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Книги издательства «Wordsworth»
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Few American novelists of the twentieth century have stayed as modern as F. Scott Fitzgerald. He gave a name to his age, 'the Jazz Age', but his reputation has outlived it. Gathered here are the five novels he wrote in his relatively short career, together with a number of the many short stories he wrote between 1922 and his death in 1940. This Side of Paradise catapulted him to fame, its expose of the manners and morals of a post-war generation becoming a cause celebre. The Beautiful and Damned, a semi autobiographical moral parable of a doomed marriage, affirmed Fitzgerald's status as the spokesman for the generation of the 1920s. His third novel, The Great Gatsby, remains for many readers the definitive American novel of the twentieth century, its eponymous hero a complex fictional portrayal of a romantic imagination at the mercy of a corrupt reality. Tender is the Night is an American Vanity Fair set on the French Riviera in the 1920s. Fitzgerald was working on The Last Tycoon at his death in 1940, and many critics rank his account of Hollywood at the height of the studio system, even in its unfinished state, as comparable to the achievement of The Great Gatsby. |
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E.F.Benson (1867-1940) was a prolific English novelist. He wrote some very highly rated Supernatural fiction, but his most famous creations were the protagonists in the six novels known under the collective title of Mapp and Lucia, the comic exploits of two upper-middle-class ladies living in a seaside town, very like Rye in East Sussex, in the 1920 and 1930s. These stories, of enduring popularity, were made into a TV series in the 1980s. Volume One contains: Queen Lucia (1920); Miss Mapp (1922); and, Lucia in London (1927). |
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E.F.Benson (1867-1940) was a prolific English novelist. He wrote some very highly rated Supernatural fiction, but his most famous creations were the protagonists in the six novels known under the collective title of Mapp and Lucia, the comic exploits of two upper-middle-class ladies living in a seaside town, very like Rye in East Sussex, in the 1920 and 1930s. These stories, of enduring popularity, were made into a TV series in the 1980s. Volume Two contains: Mapp and Lucia (1931); Lucia's Progress (1935); and, Trouble for Lucia (1939). |
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This book is introduced by Mark Valentine. Dr Nikola — Victorian master criminal. Elegant, ruthless, hypnotic: enter Dr Nikola and his black cat Apollyon. He was the world's first master villain, a Victorian forerunner of Dr Fu Manchu and the mad cat-stroking evil genius Blofeld in the James Bond books and films. Now Dr Nikola is back, wielding his sinister powers across the globe. In England, Egypt, Australia, Tibet, he pursues a priceless holy relic that will help him achieve his ultimate goal: immortality. Whether giving orders to his henchmen, suave in an evening suit in a private London restaurant, or languidly interrogating his prisoners in his secret torture chamber, Dr Nikola is always at his ease. And even when, by some mischance, his plans are temporarily thwarted, Dr Nikola manages to return, his implacable dark eyes drawing you to obey his will — Here you will find his two greatest adventures, the vintage Victorian thrillers A Bid for Fortune (1895) and Dr Nikola (1896) in one breathless, pacy, nightmarish volume. Created by Anglo-Australian novelist Guy Boothby, these books won praise from Rudyard Kipling and George Orwell. Dr Nikola is a character you will not be able to forget. 'Frank sensationalism carried to its furthest limits' — The Times, 1905. |
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In Henry IV, Part 1, the King is in a doubly ironic position. His rebellion against Richard II was successful, but now he himself is beset by rebels, led by the charismatic Harry Hotspur. The King's son, Prince Hal, seems to be more concerned with the pleasures of the tavern world and the company of the fat rogue, Falstaff, than with concerns of state. Eventually, however, Hal proves a courageous foe of the rebels. This history play is lively in its interplay of political intrigue and boisterous comedy, subtle in the connections between high statecraft and low craftiness, exuberant in its range of vivid characters, and memorable in its thematic concern with honour, loyalty and the quest for power. In Henry IV, Part 2, the King is ailing, Falstaff is ageing, and the kingdom itself, where rebellion is still rife, seems diseased or debilitated. The comedy has a melancholy undertone, and the politics verge on the Machiavellian. Eventually, the resourceful Hal, inheriting the crown as Henry V, must prove that he can uphold justice in the realm. Here Shakespeare demonstrates a mastery of thematic complexity and subtlety, and shows the price in human terms that may be exacted by political success. |
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This collection brings together Jane Austen's earliest experiments in the art of fiction and novels that she left incomplete at the time of her premature death in 1817. Her fragmentary juvenilia show Austen developing her own sense of narrative form whilst parodying popular kinds of fiction of her day. Lady Susan is a wickedly funny epistolary novel about a captivating but unscrupulous widow seeking to snare husbands for her daughter and herself. The Watsons explores themes of family relationships, the marriage market, and attitudes to rank, which became the hallmarks of her major novels. In Sanditon, Austen exercises her acute powers of social observation in the setting of a newly fashionable seaside resort. These novels are here joined by shorter fictions that survive in Austen's manuscripts, including critically acclaimed works like Catharine, Love and Freindship, and The History of England. |
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When Princess Irene and her nursemaid stay out too late one night and are chased home by goblins, a young miner boy called Curdie comes to their rescue. So begins a fantastic adventure in which Irene and Curdie must try to stop a goblin invasion, helped by Irene's mysterious great-great-grandmother. This much-loved tale was a personal favourite of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. This edition includes the sequel, The Princess and Curdie. |
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The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is a classic representation of the impoverished and politically powerless underclass of British society in Edwardian England, ruthlessly exploited by the institutionalized corruption of their employers and the civic and religious authorities. Epic in scale, the novel charts the ruinous effects of the laissez-faire mercantilist ethics on the men, women, and children of the working classes, and through its emblematic characters, argues for a socialist politics as the only hope for a civilized and humane life for all. It is a timeless work whose political message is as relevant today as it was in Tressell's time. For this it has long been honoured by the Trade Union movement and thinkers across the political spectrum. |
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Richard II is one of Shakespeare's finest works: lucid, eloquent, and boldly structured. It can be seen as a tragedy, or a historical play, or a political drama, or as one part of a vast dramatic cycle which helped to generate England's national identity. Today, to some of us, Richard II may appear conservative; but, in Shakespeare's day, it could appear subversive: 'I am Richard II', declared an indignant Queen Elizabeth. Numerous recent revivals in the theatre and on screen have demonstrated the enduring power and poignancy of this drama of the downfall of an egoistic but pitiable monarch. Richard II is the seventeenth volume in the Wordsworth Classics' Shakespeare Series, in which each volume has been freshly edited by Cedric Watts. |
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This is a book that may have changed history — and still thrills today. One of the first and still one of the finest spy stories ever written, Erskine Childers' book introduced Edwardian readers to the idea of a 'secret service'. In an enthralling tale of a duel among the islands and sandbanks of the North Sea, two amateur investigators and yachtsmen discover sinister preparations off the German coast. At great peril both from an implacable enemy and furious storms at sea, they stake their lives on the strength of their doughty boat, the Dulcibella. Will they fight their way back to England in time to sound a warning? The Riddle of the Sands caused a sensation when it appeared in 1903, with statesmen and soldiers drawn into a debate about Britain's readiness to repulse a naval invasion. So strong was its impact that one critic later accused its author of almost single-handedly starting a European war. But its influence would not have been so great if it had not been so powerfully readable, a quality it keeps to this day. Ranked with the greatest work of John Buchan, Joseph Conrad and Ian Fleming, this vintage adventure has lost none of its force. |
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This book is selected & introduced by David Stuart Davies. Traumatised by ghost stories in her youth, Pulitzer Prize winning author Edith Wharton (1862 — 1937) channelled her fear and obsession into creating a series of spine-tingling tales filled with spirits beyond the grave and other supernatural phenomena. While claiming not to believe in ghosts, paradoxically she did confess that she was frightened of them. Wharton imbues this potent irrational and imaginative fear into her ghostly fiction to great effect. In this unique collection of finely wrought tales Wharton demonstrates her mastery of the ghost story genre. Amongst the many supernatural treats within these pages you will encounter a married farmer bewitched by a dead girl; a ghostly bell which saves a woman's reputation; the weird spectral eyes which terrorise the midnight hours of an elderly aesthete; the haunted man who receives letters from his dead wife; and the frightening power of a doppelganger which foreshadows a terrible tragedy. Compelling, rich and strange, the ghost stories of Edith Wharton, like vintage wine, have matured and grown more potent with the passing years. |
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Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is best known today as one of the Victorian period's leading exponents of supernatural fiction, and was described by M R James as standing 'absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories.' The House by the Churchyard is perhaps his best novel in this genre. Set in the village of Chapelizod, near Dublin, in the 1760s the story opens with the accidental disinterment of an old skull in the churchyard, and an eerie late-night funeral. This discovery relates to murders, both recent and historical whose repercussions disrupt the complacent pace of village affairs and change the lives of many of its notable characters forever. Charm and chilling darkness abound in equal measure in one of this greatest novels of a Victorian master of mystery. |
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'His body was pressed against the wall at the head of the bed, and the face was a mask of agonised horror and fruitless entreaty. But the eyes were already glazed in death, and before Francis could reach the bed the body had toppled over and lay inert and lifeless. Even as he looked, he heard a limping step go down the passage outside'. E. F. Benson was a master of the ghost story and now all his rich, imaginative, spine-tingling and beautifully written tales are presented together in this bumper collection. The range and variety of these spooky narratives is far broader and more adventurous than those of any other writer of supernatural fiction. Within the covers of this volume you will encounter revengeful spectres, vampires, homicidal spirits, monstrous spectral worms and slugs and other entities of nameless dread. This is a classic collection that cannot fail to charm and chill. |
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This collection comprises of Joyce's three novels, plus the short story collection Dubliners. Dubliners, about Joyce's native city, is faithful to his country, seeing it unflinchingly and challenging every precedent and piety in Irish literature. The stories in Dubliners show us truants, seducers, hostesses, corrupt politicians, failing priests, struggling musicians, poets, patriots, and many more simply striving to get by. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man falls between the realism of Dubliners and the symbolism of Ulysses. The novel is a highly autobiographical account of the youth of Stephen Dedalus, who comes to realize that before he can become a true artist, he must rid himself of the stultifying effects of the religion, politics and essential bigotry of his life in late 19th century Ireland. Written with a light touch, it is perhaps the most accessible of Joyce's works. Ulysses is James Joyce's astonishing masterpiece. Scandalously frank, it tells of the events which befall Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on 16 June 1904, during which Bloom's voluptuous wife, Molly, commits adultery. Initially deemed obscene in England and the USA, this richly-allusive novel, revolutionary in its modernistic experimentalism, was hailed as a work of genius by W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway. Finnegans Wake is the book of Here Comes Everybody and Anna Livia Plurabelle and their family — their book, but in a curious way the book of us all as well as all our books. Joyce's last great work, it is not comprised of many borrowed styles, like Ulysses, but, rather, formulated as one dense, tongue-twisting soundscape. It also remains the most hilarious, 'obscene', book of innuendos ever to be imagined. |
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'The thing came abruptly and unannounced; a demon, rat-like, scurrying from pits remote and unimaginable, a hellish panting and stifled grunting, and then from that opening beneath the chimney a burst of multitudinous and leprous life — a loathsome night-spawned flood of organic corruption more devastatingly hideous than the blackest conjurations of mortal madness and morbidity'. Only the expansive imagination of H.P. Lovecraft could conceive the delicious and spine-tingling horrors you will find within the pages of this unique collection. In addition to such classics as The Picture in the House, The Music of Erich Zann and The Rats in the Walls, this volume contains some fascinating rarities: examples of Lovecraft's earliest weird fiction and material unpublished during his lifetime. H.P. Lovecraft's creation of the Cthulhu Mythos has influenced many modern authors, and still remains at the forefront of supernatural literature. |
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Mathilda is Mary Shelley's haunting story of an incestuous and fatal love. The narrative traces the teenaged Matilda's reunion with her unnamed father, and the development of their obsessive bond that culminates in suicide. Shelley's own father, William Godwin, was so disturbed after reading the manuscript that he refused to return it to her and it remained unpublished for over one hundred years. This near-forgotten and harrowing work encompasses the Romantic themes of the individual's growth, isolation, and the power of imagination. Shelley's violent and terrifying short stories share Mathilda's fixation with feminist concerns and Gothic conventions. The murderous plots and sinister settings of these later stories reveal Shelley's ongoing preoccupation with the supernatural, transformation, and untamed nature. |
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Max Carrados is one of the most unusual detectives in all fiction. He is blind — and yet he has developed his other faculties to such an amazing degree that they more than compensate for his lack of sight. Lose one sense and the others, touch, taste, smell, hearing improve... with a little dedicated training. Carrados can read a newspaper headline with the touch of his fingers, detect a man wearing a false moustache because he carries a five yard aura of spirit gum and shoot a villain by aiming at the sound of his beating heart. Assisted by his sharp-eyed manservant, Parker, Carrados is the mystery-solver par excellence. Here is a collection of the best of Max Carrados, a set of stories featuring a series of baffling puzzles to challenge the greatest of detectives. They are written by Ernest Bramah with great wit, style and panache. This is vintage crime fiction at its best. |
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The Descent of Man is Darwin's second book, first published in 1871. In this edition, Darwin applies evolutionary theory to humans and details his theory of sexual selection. |
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Les Liaisons dangereuses better known as Dangerous Liaisons is a French epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, first published in four volumes by Durand Neveu from March 23, 1782. It is the story of the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, two rivals (and ex-lovers) who use sex as a weapon to humiliate and degrade others, all the while enjoying their cruel games. It has been claimed to depict the decadence of the French aristocracy shortly before the French Revolution, thereby exposing the perversions of the so-called Ancien Regime. However, it has also been described as a vague, amoral story. As an epistolary novel, the book is composed entirely of letters written by the various characters to each other. In particular, the letters between Valmont and the Marquise drive the plot, with those of other characters serving as illustrations to give the story its depth. |
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