Everyman's Library CLASSICS

First assembled on paper in the fourteenth century, the eleven stories in The Mabinogion reach far back into the oral traditions of Welsh poetry. Closely linked to the Arthurian legends – King Arthur himself appears in one of the stories – they summon up a world of mystery and magic which is still evoked by the landscape so vividly described in them.

Mingling fantasy with tales of chivalry, they prefigure the great romances of the Middle Ages but stand on their own merits as magnificent evocations of a golden age of Celtic civilization.

It has been said that, after the Bible, Plato's dialogues are the most influential books in Western culture. And of the dialogues, the Symposium is the most delightful and accessible, requiring no special knowledge of ancient Greek philosophy or customs. Dramatizing a party in fifth-century B.C. Athens, the deceptively unassuming Symposium introduces--in the guise of convivial after-dinner conversation--profound ideas about the nature of love. In Phaedrus, here published together with the Symposium, Plato discusses the place of eloquence in expounding truth. In both dialogues, Socrates plays the leading role, by turns teasing, arguing, analyzing, joking, inspiring, and cajoling his followers into understanding ideas that have remained central to Western thought through the centuries.

Confucius is one of the most humane, rational, and lucid of moral teachers, concerned not with arcane metaphysics, but with practical issues of life and conduct.

What is virtue?

What sort of life is most conducive to happiness?

How should the state be ruled?

What is the proper relationship between human beings and their environment?


In this classic translation by Arthur Waley, the questions Confucius addressed two and a half millennia ago remain as relevant as ever.

As an operative for Pinkerton’s Detective Agency Dashiell Hammett knew about sleuthing from the inside, but his career was cut short by the ruin of his health in World War I. These three celebrated novels are therefore the products of a hard real life, not a literary education. Despite – or because of – that, Hammett had an enormous effect on mainstream writers between the wars. Like his readers, they were attracted by the combination of laconic style, sharp convincing dialogue, vivid settings and, above all, the low-life, hard-boiled characters who populate the streets of his stories. Taking detective fiction out of the drawing-room, Hammett ‘gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it’, as Raymond Chandler said. In so doing, he left his mark on modern fiction.

It is hard to imagine how radically the tender songs and simple stories in this collection changed the history of English poetry, but Wordsworth exerted a profound influence on the whole of nineteeth-century culture in Britain and America.

His literary revolution was founded on three principles: introspection, nature worship and the cult of ordinary experience. These three he blended together in a verse which is simple in manner but profound and deeply moving in content. In an age of revolutionary upheaval, industrial stress and religious doubt, Wordsworth rediscovered spiritual value in the individual’s encounter with nature. In our own age of ecological disaster and moral uncertainty, his achievement speaks to us more urgently than ever.

From the poet’s extensive output, this comprehensive selection includes everything non-specialist readers are likely to need.

George Eliot’s last novel, published in 1876, weaves together two stories, one about Gwendolen Harleth, the spoilt beauty who marries for money, the other concerning the mysterious hero of the title whose search for his true destiny leads him towards Zionism. All Eliot’s great themes – moral choice, the role of chance, the interaction of characters with their environment – are worked out with her incomparable power, and many readers have agreed with F. R. Leavis that the first section of the novel is the greatest achievement in English fiction.

Set in mid 19th-century Russia, Demons examines the effect of a charismatic but unscrupulous self-styled revolutionary leader on a group of credulous followers.Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horrified Russians in 1869, Fyodor Dostoevsky conceived of Demons as a “novel-pamphlet” in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. What emerged was a prophetic and ferociously funny masterpiece of ideology and murder in pre-revolutionary Russia–a novel that is rivaled only by The Brothers Karamazov as Dostoevsky’s greatest.

The award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky continue their acclaimed series of Dostoevsky translations with this novel, also known as The Possessed.

Primo Levi's account of life as a concentration camp prisoner falls into two parts. IF THIS IS A MAN describes his deportation to Poland and the twenty months he spend working in Auschwitz. THE TRUCE covers his long journey to Italy at the end of the war through Russia and Central Europe. Levi never raises his voice, complains or attributes blame. By telling his story quietly, objectively and in plain language he renders both the horror and the hope of the situation with absolute clarity. Probing the themes which preoccupy all his writing - work love, power, the nature of things, what it is to be human - he leaves the reader drained, elated, apprehensive.

Three classic crime novels by a master of the macabre – The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, and Ripley's Game – appear here together in hardcover for the first time. Suave, agreeable, and completely amoral, Patricia Highsmith’s hero, the inimitable Tom Ripley, stops at nothing – not even murder – to accomplish his goals. In achieving the opulent life that he was denied as a child, Ripley shows himself to be a master of illusion and manipulation and a disturbingly sympathetic combination of genius and psychopath. Sent on a mission to Italy to coax an irresponsible young playboy back to his wealthy father in America, Ripley finds himself so fond of the young man that he sets out to be like him – exactly like him. The precarious charade that ensues is the first step to a life of elegance and ease – and perpetual danger. As she leads us through the mesmerizing tangle of Ripley’s deadly and sinister games, Highsmith turns the mystery genre inside out and takes us into the mind of a man utterly indifferent to evil.

Volume 1 Covers the period from 1866 to 1891, the years in which James was evolving and perfecting his art as a storyteller. It includes such well-known masterpieces as Daisy Miller, The Aspern Papers, The Siege of London and the Lesson of the Mast, and many other tales in which james established his favourite characters and situations: the American girl in Europe, the solitary observer, the social climber, the literacy lion.

Volume 2 Takes us from A private Life of 1892 to James's last story, A Round of Visits, published in 1910. These are the magnificient works of James' maturity - The Death of the Lion, The Altar of the Dead, The Figyre in the Carpet, The Turn of the Screw, In the Cage, The Beast in the Jungle and many others - in which the deepening darkness of the author's own life casts a tragic but heroic shadow on the themes of his youth.

Encompassing a period of almost fifty years, the stories of Henry James represent the most remarkable feat of sustained literary creatio n in modern times. For sheer richness, variety and intensity, they have no equal in fiction, enabling us to trace the evolution of a great writer in the finest detail. This collection reprints all the major stories together with many unfamiliar but equally intriguing pieces which illuminate their more celebrated companions.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832) is one of the towering figures of world culture, a universal man whose extraordinary talents found expression in literature, drama, autobiography, politics and the sciences. Edited and introduced by Nicholas Boyle, author of the definitive biography of Goethe, the Everyman's Library edition shows that Goethe remains one of the most intriguing and readable of European writers. Goethe established an international literary reputation overnight with The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), a story of disappointed love and pathological sensibility which mounted a powerful challenge to the rationalism of the Enlightenment.

The plays of Shakespeare, the Authorized version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, all produced in the late 16th/early 17th centuries, are the three dounding texts of the English nation and its language. Not only do they share a beauty and a power of style which have never been equalled: their influence on Anglophone culture remains profound. Originally produced by Archbishop Cranmer and his allies to bolster the Tudor secession from Catholicism, the Pray Book rapidly took on a life of its own. Until the present century, most Anglicans knew long stretches of the text by heart. It invaded the style of 17th-century p oets and even 19th century novelists like George Elliot. It still colours our language and our way of feeling today, though we hardly know it. In recent years the Prayer Book has been under attack by modernizers and radicals within the church itself. On the 450th anniversary of its first appearance, the time has come to proclaim the value of this work once more and to recognize it for what it is: a liturgical and literary masterpiece.

The new expanded Everyman edition of Pushkin's prose fiction contains all his mature work. In addition to 'The Captain's Daughter' and 'The Tales of Belkin', the volume now includes many more short pieces and 'The History of Pugachev', a vivid account of an eighteenth-century Russian rebellion. Pushkin's prose tales are the foundation stones of Russian literature. They made possible the great achievements of Dostosvsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov. But they are also, of course, brilliant and fascinating in their own right. At this volume makes clear, Pushkins is one of the world's great story-tellers' direct, dramatic, tender, with the author 's voices always peruasively present. Paul Debreceny's highly acclaimed translation was first published in 1983. The Everyman edition is published to coincide with the Bicentenary of Pushkin's birth on 26th May 1999.

An autobiographical volume which recounts the story of Nabokov's first forty years up to his departure from Europe for America at the outset of World War Two. It tells of his emergence as a writer, his early loves and his marriage, and his passions for butterflies and his lost homeland. Written in this writer's characteristically brilliant, mordant style, this book is also a tender record of lost childhood and youth in pre-Revolutionary Russia.