Oxford Books of Prose – serie

It is no surprise that one of the earliest works in English literature should be a poem about the sea: the sea has been a source of fascination from the earliest times, and the Anglo-Saxon poem 'The Seafarer' is only the first in a long series of writings which ponder its mystery.A powerful and restless presence in real life, the sea is one of the most ubiquitous and protean symbols in literature, changing in response to shifts in sensibility, and holding a mirror to all who confront it - Renaissance explorers and Augustan gentlemen, Romantic outcasts and Victorian travellers, small-boat sailors, naturalists and novelists, poets and oceanographers: men and women in a state of wonder before the sea.Jonathan Raban brings a special awareness and knowledge to his role as editor; in the words of Colin Thubron, 'nobody of his generation writes more subtly or imaginatively on travel'. Raban's introduction constitutes an important essay on the meaning of the sea in literature, and the pieces he has chosen display the exhilarating richness of writing in the tradition. Alongside extracts from the acknowledged marine masterpieces are many unexpected delights: Emily Dickinson's affirmative poem 'Exhalation is the Going'; a meditation on a seaside holiday by Larkin; Jane Austen's tart satirizing of Byron's Romanticized sea; Thoreau's contemplation of monsters and lost anchors off Cape Cod; Willard Bascom's brilliantly observed description of breaking waves.As richly varied and enthralling as the sea itself, this sparkling collection spans the centuries from AD 900 to the present and forms a unique and important body of writing to delight in and admire.

The Caribbean is the source of one of the richest, most accessible, and yet technically adventurous traditions of contemporary world literature. This collection of Caribbean short stories is pan-Caribbean, including stories from the four main languages of the region: English, Spanish, French, and Dutch. Stories by major figures in the English language tradition such as V. S. Naipaul, Sam Sevlon, and Jean Rhys are set alongside their Spanish- and French-speaking contemporaries like Alejo Carpentier, Jan Bosh, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Their work, in all its diversity of style, theme, and linguistic energy, provides a context for the work of an exciting new generation of Caribbean writers like Edwidge Danticat, Robert Antoni, Astrid Roemer, and Jamaica Kincaid.A celebration of regional creativity, the collection contains sufficient surprises to keep even the most avid student of West Indian writing turning the pages, while reminding readers that the Caribbean is a multilingual, multicultural space.

'And then went down to the ship.' Thus, with a nod to Homer, Ezra Pound began his own epic odyssey through the world of literature and the modern world. There is no literature without a departure, a setting forth; and very often that has meant leaving the land for the more uncertain world of the sea. Many great writers have written about life at sea and the adventures that are to be had, and in this selection of short stories, Tony Tanner's aim was to avoid the obvious and where possible to seek out their more neglected works. As a separate and recognizable genre, the sea story was effectively invented by American writers and they are well represented, with contributions from Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner. From Herman Melville(who wrote no short stories) we read his account of the final three days of the chase of Moby Dick, which concludes that novel and is one of the high points in American literature. Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, John Masefield, E. M. Forster, Malcolm Lowry, and Peter Ustinov are some of British authors in this collection. Although not British in origin, the greatest of all writers of sea fiction is Joseph Conrad, the only writer to be represented by two stories: 'Initiation', which begins the volume, and 'The Secret Sharer', in which he charts one of the most extraordinary relationships between men at sea ever imagined and analyzed. In his introduction, Tony Tanner seeks to explore and establish the particular qualities that emerge when writing takes to the waters and we, as readers, are offered what Conrad called his 'paper-boats'. This wide-ranging collection of stories will prove absorbing and thoroughly entertaining reading for anyone with an interest in the sea and its literature.

The field of detective fiction is vast, and The Oxford Book of Detective Stories brings together the best short fiction from around the world to show how different nationalities have imposed their own stamp on the genre. As well as English and American stories from acknowledged masters such as Ellery Queen, Dashiell Hammett, and Agatha Christie, the anthology includes stories by Simenon, Conan Doyle, Sarah Paretsky, and Ian Rankin, and roams across Europe and further afield to embrace Japan, Denmark, Holland, Italy, Argentina, Czechoslovakia, and other countries. Women detectives, police procedurals, the amateur sleuth, locked-room mysteries are all here, and in her introduction Patricia Craig examines the figure of the detective in international literature.

From dreams realistic and reminiscent to the world of nightmare and phantasmagoria, from the bizarre and ridiculous to the perplexing and haunting, this anthology draws on the dreams of a wide variety of novelists, poets, playwrights, and others to explore the inexhaustible fascination of dreams and their power as a source of literary inspiration.

In this entertaining and lively anthology, Jan Morris traces the history of the University from its foundation in the Middle Ages through to the twentieth century, combining extracts from contemporary observers with her own informative commentary. The reader is invited to view the development of the college system, the creation of the Bodleian, Magdalen's defiance of James II, Newman, and the Oxford Movement. The life and times of Oxford are exalted or derided by writers ranging from the antiquarian Anthony Wood to Evelyn Waugh, Dr Johnson and Mr Gladstone, Hilaire Belloc and Thomas Hardy. Unworldly scholars and eccentric dons walk the pages, accompanied by the great characters of Oxford such as Benjamin Jowett, Sir Maurice Bowra, and William Spooner.

This anthology demonstrates to the full just how rewarding an art form the aphorism can be, and just how brilliantly the aphorist can illuminate the hidden truth, or lay bare the ironies of existence.Specific sections including 'Religion', 'Money & Rank', 'Men, Women, Marriage' and 'Politics', cover the whole range of aphoristic literature. This book brings together the most diverse figures-the classic aphorists, like La Rochefoucauld; the philosophers, from the Greeks to Samuel Johnson to Virginia Woolf-as well as statesmen, scientists, boulevardiers, Olympians, and gadflies. John Gross draws on their wisdom and wit to produce an anthology that will be referred to time and time again.