Everyman's Library CLASSICS

The greatest English comic novelist of the twentieth century produced a considerable body of shorter fiction, including several master-pieces, notably Mr Loveday's Little Outing and Scott-King's Modern Europe. These stories have all Waugh's characteristically brilliant, savage wit and reproduce his unmistakeable world in miniature. They also constitute a vital supplement to the major novels, while standing up as significant works in their own right. Two chapters of Waugh's tantalizingly unfinished novel Work Suspended are also included. This edition brings back into print 17 stories that have long been unavailable in England and America.

The single most important book in the history of all Christian literature is presented here in the Authorized Version which has exerted such a profound influence on both spiritual life and the literary production of English-speaking cultures. The King James Bible was originally issued in the early years of the seventeenth century and is therefore contemporary with Shakespeare's last plays. Despite many subsequent attempts to render the text in good English, its beauty of language and rhetorical power still continue to eclipse any more recent translation. Most editions of the Bible are presented in columns. This text is laid out like a normal book to make for ease of reading and reference.

Fielding's satire on Richardsons's Pamela has survived its model in popularity for obvious reasons: the combination of breezy comedy, knockabout farce, lively narrative and vigorous satire is irresistible. But above all, it is the character of Parson Adams who continues to breathe life into the story, imbued as he is with so much of Fielding's own generosity, humanity and warm-heartedness. Conceived as a literary parody, Joseph Andrews (1742) rises triumphantly above its original purpose as a great novel in its own right. It is paired with the splendidly bawdy (Shamela 1741), another skit on Pamela. The explanatory notes are by Professor A. R. Humphreys. The Everyman edition is recognised as the definitive edition.

Albert Camus' laconic masterpiece about a Frenchman who murders an Arab in colonial Algeria is famous in its time for diagnosing a state of alienation and spiritual exhaustion which summed up the mood of the mid-twentieth century. Today, more than fifty years after its first appearance, we can see that this early success was no passing fashion: The Outsider continues to speak to us of ultimate things with the force of a parable and the excitement of a thriller and remains one of the most widely read and influential classics of the century.

When young Charles Dickens was commissioned to write the text for a series of sporting illustrations in 1836, no one could have suspected that this journeyman task was to turn in to one of the great comic novels in English literature. After the premature death of the original illustrator, Dickens took charge of the project, which was published in monthly parts. The result is a brilliant panorama of English life in the 1830s, a cornucopia of stories and vignettes featuring dozens of vividly drawn characters. Chief among them are Mr Pickwick himself, a later day Don Quixote travelling about the country righting wrongs; and his Sancho Panza, Sam Weller, whose pithy sayings and bizarre anecdotes immediately became and remained part of national mythology. With The Pickwick Papers Dickens established himself at a single stroke as a major creative artist, revealing the depth of his human sympathies, the breadth of his interests and his extraordinary linguistic virtuosity.

3et in the Malay Archipelago, where Conrad spent much of his youth as an officer in the British Merchant Navy, VICTORY is a sombre yet brilliant study of good and evil in Conrad's mature manner. The characteristic theme of a man reaching out from his apparently total solitude in sympathy for another human being is explored through the story of Axel Heyst's attempt to rescue a girl from the machinations of a brutal gang. Conrad's extraordinary blend of moral profundity, pathos and bitter irony is conjured up in prose which is at once atmospheric and inimitable. The book is published to coincided with the film staring Rufus Sewell Sam Neill, William Defoe and Irene Jacob

Tolstoy is said to have called Les Miserables the greatest novel ever written, and it exerted a powerful influence on the creation of War and Peace. At one level a detective story in which the relentless Inspector Javert obsessively pursues the escaped convict Jean Valjean, culminating in a dramatic chase through the sewers of Paris, at another level Hugo's masterpiece is a drama of crime, punishment and rehabilitation set against a panoramic description of French society in the years after Napoleon's fall from power. But this book is also about the metaphysical struggle between good and evil in the soul of every man and every community. Coloured by Hugo's distinctive philosophy, it is a plea for social justice, political enlightenment and personal charity which continues to speak with the undiminished authority more than a century after its first appearance.

With the publication of this volume we complete the series of Trollope's six Barsetshire novels in the Everyman Library. THE SMALL HOUSE is perhaps Trollope's gentlest and most charming story, less satirical than its predecessors in the Barchester series, less shaded with tragic overtones then THE LAST CHRONICLE. The characters are drawn with humour and affection, the social and political landscape in which they live shrewdly etched, and the story of Lily Dale is generally agreed to be among Trollope's most successful attempts to portray the psychology of love.

In this extraordinary variation on the theme of the eternal triangle, Henry James contrasts two women who love one man: the magnificent but ambitious and unscrupulous Kate Croy, and the fragile heiress Millie Theale whose early death precipitates the story's surprising outcome. Together with THE GOLDEN BOWL and THE AMBASSADORS, this novel completes a celebrated trilogy in which James explores his perennial themes of love and renunciation with all the strength, drama and subtlety of a very great writer at the height of his powers.

There are novels, like journeys, which you never want to end: this is one of them. One seventh of July at six in the afternoon, a woman of 71 and a man of 78 ascend a gangplank and begin one of the greatest adventures in modern literature. The man is Florentino Ariza, President of the Carribean River Boat Company; the woman is his childhood sweetheart, the recently widowed Fermina Daza. She has earache. He is bald and lame. Their journey up-river, at an age when they can expect 'nothing more in life', holds out a shimmering promise: the consummation of an amor interruptus spanning half a century. LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA is one of the most uplifting romances of our times. An epiphany to late-flowering love, it holds out the subversive promise that you can have what you wish for: you may just have to wait. Set on the Colombian coast in the early part of this century, it is, arguably even more so than ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE which won him the Nobel Prize, the crowning work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. 'My best, ' he says of it. 'The novel that was written from my gut. ' Publication is timed to tie in with the launch of Marquez' new novel, NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING, by Jonathan Cape on 3 July.

Hardy described the theme of THE WOODLANDERS as 'the immortal puzzle -given the man and woman, how to find a basis for their sexual relation'. Set in the familiar Dorset landscape, this time on the wooded outskirts of Blackmoor Vale, it tells the story of two women who love the same man. The elegant Grace Melbury and homelier Marty South compete for the attention of Giles Winterbourne, but both are doomed to disappointment. Written in 1887, shortly before TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES, THE WOODLANDERS has none of that novel's fierce cruelty. Though often sad, it is also lyrical and gentle, drawing the complexities of female desires with a notably subtle hand. This is one of Hardy's most accomplished mature novels, with a fine finish he did not always achieve, and it was among his own favourites. The Everyman edition is published to coincide with the launch of the Channel 4 Film starring Rufus Sewell, Polly Walker, Tony Haygarth and Emily Woolfe, directed by Phil Agland.

A magnificent new translation of Dostoevsky's masterpiece, which when first published in 1991 was described by the TIMES as 'a miracle' and by THE INDEPENDENT as a near 'ideal translation'. The BROTHERS KARAMAZOV - Dostoevsky's most widely read novel - is at once a murder mystery, a mordant comedy of family intrigue, a pioneering work of psychological realism and an unblinking look into the abyss of human suffering.

Herman Melville (1819-91) brought as much genius to the smaller-scale literary forms as he did to the full-blown novel: his poems and the short stories and novellas collected in this volume reveal a deftness and a delicacy of touch that is in some ways even more impressive than the massive, tectonic passions of Moby-Dick. In a story like “Bartleby, the Scrivener” — one of the very few perfect representatives of the form in the English language — he displayed an unflinching precision and insight and empathy in his depiction of the drastically alienated inner life of the title character. In “Benito Cereno,” he addressed the great racial dilemmas of the nineteenth century with a profound, almost surreal imaginative clarity. And in Billy, Budd, Sailor, the masterpiece of his last years, he fused the knowledge and craft gained from a lifetime’s magnificent work into a pure, stark, flawlessly composed tale of innocence betrayed and destroyed. Melville is justly honored for the epic sweep of his mind, but his lyricism, his skill in rendering the minute, the particular, the local, was equally sublime.

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Traditionally known as the Father of History, the Greek writer Herodotus(c. 484-420 BC), was the first man to tell a story in prose on the scale of the ILIAD and the ODYSSEY. His subject is the war between the Persians and the Greeks but, in order to explain how this war came about, he also describes the rise of the Persian empire and analyses the causes of its conflict with neighbouring states. Despite its remoteness from our own time, this is a fascinating story, told by a great writer. Herodotus has a powerful narrative style and penetrating eye for character. The great men of the age are vividly described and extraordinary details of customs, places and even the weather are sketched in. Herodotus is not merely an historian; he is also a political commentator, a geographer, an anthropologist and a philosopher. Yet events are described swiftly in simple sentences and drama is rarely far away. The continuing relevance of the HISTORIES to our time has been vividly highlighted by the extensive allusions to the book in Michael Ondaatje's novel THE ENGLISH PATIENT. The film of THE ENGLISH PATIENT in which the role of Herodotus' HISTORIES is even more pronounced opens in Britain in March 1997 after colossal success in the US.