Literature

This compilation of short stories by one of the twentieth century's preeminent authors spotlights journal and magazine fiction from 1900 to 1911. These early tales exhibit the first traces of E. M. Forster's witty and elegant style as well as the profound humanism that he further developed in his later novels. Six fables reinterpret classical stories and themes, drawing upon folkloric elements to explore the truth of the imagination and the effects of the unseen on ordinary lives. In "The Story of a Panic," a spoiled boy discovers his true self. "The Road from Colonus" echoes the tragedy of Oedipus and Antigone, "Other Kingdom" offers a modern version of Apollo's pursuit of Daphne, and "The Curate's Friend" centers on a clergyman who's advised by a faun. "The Other Side of the Hedge" illustrates the futility of chasing goals, and "The Celestial Omnibus" recounts a boy's visit to heaven, where he is forever changed by encounters with characters from literature and myth.

Judge Dee is about to step into the shoes of a dead man…Most people would refuse the job of Magistrate at the lonely port town of Peng-lai – especially as the last occupant of the post has been found poisoned in his library, his papers missing. But Judge Dee is not most men. He arrives ready to get to the truth, only to find his life complicated even further by a missing bride, a vanished artisan, a man-eating tiger and an evil conspiracy.

They're the gang that can't shoot straight: tough-guy wannabes straight out of a Greek-subtitled version of Thieves Like Us, downmarket motorcycle punks (no Hell's angels these), dead-end kids from the urban depths with foulmouthed girlfriends and parents as remote as prosperity. Innocents with attitude. Stamati, the bumbling ringleader, his faithful side-kick Takouli, and Foti, a self-styled strong, silent type who falls for a horny journalist, form a threesome with no past, no future, and a present as insouciant and short-lived as a cicada. Armed with little more than an empty shotgun and plenty of bravado, the three blow their big chance: a hold-up at a district tax office. Their Technicolor dream comes unraveled on a furious motorcycle ride north, in a comic brawl on a deserted beach, and in the final ignominy of capture under the flashing lights of a provincial disco. Life, suggests The Cicadas, is as tough, nasty and indifferent as a B thriller. Vangelis Raptopoulos' characters, sketched with sure-handed empathy, with a knife-edged ear for the hard humor of the street, throb with the fervid intensity of cicadas buzzing in the noonday heat. Nothing in their voice intimated how soon they will die.

A typist uncovers a man's body from behind the sofa... As instructed, stenographer Sheila Webb let herself into the house at 19 Wilbraham Crescent. It was then that she made a grisly discovery: the body of a dead man sprawled across the living room floor. What intrigued Poirot about the case was the time factor. Although in a state of shock, Sheila clearly remembered having heard a cuckoo clock strike three o'clock. Yet, the four other clocks in the living room all showed the time as 4.13. Even more strangely, only one of these clocks belonged to the owner of the house...

Jim Sams has undergone a metamorphosis. In his previous life he was ignored or loathed, but in his new incarnation he is the most powerful man in Britain – and it is his mission to carry out the will of the people. Nothing must get in his way: not the opposition, nor the dissenters within his own party. Not even the rules of parliamentary democracy.

With trademark intelligence, insight and scabrous humour, Ian McEwan pays tribute to Franz Kafka’s most famous work to engage with a world turned on its head.

With an Introduction by Antonia Till. William Wordsworth (1771-1850) is the foremost of the English Romantic poets. He was much influenced by the events of the French Revolution in his youth, and he deliberately broke away from the artificial diction of the Augustan and neo-classical tradition of the eighteenth century. He sought to write in the language of ordinary men and women, of ordinary thoughts, sights and sounds, and his early poetry represents this fresh approach to his art. Wordsworth spent most of his adult life in the Lake District with his sister Dorothy and his wife Mary, by whom he had four children. His remarkable autobiographical poem 'The Prelude' was completed in 1805, but was not published until after his death, and it is included in this full edition of Wordsworth's poetry.

Katherine Mansfield is widely regarded as a writer who helped create the modern short story. Born in Wellinton, New Zealand in 1888, she came to London in 1903 to attend Queen's College and returned permanently in 1908. her first book of stories, In a German Pension, appeared in 1911, and she went on to write and publish an extraordinary body of work. This edition of The Collected Stories brings together all of the stories that Mansfield had written up until her death in January of 1923. With an introduction and head-notes, this volume allows the reader to become familiar with the complete range of Mansfield's work from the early, satirical stories set in Bavaria, through the luminous recollections of her childhood in New Zealand, and through the mature, deeply felt stories of her last years.

Richard Yates was acclaimed as one of the most powerful, compassionate and accomplished writers of America's post-war generation. Whether addressing the smothered desire of suburban housewives, the white-collar despair of Manhattan office workers or the heartbreak of a single mother with artistic pretensions, Yates ruthlessly examines the hopes and disappointments of ordinary people with empathy and humour.