This collection, the first and only edition of Marai's poems in the English language - here presented in John Ridland's and Peter V. Czipott's brilliant verse translation - offers a comprehensive
In A Voyage to the Moon, the narrator (called, like the author, Cyrano de Bergerac), after a failed first attempt to reach the moon using vials of dewdrops, finally makes it into space and to his desi
Miss Charlotte – the new coach of a children's football team – has some odd methods to prepare them for the big match, including talking to the ball and drinking a special potion, smalalamiam. Also, s
First published in 1861, Humiliated and Insulted plunges the reader into a world of moral degradation, childhood trauma, unrequited love and irreconcilable relationships. At the centre of the story are a young struggling author, an orphaned teenager and a depraved aristocrat, who not only foreshadows the great figures of evil in Dostoevsky's later fiction, but is a powerful and original presence in his own right.This new translation catches the verve and tumult of the original, which – in concept and execution – affords a refreshingly unfamiliar glimpse of the author.
“There was an Old Derry down Derry,Who loved to see little folks merry;So he made them a Book,And with laughter they shookAt the fun of that Derry down Derry.”First published in 1846 under the pseudon
One of Tolstoy's last published works of fiction, The Devil revolves around the young landowner Yevgeny's irrepressible lust for Stepanida, a sensual peasant woman. Even when he gets married to a resp
Set in a modern, urban Paris, the prose pieces in this volume constitute a further exploration of the terrain Baudelaire had covered in his verse masterpiece, The Flowers of Evil: the city with all it
While Charles Dickens is best known and celebrated for his prolific journalistic output and novelistic creations, he also devoted some of his creative energies to verse.
The Vita Nuova, with its unusual blend of prose and poetry, is universally recognized as Dante's early masterpiece and provides an indispensable prequel to The Divine Comedy. Set in thirteenth-century
In this dispassionate analysis of the act of murder, De Quincey's innovative, idiosyncratic artistic vision found space for gruesome reportage, satire, aesthetic and literary criticism, in a work str
The Mudfog Papers, a collection of sketches by Dickens published in Bentley's Miscellany between 1837 and 1838, describes the local politics of the fictional town of Mudfog - such as the delusions of
As the young Zinaida and her sweetheart, the student Nemovetsky, stroll through the idyllic Russian countryside, their memories, dreams and thoughts about life and the future mingle in the evening bre
When the mysterious and eccentric Miss Charlotte arrives in the village of Saint-Anatole to take over the tiny library, the locals are surprised to find out that she does things differently. Wearing a
Under the feckless husbandry of Mr Jones, Manor Farm has fallen into disrepair. Pushed into hardship, the animals decide to stage a revolt, and led by two young pigs, Snowball and Napoleon, they overt
