Forty Stories

With these audacious and murderous witty stories, Donald Barthelme threw the preoccupation of our time into the literary equivalent of a Cuisinart and served up a gorgeous salad of American culture, high and low. Here are urban upheavals reimagined as frontier myth; travelogues through countries that might have been created by Kafka; cryptic dialogues that bore down to the bedrock of our longings,...

Почти все свои книги Владимир Набоков посвящал жене Вере. Они редко надолго расставались, так что необходимости писать друг другу у них почти не было. И все же в архиве Набокова сохранилось триста писем, охватывающих более чем пятьдесят лет их совместной жизни, совпавших с самыми драматичными перипетиями ХХ века.

A modern fable, a post-apocalyptic romance, a gothic horror story; Angela Carter's genre-defying fantasia "Heroes and Villains" includes an introduction by Robert Coover in "Penguin Modern Classics". Sharp-eyed Marianne lives in a white tower made of steel and concrete with her father and the other Professors. Outside, where the land is thickly wooded and wild beasts roam, live the Barbarians...

This collection of essays contains some of the most important pieces of criticism of the twentieth century, including the classics "The Aesthetics of Silence", a brilliant account of language, thought and consciousness, and "Trip to Hanoi", written during the Vietnam War. Here too is an excoriating account of America's identity and future, a robust and surprising discussion of pornography and...

In a small town in the American South, four men, young and old, consider their pasts and their futures. J.T.Malone, a lonely middle-aged drugstore owner, discovers he is dying and tries to atone for his misspent life. The aged Judge Clane resists integration and longs for the old ways of the South, while his idealistic grandson, Jester, is drawn to Sherman, a volatile, blue-eyed, black orphan in s...

The author who most epitomises the decadent jazz age and "the lost generation" of post-World War One America, Fitzgerald remains a best-selling author worldwide. Collected here in this covetable and must-have boxed set are four of his major works, including "The Great Gatsby".

THE OLD PATAGONIAN EXPRESS tells of Paul Theroux's train journey down the length of North and South America. Beginning on Boston's subway, he depicts a voyage from ice-bound Massachusetts to the arid plateau of Argentina's most southerly tip, via pretty Central American towns and the ancient Inca city of Machu Picchu. Sweating and shivering by turns as the temperature and altitude r...

Reading Brodsky's essays is like a conversation with an immensely erudite, hugely entertaining and witty (and often very funny) interlocutor. This collection of forty-eight short pieces on Venice showcase Joseph Brodsky at his very best: witty, intelligent, moving and elegant. Looking at every aspect of Venice, from its waterways, streets and architecture to its food, politics and people, Bro...

With delicacy of perception and memory, humour and pathos, Carson McCullers spreads before us the three phases of a weekend crisis in the life of a motherless twelve-year-old girl. Within the span of a few hours, the irresistible, hoydenish Frankie passionately plays out her fantasies at her elder brother's wedding. Through a perilous skylight we look into the mind of a child torn between her...

In free-spirited Paris, Jules and Jim live a carefree, bohemian existence. They write in cafes, travel when the mood takes them, and share the women they love without jealousy. Women like Lucie, flawless, an abbess, and Odile, impulsive, mischievous, almost feral. But it is Kate - with a smile the two friends had determined to always follow before they even met her, but capricious enough to jump i...