Five early stories of men posted where the empire runs out: a Dutch trader married into a Malay family and despised by both sides, a colonial agent alone at a river station, a Breton farm where the peasants deal with a fool. Conrad's first collection, written while he was still deciding whether he was a sailor who wrote or a writer who had sailed. The lagoon and the outpost are already his.
Catherine Morland reads too many gothic novels and arrives at an ancient abbey convinced she will find a murdered wife behind a locked door. Austen sold the manuscript in 1803 for ten pounds; the publisher sat on it for years and her brother had to buy it back. It is her funniest book and her first, and it takes the trouble to defend novel-reading in the middle of mocking it.
A young Gascon arrives in Paris with a letter of introduction, a borrowed horse and a talent for being challenged to duels, and by nightfall he has three of them arranged. Dumas - grandson of an enslaved woman, son of one of Napoleon's generals - ran a fiction factory with collaborators and outsold everyone in France; the swagger of this book has never dated. Behind the swordplay sits a queen's necklace and a cardinal's patience.
Five early stories of men posted where the empire runs out: a Dutch trader married into a Malay family and despised by both sides, a colonial agent alone at a river station, a Breton farm where the peasants deal with a fool. Conrad's first collection, written while he was still deciding whether he was a sailor who wrote or a writer who had sailed. The lagoon and the outpost are already his.
Catherine Morland reads too many gothic novels and arrives at an ancient abbey convinced she will find a murdered wife behind a locked door. Austen sold the manuscript in 1803 for ten pounds; the publisher sat on it for years and her brother had to buy it back. It is her funniest book and her first, and it takes the trouble to defend novel-reading in the middle of mocking it.
A young Gascon arrives in Paris with a letter of introduction, a borrowed horse and a talent for being challenged to duels, and by nightfall he has three of them arranged. Dumas - grandson of an enslaved woman, son of one of Napoleon's generals - ran a fiction factory with collaborators and outsold everyone in France; the swagger of this book has never dated. Behind the swordplay sits a queen's necklace and a cardinal's patience.