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"Stefan Zweig's brilliant novel, Beware of Pity, is an original and powerful work."—The New York Times

The great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig was a master anatomist of the deceitful heart, and Beware of Pity, the only novel he published during his lifetime, uncovers the seed of selfishness within even the finest of feelings. Beware of Pity is an almost unbearably tense and powerful tale of unrequited love and the danger of pity. 

In 1913, Hofmiller, an Austro-Hungarian cavalry officer stationed at the edge of the empire, is invited to a party at the home of a rich local landowner, a world away from the dreary routine of the barracks. The surroundings are glamorous, wine flows freely, and the exhilarated young Hofmiller asks his host’s lovely daughter for a dance, only to discover that sickness has left her painfully crippled. It is a minor blunder that will destroy his life, as pity and guilt gradually implicate him in a well-meaning but tragically wrongheaded plot to restore the unhappy invalid to health.

Stefan Zweig's only novel is a devastating depiction of the torment of the betrayal of both honour and love, realised against the background of the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

'The novel I'll really remember reading this year is Stefan Zweig's frighteningly gripping Beware of Pity, first published in 1939 ... an intoxicating, morally shaking read about human responsibilities and a real reminder of what fiction can do best' –Times Literary Supplement

About the author

Stefan Zweig (1881—1942) was an Austrian novelist, poet, playwright and biographer. Born into an Austrian-­Jewish family in 1881, he became a leading figure in Vienna’s cultural world and was famed for his gripping novellas and  biographies. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most popular writers in the world: extremely popular in the United States, South America and Europe – he remains so in continental Europe – however, he was largely ignored by the British public.

Zweig is best known for his novellas (notably The Burning Secret, The Royal Game, Amok, and Letter from an Unknown Woman; novels (Beware of Pity, Confusion, and the post­humously published The Post Office Girl); and his vivid psychological biographical essays on famous writers and thinkers such as Erasmus, Tolstoy, Balzac, Stendhal, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Freud and Mesmer.

In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, Zweig fled from Salzburg to London, then to New York, and finally to Brazil. Zweig’s memoir, The World of Yesterday, was completed in 1942, one day before Zweig and his second wife were found dead, following an apparent double suicide.

''Many others have said it before, and more eloquently, but, man, is "Middlemarch" good. I mean, miss-your-stop-on-the-train and sneak-a-read-at-work good.'' - The New Yorker

Considered one the masterpieces of realist fiction, George Eliot''s novel, Middlemarch is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamund and pioneering medical methods threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as ''one of the few English novels written for adult people''.

''What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory.'' - Emily Dickinson

''The most meaningful lives, I''ve learned, are often not the extraordinary ones. They''re the ordinary ones lived with dignity. There''s perhaps no better expression of that wisdom than George Eliot''s Middlemarch.'' - The New York Times

About the author

George Eliot was the pen name of the novelist Mary Anne Evans. Born in 1819 in rural Warwickshire, in 1841 she moved to Coventry, the city she would later use as inspiration for the fictional town of Middlemarch. There she joined a circle of free-thinking intellectuals and lost her Christian faith. After a period abroad, she settled in London to work as an editor at the left-wing Westminster Review. Eliot openly co-habited with the married philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes in defiance of contemporary notions of propriety. Lewes encouraged her to write fiction, for which she adopted her male pseudonym. Although female authors were published under their own names during her lifetime, she wanted to escape the stereotype of women''s writing being limited to lighthearted romances. She also wanted to have her fiction judged separately from her already extensive and widely known work as an editor and critic. Another factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny, thus avoiding the scandal that would have arisen because of her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes.

She wrote seven novels, Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862-63), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871-72) and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of which are set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight.

Middlemarch has been described by the novelists Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language - and triumphed in BBC Culture''s poll of the greatest British novels, as voted by the rest of the world.

''The Enchanted April is a pure wish-fulfillment story but there''s an acid edge to it ... hints of feminist revolt beneath the sparkly surface.'' - Los Angeles Times

''A genuine feeling for color and for beauty.'' - The New York Times

An immediate bestseller upon its first publication The Enchanted April set off a craze for tourism to the Italian Riviera that continues today. A charming, slyly comic feminist novel of longing and transformation.

The women at the center of The Enchanted April are alike only in their dissatisfaction with their everyday lives. They find each other - and the castle of their dreams - through a classified ad in a London newspaper one rainy February afternoon. The ladies expect a pleasant holiday, but they don''t anticipate that the month they spend in Portofino will reintroduce them to their true natures and reacquaint them with joy. Now, if the same transformation can be worked on their husbands and lovers, the enchantment will be complete.

''A particular kind of witty and well-constructed fiction, a sort of sparkling Euclid, which nobody else can touch.'' - Rebecca West

''Elizabeth von Arnim''s prose is textured with a dry and sometimes even acerbic wit, and her principle theme is a satirical questioning of the social order, underscored by her feminist tendencies and a skeptical view of the institution of marriage.'' - The New York Public Library

''A comedy of miscommunication ... a sun-washed fairytale, delicious in its contrivance '' - The Guardian

About the author

Elizabeth von Arnim was born on 31 August 1866 in Australia. She was cousin to the writer Katherine Mansfield. In 1890 she married her first husband, Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin, a Prussian aristocrat, with whom she had five children. Elizabeth and her German Garden, published anonymously in 1898, was a barely fictionalised account of Elizabeth''s life and the creation of her garden at the family home of Nassenheide in Pomerania, where Hugh Walpole and E. M. Forster were tutors to her children. Its instant success was followed by many more novels, including Vera (1921) and The Enchanted April (1922), and another almost-autobiography, All the Dogs of My Life (1936). She separated from Count von Arnim in 1908, and after his death two years later she built a house in Switzerland, marrying John Francis Stanley Russell in 1916. This marriage also ended in separation in 1919 when Elizabeth moved to America, where she died on 9 February 1941, aged 74.

''We are in the world of Conrad''s Under Western Eyes.'' - The Guardian

Hailed as one of Joseph Conrad''s finest literary achievements, this is the story of a young man unwittingly caught in the political turmoil of pre-Revolutionary czarist Russia.

A gripping novel that ultimately questions our capacity for moral strength and the depths of human integrity. This new edition includes commentary and a reading group guide.

''A novel crowded with enigmas & transmuted personal history.'' - The New Yorker

''The real question for the world''s future, in Conrad''s theory, wasn''t what would happen. It was when and how.'' - Maya Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch

''We are in the world of Conrad''s Under Western Eyes.'' - The Guardian

''Under Western Eyes is valuable not because it came true but because it rang true even at the time, only now we can better hear the deep, sad note.'' - Clive James

About the author

Joseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Ukraine, in 1857. After both of his parents died of tuberculosis, Conrad went to live with his uncle in Switzerland. After attending school in Kraków, he joined the French and then the British merchant marines, sailing to exotic destinations like the West Indies and the Congo, which would later become the backdrops for some of his fiction. In 1894 he settled down in England and began his literary career. In 1902 Conrad published his most famous work, Heart of Darkness, and continued to write until his death in 1924.

''The Fortunes of Richard Mahony deserves the accolade of the Great Australian Novel'' - Peter Craven

A superb, sprawling trilogy of a family fortune won and lost in gold-rush Australia. The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is Australia''s most significant nineteenth-century work. It tells the story of Richard Mahony, loosely based on the author''s own father, and his rise and tragic fall in Australia''s gold rush.

All three volumes - Australia Felix, The Way Home and Ultima Thule - are included here. The trilogy stands as one of the great portraits of the Australian canon - and a vivid depiction of the migrant experience.

''A work of huge ambition, power, pity and unflinching honesty'' - The Age

''The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is an all but lost continent of a book. It is a novel about poverty and worldly failure, and the grind and nightmare of a life that is ruled by money, which does its best to ride roughshod over every impulse towards simplicity and delicacy and truth. It is a book written in defiance of materialism and complacency, full of hatred of the vision of Australia summed up by James McAuley''s words: "The people are kindly with nothing inside them."'' - Sydney Morning Herald

''The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is a masterpiece, a great novel. Reading it was one of the most fulfilling literary experiences I''ve ever had.'' - Angela Meyer, LiteraryMinded

''One of the greatest novels in the English language.'' - William Heinemann

''More than any other novel in our literature, more than Voss, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony deserves the accolade of the Great Australian Novel...it is a mighty and moving work, this bursting at the seams anti-epic to the muse of a vanity which sees every golden bowl broken and every silver cord loosed.'' - Peter Craven

About the author

''Henry Handel Richardson'' was the pen-name of Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, who was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1870. Her father was a medical graduate of Edinburgh University, and her mother was the daughter of a Leicester solicitor; they married after migrating to Australia during the Victorian goldrushes. After her father''s death in 1879, her mother worked as a postmistress in country towns, but later she was able to take Ethel and her sister Lilian to Europe, to study music at Leipzig. Ethel, who became a skilled pianist, married John George Robertson, a science graduate turned philologist. Robertson was appointed Professor of German and Scandinavian Languages and Literatures at London University in 1903, where he became one of the foremost scholars of his day. By this time Ethel had begun to write, having given up all thought of a musical career. Her first novel, Maurice Guest, was published in 1908 and had a number of imitators. Her second, The Getting of Wisdom, published in 1910 was described by H. G. Wells as the best school story he knew. Her most important work was The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, published in three volumes, comprising Australia Felix, The Way Home and Ultima Thule, from 1917 to 1929.

"Emotional quicksand ... illuminating a spiritual and social condition." - The New Yorker

Oblomov is a timeless novel and a monument to human idleness. 

From the pen of Ivan Goncharov (1812-1891) emerged a portrait of a young man - Ilya Ilyitch Oblomov - a dreamer, content above all to spend most of the day in bed. Rich in situational comedy, psychological complexity and social satire, Oblomov is a masterpiece of skilled and imaginative literature; comparable in its stature to Gogol''s Dead Souls, Tolstoy''s Anna Karenina and Dostoevsky''s Brothers Karamazov. 

This vivacious translation by Natalie Duddington captures all the subtle comedy and near-tragedy of the original.

For fans of Ottessa Moshfegh''s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the classic Russian novel about an indolent aristocrat who spends most of his days in bed.

Praise

"From the start, Oblomov was recognized as a masterpiece. ''Goncharov is ten heads above me in talent,'' said Chekhov. ''I am in rapture over Oblomov and keep rereading it,'' said Tolstoy. And Dostoevsky came to rank it with Dead Souls and War and Peace. Who are we to disagree?" - Robert Gottlieb

"In each of us there resides a significant part of Oblomov." - Nikolay Dobrolyubov

"Emotional quicksand ... illuminating a spiritual and social condition." - The New Yorker

"In its particular sensitivity to the subtlety of Goncharov''s Russian, in its liveliness and its elegance [Duddington''s translation has] a freshness of manner that admirably matches the same enduring quality in the original." - Richard Freeborn, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of London.

"Goncharov is ten heads above me in talent." - Anton Chekhov

"I am in raptures over Oblomov and keep re-reading it." - Leo Tolstoy

About the author

Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov (1812-1891) was a Russian novelist and travel writer, whose highly esteemed novels dramatize social change in Russia and contain some of Russian literature''s most vivid and memorable characters. 

Goncharov''s most notable achievement lies in his three novels, of which the first was A Common Story (1847), a novel that immediately made his reputation when it was acclaimed by the influential critic Vissarion Belinsky. Oblomov (1859), a more mature work, generally accepted as one of the most important Russian novels, draws a powerful contrast between the aristocratic and capitalistic classes in Russia and attacks the way of life based on serfdom. Goncharov''s third novel, The Precipice (1869), is a brilliant work of psychological prose. 

In all three novels Goncharov contrasts an easygoing dreamer with an opposing character who typifies businesslike efficiency; the contrast illumines social conditions in Russia at a time when rising capitalism and industrialization uneasily coexisted with the aristocratic traditions of old Russia.

Oblomov is an indisputable classic of Russian literature, the artistic stature and cultural significance of which may be compared only to other such masterpieces as Nikolai Gogol''s Dead Souls, Leo Tolstoy''s Anna Karenina, and Fyodor Dostoevsky''s Brothers Karamazov. 

''Termed the finest study of the mind of a dog ever written, a few boldly assert that it is no doubt one of the greatest portrayals of a man''s mind'' - New York Times

In Bashan and I (sometime referred to as A Man and His Dog), Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice, writes in the most remarkable way of the unique relation that links a dog with his master. These memoirs read as a novel, and describe in fierce detail the behavior, feelings and psychology of Mann''s dog Bashan, and of Mann himself. Mann tells how he acquired Bashan, details traits of his character, and describes how they go on harmless and bucolic hunts.

Written in 1918 at the end of the First World War, Bashan and I is an ode to life, to nature, to simple joys, and to a dog.

Praise

"Termed the finest study of the mind of a dog ever written, a few boldly assert that it is no doubt one of the greatest portrayals of a man''s mind ... An extremely lovable story ... An enchanting classic." - New York Times

"The life of a dog is a simple and strangely marvelous thing; and that finally may be what sets Bashan and I apart: it is true to the life of a dog."-Gary Amdahl, Ruminator Review

About the author

Thomas Mann (1875-1955), author of many novels and stories, including Magic Mountain, Death in Venice, Buddenbrooks, and Doctor Faustus, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. An ardent antifascist, he left Germany in 1933 and became a U.S. citizen in 1944.

''One of the great feminist novels of the 19th century'' - Vivian Gornick

George Gissing''s intensely modern The Odd Women is one of the truly great novels of nineteenth-century fiction. The impoverished Madden sisters are ill-equiped to support themselves when their father dies, and Monica sees her only chance of escape from a life of grinding misery in marriage. When she is befriended by two independent women, who strive to educate single women to take control of their destinies, the choices that lie ahead of them are starkly defined.

The Odd Women is a dramatic exploration of the dilemmas facing the single woman at the turn of the century. Set in grimy, fog-ridden London, the novel paints a vivid portrait of the hardships and inequalities in and outside of marriage, and of a society whose values are in flux.

A novel of social realism, The Odd Women reflects the major sexual and cultural issues of the late nineteenth century. Gissing portrays contemporary society''s blatant ambivalence towards its own period of transition. Judged by contemporary critics to be as provocative as Zola and Ibsen, Gissing produced an intensely modern work, and the issues it raises remain the subject of contemporary debate.

Praise for The Odd Women

''In The Odd Women there is not a single major character whose life is not ruined either by having too little money, or by getting it too late in life, or by the pressure of social conventions which are obviously absurd but which cannot be questioned ... the disaster lies in obeying the accepted social code, or in not having enough money to circumvent it ... I am ready to maintain that England has produced very few better novelists ... Gissing was not a writer of picaresque tales, or burlesques, or comedies, or political tracts: he was interested in individual human beings, and the fact that he can deal sympathetically with several different sets of motives, and makes a credible story out of the collision between them, makes him exceptional among English writers.'' - George Orwell

''The Odd Women has gained considerable circulation as an early treatment of feminism ...'' - The New York Times

''[The Odd Women] is an 1893 novel by George Gissing that deals with the first breaths of the modern feminist movement in England.'' - The New Yorker

''One of the great feminist novels of the 19th century ... In this novel - published in 1893 - I could see and hear the characters as if they were women and men of my own acquaintance. I knew intimately what was tearing these people apart. What''s more, I recognized myself as one of the ''odd'' women. Every fifty years from the time of the French Revolution, feminists had been described as ''new'' women, ''free'' women, ''liberated'' women - but Gissing had gotten it just right. We were the ''odd'' women.'' - Vivian Gornick

''No one who has read this book will ever forget it - no woman at least'' - Pierre Coustillas, Gissing: The Cultural Heritage

Astonishingly ahead of its time, The Odd Women is a pioneering work of early feminism, as provocative as Zola and Ibsen.

“The Magic Mountain is simply one of the greatest novels ever written.” – The Guardian  

With this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Thomas Mann rose to the front ranks of the great modern novelists, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps – a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War. To this hermetic and otherworldly realm comes Hans Castorp, an "ordinary young man" who arrives for a short visit and ends up staying for seven years, during which he succumbs both to the lure of eros and to the intoxication of ideas.

“Mann was a master of this genre, in private life as in his fiction.” – The London Review of Books

“In Mann’s work the historic and contemporary retains its outsideness. He is a Wagnerian spellbinder, a mythmaker, but the myth always refers back to the real world.” – The New York Review of Books

“Mann's sense of vulnerability modifies his temptation to abstraction; his awareness of the tawdry and shameful humanizes his concentration on the very act of art. He is saved by the perverse, by the knowledge that comes from having looked at the lost. For this his greatness, threatened by its own energy, still inspires awe and love.” – The New York Times

“The Magic Mountain taught me that big ideas have vitality, that intellectual life could make for great storytelling, and that the map of an age could be found in the personalities of the people who lived it, lessons that I carried into the writing of history. But the truth is, I have returned again and again to The Magic Mountain because the characters who inhabit it are such delightful company.” — The American Scholar

“[The Magic Mountain] is one of those works that changed the shape and possibilities of European literature. It is a masterwork, unlike any other. It is also, if we learn to read it on its own terms, a delight, comic and profound, a new form of language, a new way of seeing.” – A. S. Byatt

“Long acclaimed as a masterly synthesis of the intellectual history of early 20th-century Europe and for its prescient scrutiny of elements in the German national character that had, and would again, find expression in the calamitous form of the world war.” – Kirkus

“Magnificent... a beautiful, feverish account of obsessive love” – Jonathan Coe

“A monumental writer” – Sunday Telegraph

“The greatest German novelist of the 20th century” – Spectator

“Mann is Germany's outstanding modern classic, a decadent representative of the tradition of Goethe and Schiller. With his famous irony, he was up there with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Freud, holding together the modern world with a love of art and imagination to compensate for the emptiness left by social and religious collapse.” – Independent

“Mann's real masterpiece is his sprawling snowbound epic of 1924, The Magic Mountain ... The entire work is suffused with a sly and gentle humour, making it an absolute delight to read ... A book I return to every couple of years, The Magic Mountain is simply one of the greatest novels ever written.” – The Guardian  

'Each book by Jack Kerouac in unique, a telepathic diamond. With prose set in the middle of his mind, he reveals consciousness itself in all its syntactic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion. Such rich natural writing is nonpareil in later half xx-century, a synthesis of Proust,  Céline, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Genet, Thelonious Monk, Basho, Charlie Parker, and Kerouac’s own athletic sacred insight.

Big Sur’s a humane, precise account of the extraordinary ravages of alcohol delirium tremens on Kerouac, a superior novelist who had strength to complete his poetic narrative, a task few scribes so afflicted have accomplished—others crack up. Here we meet San Francisco’s poets & recognize hero Dean Moriarty ten years after On the Road. Jack Kerouac was a ‘writer,’ as his great peer W.S. Burroughs says, and here at the peak of his suffering humorous genius he wrote through his misery to end with ‘Sea,’ a brilliant poem appended, on the hallucinatory Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur.'—Allen Ginsberg

''The poem that defined a generation'' - Guardian

Beat movement icon and visionary poet, Allen Ginsberg broke boundaries with his fearless, pyrotechnic verse. The apocalyptic ''Howl'' became the subject of an obscenity trial when it was first published in 1956 - its vindication was a watershed moment in twentieth-century history. Dark, ecstatic and rhapsodic, ''Howl'' shows why Ginsberg was one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century.

Howl and Other Poems is a collection of Ginsberg''s finest work, including ''Howl'', one of the principal works of the Beat Generation as well as ''A Supermarket in California'', ''Transcription of Organ Music'', ''Sunflower Sutra'', ''America'', ''In the Baggage Room at Greyhound"'', and some of his earlier works. 

"Ginsberg is both tragic and dynamic, a lyrical genius ... probably the single greatest influence on American poetical voice since Whitman." - Bob Dylan 

''Allen is ever-present in his words. His words are him - they''re like a living embodiment of him - they have his energy, his philosophy, his playfulness, his sexuality and his compassion. Not only did he give us love and poetry, he reminded us of our civic duty to use our voice.'' - Patti Smith

About the Author

Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1926, the son of Naomi Ginsberg and the well-known lyric poet/teacher Louis Ginsberg. As a Columbia College student in the 1940s he began close friendships with William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Gregory Corso and Jack Kerouac. He became associated with the Beat movement and the 1950s San Francisco Renaissance poets Gary Snyder and Michael McClure. After jobs as a labourer, market researcher and sailor, Ginsberg published his first volume, Howl and Other Poems, in 1956. 

Howl overcame censorship trials to become one of the most widely read poems of the century, translated into twenty-eight languages. In 1965 Ginsberg was, in a matter of weeks, crowned Prague May King, expelled by the Czech police and placed on the FBI''s Dangerous Security list. Though he travelled widely, teaching in India, China, and Western and Eastern Europe, his home for most of his life was New York''s Lower East Side.

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Allen Ginsberg was awarded the medal of Chevalier de l''Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 1993, honoured as Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Poet 1994 and co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute, the first accredited Buddhist college in the western world.

Ginsberg died in New York on 5 April 1997, eight days after being diagnosed seriously ill. He continued to write until the last few days of his life and died surrounded by his friends and family. One of the last of the ''Beats'', he embodied the surprising, experimental and sometimes lunatic spirit of the artistic and literary scene he was so much a part of. On his death James Campbell wrote of him in the Guardian, ''Allen Ginsberg was the exemplary avant-garde figure of the post-war world. In verse, in politics, in his own intimate life - there was no room for a ''private life'' - Ginsberg resisted and disdained the orthodox, the social lie. Few people have done as much to make non-conformism respectable in our time as he did.''

‘The world’s bleakest romantic comedy’ — Los Angeles Times

"An exuberant, extravagant chronicle of gestation which romps through to the final production of the Fante's firstborn in high Italianate style and immerses a succession of hair-raising to breast-beating sequences in tears — and Chianti."—Kirkus

"The universe of John Fante’s fiction is so immediately moving, so poetically vivid, that it is hard to decide which is the greater quandary: that it went so long unrecognized, or that in the factitious worlds of publishing and Hollywood it is receiving such enormous recognition today." — Boston Review

"Fante’s disturbing, singular writing stands absolutely alone among American Depression and mid-century writers. He was always the equal, and often the better, of his recognized contemporaries: Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, West, Schulberg."—Neil Gordon

"Charming and hilarious"—Salon

"Fante's best writing ... astonishingly wide-ranging and compressed"—London Review of Books

Dear Reader, if you have ever been a member of a family that has ever been "in a family way" this is your book.

The narrator of this extravagant domestic comedy, who lives in Los Angeles, finds himself a home-owner and expectant father almost simultaneously and both sensations please him. It must be granted that there are certain adjustments to be made. One is to work out an amicable arrangement with his wife Joyce, who changes from a serene and reasonable companion to an unpredictable creature of compulsions and obsessions, furiously resenting any implication that her "condition" (a word she hates anyway) might be responsible. Aesthetically too, Joyce creates a problem for her sensitive husband, symbolised by her switch from a magical perfume called "Fernery at Twilight" to "a kind of Gayelord Hauser cologne, reeking of just plain good health, clean alcohol and simple soap."

But it is the termites' ravishment of the kitchen floor that helps the Fante family in an uproar for the rest of the confinement.

First Papa Nick Fante must be fetched – the best bricklayer in California. At his parents' house, it only take a few minutes for John to become aware that the child expected 'must' be a boy. No two ways about it. Unthinkable for the Fantes to be without a grandson. Against the obdurate reliance of his Papa and Mama on homemade insurance he is helpless: eggs and oysters are fine, but garlic in the keyhole and salt in the bed just can't be beaten.

The return train trip with Papa is a hilarious nightmare, complete with tool kit, wine jugs, salami and goat cheese. Papa Fante is equipped with a violent Italian temper as well, and a sly knowledge of everyone's soft and sore spots, which knowledge he exploits shamelessly. 

Back in Los Angeles the caved in floor (it had sunk under Joyce' weight) is ignored and he decides to build a fireplace instead – "for his first grandson." The story of Uncle Mingo and the bandits must be preserved – "for his grandson" – and Papa and Joyce enter into a smug conspiracy that threatens to break up the household.

The sight of the pregnant Joyce enchants her father-in-law. He adored the "voluptuous roundness that contained a part of him too," says the vastly impressed and also somewhat depressed husband. "You could see him tremble before it, giddy with joy, this extension of himself, the projection of his life far beyond the limits of his years upon the earth. I knew suddenly that even the birth of his own children had not held the romance and excitement of this child's coming."

Beyond Good and Evil is one of the most scathing and powerful critiques of philosophy, religion, science, politics and ethics ever written - an essential summary of Friedrich Nietzsche''s philosophy. 

One of the most iconoclastic philosophers of all time, Nietzsche dramatically rejected notions of good and evil, truth and God. Beyond Good and Evil is one of the most remarkable and influential books of the nineteenth century. 

Beyond Good and Evil represents Nietzsche''s attempt to sum up his philosophy. It demonstrates that the world is steeped in false piety and infected with a ''slave morality''. With wit and subversive energy, Nietzsche demands that the individual impose their own ''will to power'' upon the world.

In nine parts the book is designed to give the reader a comprehensive idea of Nietzsche''s thought and style: they span "The Prejudices of Philsophers," "The Free Spirit," religion, morals, scholarship, "Our Virtues," "Peoples and Fatherlands," and "What Is Noble," as well as epigrams and a concluding poem.

"He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee."- Friedrich Nietzsche

About the Author

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. His attempts to unmask the motives that underlie traditional Western religion, morality, and philosophy deeply affected generations of theologians, philosophers, psychologists, poets, novelists, and playwrights. He thought through the consequences of the triumph of the Enlightenment''s secularism, expressed in his observation that "God is dead," in a way that determined the agenda for many of Europe''s most-celebrated intellectuals after his death. He was an ardent foe of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and power politics. 

Nietzsche once wrote that some men are born posthumously, and that is certainly true in his case. The history of philosophy, theology, and psychology since the early 20th century is unintelligible without him. Nietzsche''s great influence is due not only to his originality but also to the fact that he was one of the German language''s most-brilliant prose writers.

“Breathtaking … unlike anything I have ever read before” — The Guardian

The Burning Secret is a darkly compelling coming-of-age story – a tale of seduction, jealousy and betrayal from the master of the novella, Stefan Zweig.

A suave baron, bored on holiday, takes a fancy to twelve-year-old Edgar's mother, while the three are holidaying in an Austrian mountain resort. His initial advances rejected, the baron befriends Edgar in order to get closer to the woman he desires. The initially unsuspecting child soon senses something is amiss, but has no idea of the burning secret that is driving the affair, and that will soon change his life for ever.

Zweig – whose life and work inspired Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel – was a wildly popular writer of compelling short fiction. His books will stay with the reader for ever. The Burning Secret is a witty, potent look at innocence, adult attraction and childhood passion.

‘Zweig’s time of oblivion is over for good … it’s good to have him back ‘ — The New York Times

About the author

Stefan Zweig (1881—1942) was an Austrian novelist, poet, playwright and biographer. Born into an Austrian-­Jewish family in 1881, he became a leading figure in Vienna’s cultural world and was famed for his gripping novellas and  biographies. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most popular writers in the world: extremely popular in the United States, South America and Europe – he remains so in continental Europe – however, he was largely ignored by the British public.

Zweig is best known for his novellas (notably The Burning Secret, The Royal Game, Amok, and Letter from an Unknown Woman; novels (Beware of Pity, Confusion, and the post­humously published The Post Office Girl); and his vivid psychological biographical essays on famous writers and thinkers such as Erasmus, Tolstoy, Balzac, Stendhal, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Freud and Mesmer.

In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, Zweig fled from Salzburg to London, then to New York, and finally to Brazil. Zweig’s memoir, The World of Yesterday, was completed in 1942, one day before Zweig and his second wife were found dead, following an apparent double suicide.

‘The best single work of science fiction yet written’ — Ursula K. LeGuin 

Written in 1921 and banned in its native Russia until 1988, We is a uniquely prophetic dystopian satire, fearlessly excoriating the very concept of censorship and predicting the rise of a future police state. 

In the far-future city of OneState, happiness has been reduced to a simple equation: remove freedom and choice, and create contentment for all. In a city of straight lines, protected by green walls and a glass dome, a spaceship is being built in order to spearhead the conquest of new planets. Its chief engineer, a man called D-503, keeps a journal of his life and activities: to his mathematical mind everything seems to make sense and proceed as it should, until a chance encounter with a woman threatens to shatter the very foundations of the world he lives in. The beautiful and mysterious I-330, a dangerous revolutionary, throws the strict rhythms of D-503's existence into chaos, and he soon finds himself diagnosed with that most degrading of ancient diseases – the ownership of a soul.

Written in a highly charged, direct and concise style, Zamyatin’s 1921 seminal novel is not only an indictment of totalitarianism and a precursor of the works of Orwell and the dystopian genre, but also a prefiguration of much of twentieth-century history and a harbinger of the ominous future that may still lay ahead of us. We is a rediscovered classic and a work of tremendous relevance to our own times.

“[Zamyatin’s] intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism — human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself — makes [We] superior to Huxley’s [Brave New World].” — George Orwell

"This is the original modern dystopia, serving as a model for Orwell's 1984. Zamyatin's novel is both worryingly prophetic and amusingly ironic, and thus in certain passages light-hearted in a way Orwell and Huxley (in Brave New World, the other comparison that springs to mind) never manage to be. Passages where the narrator becomes increasingly torn between his loyalty to OneState and his passion for the beautiful female "number" I-330 become increasingly modernist and fragmented in style, showing a formal ambition that also goes beyond Orwell and Huxley's works." – The Guardian

We inspired Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Ayn Rand’s Anthem (1938), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952), and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974). 

About the author

Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884—1937) was a Russian author of science-­fiction and political satire. Due to his use of literature to criticize Soviet society, Zamyatin has been referred to as one of the first Soviet dissidents. Although Zamyatin supported the Communist Party of the Soviet Union before they came to power, he slowly came to disagree with their policies, particularly those regarding censorship of the arts. In his 1921 essay “I Am Afraid,” Zamyatin wrote: “True literature can exist only when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and skeptics.” This attitude made his position increasingly difficult as the 1920s wore on. In 1923, Zamyatin arranged for the manuscript of We to be smuggled to E.P. Dutton and Company in New York City. After being translated into English by Gregory Zilboorg, the novel was published in 1924.

A touching autobiographical novel of adolescent love in a New England mill town, Maggie Cassidy is a remarkable, bittersweet evocation of the awkwardness and the joy of growing up in America. 

“Each book by Jack Kerouac in unique, a telepathic diamond … Such rich natural writing is nonpareil in later half xx-century, a synthesis of Proust, Céline, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Genet, Thelonious Monk, Basho, Charlie Parker, and Kerouac’s own athletic sacred insight."—Allen Ginsberg

About the author

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a football scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. He quit school in his sophomore year after a dispute with his football coach. In 1947, enthused by bebop, the rebel attitude of his friends and the throng of hobos, drug addicts and hustlers he encountered in New York, he decided to discover America and hitchhike across the country. His writing was openly autobiographical and he developed a style he referred to as ‘spontaneous prose’ which he used to record the experiences. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, first published in 1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the world what became known as the Beat Generation, and made Kerouac one of the most controversial and best-known writers of his time. Publication of his many other books followed, among them The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and Big Sur. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.

An underground classic.

Tristessa is a portrait of a young prostitute destroying herself in the squalid drug underworld of Mexico City. Here, in the characteristic voice of Kerouac at the height of his dazzling descriptive powers, emerge the major themes of his eclectic religious romanticism. One of the final works in Kerouac’s 13-book Proustian memoir and a quintessential classic in the Kerouac Canon.

“Kerouac is a writer of exquisitely sad love stories, with complex and fully realized women: In Tristessa we find to our surprise that Kerouac was one of the most romantic of American novelists.” — Eric D. Lehman, Empty Mirror

“Each book by Jack Kerouac in unique, a telepathic diamond … Such rich natural writing is nonpareil in later half xx-century, a synthesis of Proust,  Céline, Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Genet, Thelonious Monk, Basho, Charlie Parker, and Kerouac’s own athletic sacred insight.” — Allen Ginsberg

About the author

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1922, the youngest of three children in a Franco-American family. He attended local Catholic and public schools and won a football scholarship to Columbia University in New York City, where he first met Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. He quit school in his sophomore year after a dispute with his football coach. In 1947, enthused by bebop, the rebel attitude of his friends and the throng of hobos, drug addicts and hustlers he encountered in New York, he decided to discover America and hitchhike across the country. His writing was openly autobiographical and he developed a style he referred to as ‘spontaneous prose’ which he used to record the experiences. His first novel, The Town and the City, appeared in 1950, but it was On the Road, first published in 1957 and memorializing his adventures with Neal Cassady, that epitomized to the world what became known as the Beat Generation, and made Kerouac one of the most controversial and best-known writers of his time. Publication of his many other books followed, among them The Dharma Bums, The Subterraneans, and Big Sur. He died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1969, at the age of forty-seven.

“Brilliant and penetrating ... the most important work which has opened up an understanding of Marx’s humanism.” — Erich Fromm

Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory is the philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s first major work in English – a masterful interpretation of Hegel's philosophy and the influence it has had on European political thought from the French Revolution to the present day.

Reason & Revolution, written in 1941, was the first Hegelian Marxist text to appear in English, the first systematic study of Hegel by a Marxist, and the first work in English to discuss the young Marx seriously. It introduced introduced Hegelian and Marxist concepts such as alienation, subjectivity, negativity, and the Frankfurt School's critique of positivism to a wide international audience. 

Acclaimed for its profound and undistorted reading of Hegel’s social and political theory, the appreciation of Reason and Revolution has remained high, more relevant now than ever before. There is no better guide than Marcuse to where we have been and to what we might expect. 

“In my books, I have tried to make a critique of society — and not only of capitalist society — in terms that avoid all ideology, even the socialist ideology. I have tried to show that contemporary society is a repressive society in all its aspects, that even the comfort, the prosperity, the alleged political and moral freedom, are utilised for oppressive ends.”—Herbert Marcuse, The New York Times Magazine

The most influential radical philosopher of the 1960s, Marcuse’s writings are as relevant to today's society as they were at the time they were written.

“We fell in love with Marcuse’s mind, his method, his scholarship. We read everything he wrote... His book on Hegel and Marx, Reason and Revolution, was high on our list because we wanted to understand the intellectual origins of revolutionary Marxism.” – Dan La Botz, author of A Troublemakers’ Handbook: How to Fight Back Where You Work and Win!

“A Marxian philosopher who became a hero to the student radicals of the 1960s because of his view that modern society has enslaved mankind” – The Washington Post

“A guiding figure to many social activists” – The New York Times

About the author

Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) was a philosopher, sociologist, and political theorist. He studied at the University of Berlin and the University of Freiburg, and became a crucial figure at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, and of the Frankfurt School of social theory. He was forced to leave Germany in 1933, eventually settling in the United States, where he would spend much of his life and taught at many of the country’s greatest schools and universities. 

A Hegelian-Freudian-Marxist, Marcuse highlighted the cultural forms of repression and the role of technology and the expansion of the production of consumer goods in the maintenance of the stability of capitalism. His classic studies of capitalist society were important influences on the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s and his libertarian socialism remains an important intellectual resource. 

Philosophical speculation seldom attracts headlines, let alone threats of death. Yet such was the fate that overtook Herbert Marcuse in the late 1960s, when he was catapulted into international controversy as a prophet of the revolutionary student movement. Among his major writings are Reason and Revolution, One-Dimensional Man, and Eros and Civilization.

A collection of the most famous cases faced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's peerless creation, Sherlock Holmes.

Venture back in time to the foggy, mysterious backdrops of London and the English countryside, to join literature's greatest detective team – the brilliant Sherlock Holmes and his devoted assistant, Dr. Watson – as they investigate a dozen of their best-known cases. 

This classic collection includes many of the famous cases – and great strokes of brilliance – that made the legendary Sherlock Holmes one of fiction's most popular creations. With his devoted amanuensis Dr Watson, Holmes emerges from his smoke filled room in Baker Street to grapple with the forces of treachery, intrigue and evil in such cases as 'The Speckled Band', in which a terrified woman begs their help in solving the mystery surrounding her sister's death, or 'A Scandal in Bohemia', which portrays a European king blackmailed by his mistress. In 'Silver Blaze' the pair investigate the disappearance of a racehorse and the violent murder of its trainer, while in 'The Final Problem' Holmes at last comes face to face with his nemesis, the diabolical Professor Moriarty - 'the Napoleon of crime'.

'Arthur Conan Doyle is unique ... I would walk a mile in tight boots to read him to the milkman'—Stephen Fry

"Perhaps the greatest of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries is this: that when we talk of him we invariably fall into the fancy of his existence."—TS Eliot

The Great American Novel of love and betrayal in the Jazz Age.

Considered one of the all-time great American works of fiction, F. Scott Fitzgerald''s The Great Gatsby is a consummate summary of the "roaring twenties", and a devastating expose of the "Jazz Age".

After the war, the mysterious Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire pursues wealth, riches and the lady he lost to another man with stoic determination. He buys a mansion across from her house and throws lavish parties to try and entice her. When Gatsby finally does reunite with Daisy Buchanan, tragic events are set in motion. Told through the eyes of his detached and omnipresent neighbour and friend, Nick Carraway, Fitzgerald''s succinct and powerful prose hints at the destruction and tragedy that awaits.

Fitzgerald''s glorious yet ultimately tragic social satire on the Jazz Age encapsulates the exuberance, energy and decadence of an era.

''A classic, perhaps the supreme American novel'' -Sunday Times, Books of the Century

''More than an American classic; it''s become a defining document of the national psyche, a creation myth, the Rosetta Stone of the American dream'' -The Guardian

''An unquiet masterpiece whose mystery never fails to exert its power'' -Observer, The 100 Best Novels in English

''Fitzgerald''s mythologizing of the social whirl, his casting of American types as archetypes, his framing of psychology as destiny, of style as divine grace, captured its moment. He offered glamour along with compassion and consolation, a sense of sad magic along with the expansive glow of romance.'' -The New Yorker

''What begins as an alluring fable ends as a full-on modernist nightmare.'' - The New Yorker

First published in 1890, The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde''s only novel. At first the subject of intense controversy, it has endured as a classic for years.

Dorian is a good-natured young man until he discovers the power of his own exceptional beauty. As he gradually sinks deep into a frivolous, glamorous world of selfish luxury, he apparently remains physically unchanged by the stresses of his corrupt lifestyle and untouched by age. But up in his attic, hidden behind a curtain, his portrait tells a different story...

''Nasty and nauseous'' - The St. James Gazette

''Wilde made clear from the outset that he wished to show not only the thrills and pleasures of a ruthlessly aesthetic life but also its limits and dangers ... What begins as an alluring fable ends as a full-on modernist nightmare.'' - The New Yorker

''Wilde''s brilliantly allusive moral tale of youth, beauty and corruption'' - The Guardian

''Unclean, poisonous, and heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction.'' - The Daily Chronicle of London

''He towered above us all'' - Arthur Conan Doyle

''Both a cautionary tale of a life of depravity and sham, and a tender portrait of the aesthetic urge unbridled and spinning out of control ... A dark, supernatural affair, its sparkling wit never completely conceals a Gothic layer that would have done justice to Edgar Allan Poe at his best.'' - Irvine Welsh

About the auhor:

Oscar Wilde was known for his acclaimed works including The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest, as well as his brilliant wit, flamboyant style and infamous imprisonment for homosexuality.

Author, playwright and poet, Oscar Wilde was a popular literary figure in late Victorian England. After graduating from Oxford University, he lectured as a poet, art critic and a leading proponent of the principles of aestheticism. In 1891, he published The Picture of Dorian Gray, his only novel which was panned as immoral by Victorian critics, but is now considered one of his most notable works. As a dramatist, many of Wilde''s plays were well received including his satirical comedies Lady Windermere''s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), his most famous play. Unconventional in his writing and life, Wilde''s affair with a young man led to his arrest on charges of "gross indecency" in 1895. He was imprisoned for two years and died in poverty three years after his release at the age of 46.

''Surprisingly radical.'' - The Atlantic 

''A miniaturist of the soul, Brontë captured shades of emotion with a psychological subtlety that still feels exquisitely modern.'' - The New York Times

Passionate, poetic and revolutionary, Jane Eyre is a novel of naked emotional power. Its story of a defiant, fiercely intelligent woman who refuses to accept her appointed place in society - and instead finds love on her own terms - has become famous as one of the greatest romances ever written, but it is also a brooding Gothic mystery, a profound depiction of character and a transformative work of the imagination.

Charlotte Brontë''s most beloved novel describes the passionate love between the courageous orphan Jane Eyre and the brilliant, brooding, and domineering Rochester. The loneliness and cruelty of Jane''s childhood strengthens her natural independence and spirit, which prove invaluable when she takes a position as a governess at Thornfield Hall. But after she falls in love with her sardonic employer, her discovery of his terrible secret forces her to make a heart-wrenching choice. 

Ever since its publication in 1847, Jane Eyre has enthralled every kind of reader, from the most critical and cultivated to the youngest and most unabashedly romantic. It lives as one of the great triumphs of storytelling and as a moving and unforgettable portrayal of a woman''s quest for self-respect.

''Unless I have the courage to use the language of Truth in preference to the jargon of Conventionality, I ought to be silent ...'' - Charlotte Brontë

About the author

Charlotte Brontë lived from 1816 to 1855. Jane Eyre appeared in 1847 and was followed by Shirley (1848) and Vilette (1853). In 1854, Charlotte Brontë married her father''s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls. She died during her pregnancy on March 31, 1855, in Haworth, Yorkshire. The Professor was posthumously published in 1857.

''At the end we are steeped through and through with the genius, the vehemence, the indignation of Charlotte Brontë.'' - Virginia Woolf

''One of the reasons Jane Eyre continues to provoke so much discussion and theorising is that, like Jane herself, it eludes definition. It does one thing with its right hand while doing quite another with its left. - The Guardian

''Charlotte Brontë''s 1847 novel helped introduce the idea of the "modern individual"-a surprisingly radical concept for readers at the time.'' - The Atlantic 

''A miniaturist of the soul, Brontë captured shades of emotion with a psychological subtlety that still feels exquisitely modern." - The New York Times

"The Frankfurt School knew Trump was coming" - The New Yorker

Max Horkheimer, founder and long-time director of the famous Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, was professor emeritus of philosophy and sociology at the University of Frankfurt until his death in 1973. He is one of the founders of the Frankfurt School. Horkheimer''s writings are essential to an understanding of the intellectual background of the New Left and the to much current social-philosophical thought. 

In his most important work, Eclipse of Reason, Max Horkheimer surveys and demonstrates the gradual ascendancy of Reason in Western philosophy, its eventual total application to all spheres of life, and what he considers its present reified domination. 

First published in 1947, Horkheimer here explores the ways in Nazism co-opted ideas of rationality for its own ends. Eclipse of Reason provides a magnificent critical description of how reason collapses into irrationality through its emphasis on instrumental concerns. Ultimately, the book is a warning of the ways this might happen again and, as such, this is a book that has never appeared more timely. 

"Virtuosic at critiquing the viciousness of fascism and capitalism''s socially eviscerating, spiritually crushing impact on western societies." - Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School

"Reason is sick. Horkheimer made a magnificent diagnosis of this illness." - Wilson Decembre, Can reason save itself? A critical reading of Max Horkheimer''s "Eclipse of reason"

"A profoundly suggestive diagnosis of the intellectual sickness of our day" - Nature

"The ongoing international crisis of capitalism and liberal democracy has prompted a resurgence of interest in [the Frankfurt School''s] body of work known as critical theory." - The New Yorker

About the author:

Max Horkheimer (1895-1973) was a leader of the ''Frankfurt School,'' a group of philosophers and social scientists associated with the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany. Horkheimer was the director of the Institute and Professor of Social Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt from 1930-1933, and again from 1949-1958. In between those periods he would lead the Institute in exile, primarily in America. As a philosopher he is best known for his work during the 1940s, including Eclipse of Reason and Dialectic of Enlightenment (co-authored with Theodor Adorno). Horkheimer''s work was largely responsible for developing the epistemological and methodological orientation of Frankfurt School critical theory. This work both influenced his contemporaries (including Adorno and Herbert Marcuse) and has had an enduring influence on critical theory''s later practitioners.

''The forgotten feminist classic about a civilisation without men ...  deeply, viscerally empowering.'' - The Guardian

In 1915, Charlotte Perkins Gilman - a feminist, futurist, and activist - published Herland, a story about an all-women utopian society hidden in a jungle. They shared all labor and child care equally and reproduced without men. For generations, they lived peacefully, communally, and happily-until three men barged in, disrupting the order.

Gilman''s story was an allegory for her very real philosophy about what it would take for women to escape oppression: having full and equal opportunities to participate in all aspects of society, which meant turning all childcare and household work into a paid profession.

About the author

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), also known as Charlotte Perkins Stetson, her first married name, was a prominent American humanist, novelist, writer of short stories, poetry and nonfiction, and a lecturer for social reform. She was a utopian feminist and served as a role model for future generations of feminists because of her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle. She has been inducted into the National Women''s Hall of Fame. Her best remembered works today are her semi-autobiographical short story The Yellow Wallpaper, which she wrote after a severe bout of postpartum psychosis; and Herland, the rediscovered feminist classic about a civilisation without men.

Praise for Herland

''The forgotten feminist classic about a civilisation without men ... deeply, viscerally empowering.'' - The Guardian

''A seriously funny book, related to the traditions of Utopian literature and set apart from that tradition by its extraordinary wit.'' - The New York Times

''Charlotte Perkins Gilman''s vast writings on ideal societies were the catalyst for the feminist utopia Herland.'' - The New Yorker

"Certainly the writer who most directly influenced my work." - William S. Burroughs 

A Voice Through A Cloud is Denton Welch''s unfinished masterpiece.

Welch, one of the most gifted creative artists of his generation, died in 1948 at the age of thirty-one, leaving this, perhaps his finest work, almost but not quite completed. Under the thin disguise of fiction Welch recreates the world of hospitals and nursing homes in which he spent so many months after the accident which was eventually to prove fatal to him. 

The details of daily routine, the fellow patients, the nurses and doctors, the comedies and tragedies which loom so large in the confined existence of the sick, all are described so vividly, with so much humour and pathos, with so accurate a listening ear, so watchful and penetrating an eye, that it is almost impossible to believe that the experience on which it is based was one of long exhausting pain to the author himself, and that book was conceived in pain and carried through with failing physical powers.

"Rapt attention to the aesthetic ... essential." - The Paris Review

"So deliciously subversive, it is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger." - John Waters

About the author

Denton Welch (1915-1948) was born in Shanghai in 1915, the youngest of four boys, to a wealthy British-­American family. After leaving his English boarding school (Repton), Welch decided to follow his dream of becoming a painter, and studied art at Goldsmiths in London. The physical injuries sustained in a cycling accident in 1935, however, saw him increasingly turn towards a hitherto secondary interest: writing. When Welch''s debut, Maiden Voyage, was published in 1942, it was an instant literary sensation (''I have been told that it reeks of homosexuality,'' wrote Winston Churchill''s secretary; ''I think I must get it''). This was followed by In Youth Is Pleasure in 1945 and, after his premature death from spinal tuberculosis in 1948, the publication of his unfinished masterpiece, A Voice Through A Cloud. ''If any writer has been neglected it is Denton'', wrote William Burroughs in 1985 - but Welch is also a writer who has attracted a firm coterie of admirers, ranging from W.H. Auden to Alan Bennett, Edith Sitwell to John Waters. Of his short life, Edmund White has noted, ''He had the power to generate interest out of even the most meagre materials. He had this gift from the beginning but suffering and illness refined it to a white-­hot flame.''

Praise

''That rare being, a born writer.'' - Edith Sitwell

''The real horror implicit in the book is that pain is the only reality.'' - Jocelyn Brooke 

''Are we not all, emotionally, what Mr Welch is in fact - orphans, each traveling alone on a journey which, if it is headed in the direction of unknown dangers, at least is heading away from the fears one knows?''  - W.H. Auden 

''An incomparable account of shattered flash and refracted spirit.'' - John Updike, The New Yorker

''A Voice Through a Cloud is one of the saddest books in all fiction. It is also one of the most exquisite.'' - Lars Iyer

''His best book.'' - The New York Review of Books

''Rapt attention to the aesthetic ... His protagonists are misfits: alienated, implicitly gay, longing for love, frequently hard to be around, always fixated on small pleasures that compensate for an essential feeling of not belonging.'' - The Paris Review

"Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch''s In Youth Is Pleasure." - John Waters

Flagrantly controversial on its first publication in 1945, In Youth Is Pleasure is a tender and fierce account of boyhood and nascent homosexual desire by Denton Welch (1915-48). 

Against the backdrop of an English country hotel in a languid pre-war summer, Denton Welch''s alter ego, Orvil Pym, examines his early life and formative experiences with a Proustian intensity. An adolescent voyeur, Orvil takes pleasure in the microscopic observation of his relatives and fellow guests, charting their eccentricities and love affairs as faithfully as he exposes his own obsessions.

In Youth Is Pleasure was Welch''s second novel, a study of an adolescent who is hyper-sensitive and precocious (like the author himself), and who falls in love with nature and does not wish to return to school - but as in all of Welch''s work, what is most important are the details of his characters'' surroundings. 

"In Youth Is Pleasure couples the linguistic virtuosity of modernism with a manic cast of characters" - Los Angeles Review of Books

''Denton Welch makes the reader aware of the magic that is right under his eyes ... If any writer has been neglected it is Denton.'' - William S. Burroughs

"Two Serious Ladies is a singular achievement - a modernist cult classic." - The Guardian

"The most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters" - Tennessee Williams

Inspired by the author''s honeymoon in Mexico with her husband, the writer and composer Paul Bowles, Two Serious Ladies (1943) is the only novel by avant-garde literary star Jane Bowles. A modernist cult-classic - mysterious, profound, anarchic, and funny - that follows two upper-class women as they descend into debauchery; jettisoning sexual and cultural norms in search of happiness and liberation. Abandoning her family home, Miss Goering decamps to a dilapidated house on an island, but asceticism yields swiftly to increasingly sordid encounters with strange men. Mrs Copperfield dutifully accompanies her husband on a cruise to Panama, but falls in love with a prostitute and is swallowed up by a seedy world of bars and bordellos. When the two meet again, they are much changed - both have suffered the depredations of their deadbeat odysseys, but have found a new strength too.

"[Bowles] has a very special way of seeing things ... master of the unforgettable phrase that no one else could have written." - William S. Burroughs

"Bowles''s spare, elliptical prose has a hallucinatory quality, pierced by moments of startling clarity and wit. Her characters retain a sphinx-like opacity, as unsettling as it is engrossing." - The Guardian

"A modern legend" - Truman Capote

"Bowles was a dizzyingly original stylist, and the texture of her writing and her dialogue in particular - staccato, self-confidently awkward - is unmistakably her own." - The New York Times

About the author

Jane Bowles (born Jane Auer, 1917-1973) - a daring and stylish modernist - has long had an underground reputation as one of the truly original writers of this century. The author of a novel, Two Serious Ladies, a play, In the Summer House, and a volume of stories, Plain Pleasures. Her genius for spare prose and vivid dialogue had an outsized influence on her contemporaries. Tennessee Williams called her "the most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters"; Truman Capote said she was a "modern legend"; and for John Ashbery she was "one of the finest modern writers of fiction in any language." Jane Auer grew up in New York City, where as a teenager she became part of a bohemian, bisexual scene, along with the writer Paul Bowles. The pair married in 1938, somewhat impulsively, as both primarily pursued same-sex relationships (when she met Bowles, she told a friend, "He''s my enemy"). Jane Bowles belonged to the New York artistic circles of the 1940s before moving with Paul to Paris and Tangier, where she knew Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Gertrude Stein, among others. Though her body of work was relatively small, Bowles has enjoyed a large literary influence, with Edmund White writing that "the luminous pages she left behind comprise some of the best American fiction we have." Besides her literary output, Bowles''s letters-to Virgil Thomson, Carl Van Vechten, Carson McCullers, and Paul Bowles, and about John Ashbery, William Burroughs, Aaron Copland, Ira Gershwin, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Paul Robeson, Susan Sontag, Alice Toklas, Gore Vidal, and Eudora Welty, among others-are by turns candid and heartbreaking, both serious and seriously funny. At the age of 40, Jane suffered a debilitating stroke, which brought an early end to her writing. She died in 1973.

"Her dark, furiously readable tales of self-destructive women are plainly influenced by the European existentialists. But her literary method was as American, and as deadly, as a Colt .45." - The Wall Street Journal

"A horselaugh at a world that is too ugly and bitter to be dealt with in any other way." -The New York Times

Widely regarded as one of the best English-language novels of the twentieth century, The Day of the Locust is about Hollywood and its corrupting touch - about the American dream turned into a sun-drenched California nightmare.

Nathanael West''s Hollywood is not the glamorous "home of the stars" but a seedy world of little people, all twisted by their own desires - from the ironically romantic artist narrator, to the hard-as-nails call girl would-be-star whom they all lust after. An unforgettable portrayal of a world that mocks the real and rewards the sham, turns its back on love to plunge into empty sex, and breeds a savage violence that is its own undoing. 

Admired by F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Fante, Bob Dylan, Dorothy Parker, Harold Bloom, and Dashiell Hammett, and hailed as one of the "Best 100 English-language novels" by Time magazine, The Day of the Locust stands as a classic indictment of American life.

"Scenes of extraordinary power ... vividly drawn grotesques." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

"Los Angeles has been the subject of, and setting for, many fine novels yet The Day of the Locust still feels like the single best-achieved piece of fiction the city has inspired." -The Los Angeles Times

"By applying the magpie aesthetics of Surrealism and T.S. Eliot to the ''American Grain,'' by delving into the popular culture and emerging not with surrender or refusal but a razor-cool critique, West became the great precursor to Heller, Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, George Saunders, and so much else." -Jonathan Lethem

"[West''s] novels say more about the way we live now - and the things that brought us to our present pass - than any other work of fiction I can think of." - The New Yorker

About the author

Nathanael West published four novels during the thirty-six years of his life. The first, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, an experimental work written in the 1920s, was well-received but sales were poor. The second, the brilliant Miss Lonelyhearts, was published in 1933, a few months before his publisher went bankrupt. The third, A Cool Million, vanished into the depths of the Depression. It was at this point that West went to Hollywood to earn his living as a scriptwriter. From his Hollywood experience came The Day of the Locust. Publishing in 1939, the novel received very little recognition. The following year, on December 22nd, the day after his neighbour F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack, Nathanael West and his wife were killed in a California highway accident. Since his death, West has come to be recognised as one of the finest novelists, and The Day of the Locust has taken its place as a masterpiece. 

''The most diabolical humor ... Nat''s best book is A Cool Million.'' - John Fante

A Cool Million: or The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin is Nathanael West''s third novel, published in 1934. It is a brutal satire of eternal optimism.

A Cool Million, as its subtitle suggests, presents "the dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin," piece by piece. As a satire of the Horatio Alger myth of success, the novel is evocative of Voltaire''s Candide, which satirized the philosophical optimism of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Alexander Pope. Pitkin is a typical ''Schlemiel'', stumbling from one situation to the next; he gets robbed, cheated, unjustly arrested, frequently beaten and exploited. In a parallel plot Betty Prail, Pitkin''s love interest, is raped, abused, and sold into prostitution. Over the course of the novel Pitkin manages to lose an eye, his teeth, his thumb, his scalp and his leg, but nevertheless retains his optimism and gullibility to the inevitably bitter end.

Admired by F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Fante, Bob Dylan, Dorothy Parker, Harold Bloom, and Dashiell Hammett, West''s is a classic indictment of American life.

"Scenes of extraordinary power ... vividly drawn grotesques." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

"By applying the magpie aesthetics of Surrealism and T.S. Eliot to the ''American Grain,'' by delving into the popular culture and emerging not with surrender or refusal but a razor-cool critique, West became the great precursor to Heller, Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, George Saunders, and so much else." -Jonathan Lethem

"[West''s] novels say more about the way we live now - and the things that brought us to our present pass - than any other work of fiction I can think of." - The New Yorker

"Nathanael West''s stunning four novels are American tales, rooted in our transmogrifying soil. Morality plays they are, classified as comedies. They are indeed often funny. Funny as a crutch." -Elizabeth Hardwick, The New York Review of Books

''In its awareness of political technique, its devastatingly true analysis of unrestricted Capitalist method, its foreshadowing of Americianism turned into a possible Fascism, A Cool Million is brilliantly successful.'' - Alan Ross

About the author

Nathanael West published four novels during the thirty-six years of his life. The first, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, an experimental work written in the 1920s, was well-received but sales were poor. The second, the brilliant Miss Lonelyhearts, was published in 1933, a few months before his publisher went bankrupt. The third, A Cool Million, vanished into the depths of the Depression. It was at this point that West went to Hollywood to earn his living as a scriptwriter. From his Hollywood experience came The Day of the Locust. Publishing in 1939, the novel received very little recognition. The following year, on December 22nd, the day after his neighbour F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack, Nathanael West and his wife were killed in a California highway accident. When West died, at the age of thirty-seven, his originality and brilliance were little known outside an intensely admiring circle of fellow writers: William Carlos Williams, Edmund Wilson, S. J. Perelman, and others. Not until West''s four novels were reissued in the late 1950s was he acknowledged as one of the most gifted writers of his generation. His masterpieces blend manic farce and despairing compassion, and their vision of an America awash in its own mass-produced fantasies, read like a prophecy of much that was to come in American literature and life.