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Oxford University Press
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The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. Richard Walton is in trouble again. He has lost his job, and he has borrowed money from his sister, Jennifer — again. And now he has disappeared. Jennifer is looking for him, and so are the police. They both have some questions that they want to ask him. How did he lose his job? Why did he fly to Frankfurt? Who gave his girlfriend those very expensive gold ear-rings? Only Richard can answer these questions. But nobody can find Richard. |
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The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. Arnold Bennett is famous for his stories about the Five Towns and the people who live there. They look and sound just like other people, and, like all of us, sometimes they do some very strange things. There's Sir Jee, who is a rich businessman. So why is he making a plan with a burglar? Then there is Toby Hall. Why does he decide to visit Number 11 Child Row, and who does he find there? And then there are the Hessian brothers and Annie Emery — and the little problem of twelve thousand pounds. |
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The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. On a September day in 1821, in the church of a Yorkshire village, a man and six children stood around a grave. They were burying a woman: the man's wife, the children's mother. The children were all very young, and within a few years the two oldest were dead, too. Close to the wild beauty of the Yorkshire moors, the father brought up his young family. Who had heard of the Brontës of Haworth then? Branwell died while he was still a young man, but the three sisters who were left had an extraordinary gift. They could write marvellous stories — Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey... But Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë did not live to grow old or to enjoy their fame. Only their father was left, alone with his memories. |
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The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. 'We have to leave our house in London', Mother said to the children. 'We're going to live in the country, in a little house near a railway line.' And so begins a new life for Roberta, Peter, and Phyllis. They become the railway children — they know all the trains, Perks the station porter is their best friend, and they have many adventures on the railway line. But why has their father had to go away? Where is he, and will he ever come back? |
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The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. The human mind is a dark, bottomless pit, and sometimes it works in strange and frightening ways. That sound in the night... is it a door banging in the wind, or a murdered man knocking inside his coffin? The face in the mirror... is it yours, or the face of someone standing behind you, who is never there when you turn round? These famous short stories by Edgar Allan Poe, that master of horror, explore the dark world of the imagination, where the dead live and speak, where fear lies in every shadow of the mind... |
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The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. General Sternwood has four million dollars, and two young daughters, both pretty and both wild. He's an old, sick man, close to death, but he doesn't like being blackmailed. So he asks private detective Philip Marlowe to get the blackmailer off his back. Marlowe knows the dark side of life in Los Angeles well, and nothing much surprises him. But the Sternwood girls are a lot wilder than their old father realizes. They like men, drink, drugs — and it's not just a question of blackmail. |
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The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. When Black Beauty is trained to carry a rider on his back, or to pull a carriage behind him, he finds it hard at first. But he is lucky — his first home is a good one, where his owners are kind people, who would never be cruel to a horse. But in the nineteenth century many people were cruel to their horses, whipping them and beating them, and using them like machines until they dropped dead. Black Beauty soon finds this out, and as he describes his life, he has many terrible stories to tell. |
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The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. 'Curtis Colt didn't kill that liquor store woman, and that's a fact. It's not right that he should have to ride the lightning — that's what prisoners call dying in the electric chair. Curtis doesn't belong in it, and I can prove it.' But can Curtis's girlfriend prove it? Murder has undoubtedly been done, and if Curtis doesn't ride the lightning for it, then who will? These seven short stories, by well-known writers such as Dashiel Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, and Nancy Pickard, will keep you on the edge of your seat |
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The Oxford Bookworms Library provides superb reading and student / teacher support for the classroom, and is also highly recommended for schools running Extensive Reading Programmes, offering the right range of books that encourage students to read for pleasure. There are so many things that a mother wishes to teach her daughter. How to lose your innocence but not your hope. How to keep hoping, when hope is your only joy. How to laugh for ever. This is the story of four mothers and their daughters — Chinese-American women, the mothers born in China, and the daughters born in America. Through their eyes we see life in pre-Revolutionary China, and life in downtown San Francisco; women struggling to find a cultural identity that can include a past and a future half a world apart. |
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Provides students of all ages with easy-to-follow guidance on how to structure an essay and how to select and research the most appropriate subject to write on. The first section covers gathering and developing information; the second offers schematic sumaries to the first part. |
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- A unique collection of Chekhov's most lyrical stories in a new translation of great skill and originality, published to coincide with the centenary of Chekhov's death. — This translation captures Chekhov's musicality and modernism by paying special attention to his tone and prose rhythm — closer to the Russian while shaping the prose idiomatically. — The stories are arranged chronologically to show the evolution of Chekhov's art and include familiar as well as less well-known works. — Growing interest in Chekhov as a prose writer, evidenced by the attention given to recent publications of Chekhov's previously unpublished work, and the influence he had had on modern writers such as Katherine Mansfield, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. |
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«Devils», also known in English as «The Possessed and The Demons», was first published in 1871. The third of Dostoevsky's five major novels, it is at once a powerful political tract and a profound study of atheism, depicting the disarray which follows the appearance of a band of modish radicals in a small provincial town. Dostoevsky compares infectious radicalism to the devils that drove the Gadarene swine over the precipice in his vision of a society possessed by demonic creatures that produce devastating delusions of rationality. Dostoevsky is at his most imaginatively humorous in Devils: the novel is full of buffoonery and grotesque comedy. The plot is loosely based on the details of a notorious case of political murder, but Dostoevsky weaves suicide, rape, and a multiplicity of scandals into a compelling story of political evil. This new translation also includes the chapter `Stavrogin's Confession', which was initially considered to be too shocking to print. In this edition it appears where the author originally intended it.» |
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Turgenev's masterpiece about the conflict between generations is as fresh, outspoken, and exciting today as it was in when it was first published in 1862. The controversial portrait of Bazarov, the energetic, cynical, and self-assured `nihilist' who repudiates the romanticism of his elders, shook Russian society. Indeed the image of humanity liberated by science from age-old conformities and prejudices is one that can threaten establishments of any political or religious persuasion, and is especially potent in the modern era. This new translation, specially commissioned for the World's Classics, is the first to draw on Turgenev's working manuscript, which only came to light in 1988. |
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«This volume contains English translations of: «Ivanov», «The Seagull», «Uncle Vanya», «Three Sisters», and «The Cherry Orchard», with a new Introduction by Ronald Hingley.» |
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«Frankenstein» was Mary Shelley's immensely powerful contribution to the ghost stories which she, Percy Shelley, and Byron wrote one wet summer in Switzerland. Its protagonist is a young student of natural philosophy, who learns the secret of imparting life to a creature constructed from relics of the dead, with horrific consequences. «Frankenstein» confronts some of the most feared innovations of evolutionism: topics such as degeneracy, hereditary disease, and mankind's status as a species of animal. The text used here is from the 1818 edition, which is a mocking exposé of leaders and achievers who leave desolation in their wake, showing mankind its choice — to live cooperatively or to die of selfishness. It is also a black comedy, and harder and wittier than the 1831 version with which we are more familiar. Drawing on new research, Marilyn Butler examines the novel in the context of the radical sciences, which were developing among much controversy in the years following the Napoleonic Wars, and shows how Frankenstein's experiment relates to a contemporary debate between the champions of materialist science and of received religion.» |
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«He talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy. His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was...» «The Great Gatsby» (1925), F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, stands among the greatest of all American fiction. Jay Gatsby's lavish lifestyle in a mansion on Long Island's gold coast encapsulates the spirit, excitement, and violence of the era Fitzgerald named `the Jazz Age'. Impelled by his love for Daisy Buchanan, Gatsby seeks nothing less than to recapture the moment five years earlier when his best and brightest dreams — his `unutterable visions' — seemed to be incarnated in her kiss. A moving portrayal of the power of romantic imagination, as well as the pathos and courage entailed in the pusuit of an unattainable dream, The Great Gatsby is a classic fiction of hope and disillusion. This edition is fully annotated with a fine Introduction incorporating new interpretation and detailing Fitzgerald's struggle to write the novel, its critical reception and its significance for future generations.» |
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«The Hound of the Baskervilles» is the tale of an ancient curse suddenly given a terrifying modern application. The grey towers of Baskerville Hall and the wild open country of Dartmoor hold many secrets for Holmes and Watson to unravel. The detective is contemptuous of supernatural manifestations, but the reader will remain perpetually haunted by the hound from the moor. The editor of this volume, W.W. Robson, was Emeritus David Masson Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh and author of «Modern English Literature». The general editor of the Oxford Sherlock Holmes, Owen Dudley Edwards, is Reader in History at the University of Edinburgh and author or «The Quest for Sherlock Holmes: A Biographical Study of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle».» |
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«The Jungle Books» can be regarded as classic stories told by an adult to children. But they also constitute a complex literary work of art in which the whole of Kipling's philosophy of life is expressed in miniature. They are best known for the 'Mowgli' stories; the tale of a baby abandoned and brought up by wolves, educated in the ways and secrets of the jungle by Kaa the python, Baloo the bear, and Bagheera the black panther. The stories, a mixture of fantasy, myth, and magic, are underpinned by Kipling's abiding preoccupation with the theme of self-discovery, and the nature of the 'Law'.» |
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«The «Lives of the Caesars» include the biographies of Julius Caesar and the eleven subsequent emperors: Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitelius, Vespasian, Titus, Domitian. Suetonius composed his material from a variety of sources, without much concern for their reliability. His biographies consist the ancestry and career of each emperor in turn; however, his interest is not so much analytical or historical, but anecdotal and salacious which gives rise to a lively and provocative succession of portraits. The account of Julius Caesar does not simply mention his crossing of the Rubicon and his assassination, but draws attention to his dark piercing eyes and attempts to conceal his baldness. The Live of Caligula presents a vivid picture of the emperor's grotesque appearance, his waywardness, and his insane cruelties. The format and style of Suetonius' Lives of the Caesars was to set the tone for biography throughout western literature — his work remains thoroughly readable and full of interest.» |
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In this almost documentary account of his own experiences of penal servitude in Serbia, Dostoevsky describes the physical and mental suffering of the convicts, the squalor and the degradation, in relentless detail. The inticate procedure whereby the men strip for the bath without removing their ten-pound leg-fetters is an extraordinary tour de force, compared by Turgenev to passages from Dante's Inferno. Terror and resignation — the rampages of a pyschopath, the brief serence interlude of Christmas Day — are evoked by Dostoevsky, writing several years after his release, with a strikingly uncharacteristic detachment. For this reason, House of the Dead is certainly the least Dostoevskian of his works, yet, paradoxically, it ranks among his great masterpieces. |
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