“How much pain and suffering must a man endure in the name of the child, for the breach of trust, oath and honor for a land he so dearly loved, for its people insofar as he WAS PREPARED to give his life for the freedom of others for the preservation of laws of mankind, for the true love and dedication before of his Queen”?

Written over a period of more than half a century, Leo Tolstoy’s stories reflect every aspect of his art and personality. They cover his experiences as a soldier in the Caucasus, his married life, his passionate interest in the peasantry, his cult of truth and simplicity, and his growing preoccupation with religion.The stories in Volume 1 of the Collected Shorter Fiction date from the period in which the young Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina and War and Peace.

Ranging in scope from lengthy novellas to fables and folktales only a few pages long, Leo Tolstoy’s short fiction provides a marvelous opportunity to become closely acquainted with Russia’s great novelist.Volume 2 of the Collected Shorter Fiction reveals howTolstoy’s growing spiritual preoccupations flowered into a series of extraordinary late masterpieces that equal anything in the earlier novels for intensity and power. Readers of The Death of Iván Ilých, The Kreutze...

Ford masterfully combines his trademark subtlety and complexity in this masterful tetralogy that follows Christopher Tietjens, an officer and a gentleman, as he traverses the tumultuous path leading from Edwardian England to World War I. Against the chaotic backdrop of a world at war, the complicated sexual warfare between Tietjens and his sadistic wife, Sylvia, comes to a head while Tietjens is faced with a deteriorating sense of self and an increasingly ruinous life.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning author's revelatory celebration of the novel - at once an anatomy of the art of fiction, a guide for readers and writers and a memoir of literary life.Over her 20 year career, Jane Smiley has written many kinds of novels - mystery, comedy, historical fiction, epic. But when her impulse to write faltered after 9/11, she decided to approach novels from a different angle: she read 100 of them, from the 1000-year-old Tale of Genji to the recent...

"A feminist classic."—Judith Shulevitz, New York Times Book Review“A pivotal book, one of those after which we will never think the same again.”—Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Washington Post Book WorldA pathbreaking book of literary criticism is now reissued with a new introduction by Lisa Appignanesi that speaks to how The Madwoman in the Attic set the groundwork for subsequent generations of scholars writing about women ...

This collection of short stories by some of Russia’s most famous authors is beautifully illustrated with nearly 20 wonderful images to amplify the narrative. Simply gorgeous!From Chekhov to Gorky, Pushkin to Dostoyevsky, Russian writers have long been celebrated for their excellent short fiction. Even Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace, one of the longest novels ever written, wrote short stories. These Russian storytellers, along with others, are represented here by ...

THE FIRST BOOK IN THE MULTI-MILLION COPY, INTERNATIONALLY BESTSELLING ERAST FANDORIN MYSTERIES SERIES'A sparkling romp of a story' TLS'In Russia Boris Akunin is roughly the counterpart of John Grisham' TIME'Think Tolstoy writing James Bond with the logical rigour of Sherlock Holmes' GUARDIANMoscow 1876.A young law student commits suicide in broad day...

The first edition of The Rhetoric of Fiction transformed the criticism of fiction and soon became a classic in the field. One of the most widely used texts in fiction courses, it is a standard reference point in advanced discussions of how fictional form works, how authors make novels accessible, and how readers recreate texts, and its concepts and terms—such as "the implied author," "the postulated reader," and "the unreliable narrator"—have become part of the standard critical l...

This unique eBook presents the complete FICTIONAL works of Nikolai Gogol, with beautiful illustrations, informative introductions and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 1)* Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Gogol's life and works* Concise introductions to the novels and other works* The complete novels, stories and plays, with contents tables* Features many of Constance Garnett's original translations* Images of how the books were fi...

Unforbidden Pleasures is the dazzling new book from Adam Phillips, author of Missing Out and Going SaneAdam Phillips takes Oscar Wilde as a springboard for a deep dive into the meanings and importance of the Unforbidden, from the fall of our 'first parents' Adam and Eve to the work of the great twentieth-century psychoanalytic thinkers.Unforbidden pleasures, he argues, are always the ones we tend not to think about, yet when you look into ...

Wayne Booth transformed the study of fiction in the twentieth century and wrote some of the most influential and engaging criticism of our time. In What Every Novelist Needs to Know about Narrators, Booth tackles one of the most difficult issues writers of fiction face: the choice of which narrative approach to take in their work. With trademark Booth aplomb, he articulates the methods behind dramatization, character development, and point of view that are indispensable for succes...