The Traveller's library

From the master of literary domestic drama, a page-turning novel that dissects the complexities of female friendship and the choices that define women's lives. It is Eleanor who starts the Friday night get-togethers. From her window she sees two young women, with small children, separate, struggling, and plainly lonely--and decides to ask them in. What began as a lark soon becomes a ritual, and the circle widens to include six very different women. They range in age from Jules, who is twenty-two and wants to be a DJ, to Eleanor herself, a retired professional who walks with a stick. They include one wife, three mothers, three singles, and five working women. All of them, variously, value Friday nights. Until one of them meets a man--an enigmatic, significant man--and the whole dynamic changes. The bonds that have been so closely forged are tested--and some of them break. With wit and warmth, Joanna Trollope explores the complexities, the sabotages, and the shifting currents of modern female friendship.

Double Lives is the first major study since the fall of the Soviet regime on Stalinist culture in the intellectual life of the West.

“A young poet tramped across America, crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic as a cattleman, begged and peddled in England, developing meanwhile in the power to write with rare perception and beauty.” — A.L.A. Catalog 1926

Ambrose Bierce’s second major short story collection, Can Such Things Be? collected nearly all of Bierce’s supernatural horror stories. Bierce himself was a skeptic of the supernatural, having once written a satirical essay “The Clothing of Ghosts,” in which he insisted that “The materialized spook appealing to our senses for recognition of his ghostly character must authenticate himself otherwise than by familiar and remembered habiliments. He must be credentialed by nudity—and that regardless of temperature or who may happen to be present.” Despite his personal skepticism, Bierce was able to capture the essence of the supernatural horror story. “The Moonlit Road” is a strong example, providing three distinct vantage points of the same events, and both “The Death of Halpin Frayser” and “The Damned Thing” are frequently anthologized as pioneers in the genre. Not all stories in the collection are strictly “ghost stories”—“Moxon’s Master” is one of the first examples in English literature to describe a robotic thinking machine (and the fate of its master), and “Haïta the Shepherd” is a tale of a young man’s search for meaning in his life. Bierce also plays with the idea of holes in reality in the various “Mysterious Disappearances” stories, portals to horrifying locations in “The Spook House,” and parallel dimensions or altered states in “A Psychological Shipwreck” and “The Realm of the Unreal.” H.P. Lovecraft discusses Bierce in his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” quoting Samuel Loveman: “In Bierce, the evocation of horror becomes for the first time, not so much the prescription or perversion of Poe and Maupassant, but an atmosphere definite and uncannily precise. Words, so simple that one would be prone to ascribe them to the limitations of a literary hack, take on an unholy horror, a new and unguessed transformation.” Like his other major published collection of short stories, Bierce updated and modified his stories for each new edition. This collection includes all stories as revised and published in his 1910 Collected Works, Volume III: Can Such Things Be?, as well as several stories from the “Bodies of the Dead” section in an earlier 1903 edition, which were not included in his Collected Works.

Kai Lung is an itinerant story-teller in ancient China. "I spread my mat," he says, "wherever my uplifted voice can entice together a company to listen," and his powers of enchantment are abundantly revealed in this volume. He incurs the enmity of a sinister figure called Ming-shu, who is the confidential agent of the Mandarin, Shan Tien, and has to defend himself in the Mandarin's court against a series of treasonable charges. Kai Lung's defence takes the original form of inducing the Mandarin to listen to a recital of the traditional tales of China, and so well does he beguile the capricious tyrant that he secures one adjournment after the other and, finally, his freedom--as well as the love of the maiden Hwa-Mei. Please Note: This book has been reformatted to be easy to read in true text, not scanned images that can sometimes be difficult to decipher. The Microsoft eBook has a contents page linked to the chapter headings for easy navigation. The Adobe eBook has bookmarks at chapter headings and is printable up to two full copies per year. Both versions are text searchable.