Everyman's Library POCKET CLASSICS

Writers have always been uniquely inspired by New York City, and the classic stories collected here provide a kaleidoscopic vision of the metropolis in all its grittiness and glamour. Acclaimed writers past and present, ranging from Truman Capote, Bernard Malamud, John Cheever and Shirley Jackson to Jay McInerney, Edwidge Danticat and Junot Diaz, introduce us to starry-eyed tourists and ambitious immigrants, starving artists and hedonistic yuppies, Jewish matchmakers in the Bronx and Haitian nannies in Central Park. Colourful characters of all kinds come alive in these pages, nursing their dreams in the tiny apartments, the lonely cafés, and the bustling streets of the city that never sleeps.

The unforgettable canines gathered here include Kipling's heroically faithful 'Garm', Bret Harte's irrepressible scoundrel of a 'yaller dog' and the aggressively affectionate three-legged pit bull who lives in a block of flats for dogs in Jonathan Lethem's 'Ava's Apartment'. Here are stories which touchingly illuminate the dog's role in the emotional lives of humans, such as Tobias Wolff's 'Her Dog', where a widower shares his grief for his wife with her grieving pet. Here, too, are humorous glimpses of the canine point of view, from O. Henry's tale of a dissatisfied lapdog's escape to P. G. Wodehouse's cheerfully naïve watchdog who simply wants everybody to get along. These writers and others - Ray Bradbury, JamesThurber and Penelope Lively among them - offer imaginative, lyrical and empathetic portraits of man and woman's most devoted companion

Classic adventure stories by Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Stephen Crane, Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London mix with marvellously imaginative tales by Isak Dinesen, Patricia Highsmith and J. G. Ballard. Robert Olen Butler explores the memories of a Titanic victim who has become part of the sea that swallowed him; Ray Bradbury's 'The Fog Horn' summons something primeval and lonely from the ocean depths; John Updike's lovers retrace the route of Homer's Odyssey on a cruise ship. From Edgar Allan Poe's dramatic 'A Descent into the Maelstrom' to Ernest Hemingway's chilling 'After the Storm', the stories here are as wide-ranging and entrancing as the sea itself.

A glorious collection of some of the best sleuths in the business. Including creators such as Poe and Conan Doyle to Hammet, Christie, Chandler, Rendell and Rankin. Perfect gift edition.

In 1956 John Updike wrote a short story about newly-weds Joan and Richard Maple. Over the next two decades he returned to this couple again and again, tracking their years together as they raise children and deal with the heartbreak of infidelity and estrangement. Gathered here for the first time in hardcover - and with the addition of a later story, 'Grandparenting', that shows us the Maples after their divorce - THE MAPLES STORIES offers a nuanced portrait of two deeply flawed but moving characters and their entwined lives.

'Though the Maples stories trace the decline and fall of a marriage, they also illumine a history in many ways happy, of growing children and a million mundane moments shared. That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing really succeeds. The moral of these stories is that all blessings are mixed.'
- From the Foreword by John Updike

Love Stories brings together a captivating assortment of short stories inspired by romantic entanglement in its many forms: first love, infatuation, obsession, unrequited love, marriage, adultery, jealousy, and the complicated bonds of those who have spent their lives together.
An array of writers evoke a variety of moods, from the raw, erotic passion of Lawrence and Colette to the wickedlycynical comedy of Dorothy Parker and Roald Dahl; from the agonizing madness of jealousy in Nabokov's 'That in Aleppo Once ...' to romantic illusions in Scott Fitzgerald's 'Winter Dreams'. Objects of passion range from a glamorous silent-movie star in Elizabeth Bowen's haunting 'Dead Mabelle' to a faithful ghost in Kawabata's 'Immortality' and a successful heart surgeon and serial husband in Margaret Atwood's 'Bluebeard's Egg'. Jhumpa Lahiri plumbs the depths of a couple sundered by tragedy while Lorrie Moore movingly portrays a husband and wife brought together by it.
Katherine Mansfield, Tobias Wolff and William Trevor explore the intricacies of long-term relationships, while Maupassant, Calvino and T. C. Boyle convey the elemental force of love in extremely different ways.
Together these nineteen stories make an enticing gift for lovers at any stage of life. Perfect for Valentine's Day.

Tales about ghosts are as old as human culture itself but the ghost story as a distinguished literary form reached its apogee in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As traditional religions declined in the West during those years, people looked for new ways of describing the spiritual realities explained by religion. The ghost story is a literary expression of this need, its rise corresponding to the growing popularity of Spiritualism. Ghost stories balance the increasingly powerful scientific materialism of the age with intimations that there are other orders of experience which we cannot define and only glimpse.
The Everyman selection of ghost stories includes examples from this period by major writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Guy de Maupassant, Henry James and Edith Wharton. M. R. James is featured as a specialist in the genre. Later writers include Elizabeth Bowen, Penelope Lively and Ray Bradbury.
One feature of this collection is to show that there is more to the ghost story than the thrill of horror, important though that is. These stories include comedy and tragedy, pathos, drama and even poetry. Each is a masterpiece in its own right, irrespective of whether or not we believe in the realm of spectres.

As a literary subject, Christmas has inspired everything from intimate domestic dramas, to fanciful flights of the imagination, and the full range of its expression is represented in this wonderfully engaging collection. Goblins frolic in the graveyard of an early Dickens tale; a love-struck ghost disrupts a country estate in Elizabeth Bowen's 'Green Holly'; devils, witches, Cossacks and peasants cavort in Gogol's 'The Night Before Christmas'. The plight of the less fortunate haunts Chekhov's 'Vanka' and Willa Cather's 'The Burglar's Christmas', but takes a boisterously comic turn in Damon Runyon's 'Dancing Dan's Christmas' and John Cheever's 'Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor'. From Nabokov's intensely moving story of a father's grief in 'Christmas' to Truman Capote's hilarious yet heartbreaking 'A Christmas Memory', from Grace Paley's Jewish girl in the Christmas pageant in 'The Loudest Voice' to the dysfunctional family ski holiday in Richard Ford's 'Creche' - each of the stories is imbued with Christmas spirit of one kind or another, and all are richly and indelibly entertaining.

Each story captures a slice of life, and together they create a picture of Indian reality in all its fascinating variety. A number of themes predominate: the poverty aggravated by the dominance of landlords and the caste system; the position of women within the family and their desire for shape their own destiny; the lure of the city in a country that was and remains predominantly rural and agricultural. The inspiration and subject matter are Indian, but in their artistry and humanity these powerful and poignant tales are truly universal.

India has a long history of storytelling. To use Salman Rushdie’s phrase, it is ‘an ocean of stories’. So, when British rule brought the Western forms of the novel and the short story to India, they were grafted onto more ancient and varied oral traditions to create something quite unique. Rabindranath Tagore’s short story collections of the 1890s paved the way, but the form swiftly captured the imagination of writers across the subcontinent.