Francie Brady, the "pig boy," is growing up in a poor small Irish town in the early sixties, fueled on an adolescent's comic books, Flash Bars, and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. He is determined to win the Francie Brady Not A Bad Bastard Anymore Diploma. But how do you do that when your mother is sent to the madhouse, your father is an alcoholic, and everyone turns their back on you? Not only was The Butcher Boy nominated for, and the winner of, major literary prizes, but McCabe's theatrical adaptation of the novel, Frank Pig Says Hello, was staged in Dublin with tremendous success, and a production is now planned for London's Royal Court theater.

From Amazon.com: In this city-by-city description of the way homosexual men lived in the late seventies, Edmund White gives us a picture of Gay America that will surprise gay and straight readers alike. With great wit and humor, the co-author of The Joy of Gay Sex tells what goes on behind the glittering surface of fashionable nightspots and glamorous resorts. But he also shows us gay engineers, gay computer experts, and gay cowboys; this is a look at a vast world never before documented. By introducing us to a wide variety of gay people, White gives us remarkable new insights into what it means to be gay in America. In States of Desire, you will meet a gay timber baron from Portland and a "big-wig" (literally as well as figuratively) in the Florida drag world. Here are: handsome lifeguards in Chicago—those "bronzed demigods . . . who lord it above us on their white wood towers"; a Hollywood host who has just spent "a typical L.A. day, driving 150 miles assembling the twelve ingredients for supper"; a San Franciscan who embraces his friends "with long, therapeutic hugs, silently searching their faces for the weather report of their subtlest, innermost feelings"; and Boston gay radicals, who defend some of the most controversial positions that concern society today. You will hear the stories of gay Cubans in Miami, a gay lobbyist in Washington, D.C., and even a self-appointed gay Mormon prophet in Salt Lake City—all narrated with a novelist's fine ear for nuance. Into this vivid tapestry of people and places the author weaves the pros and cons of such issues as gay radicalism, the "urban gay renaissance" and the much discussed gay penchant for hedonism and sexual extremism. Above all, White shows the remarkable possibilities for gay life today—from the black gay ghettos of Atlanta to communes in New England; from "friendship networks" in New York City to New Orleans-style "uptown marriages" (in which men live with wife and children uptown and keep a boy in the Quarter); from Kansas City, where the self-oppression of 1950s gay life still reigns supreme, to Fire Island's unrivaled "spectacle of gay affluence and gay-male beauty." For this eye-opening book makes clear that gay life is every bit as rich and varied as the many gay lives the author so effectively describes

A sensitive portrayal of growing up in an alien culture as a 15-year-old blind boy leaves India to attend school in Arkansas.

Story of Gurdjieff's search through the Middle East and Central Asia for an esoteric brotherhood thought to hold answers to the meaning of life.

Told in the alternating voices of a wise Chippewa Indian leader, and a young, embittered mixed-blood woman, the novel chronicles the drama of daily lives overshadowed by the clash of cultures and mythologies.

After My Fashion has an unusual publishing history. Although it was John Cowper Powys' third novel and written in 1920, it wasn't published until 1980. It seems that when his US publisher turned it down Powys made no effort to place it elsewhere. Indeed, when Powys had finished a book he tended to be oddly indifferent to its fate. The novel has two other unusual features: its locations (Sussex and Greenwich Village); and Isadora Duncan being the inspiration for Elise, the dancer and mistress of the protagonist, Richard Storm (based quite largely on Powys himself). As one would expect from Powys the writing is vivid, not least in the descriptions of the Sussex landscape and the bohemian milieu of Greenwich Village.

This lovely book (1978) describes a two month search for the snow leopard with naturalist George Schaller in the Dolpo region of Nepal. The book combines the search for the snow leopard with a search for inner meaning (Zen Buddism)

Beautiful, fearless, tormented, at 45 Dalva has lived a life of lovers and adventures. Now she returns to the bosom of her family and searches for the son she gave up years before.

"If men and women are equally capable of genius, why have there been no female artists of the stature of Leonardo, Titian or Poussin? In seeking to answer this question, Germaine Greer introduces us to major but underestimated figures in the history of Western painting -- Angelica Kauffmann, Natalia Goncharova, Suzanne Valadon, Berthe Morisot, Kathe Kollwitz -- and produces a brilliantly incisive and richly illustrated study. She explains the obstacles as both external and surmountable and internal and insurmountable in the race for achievement."--Publisher's description.

“One episode simply melts away as the next takes over” (The New York Times) in this deliciously sinister turn-of-the-century tale of a French evil genius run rampant. Three appalling crimes leave all of Paris aghast: the Marquise de Langruen is hacked to death, the Princess Sonia is robbed, and Lord Beltham is found dead, stuffed into a trunk. Inspector Juve knows that all the clues point to one suspect: the master of disguise, Fantomas. Juve cleverly pursues him in speeding trains, down dark alleys, through glittering Parisian salons, obsessed with bringing the demon mastermind to justice. As thrilling to read now as it was when first published in 1915, Fantomas “is not a puzzle but an intoxicant” (The Village Voice).

Lantern Lecture is a stunning debut by a young British writer of extraordinary gifts. Each of the three stories in this collection is a virtuoso performance, a juggling of unlikely subjects and unusual styles that dazzles the reader with the effortless mastery of both tone and content. The stories concern people who are so far from the centre of things that they have to invent the world as they go along (an eccentric, a criminal) and also people (a judge, a Queen) who are so deeply identified with an institution that they somehow cease to exist. But subject matter is only the beginning. The magical transformation of factual material into something sheerly imaginative is one to the hallmarks of the writing. So Lantern Lecture makes of a chaotic true romance an intricate construction that is, for all its brevity and symmetry, almost a transistorised novel. Hoosh-mi, by contract subjects the idea of royalty to a whirlwind of subversive devices. It is an outrageous satire, but is also exhibits a sneaking fondness for its subject. It is a watercolour as well as a cartoon. The longest story, Bathpool Park, is closely based on a famous criminal trial. It sets out to be faithful to the facts, but free in its interpretation. Although the story’s starting point is a sensational case, it moves the reader towards a state of mind inaccessible to journalism. Slice by slice, Bathpool Park analyses not only the British legal system, but the other other agents (press, police) which co-operate with it but need not share its priorities. And when elements are reassembled, everything looks a little different.

The most remarkable novel yet from the internationally acclaimed author of Death of a River Guide and The Sound of One Hand Clapping, this is a marvelous historical epic of 19th century Australia, a world of convicts and colonists, thieves and catamites, whose bloody history is recorded in a very unusual taxonomy of fish.

In this vivid, powerful novel, Chatwin tells of Francisco Manoel de Silva, a poor Brazilian adventurer who sails to Dahomey in West Africa to trade for slaves and amass his fortune. His plans exceed his dreams, and soon he is the Viceroy of Ouidah, master of all slave trading in Dahomey. But the ghastly business of slave trading and the open savagery of life in Dahomey slowly consume Manoel's wealth and sanity.

Reportaż Ryszarda Kapuścińskiego wydany w formie książki o rewolucjach w Iranie, poczynając od I wojny światowej, przez panowanie szacha Rezy Pahlawiego, jego następcy Mohameda Rezy, do rewolucji Chomeiniego w Iranie w 1979 roku.

The Memoirs of a Survivor is a dystopian novel by Nobel Prize-winner Doris Lessing. It was first published in 1974 by Octagon Press. It was made into a film in 1981, starring Julie Christie and Nigel Hawthorne, and directed by David Gladwell. (Source: [Wikipedia](

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SEBASTIAN FAULKS Henry Green, whom W. H. Auden called 'the finest living English novelist', is the most neglected writer of the last century and the one most deserving of rediscovery by a new generation. This volume brings together three of Henry Green's intensely original novels. Loving explored class distinctions through the medium of love and brilliantly contrasts the lives of servants and masters in an Irish castle during World War Two, Living of workers and owners in a Birmingham iron foundry. Party Going is a brilliant comedy of manners, presenting a party of wealthy travellers stranded by fog in a London railway hotel while throngs of workers await trains in the station below. Review "Loving stands, together with Living, as the masterpiece of this disciplined, poetic and grimly realistic, witty and melancholy, amorous and austere voluptuary--comic, richly entertaining--haunting and poetic--writer." - TLS "Green's works live with ever-brightening intensity--it's like dancing with Nijinsky or Astaire, who lead you effortlessly on." - The Wall Street Journal "Green's novels-- have become, with time, photographs of a vanished England--Green's human qualities - his love of work and laughter; his absolute empathy; his sense of splendour amid loss - make him a precious witness to any age." - John Updike "Green's books are solid and glittering as gems." - Anthony Burgess From the Inside Flap With an Introduction by Paul Bailey As an early novel, Living marks the beginning of Henry Green's career as a writer who made his name by exploring class distinctions through the medium of love. Set in an iron foundry in Birmingham, the novel grittily and entertainingly contrasts the lives of the workers and the owners.

Gathered at Miss Elizabeth's deathbed, the whole Hesse family learns unexpected secrets about Elizabeth and each other.

"One of the most widely read and frequently cited feminist novels of our time. Depicting the overthrow of the old order by a tribe of warrior women, this epic celebration proclaims the destruction of patriarchal institutions and language and the birth of a new feminist order."--Page 4 of cover.

Contains primary source material.

Starting in 1970, Jean Genet---petty thief, prostitute, modernist master---spent two years in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. Always an outcast himself, Genet was drawn to this displaced people, an attraction that was to prove as complicated for him as it was enduring. Prisoner of Love, written some ten years later, when many of the men Genet had known had been killed, and he himself was dying, is a beautifully observed description of that time and those men as well as a reaffirmation of the author's commitment not only to the Palestinian revolution but to rebellion itself. For Genet's most overtly political book is also his most personal---the last step in the unrepentantly sacrilegious pilgrimage first recorded in The Thief's Journal, and a searching meditation, packed with visions, ruses, and contradictions, on such life-and-death issues as the politics of the image and the seductive and treacherous character of identity. Genet's final masterpiece is a lyrical and philosophical voyage to the bloody intersection of oppression, terror, and desire at the heart of the contemporary world.

Two novels, published in the same year (1962), and both set in the hills of Provence in France, Jean de Florette tells the story of two grasping and unprincipled farmers who plot to trick a naïve newcomer out of his land. Manon des Sources, which takes up the story some ten years later, is the story of the man’s daughter who finds a way of exacting revenge on the village for the inadvertent death of her father.