Oxford Books of Prose & Verse – serie

Ireland has always been a nation of story-tellers – tall stories, simple stories, stories of mystery and wonder, love and violence – and Irish short-story writers are perhaps the most talented in the world. This magnificent anthology chronicles the development of a rich literary tradition from the earliest folktales to James Joyce, Liam O'Flaherty, and the rising stars of a new generation.William Trevor, described as `perhaps the finest short-story writer in the English language', has collected 45 stories representing the best of Irish short fiction: He includes several longer stories such as the masterly `Albert Nobbs' by George Moore and Seumas O'Kelly's `The Weaver's Grave' which shows these writers at the peak of their form; and there are also distinguished contributions from Oliver Goldsmith, Maria Edgeworth, William Carleton, Sheridan Le Fanu, Sean O'Faolain, Frank O'Connor, and Elizabeth Bowen among others.This splendid addition to the popular Oxford Books series will be welcomed by everyone who enjoys short stories.

There can be no area of human experience that has generated a wider range of powerful feelings than war. Jon Stallworthy's classic and celebrated anthology spans centuries of human experience of war, from Homer's Iliad, through the First and Second World Wars, the Vietnam War, and the wars fought since. This new edition, published to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, includes a new introduction and additional poems from David Harsent and Peter Wyton amongst others. The new selection provides improved coverage of the two World Wars and the Vietnam War, and new coverage of the wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

There can be no area of human experience that has generated a wider range of powerful feelings than war. Jon Stallworthy's classic and celebrated anthology spans centuries of human experience of war, from Homer's Iliad, through the First and Second World Wars, the Vietnam War, and the wars fought since. This new edition, published to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, includes a new introduction additonal poems from David Harsent and Peter Wyton amongst others. The new selection provides improved coverage of the two World Wars and the Vietnam War, and new coverage of the wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

An unrivalled collection of literary gossip and intimate sidelights on the lives of the authors.The dictionary defines an anecdote as 'a short account of an entertaining or interesting incident', and the anecdotes in this collection more than live up to that description. Many of them are funny, often explosively so. Others are touching, outrageous, sinister, inspiring, or downright weird. They show writers in the English-speaking world from Chaucer to the present acting both unpredictably, and deeply in character. The range is wide - this is a book which finds room for Milton and Margaret Atwood, George Eliot and P. G. Wodehouse, Chinua Achebe and Ian Fleming, Brendan Behan and Wittgenstein. It is also a book in which you can find out which great historian's face was once mistaken for a baby's bottom, which film star left a haunting account of Virginia Woolf not long before her death, and what Agatha Christie really thought of Hercule Poirot - a book not just for lovers of literature, but for anyone with a taste for the curiosities of human nature.

The seventeenth century was a period of remarkable achievement in the field of English poetry: it was the age of Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, Jonson, Drayton, Herbert, Dryden, and Rochester among others. Alastair Fowler's celebrated anthology maps the terrain afresh, including innumerable and generous selections from all of the century's masterpieces as well as fascinating work by less familiar names. It strikes a balance between Metaphysical wit and intellect and Jonsonian simplicity, while also accommodating hitherto neglected popular verse. The result is a truer, more Catholic representation of seventeenth-century verse than any previous anthology.

The thrill and chill of the ghost story is displayed in all its variety and vitality through this marvellous anthology. Ranging from the early 19th century to the 1960s, the collection reveals the development of the genre, and showcases many of its greatest expositors - from Sir Walter Scott, H. G. Wells, M. R. James, T. H. White, Walter de la Mare, and Elizabeth Bowen in the UK to Edith Wharton in America. Though its heyday coincided with the golden age of Empire in the nineteenth century, the ghost story enjoyed a second flowering between the two World Wars and its popularity is as great as ever.

A great age of poetry speaks for itself in Christopher Ricks's celebrated anthology: the variety and power of Victorian verse, the innovation and creativity with which poets resisted the bad propensities of the era through which they lived. The great figures are of course strongly represented - Tennyson and Browning, Swinburne and Hopkins - but not so as to crowd out the less expected but equally rewarding facets of light verse and nonsense, of grotesque and protest. At long last justice is done to the poignant directness of 'the true voice of feeling', from William Barnes and John Clare, through Emily Jane Bronte and Christina G. Rossetti, to Thomas Hardy.

The inescapable reality of death has given rise to much of literature's most profound and moving work. D. J. Enright's wonderfully eclectic selection presents the words of poet and novelist, scientist and philosopher, mystic and sceptic. And alongside these 'professional' writers, he allows the voices of ordinary people to be heard; for this is a subject on which there are no real experts and wisdom lies in many unexpected places.

From tales of the supernatural to pungent social realism, and from the humorous to the disturbing, whether rural or urban, this anthology shows the vitality of the Scottish short story.Douglas Dunn's eclectic selection displays the marvellous range of Scottish story-telling, beginning with three early traditional tales, and including a wealth of writers from the last three centuries: amongst them Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, J. M. Barrie, Violet Jacob, Neil Gunn, Eric Linklater, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, and younger talents such as Ronald Frame, Janice Galloway, and A. L. Kennedy.

The essay is one of the richest of literary forms. Its most obvious characteristics are freedom, informality, and the personal touch - though it can also find room for poetry, satire, fantasy, and sustained argument. All these qualities, and many others, are on display in The Oxford Book of Essays. The most wide-ranging collection of its kind to appear for many years, it includes 140 essays by 120 writers: classics, curiosities, meditations, diversions, old favourites, recent examples that deserve to be better known. A particularly welcome feature is the amount of space allotted to American essayists, from Benjamin Franklin to John Updike and beyond. This is an anthology that opens with wise words about the nature of truth, and closes with a consideration of the novels of Judith Krantz. Some of the other topics discussed in its pages are anger, pleasure, Gandhi, Beau Brummell, wasps, party-going, gangsters, plumbers, Beethoven, potato crisps, the importance of being the right size, and the demolition of Westminster Abbey. It contains some of the most eloquent writing in English, and some of the most entertaining.

No previous anthology has succeeded in illustrating so thoroughly the kinds of verse actually written in the eighteenth century. The familiar tradition is fully represented by selections from such poets as Pope, Swift, Tomson, Gray, Smart, Goldsmith, Cowper, Burns, and Blake. In addition, the anthology includes verse by many forgotten writers, both men and women, from all levels of society. Although they have never figured in conventional literary history, they wrote humorous, idiosyncratic, and graphic verse about their personal experience and the world around them, in a way that should challenge received ideas about the period's restraints and inhibitions.

An attractive reissue of the late Bishop George Appleton's celebrated selection of over 1,100 prayers from many centuries and many traditions, including Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Iranian, Shinto, Classical Greek and Latin, native American, and Bahá'í. The wide-ranging contents ofThe Oxford Book of Prayer reflect the cooperation of the many advisers who have ensured that the choice of prayers is ecumenical in the widest sense of the word. The prayers are arranged under headings such as 'Prayers from the Scriptures', 'Prayers of Christians, personal and occasional', 'Prayers of the Church', and 'Prayers from other traditions of faith', but there is also a subject index to guide the user to prayers for particular occasions, and an index of authors and sources. The book may thus be used for browsing or for more structured prayer, for private meditation or for public worship.

The sixteenth century has long been acknowledged the 'Golden Age' of English verse - with such names as Shakespeare, Donne, and Spenser to its credit it could hardly be otherwise. Yet this anthology, which includes both undisputed masterpieces and achievements in hitherto neglected fields, is the first to reveal the full range and diversity of the century's poetic riches. What emerges is the most complete picture available of the poetic vitality of the sixteenth century.

The Gothic tale has been with us for over two hundred years, but this collection is the first to illustrate the continuing strength of this special fictional tradition from its origins in the late eighteenth century. Gothic fiction is generally identified from Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto and the works of Ann Radcliffe, and with heroes and heroines menaced by feudal villains amid crumbling ruins. While the repertoire of claustrophobic settings, gloomy themes, and threatening atmosphere established the Gothic genre, later writers from Poe onwards achieved an ever greater sophistication, and a shift in emphasis from cruelty to decadence. Modern Gothic is distinguished by its imaginative variety of voice, from the chilling depiction of a disordered mind to the sinister suggestion of vampirism. This anthology brings together the work of writers such as Le Fanu, Hawthorne, Hardy, Faulkner, and Borges with their earliest literary forebears, and emphasizes the central role of women writers from Anna Laetitia Aikin to Isabel Allende and Angela Carter. While the Gothic tale shares some characteristics with the ghost story and tales of horror and fantasy, the present volume triumphantly celebrates the distinctive features that define this powerful and unsettling literary form.

The Caribbean has produced one of the most vigorous and exciting bodies of poetry of the last one hundred year. The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse is the only contemporary anthology to present the best of the English-language poetry of the region alongside selections from the poetry of both the French and Spanish Caribbean. Featuring a range of established poets from Derek Walcott to Jesus Cos Causse, Olive Senior to Aimé Césaire, as well as exciting new voices, this is a rich and challenging book.

The Oxford Book of English Short Stories , edited by A. S. Byatt, herself the author of several collections of short stories, is the first anthology to specifically take the English short story as its theme. The 37 stories featured here are selected from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ranging from Dickens, Trollope, and Hardy to J. G. Ballard, Angela Carter, and Ian McEwan, though many draw ingeniously from the richness of earlier English literary writing.There are all sorts of threads of connection and contrast running through these stories. Their subjects vary from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the momentous to the trivial, from the grim to the farcical. There is English empiricism, English pragmatism, English starkness, English humour, English satire, English dandyism, English horror, and English whimsy. There are examples of social realism, from rural poverty to blitzed London; ghost stories and tales of the supernatural; surreal fantasy and science fiction. There are stories of sensibility, precisely delineated, from Hardy's reluctant bride to the shocked heroine of Elizabeth Taylor's The Blush, from H. E. Bates's brilliant fusion of class, sex, death, and landscape, to D. H. Lawrence's exploration of a consciousness slowly detaching itself from its world. There are exuberant stories by Saki and Waugh, Wodehouse and Firbank, with a particularly English range from high irony to pure orchestrated farce.The very range and scope of the collection celebrates the eccentric differences and excellences of English short stories. Some of A. S. Byatt's choices clearly take their place in the grand tradition of story-telling, while others are more unusual. Many break all the rules of unity of tone and narrative, appearing to be one kind of story before unexpectedly turning into another. They pack together comedy and tragedy, farce and delicacy, elegance and the grotesque, with language as various as the subject matter. As A. S. Byatt explains: 'My only criterion was that those stories I selected should be startling and satisfying, and if possible make the hairs on the neck prickle with excitement, aesthetic or narrative'.

From Chaucer to Vikram Seth and Victoria Wood; from Byron to John Updike; from Augustan satire to advertising jingles; from G. K. Chesterton to Wendy Cope - this superb anthology is notable above all for its breadth. It is truly international in scope, bringing together poets from far beyond the British Isles. Drawing on many different types of verse, from epigrams to street ballads, from clerihew to music-hall lyrics, from the double-dactyl of the calypso, it offers an exceptionally wide range of comic pleasures. The poems in this collection are by turns subtle, down-to-earth, macabre, ingenious, acerbic, ribald, and cheerful; written to amuse, they call forth laughter and delight in equal measure. The established classics of comic verse, writers such as Tom Hood, W. S. Gilbert, and Ogden Nash, are represented in force, but many unfamiliar or unexpected names are also included. This collection undoubtedly contains matter of great historical interest, but the emphasis throughout is firmly on enjoyment.

V. S. Pritchett, one our greatest short-story writers, has chosen forty-one stories written in the English language for this volume, producing a collection that successfully displays the wealth and variety of an art that spans some 200 years.Great Britain, America, and especially Eire have fine traditions of short-story writing that have developed from the time of Sir Walter Scott and Nathaniel Hawthorne, while in the last century the art was perfected by Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, W. Somerset Maugham, John Updike, and V. S. Pritchett himself. The Irish contribution includes such masters as James Joyce, Frank O'Connor, and Liam O'Flaherty, and stories by Canadian, Indian, New Zealand, and Australian writers show the full range of invention and ability in a genre that continues to flourish.

Ireland has long been a nation of story-tellers. What began as a lively form of entertainment has grown into an unrivalled literary genre. Although Ireland may mourn the loss of the seanchaí, the old hearthside story-teller, the Irish art of story-telling is by no means lost. This varied anthology traces the development of the Irish short story from the early folk-tales of the oral tradition through Oliver Goldsmith, Maria Edgeworth, James Joyce, and Liam O'Flaherty, and on to the rising stars of the modern generation, such as Bernard Mac Laverty and Desmond Hogan.

This collection of French short stories in translation expands our idea of French writing by including new stories by women writers and by authors of Francophone origin. Spanning the centuries from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth, the collection opens with a rumbustious tale from the Marquis de Sade, takes in the masters of the nineteenth century, from Stendhal and Balzac to Maupassant, and reaches to Quebec, Africa, and the French Caribbean in the twentieth century. Women writers include relatively well known figures such as Renee Vivien, Colette, and Beauvoir, and newer writers such as Assia Djebar, Christiane Baroche, and Annie Saumont. The French short story is a rich and diverse medium, but all the stories selected share a common characteristic: they make exciting reading.

This collection of short stories, including many new translations, is the first to span the whole of Japan's modern era from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day. Beginning with the first writings to assimilate and rework Western literary traditions, through the flourishing of the short story genre in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Taisho era, to the new breed of writers produced under the constraints of literary censorship, and the current writings reflecting the pitfalls and paradoxes of modern life, this anthology offers a stimulating survey of the development of the Japanese short story.Various indigenous traditions, in addition to those drawn from the West, recur throughout the stories: stories of the self, of the Water Trade (Tokyo's nightlife of geishas and prostitutes), of social comment, love and obsession, legends and fairytales. This collection includes the work of two Nobel prize-winners: Kawabata and Oe, the talented women writers Hirabayashi, Euchi, Okamoto, and Hayashi, together with the acclaimed Tanizaki, Mishima, and Murakami.The introduction by Theodore Goossen gives insight into these exotic and enigmatic, sometimes disturbing stories, derived from the lyrical roots of Japanese literature with its distinctive stress on atmosphere and beauty.