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Emile Zola

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

Zola's masterpiece of working life, Germinal (1885), exposes the inhuman conditions of miners in northern France in the 1860s. By Zola's death in 1902 it had come to symbolise the call for freedom from oppression so forcefully that the crowd which gathered at his State funeral chanted 'Germinal! Germinal

Germinal

Mark Twain

Twain's playful exuberance and remarkable storytelling gifts are on full display as he regales readers with his real-life adventures, some of them so outrageous they cannot be true - or can they? 
 
As Richard Russo says in his fascinating introduction, Twain was an 'inspired, indeed, unparalleled, bullshitter' who himself cheerfully relates how as a cub reporter out West he had elevated a routine Indian attack on a wagon full of immigrants to a battle that 'to this day has no parallel in history' - once he knew he could get away with it. 
 
There is drama as well as comedy in his account of life on the Mississippi, and great sadness too when his younger brother Henry is killed in a steamboat explosion - all the more poignant for the restraint with which he describes it. In The Innocents Abroad Twain the gleeful iconoclast is a passenger on a cruise ship to Europe and the Holy Land, poking fun at European snobbery and pretension and refusing to be overawed by all that History - but fully prepared to aim his satirical barbs at his fellow-tourists and indeed, squarely at himself. 
 
He also proves to be a deeply compassionate writer, as fierce in his condemnation of injustice as he is skilful in mining the humour of human folly. He brought to literature a new, distinctly American voice - and he harboured as rich and fertile a blend of contradictions as the dynamic nation he came to embody and define.

Collected Nonfiction Volume 2

Selections from the Memoirs and Travel Writings

Marcel Proust

In the opening volume of Proust's great novel, the narrator travels backwards in time in order to tell the story of a love affair that had taken place before his own birth. Swann's jealous love for Odette provides a prophetic model of the narrator's own relationships. All Proust's great themes - time and memory, love and loss, art and the artistic vocation - are here in kernel form.

In Search Of Lost Times Volume 1

Mark Twain’s famous novels, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (available in Everyman) have long been hailed as major masterpieces, but it is less well known that the father of American literature also made his mark as a master of the short story. This is the only edition in hardcover of his complete shorter fiction: sixty tales spanning a long career – many rollicking and uproarious, some sombre and even shocking. Included, of course, are such immortal classics as ‘The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County’ (1865), a humorous piece set in Gold-Rush California, which helped establish the young author’s reputation, and ‘The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg’ (1899), a satirical novella in which a self-righteously respectable American small town is exposed as a fraud.

The Complete Short Stories Of Mark Twain

Henry James

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.

Henry James Collected Stories Vol 1

Ivan Turgenev

"So ... you were convinced of all this and decided not to do anything serious yourselves." 
"And decided not to do anything serious," Bazarov repeated grimly. ... 
"But to confine yourselves to abuse?" 
"To confine ourselves to abuse." 
"And that is called nihilism?" 
"And that is called nihilism," Bazarov repeated again, this time with marked insolence. 
 
The book examines the conflict of attitudes in mid-19th-century Russia, as distant pre-echoes of the Revolution continue to rumble through the remote rural landscape. The story follows the Kirsanov family, representatives of the old regime, and the violent character of the anti-hero Bazarov. 
 
Introduced by Michael R Katz who was born in New York City and educated at Horace Mann School, Williams College, and Oxford University. He is the author of two books and over fifteen translations of Russian novels into English, including works by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, and Tolstoy.

Fathers And Children

Laurence Sterne

Laurence Sterne's great masterpiece of bawdy humour and rich satire defies any attempt to categorize it, with a rich metafictional narrative that might classify it as the first 'postmodern' novel. Part novel, part digression, its gloriously disordered narrative interweaves the birth and life of the unfortunate 'hero' Tristram Shandy, the eccentric philosophy of his father Walter, the amours and military obsessions of Uncle Toby, and a host of other characters, including Dr Slop, Corporal Trim and the parson Yorick.

Tristram Shandy

Edith Wharton

Lily Bart, beautiful, witty and sophisticated, is accepted by 'old money' and courted by the growing tribe of nouveaux riches. But as she nears thirty, her foothold becomes precarious; a poor girl with expensive tastes, she needs a husband to preserve her social standing, and to maintain her in the luxury she has come to expect. Whilst many have sought her, something&mdash;fastidiousness or integrity&mdash;prevents her from making a 'suitable' match.

The House Of Mirth

Henry Fielding

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.

Joseph Andrews And Shamela

Horace Walpole

Author of the first gothic novel and son of the first prime minister of Great Britain, Horace Walpole had wide-ranging interests that included literature, politics, world affairs, collecting, antiquities, and architecture, and to his numerous correspondents he wrote on these and other topics in prose that is celebrated for its charm, eloquence, and wit. This new Everyman's edition offers an extensive selection of Walpole's letters, helpfully arranged by subject so the reader can choose from themes including social life, the Court, politics, literature, and the evolution of his Gothic castle and art and book collections at Strawberry Hill. This edition offers new annotations throughout, with introductions to its various sections and a general introduction on Walpole as a letter writer. In addition, the text of the letters has been corrected and previously excised passages have been restored.

Selected Letters

Samuel Johnson

Boswell James

When James Boswell persuaded Samuel Johnson to embark on a tour of Boswell’s native Scotland in 1773, the adventure resulted in two magnificent books, Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland and Boswell’sJournal of a Tour to the Hebrides. Johnson offers a magisterial account of what was then a remote and rugged land, while Boswell throws further light on the friend and mentor whom he immortalized in his biography. Together, they make up a brilliant portrait of two very different and very remarkable men exploring a feudal world which was soon to pass away for ever.

A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland & The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The illegitimate son of a landowner and his common-law peasant wife, Arkady Dolgoruky has scarcely seen these parents during his nineteen years of life. In a narrative combining farce and pathos, Dostoevsky describes Arkady's visit to St Petersburg in search of the 'accidental family' who have dominated his dreams. The confrontation with them does not turn out quite as he imagined it. This relatively late novel, written in the last decade of the author's life, nevertheless captures the exuberance and embarrassments, the bliss and bale of adolescence in all its volatility and uncertainty.

The Adolescent

Herman Melville

This is about the quest of Captain Ahab, a man consumed by his obsession with a legendary, giant white whale, Moby Dick. As the ship sails into dangerous waters, The captain's hysterical pursuit becomes a symbol for the inherent, often destructive, nature of human ambition. "Moby-Dick" is not merely a tale of daring do; it is a profound meditation on the human condition itself.  It can be read as part thriller, part sea adventure and part allegory.

Moby-Dick

Rudyard Kipling

Kipling's masterpiece is perhaps the most remarkable literary product of British India. The story of a half-caste boy, part Indian part Irish who journeys throughout the subcontinent with an aged lama in search of religious enlightenment, the nominal plot revolves around the Great Game: the struggle between Britian and Russia for control of Afghanistan. But the glory of the book lies less in the amusing picaresque adventures than in the unsurpassed panorama of Indian life they evoke: brilliant, moving and intensely alive.

Tom Jones is one of the earliest English novels, and was hugely popular when it was first published in 1749. It tells the story of the foundling Tom and his journey towards adulthood and marriage. As might be expected, this journey is a complicated one: Tom falls in love with a neighbour's daughter, discovers that he has a rival for his love in the shape of the unpleasant Master Blifil, and is expelled from Mr Allworthy's house after a series of misadventures.

Tom Jones

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. 
SEE LESS

Complete Shorter Fiction

This volume pairs two novels, one early, one late, by Ivan Turgenev, master chronicler of nineteenth-century Russia. 
 
Nest of the Gentry (1859) was his most popular work in his lifetime, and with good reason. An elegiac story of love and loss, it is both universal and particularly Russian. The hero Fyodor Lavretsky, son of a wealthy landowner and educated in the Western style, falls romantically in love with a woman he meets at the Moscow opera; they settle in Paris. When the marriage fails, he returns to Russia, a rootless cosmopolitan or ‘superfluous man’. Back on his country estate, can he make a new start, reconcile himself to his responsibilities to the land and the people, and achieve an almost spiritual fulfilment in his love for his young cousin Liza? 
 
In Virgin Soil (1877), an older Turgenev boldly tackles the new radical politics of his era. The Tsarist regime is increasingly under challenge. Young people are flocking to the countryside to live side by side with the peasants, both to learn from them and to radicalise them. Poet Alexey Nezhdanov is an unlikely revolutionary, an over-thinking Hamlet figure, and a tragedy waiting to happen. While working as a tutor on a country estate, he is attracted to the self-assured and politically committed Marianna – an ardent idealist determined to sacrifice herself for the revolutionary cause. Turgenev, himself a liberal, deals sympathetically with his characters, respecting the seriousness of purpose of this new generation whose methods he could not endorse. Virgin Soil turned Turgenev into an international figure, and explicator of the perplexing Russian political scene (in its year of publication hundreds of young Populists were brought to trial, many receiving heavy sentences); in Russia it was roundly condemned on all sides. 
 
Turgenev was a supreme artist; in both these novels his profound humanity, his love for nature and for the Russian countryside, shine through the lyrical elegance of his prose.

Nest of the Gentry & Virgin Soil

Søren Kierkegaard

Now recognized as one of the nineteenth century's leading psychologists and philosophers. Kierkegaard was among other things the harbinger of exisentialisim. In FEAR AND TREMBLING he explores the psychology of religion, addressing the question 'What is Faith?' in terms of the emotional and psychological relationship between the individual and God. But this difficult question is addressed in the most vivid terms, as Kierkegaard explores different ways of interpreting the ancient story of Abraham and Isaac to make his point.

The Fear And Trembling And The Book On Adler

Charles Dickens

In a book that is part fairy tale and part thinly veiled autobiography, Dickens transmutes his life experience into a brilliant series of comic and sentimental adventures in the spirit of the great eighteenth-century novelists he so much admired. Few readers can fail to be touched by David's fate, and fewer still to be delighted by his story. The cruel Murdstone, the feckless Micawber, the unctuous and sinister Uriah Heep, and David Copperfield himself, into whose portrait Dickens puts so much of his own early life, form a central part of our literary legacy. 
 
This edition reprints the original Everyman preface by G. K. Chesterton and includes thirty-nine illustrations by Phiz.

David Copperfield

John James Audubon

John James Audubon (1785-1851) was for half a century America's dominant wildlife artist. His seminal Birds of America, a collection of 435 life-size prints, is still a standard work, and the name Audubon remains synonymous with birds and bird conservation the world over. Born in Haiti, the illegitimate son of a French sea-captain, he was raised in France and sailed to America at the age of 18 where he went into business and began his study of birds. In 1819 he was briefly jailed for bankruptcy; with no other prospects, he set off on his epic quest to depict America's avifauna, with nothing but his gun, artist's materials, and a young assistant. Floating down the Mississippi, he lived a rugged hand-to-mouth existence while his devoted wife, Lucy, earned money as a tutor to wealthy plantation families. In 1826 he sailed with his partly finished collection to England. Lionized as the 'American woodsman', he hit just the right Romantic note for the era, and was an overnight success, finding printers for his book first in Edinburgh, then London. It was a classic American tale of triumph over adversity. 
Here are vivid 'bird biographies', his correspondence with Lucy, journal accounts of his dramatic river journeys and hunting trips with the Osage Indians, and a generous sampling of brief stories that have long been out of print, 'The Burning of the Forests' and 'Kentucky Barbecue on the Fourth of July' among them. The Audubon Reader is an unforgettable encounter with early America: with its wildlife and birds, with its people and its primordial wilderness.

The Audubon Reader

This study of natural goodness is Dostoevsky’s most touching novel. Prince Myshkin, the last, poverty-stricken member of a once great family and regarded by many as an idiot, returns to Russia from a sanatorium in Switzerland in order to collect an inheritance. Before he has even arrived home he becomes involved with Rogozhin, a rich merchant’s son whose obsession with the fascinating Nastasya Filippovna eventually draws all three of them into a tragic denouement. But this is only the main thread of a rich and complex book in which a dazzling host of characters, from generals to street urchins, present the picture of an entire society on the verge of dissolution. A tragicomic masterpiece.

The Idiot

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.

The Brothers Karamazov

Edith Wharton's novel reworks the eternal triangle of two women and a man in a strikingly original manner. When about to marry the beautiful and conventional May Welland, Newland Archer falls in love with her very unconventional cousin, the Countess Olenska. The consequent drama, set in New York during the 1870s, reveals terrifying chasms under the polished surface of upper-class society as the increasingly fraught Archer struggles with conflicting obligations and desires. The first woman to do so, Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer Prize for this dark comedy of manners which was immediately recognized as one of her greatest achievements.

The Age Of Innocence

The humour of the shop and the pilgrimage counterbalance the tragic and sentimental story of Little Nell. The story is rich in Dickensian characters, including Mrs Jarley, Quilp, Dick Swiveller, and the Marchioness. A Disney production of THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP has recently finished shotting in Ireland, starring James Fox, Peter Ustinov, and Tom Courtenay.

The Old Curiosity Shop

Joseph Conrad

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

Victory

Victor Hugo

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.

Les Miserables

George Eliot

Carpenter Adam Bede is in love with the beautiful Hetty Sorrel, but unknown to him, he has a rival, in the local squire&rsquo;s son Arthur Donnithorne. Hetty is soon attracted by Arthur&rsquo;s seductive charm and they begin to meet in secret. The relationship is to have tragic consequences that reach far beyond the couple themselves, touching not just Adam Bede, but many others, not least, pious Methodist Preacher Dinah Morris. A tale of seduction, betrayal, love and deception, the plot of Adam Bede has the quality of an English folk song. Within the setting of Hayslope, a small, rural community, Eliot brilliantly creates a sense of earthy reality, making the landscape itself as vital a presence in the novel as that of her characters themselves.

Adam Bede

Babur

A lost inheritance, a rags-to-riches journey from vagabondage in the mountains of central Asia to an imperial throne in India, warrior-poet Babur's life was one of adventure and endurance against the odds. Descended from both Genghis Khan and Timur, Babur came to the throne of a small principality at the age of eleven; ten years of warfare later, he would lose it for ever to Uzbek invaders. A lucky break led to the capture of Kabul, from which he carved out a new state for himself in Afghanistan. Just over twenty years later, he was ready for the biggest throw of all - no less than an invasion of India. He recorded his own story pretty much as it happened with startling immediacy and a winning frankness: it was the crowning achievement of a rich tradition of Islamic autobiography. 
There is history and politics here aplenty, but what is most striking about Babur's memoirs is the man they reveal - ambitious but modest and self-critical, deeply attached to friends and family, homesick amongst the treasures of India, sensitive to the beauties of nature and extremely fond of a party. He paints a fascinating portrait of a sophisticated and cultured Persian-Turkic society. As violent for political ends as many a European Renaissance ruler, Babur could order a massacre and return home to write a ghazal. Everywhere he went he created beautiful gardens. There are insights into the role of women in such a society; of Babur's several wives, but particularly the older women of his family, who commanded respect and exercised considerable influence. Four years after his Indian conquest, Babur swore to give his own life if his eldest son recovered from a dangerous illness. Humayun pulled through, and in a few months Babur was dead. But he had laid the foundations of the greatest, wealthiest and most populous of the world's Muslim-ruled empires.

The Babur Nama

Saint Augustine

Augustine’s spiritual autobiography is not only a major document in the history of Christianity and a classic of Roman Africa: it also marks a vital moment in the history of Western culture. As Augustine explains how, when and why he became the man he is at the time of writing, he probes the great themes which others were to explore after him – faith, time, truth, identity and self-understanding – in a detail unmatched in ancient literature. 
 
Illustrated with vivid portraits of friends, family, colleagues and enemies, The Confessions provides a remarkably candid account of the passage from a life of sensuality and superstition to a genuine spiritual awakening. The result is a powerful narrative of one man’s religious journey which continues to shape the way we write and behave today.

The Confessions

Anton Chekov

Chekhov, widely hailed as the supreme master of the short story, also wrote five works long enough to be called short novels. The Steppe-the most lyrical of the five-is an account of a nine-year-old boy's frightening journey by wagon train across the steppe of southern Russia to enroll in a distant school. The Duel sets two decadent figures-a fanatical rationalist and a man of literary sensibility-on a collision course that ends in a series of surprising reversals. In The Story of an Unknown Man, a political radical plans to spy on an important official by serving as valet to his son, however, as he gradually becomes involved as a silent witness in the intimate life of his young employer, he finds that his own terminal illness has changed his long-held priorities in startling ways. Three Years recounts a complex series of ironies in the personal life of a rich but passive Moscow merchant, engaging time as a narrative element in a way unusual in Chekhov's fiction. In My Life, a man renounces wealth and social position for a life of manual labour, and the resulting conflict between the moral simplicity of his ideals and the complex realities of human nature culminates in an apocalyptic vision that is unique in Chekhov's work.

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