An omnibus of works by the great British writer that showcases her hauntingly erotic fabulism and the subversive richness of her imagination. In The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter's famous collection of deeply unsettling stories inspired by fairy tales, we see a Beauty who turns into a Beast, Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother stoned as a werewolf, and Bluebeard as a murderous, porn-addicted businessman. In the surreally delightful novel Wise Children, an elderly woman recounts the colorful life she and her identical twin sister led as vaudeville performers. And the early story collection Fireworks reveals Carter taking her first forays into the fantastical writing that was to become her unforgettable legacy. As critic Laura Miller has argued, "Most contemporary literary fiction with a touch of magic owes something to Angela Carter's trailblazing." This Everyman's Library omnibus gathers the best of Angela Carter in one astonishing volume.
For the 75th anniversary of her birth, a Deluxe Edition of the master of the literary supernatural’s most celebrated book—featuring a new introduction by Kelly Link Angela Carter was a storytelling sorceress, the literary godmother of Neil Gaiman, David Mitchell, Audrey Niffenegger, J. K. Rowling, Kelly Link, and other contemporary masters of supernatural fiction. In her masterpiece, The Bloody Chamber—which includes the story that is the basis of Neil Jordan’s 1984 movie The Company of Wolves—she spins subversively dark and sensual versions of familiar fairy tales and legends like “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Bluebeard,” “Puss in Boots,” and “Beauty and the Beast,” giving them exhilarating new life in a style steeped in the romantic trappings of the gothic tradition. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
In Brixton, Nora and Dora Chance – twin chorus girls born and bred south of the river – are celebrating their 75th birthday. Over the river in Chelsea, their father and greatest actor of his generation Melchior Hazard turns 100 on the same day. As does his twin brother Peregrine. If, in fact, he's still alive. And if, in truth, Melchior is their real father after all... Wise Children is adapted for the stage from Angela Carter's last novel about a theatrical family living in South London. It centres around twin chorus girls, Nora and Dora Chance, whose lives are brimming with mystery, illegitimacy and scandal. Dora narrates the story as her older self, looking back on a tumultuous life, throughout which she and her sister have loved to sing and dance. A big, bawdy tangle of theatrical joy and heartbreak, Wise Children is a celebration of show business, family, forgiveness and hope. Expect show girls and Shakespeare, sex and scandal, music, mischief and mistaken identity – and butterflies by the thousand.
6In this collection of nine short stories, Carter pinpoints the symbolism of city streets and weaves allegories around forests and jungles of strange and erotic landscapes of the imagination.
Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir of life with her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, is a vital eyewitness account of Stalin’s Soviet Union and one of the most moving testaments to the value of literature and imaginative freedom ever written. In 1933, Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) wrote a satiric poem about Joseph Stalin, and the result of his defiance was arrest, interrogation, and exile, followed by re-arrest and death in a transit camp of the Siberian gulag in 1938. Osip’s wife, Nadezhda (1899–1980), loyally accompanied him into exile in the Urals and later worked courageously to rescue the manuscripts of his poems and to discover the truth about his death. Hope Against Hope is her harrowing account of their last years together and a window into Stalin’s persecution of Russia’s literary intelligentsia in the 1930s and beyond. But it is also a profoundly inspiring love story that relates their determination to keep both love and art alive in the most desperate circumstances. After years of circulating privately in the Soviet Union, Hope Against Hope was smuggled out and published in the West in 1970 and has since achieved the status of a classic, not only for its essential testimony to a dramatic period of history but also for the enduring brilliance of Mandelstam’s writing. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.
Fitzgerald's masterpiece--the quintessential Jazz Age novel--now in a hardcover Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics edition For generations of enthralled readers, F. Scott Fitzgerald's mysterious millionaire, Jay Gatsby, has come to embody all the glamour and decadence of the Roaring Twenties. Gatsby emerges as if from nowhere, evading questions about his past and throwing dazzling parties sparkling with champagne and jazz at his luxurious Long Island mansion. Nick Carraway, a young man who has moved in next door, is fascinated by his oddly detached neighbor, and by his discovery that Gatsby is motivated by a single-minded quest to regain his long-lost love, Daisy Buchanan. Nick finds something both appalling and appealing about the intensity of Gatsby's ambition to reinvent himself. But Daisy and her wealthy husband are cynical and careless people, and as Gatsby's dream collides with reality, Nick is witness to the violence and tragedy that result. The Great Gatsby's remarkable staying power, nearly a century after its publication, is owed both to the lyrical freshness of its storytelling and to the way that it illuminates the hollow core of the glittering American dream. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.
A hardcover edition of the classic tale of a young soldier's harrowing experiences in the trenches, widely acclaimed as the greatest war novel of all time—featuring an Introduction by historian Norman Stone. Now a Netflix Film. When twenty-year-old Paul Bäumer and his classmates enlist in the German army during World War I, they are full of youthful enthusiam. But the world of duty, culture, and progress they had been taught to believe in shatters under the first brutal bombardment in the trenches. Through the ensuing years of horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principle of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against one another. Erich Maria Remarque's classic novel not only portrays in vivid detail the combatants' physical and mental trauma, but dramatizes as well the tragic detachment from civilian life felt by many upon returning home. Remarque's stated intention—“to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war"—remains as powerful and relevant as ever, a century after that conflict's end." Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.
Widely hailed as Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul’s greatest work, A Bend in the River takes us deeply into the life of a young Indian man who moves to an isolated town at the bend of a great river in a newly independent African nation. Salim is doubly an outsider in his new home—an unnamed country that resembles the Congo—by virtue of his origins in a community of Indian merchants on the coast of East Africa. Uncertain of his future, he has come to take possession of a local trading post he has naively purchased sight unseen. But what Salim discovers on his arrival is a ghost town, reduced to ruins in the wake of the recently departed European colonizers and in the process of being reclaimed by the surrounding forest. Salim struggles to build his business against a backdrop of growing chaos, conflict, ignorance, and poverty. His is a journey into the heart of Africa, into the same territory explored by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness nearly eighty years earlier—but witnessed this time from the other side of the tragedy of colonization. Salim discovers that the nation’s violent legacy persists, through the rise of a dictator who calls himself the people’s savior but whose regime is built on fear and lies. In this haunting masterpiece of postcolonial literature, short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1979, Naipaul gives us a convincing and disturbing vision of a place caught between the dangerously alluring modern world and its own tenacious past.
The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A one-volume selection of four novels in the legendary detective series—blistering, groundbreaking capers set in Harlem's criminal underworld—by master crime writer Chester Himes. With an introduction by New York Times bestselling author S.A. Cosby. “[Himes] put a spin on crime fiction—emphasizing urban atmosphere, street smarts, and uptown carryings-on—unlike anything the genre had previously seen.” —The Boston Globe “Himes’s Harlem saga vies with the novels of David Goodis and Jim Thompson as the inescapable achievement of postwar American crime fiction.” —The New York Times "His implacable drive to examine the Black experience, the disingenuous nature of the American Dream, the reality of pain and sorrow and what it does to the soul, that is what makes [Himes] the bard of the existential African American psyche." —S.A. Cosby, from his Introduction Here in one volume is an exceptional selection from Chester Himes's acclaimed Harlem Detectives series. Winner of France's prestigious Grand Prix de Littérature Policière and lauded by Jean Cocteau as a "prodigious masterpiece," A Rage in Harlem introduces detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson in a searing escapade. In The Real Cool Killers, the duo investigates a shooting and discovers an unsettling personal connection. In The Crazy Kill, a man is found in a breadbasket, stabbed to death, leaving Himes's detectives to find out who among the many suspects did it. And in Cotton Comes to Harlem, the brazen robbery of a notorious con man running a back-to-Africa scam sets off a hunt for a bale of Southern cotton. These masterful novels exhibit Himes's evocative, baroque descriptions of Black life in Harlem and his famously blistering social commentary. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times. "The best writer of mayhem yarns since Raymond Chandler." —San Francisco Chronicle
Bulgakov's brilliant novel, first published in 1925, portrays his beloved city of Kiev as it is torn apart during a few crucial weeks in 1918, seen through the eyes of a family fleeing the Russian revolution. With cinematic vividness, Bulgakov puts us on the streets of a gracious, historic city as it is successively besieged by invading Germans, Ukrainian nationalists, the Red Guard of the Bolsheviks, and the White Guard loyal to the recently executed tsar. The Turbin siblings, once wealthy and secure in Russia, have fled to Kiev to escape the ongoing civil war, but find themselves surrounded by chaos and danger. As Bulgakov depicts their devotion to a doomed cause and the surreal horrors they face, he provides a view of history that is both grandly panoramic and movingly intimate. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.
