|
|
|
Книги издательства «Wordsworth»
|
Marco Polo (1254-1329) has achieved an almost archetypal status as a traveller, and his Travels is one of the first great travel books of Western literature, outside the ancient world. The Travels recounts Polo's journey to the eastern court of Kublai Khan, the chieftain of the Mongol empire which covered the Asian continent, but which was almost unknown to Polo's contemporaries. Encompassing a twenty-four year period from 1721, Polo's account details his travels in the service of the empire, from Beijing to northern India and ends with the remarkable story of Polo's return voyage from the Chinese port of Amoy to the Persian Gulf. Alternately factual and fantastic, Polo's prose at once reveals the medieval imagination's limits, and captures the wonder of subsequent travel writers when faced with the unfamiliar, the exotic or the unknown. |
|
«Laurence Sterne's «The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman» is a huge literary paradox, for it is both a novel and an anti-novel. As a comic novel replete with bawdy humour and generous sentiments, it introduces us to a vivid group of memorable characters, variously eccentric, farcical and endearing. As an anti-novel, it is a deliberately tantalising and exuberantly egoistic work, ostentatiously digressive, involving the reader in the labyrinthine creation of a purported autobiography. This mercurial eighteenth-century text thus anticipates modernism and postmodernism. Vibrant and bizarre, «Tristram Shandy» provides an unforgettable experience. We may see why Nietzsche termed Sterne 'the most liberated spirit of all time'.» |
|
«Thomas Hardy's only historical novel, «The Trumpet Major» is set in Wessex during the Napoleonic Wars. Hardy skilfully immerses us in the life of the day, making us feel the impact of historical events on the immemorial local way of life — the glamour of the coming of George III and his soldiery, fears of the press-gang and invasion, and the effect of distant but momentous events like the Battle of Trafalgar. He interweaves a compelling, bitter-sweet romantic love story of the rivalry of two brothers for the hand of the heroine Anne Garland, played out against the loves of a lively gallery of other characters. While there are elements of sadness and even tragedy, «The Trumpet-Major» shows Hardy's skills of story-telling, characterisation and description in a novel of vitality, comedy and warmth.» |
|
«The Turn of the Screw» is the classic ghost story for which James is most remembered. Set in a country house, it is a chilling tale of the supernatural. «The Aspern Papers» is a tale of Americans in Europe, cleverly evoking the drama of comedie humaine against the settings of a Venetian palace.» |
|
«The gentle melancholy and lyrical atmosphere of «Twelfth Night» have long made the play a favourite with Shakespearian audiences. The plot revolves around mistaken identities and unrequited love, but is further enlivened by a comic sub-plot of considerable accomplishment. In it, Sir Toby Belch and his companion outwit the pretentious Malvolio, who despite suffering their most outrageous and insulting practical jokes, emerges as an almost noble figure.» |
|
«The three works in this collection, all dating from Nietzsche's last lucid months, show him at his most stimulating and controversial: the portentous utterances of the prophet (together with the ill-defined figure of the Ubermensch) are forsaken, as wit, exuberance and dazzling insights predominate, forcing the reader to face unpalatable insights and to rethink every commonly accepted 'truth'. Thinking with Nietzsche, in Jaspers' words, means holding one's own against him, and we are indeed refreshed and challenged by the vortex of his thoughts, by concepts which test and probe. In «The Twilight of the Idols», The Antichrist, and Ecce Homo Nietzsche writes at breakneck speed of his provenance, his adversaries and his hopes for mankind; the books are largely epigrammatic and aphoristic, allowing this poet-philosopher to bewilder and fascinate us with their strangeness and their daring. He who fights with monsters, Nietzsche once told us, should look to it that he himself does not become one, and when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you. Reader, beware.» |
|
This book contains more cocktails than any other — 1,500 of them, ranging from classic Martinis to unblushing modern concoctions such as Sex on the Beach. Recipes are user friendly, assembled on a 'unit' basis that clearly shows the proportions needed to make the perfect cocktail — without fuss. Ingredients and equipment are easy to acquire, techniques straightforward. Bewildering measures — 'jigger', 'half-gill' 3/4 fl oz — are avoided. There is much entertainment to be found in these pages too, with revealing anecdotes about many of the cocktails, and generous sprinklings of apposite quotations, risque jokes and little curiosities. The Ultimate Cocktail Book is more than a reference guide, it's a concocter's companion and a source of enlightenment. A volume tailor-made, in short, for good mixers. |
|
«May Sinclair was an innovator of modern fiction, a late Victorian who was also a precursor to Virginia Woolf. In her «Uncanny Stories» (1923), Sinclair combines the traditional ghost story with the discoveries of Freud and Einstein. The stories shock, enthral, delight and unsettle. Specially included in this volume is «The Intercessor» (1911), Sinclair's powerful story of childhood and abandoned love, a tale whose intensity compares with that of the Brontes.» |
|
Uncle Tom's Cabin is the most popular, influential and controversial book written by an American. Stowe’s rich, panoramic novel passionately dramatises why the whole of America is implicated in and responsible for the sin of slavery, and resoundingly concludes that only 'repentance, justice and mercy' will prevent the onset of 'the wrath of Almighty God!'. |
|
«Under the Greenwood Tree» is Hardy's most bright, confident and optimistic novel. This delightful portrayal of a picturesque rural society, tinged with gentle humour and quiet irony, established Hardy as a writer. However, the novel is not merely a charming rural idyll. The double-plot, in which the love story of Dick Dewey and Fancy Day is inter-related with a tragic chapter in the history of Mellstock Choir, hints at the poignant disappearance of a long-lived and highly-valued traditional way of life.» |
|
More's 'Utopia' is a complex, innovative and penetrating contribution to political thought, culminating in the famous 'description' of the Utopians, who live according to the principles of natural law, but are receptive to Christian teachings, who hold all possessions in common, and view gold as worthless. |
|
«These stories of myth and resurrection, of uncanny events and violent impulse, were with one exception written and published in the latter half of the 1920s, coinciding with the composition of Lawrence's controversial masterpiece «Lady Chatterley's Lover». At this time Lawrence declared himself to be 'really awful sick of writing'; yet here we find some of his most beautiful, hauntingly melancholy fictions. In struggling to escape from their thwarted lives and to achieve human 'tenderness', the characters embody and continue the major preoccupations of Lawrence's work as a whole. «Love Among the Haystacks» provides an early illustration of the intensity and innovation which made Lawrence one of the most distinctive and important of twentieth-century writers.» |
|
«In the midst of a wood of evergreens on the banks of the Arno, a man — young, handsome, and splendidly attired — has thrown himself upon the ground, where he writhes like a stricken serpent. He is the prey of a demoniac excitement: an appalling consternation is upon him — madness is in his brain — his mind is on fire. Lightnings appear to gleam from his eyes — as if his soul were dismayed, and withering within his breast. 'Oh! no-no!' he cries with a piercing shriek, as if wrestling madly — furiously — but vainly, against some unseen fiend that holds him in his grasp. Aged and deserted, Fernand Wagner agrees to serve John Faust for the last year of his life. In return he is given youth, wealth and beauty — but at the terrible price of becoming a werewolf. He loves the glacial, beautiful, sensual Nisida, whose family history conceals a dreadful secret. Together, they flee from Florence to a desert island: but dogged by the Inquisition, and by the might of the Ottoman Empire, they are finally forced to face the horror that lurks in the closet... First published in 1847, «Wagner the Werewolf» is one of the very earliest treatments of the Werewolf theme in English literature, and has lost none of its power to shock, it is one of the greatest works of George W. M. Reynolds, once the most popular author in England, and the «Master of the Penny Dreadful».» |
|
«Washington Square» marks the culmination of James’s apprentice period as a novelist. With sharply focused attention upon just four principal characters, James provides an acute analysis of middle-class manners and behaviour in the New York of the 1870’s, a period of great change in the life of the city. This change is explored through the device of setting the novel's action during the 1840s, similarly a period of considerable turbulence as the United States experienced the onset of rapid commercial and industrial expansion. Through the relationships between Austin Sloper, a celebrated physician, and his sister Lavinia Penniman, his daughter Catherine, and Catherine's suitor, Morris Townsend, James observes the contemporary scene as a site of competing styles and performances where authentic expression cannot be articulated or is subject to suppression.» |
|
Tom, a poor orphan, is employed by the villainous chimney-sweep, Grimes, to climb up inside flues to clear away the soot. While engaged in this dreadful task, he loses his way and emerges in the bedroom of Ellie, the young daughter of the house who mistakes him for a thief. He runs away, and, hot and bothered, he slips into a cooling stream, falls asleep, and becomes a Water Baby. In his new life, he meets all sorts of aquatic creatures, including an engaging old lobster, other water babies, and at last reaches St Branden's Isle where he encounters the fierce Mrs Bedonebyeasyoudid and the motherly Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby. After a long and arduous quest to the Other-end-of-Nowhere young Tom achieves his heart's desire. |
|
«'I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot', Virginia Woolf stated of her eighth novel, «The Waves». Widely regarded as one of her greatest and most original works, it conveys the rhythms of life in synchrony with the cycle of nature and the passage of time. Six children — Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis — meet in a garden close to the sea, their voices sounding over the constant echo of the waves that roll back and forth from the shore. The subsequent continuity of these six main characters, as they develop from childhood to maturity and follow different passions and ambitions, is interspersed with interludes from the timeless and unifying chorus of nature.In pure stream-of-consciousness style, Woolf presents a cross-section of multiple yet parallel lives, each marked by the disintegrating force of a mutual tragedy. «The Waves» is her searching exploration of individual and collective identity, and the observations and emotions of life, from the simplicity and surging optimism of youth to the vacancy and despair of middle-age.» |
|
The tough-mindedness of the social satire in and its air of palpable integrity give this novel a special place in Anthony Trollope's Literary career. Trollope paints a picture as panoramic as his title promises, of the life of 1870s London, the loves of those drawn to and through the city, and the career of Augustus Melmotte. Melmotte is one of the Victorian novel’s greatest and strangest creations, and is an achievement undimmed by the passage of time. Trollope's 'Now' might, in the twenty-first century, look like some distant disenchanted 'Then', but this is still the yesterday which we must understand in order to make proper sense of our today. |
|
«'As a man loved a woman, that was how I loved...It was good, good, good...' Stephen is an ideal child of aristocratic parents — a fencer, a horse rider and a keen scholar. Stephen grows to be a war hero, a bestselling writer and a loyal, protective lover. But Stephen is a woman, and her lovers are women. As her ambitions drive her, and society confines her, Stephen is forced into desperate actions. «The Well of Loneliness» was banned for obscenity when published in 1928. It became an international bestseller, and for decades was the single most famous lesbian novel. It has influenced how love between women is understood, for the twentieth century and beyond.» |
|
«The Well-Beloved» completes the cycle of Hardy's great novels, reiterating his favourite themes of man's eternal quest for perfection in both love and art, and the suffering that ensues. Jocelyn Pierston, celebrated sculptor, tries to create an image of his ideal woman — his imaginary «Well-Beloved» — in stone, just as he tries to find her in the flesh. Powerful symbolism marks this romantic fantasy that Hardy has grounded firmly in reality with a characteristically authentic rendering of location, the Isle of Slingers, or Portland as we know it. Overt exploration of the relationship between erotic fascination and creativity makes this novel a nineteenth-century landmark in the persistent debate about art, aesthetics and gender.» |
|
«The wolf has always been a creature of legend and romance, while kings, sorcerers and outlaws have been proud to be called by the name of the wolf, it’s no wonder, then, that tales of transformation between man and wolf are so powerful and persistent. This original collection offers some of the greatest, rarest and most unusual werewolf stories ever. From the forests of Transylvania to the ordered lawns of an English country estate, here are all the classic aspects of the tale. You will encounter shadows that lope under the moon, chilling howls, family curses, crimson feasts, the desperate chase and the deathly duel. But you will also find the werewolf in less expected guises – as an adversary for Sherlock Holmes, as a myth of the Wild West, and as a figure restored to its origins in folk and fairy tales. With an informative introduction by Mark Valentine that follows the traces of the werewolf in literature, and its links to «Dracula», «Jekyll & Hyde», and «The Hound of the Baskervilles», this superb collection will make you fear the full moon.» |
|
