Gyula Krúdy is a marvelous writer who haunted the taverns of Budapest and lived on its streets while turning out a series of mesmerizing, revelatory novels that are among the masterpieces of modern literature. Krúdy conjures up a world that is entirely his own—dreamy, macabre, comic, and erotic—where urbane sophistication can erupt without warning into passion and madness.In Sunflower young Eveline leaves the city and returns to her country estate to escape the memory of h...

Mercedes Lackey's magical Elemental Masters series recasts familiar fairy tales in a richly-imagined alternate Victorian worldNinette Dupond was a dancer with the Paris Opera Ballet. She had been very lucky—if she had not been pretty, and a natural dancer, she could only have become what her mother had been: a washerwoman.But Ninette’s good luck ended the day that the lead dancer sprained her ankle and Ninette was chosen to dance her part at a matinee. Her ...

'Speak, memory', said Vladimir Nabokov. And immediately there came flooding back to him a host of enchanting recollections - of his comfortable childhood and adolescence, of his rich, liberal-minded father, his beautiful mother, an army of relations and family hangers-on and of grand old houses in St Petersburg and the surrounding countryside in pre-Revolutionary Russia. Young love, butterflies, tutors and a multitude of other themes thread together to weave an autobiography, which is itse...

The Light of Evening is a reissued edition of the novel by award-winning author Edna O'Brien.In Edna O'Brien's twentieth work of fiction, an elderly widow on her deathbed in rural Ireland tells the story of her life—a story of love, family, estrangement, and motherhood."O'Brien brings together the earthy and delicately poetic: she has the sound of Molly Bloom and the skills of Virginia Woolf." — Newsweek

A traditional source of sexual titillation for adult readers, fairy tales historically featured licentious themes before being cleaned up for the consumption of children in modern times. Seasoned erotica author Mitzi Szereto restores the explicit sex in the 15 tales in this provocative book — and adds a few surprises of her own. Here the bawdy humor of French fable meets the sublime eroticism of ancient Chinese myth as a far from virginal damsel weds a Prince Charming with a shoe fetish; L...

Alone with their authoritarian father on a vast estate where time has stopped, two siblings speak a language and inhabit a surreal universe of their own making, shaped by their reading of philosophy and tales of chivalry. When their father dies and the children set out to bury him, they encounter the inhabitants of the neighboring village, and the pair's cloak of romance and superstition falls away to reveal the appalling truth of their existence. A brilliant, masterful story in which noth...

Jean Genet's seminal Our Lady Of The Flowers (1943) is generally considered to be his finest fictional work. The first draft was written while Genet was incarcerated in a French prison; when the manuscript was discovered and destroyed by officials, Genet, still a prisoner, immediately set about writing it again. It isn't difficult to understand how and why Genet was able to reproduce the novel under such circumstances, because Our Lady Of The Flowers is nothing less than a mythic recreatio...

Perfectly paced and brimming with passion - twenty-two tales from a master storyteller of the twentieth centuryIn this indispensable collection of short stories, Stefan Zweig captures the best and worst of human nature. At the heart of these tales lies passion - from a humble waiter's love for an aristocratic guest to an exiled Frenchwoman's longing for the glitter of court life, and a bookseller's fatal lust for print in wartime Vienna.Translated by the aw...

"Enchanting, witty" fairy tales for adults from Peter Straub, Daniel Quinn, Nancy Kress, Patricia C. Wrede, and other modern-day Grimms and Andersens ( Publishers Weekly ).World Fantasy Award–winning editors Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling return with another superb collection of wonders and terrors. In Black Thorn, White Rose, the magical tales we were told at bedtime have been upended, turned inside out, reshape...

A girl is sent across the world to discover her destiny in the dark tunnels of the Metro. Another seeks a lost sister in a park where winter lasts forever. A young man fulfils a dying wish. A mother works magic to summon a true princess for her son. A man seeks an ending to his story. An old man goes in search of his shadow.This is a world of desire and transformation, the real and the not real, from the queen of modern fantasy.

A man at his desk is interrupted by the appearance of a woodland elf in his room; the piano maestro Bachmann ends his career; a barber shaves the face of a man who once tortured him; a shy dreamer makes a deal with the Devil. In these sixty-five stories of magic and melancholy, Nabokov displays an astonishing range of inventiveness, with dazzling sleight of hand, fantastical fairy tales, intellectual games and enchanting glimpses into lives of ambiguity and loss.This landmark new c...

Thomas Clayton Wolfe (October 3, 1900 – September 15, 1938) was a major American novelist of the early 20th century.Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels, plus many short stories, dramatic works and novellas. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. His books, written and published from the 1920s to the 1940s, vividly reflect on American culture and mores of the period, albeit filtered through Wolfe's sensitive, s...