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...

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.

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...

"Parade's End: The Complete Tetralogy" by Madox Ford is a masterful exploration of the tumultuous early 20th century, woven through the life of Christopher Tietjens, an English landowner caught in the throes of societal upheaval and the horrors of World War I. Ford employs a stream-of-consciousness narrative, rich with intricate characterizations and vivid imagery, to capture the complexities of modernity, class, and personal crisis. The tetralogy intricately examines themes of loyalty, lo...

This comprehensive eBook presents the complete works or all the significant works - the Œuvre - of this famous and brilliant writer in one ebook - easy-to-read and easy-to-navigate: – THE QUEEN OF SPADES A.S. Pushkin – THE CLOAK N.V. Gogol – THE DISTRICT DOCTOR I.S. Turgenev – THE CHRISTMAS TREE AND THE WEDDING F.M. Dostoyevsky – GOD SEES THE TRUTH, BUT WAITS L.N. Tolstoy – HOW A MUZHIK FED TWO OFFICIALS M.Y. Saltykov – THE SHADES, A PHANTASY V.G. Korolenko – THE SIGNAL V.N. Garshin – THE ...

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...

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...

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...

The oldest boy among 9 children, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, was raised in the protective home of an Anglican churchman. He was then sent off to the notorious English public school system as an unprepared youngster, where terrible things were done to him. What emerged was a man filled with rage at the betrayal by his parents and the institutions they supported. While maintaining the facade of propriety throughout a life as an Oxford don, he wrote several nonsen...

Unruly, unpredictable, love is a maddening deity. In this insightful and eloquent meditation on that many-splendored thing, Lisa Appignanesi draws on history, philosophy, psychology, literature, popular culture, and her own experience in order to tangle with love's paradoxes through the span of our lives.Beginning with the rose-tinted raptures of first love, she proceeds to love in marriage, the passions of triangulated love, jealousy and adultery, love in the family, and friendshi...

Beginning its life as the sensational entertainment of the eighteenth century, the novel has become the major literary genre of modern times. Drawing on hundreds of examples of famous novels from all over the world, Marina MacKay explores the essential aspects of the novel and its history: where novels came from and why we read them; how we think about their styles and techniques, their people, plots, places, and politics. Between the main chapters are longer readings of individual works, ...