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Dracula : The Towering Masterpiece Of Fear - The Towering Masterpiece Of Fear

by Bram Stoker

2,64€ + 10% CARD

 "More than any other monster of classic horror, Dracula pairs violent threat with a carnal one. Bram Stoker''s Gothic novel revitalized the vampire legend." - The New York Times I was afraid to raise my eyes... Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as one''s flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer-nearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the super-sensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited - waited with beating heart. Praise for Dracula: "More than any other monster of classic horror, Dracula pairs violent threat with a carnal one. Bram Stoker''s Gothic novel revitalized the vampire legend." - The New York Times "An exercise in dread ... something inhuman and utterly evil... brimming with paranoia and a feeling of the unknowable ... only a few pages in and the story grabs you and won''t let go." - The Guardian "Stoker did not intend for Dracula to serve as fiction, but as a warning of a very real evil." - Time Magazine "The towering masterpiece of fear." - Leonard Wolf "Dracula remains immortal." - National Review "Bram Stoker''s Dracula is an apparition of repressed sex ... the effect of repression is to turn a hunger into a horror ... bestial, polluting, depleting, deathly, satanic, a fever in the blood ... the lurking menace in the shadow of every scene." - The New York Times About the author: Bram Stoker (1847-1912), the author of Dracula, was born in Dublin in 1847. A sickly child, Bram was bedridden for much of his boyhood until about the age of seven. As a youth, Stoker was intrigued by the stories told him by his mother. Especially influential to the mind of young Stoker were the stories she related about the cholera epidemic of 1832 which claimed thousands of lives. These cruel and vivid tales began to shape the young Stoker''s imagination. In 1863, having made a full recovery, Bram entered Trinity College, Dublin, where he achieved notable success not only as a mathematician and in the Philosophical Society but also as an athlete. After graduating, he made the acquaintance of celebrated stage actor, Sir Henry Irving, England''s greatest interpreter of Shakespeare. Stoker spent nearly thirty years as Irving''s amanuensis and as the manager of Irving''s Lyceum Theatre. Irving, the heavy exposure to Shakespeare, and the world of the theatre had a profound effect on Stoker. In 1897, Stoker published his masterpiece, Dracula. While the book garnered critical success after its release, it didn''t achieve peak popularity until well after its author''s death. Stoker died in London, England, on April 20, 1912, after battling through years of poor health and shaky financial footing.
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This Is The End

by Stella Benson

5,29€ + 10% CARD

 "Stella Benson will always be something of a ''writer''s writer.'' Excellent workmanship joined to insight ... Gifted." - The New York Times This is the End is one of the most beautiful and poignant books in the English language. A psychological work of speculative fiction set against a real life backdrop: London during World War I. This Is the End is a story of identity and social class set in a London neighbourhood. Years ahead of her time, Stella Benson writes her metafiction with a light and airy touch - technically gifted, emotionally-charged and raw, a rare gift indeed.Juxtaposing dreams and fantasies with the horrors of World War I, the result is surreal and beautiful, horror that is undiluted and sadness that is not diminished by any lasting comfort."Stella Benson was a true original, and This Is The End can be read either as a bizarre, witty comedy with a hidden social commentary, or ... something even stranger, and (perhaps) closer to genius. It''s nearly a century since This Is The End was written, and I think she might still be ahead of her time." - Simon Thomas, Shiny New Books"Benson leaps to the fictional equivalent of differential geometry ... [She] also manages to address a profound issue about the relationship between perception and reality that no less weighty a thinker than Ludwig Wittgenstein was grappling with at roughly the same time. An unrecognised precursor to much of the post-modernist fiction that would be written after the Second World War. Benson belongs in the same canon as Calvino, Borges, and Queneau." - Brad Bigelow, Neglected Books "I scarcely know how to praise her, for her gifts are so elusive and so great." - Sheila Kaye-Smith About the author Between the First and Second World Wars Stella Benson ranked high among English novelists, spoken of in the same breath as Virginia Woolf or Katherine Mansfield. Witty, humorous and satirical, she was a shrewd observer of human nature; but she also looked at the world with a poet''s eyes, as if startled by its beauty and oddness. Stella won the admiration and society of some of the foremost writers of the time - the Woolfs, Winifred Holtby and H. G. Wells. International acclaim greeted her novels and she seemed set for still greater success when in 1933, aged only forty-one, she died. A personality of fascinating complexity; a gay social character and a profound introspective; a fantasist and a practical achiever; an intensely female woman deeply unsure of her own femininity; a semi-invalid determined to live her life to the full. Undeterred by the illness that dogged her all her life, Stella shook off her comfortable background and threw herself into women''s suffrage, did wartime social work in London''s East End and laboured on the land. She travelled the world, visiting the USA, India, Japan and Hong Kong, and her marriage to a member of the Chinese customs service took her to live in remote outposts of China. A brave and remarkable woman who produced some of the most original fiction of her day. ''The most enchanting, most individual, of English writers." - Rose Macaulay
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Living Alone

by Stella Benson

3,96€ + 10% CARD

 "Gifted ... a ''writer''s writer.'' Excellent workmanship joined to insight." The New York Times"Unjustly forgotten British literary fantasy ... their masterpiece ... well worth rediscovering." The Washington Post Living Alone (1919) is Stella Benson''s unique and haunting masterpiece about a woman whose life is transformed by a witch in war-torn London. Benson''s meditative, diaristic prose guides the reader alongside her protagonist, a young woman introduced to a world of witchcraft at "the House of Living Alone." Over the greyness and misery of daily life in London during the continuing First World War is embroidered the bright antics of a witch unhampered by deceit or redundant convention. Under the humour and the light handling, this is an angry book, raging against the world. Considered a pioneering work of fantasy fiction and an unrecognised precursor to much of the post-modernist fiction that would be written after the Second World War. "An unrecognised precursor to much of the post-modernist fiction that would be written after the Second World War. Benson belongs in the same canon as Calvino, Borges, and Queneau." Neglected Books "The thought that I could have gone on without knowing Benson''s work is bafflingly scary." The Guardian "I admit I envy you." Virginia Woolf About the AuthorBetween the First and Second World Wars, Stella Benson (1892-1933) ranked high among English novelists, spoken of in the same breath as Virginia Woolf or Katherine Mansfield. Witty, humorous and satirical, she was a shrewd observer of human nature; but she also looked at the world with a poet''s eyes, as if startled by its beauty and oddness. Stella won the admiration and society of some of the foremost writers of the time - the Woolfs, Winifred Holtby and H. G. Wells. International acclaim greeted her novels and she seemed set for still greater success when in 1933, aged only forty-one, she died. A personality of fascinating complexity; a gay social character and a profound introspective; a fantasist and a practical achiever; an intensely female woman deeply unsure of her own femininity; a semi-invalid determined to live her life to the full. Undeterred by the illness that dogged her all her life, Stella shook off her comfortable background and threw herself into women''s suffrage, did wartime social work in London''s East End and laboured on the land. She travelled the world, visiting the USA, India, Japan and Hong Kong, and her marriage to a member of the Chinese customs service took her to live in remote outposts of China. A brave and remarkable woman who produced some of the most original fiction of her day.
ENGLISH

I Pose

by Stella Benson

6,61€ + 10% CARD

 "Stella Benson will always be something of a ''writer''s writer.'' Excellent workmanship joined to insight ... Gifted." - The New York Times Sometimes I pose, but sometimes I pose as posing. Stella Benson began her first novel, I Pose, in 1912. An incredibly original satire: witty, indigent and entertaining, while offering criticism of the social and political order of its time: organised causes, commercialised art, and institutionalised religion are castigated as Benson forces the reader to consider the fundamental problems of personal identity and individual importance in a world that seldom peers behind facades. We are introduced to the two main characters, The Suffragette and The Gardener. The Gardener assumes and discards a continuous parade of poses: while posing as a shambolic and romantic wanderer, he meets the militant Suffragette, who repeatedly threatens to blow up property in protest for women''s rights. "Stella Benson had a unique ability to blend fantasy and reality ... Her impish humour and wicked wit, frequently directed towards a satirical end, masked an underlying compassion ... Despite her very modern, ironic treatment of the theme of individuals lost, isolated, and alienated in strange and frightening situations, she has not garnered much contemporary critical attention, and deserves reappraisal." - George Malcolm Johnson"One of the significant debuts of its era and one of the funniest novels of the suffragette movement ... hailed immediately as a classic of a new kind ... a fresh genius of the human spirit, in all its poses." - Michael Walmer"Stella Benson, of all modern writers, typified that with the most courage, the most humour, and the most skill. She was an artist who gives the impression of never having spent a moment worrying how to be an artist." - Robin Hyde"I discovered her in a Rebecca West letter and an entry in Virginia Woolf''s diary. The thought that I could have gone on without knowing Benson''s work is bafflingly scary." - Yiyun Li, The Guardian"Benson''s novels are witty and haunting ... they develop a specifically feminine consciousness [and] seem to glimmer with ethereal magic. Original and significant. For those who dare the disarming challenge, she waits to be appreciated." - Meredith Bedell "We hardly dare to use the thumb-marked phrase, ''a born writer''; but if it means anything Miss Stella Benson is one. She seems to write like a child gathering flowers ..." - Katherine Mansfield, The Athenaeum"One of the brightest, most original, and best written books that have come my way for a long time" - Sir Henry Lucy. "A highly original novelist whose tragic view of life is artfully disposed behind a facade of remarkable comic wit" - David Daiches"Stella Benson has the same kind of wild and prickling humor that is in James Stephens'' Demigods ... enchanting absurdity and tenderness ... our own private idea of a truly great book. " Christopher Morley, New York Evening Post"Gifted" - The New York Times
ENGLISH

The Constant Nymph : Love And Loathing In Bohemia - Love And Loathing In Bohemia

by Margaret Kennedy

6,61€ + 10% CARD

 "Brilliant portraiture ... the clash between two incompatible worlds. Kennedy finds herself well to the front among novelists." - New York Times"The Constant Nymph is startlingly modern in its outlook, the bohemian world it conjures being in many ways more progressive than the society we find ourselves inhabiting almost a century later ... This is a strange, wonderful and unforgettable novel. As a study of human nature, The Constant Nymph is ageless." - Joanna Briscoe Teresa is the daughter of a brilliant avant-garde composer composer, Albert Sanger, who with his ''circus'' of precocious children, slatternly mistress and assorted hangers-on, lives in a ramshackle chalet in the Swiss Alps. The family and their home life may be chaotic, but visitors fall into an enchantment, and the claims of respectable life or upbringing fall away. ''Unbalanced, untaught and fatally warm-hearted'', at fourteen Teresa has already fallen deeply in love with Lewis Dodd, a gifted composer like her father. Confidently she awaits maturity - and Lewis - but this longed-for destiny is shattered when her father dies suddenly and Lewis is drawn away by Teresa''s beautiful cousin Florence. However, neither his marriage nor Teresa''s exile to an English boarding school can break the spell the gods have placed on Lewis and his constant nymph. But for her, the outside world holds nothing but tragedy. When The Constant Nymph was published in 1924, its author, Margaret Kennedy, achieved what most novelists dream of: literary acclaim followed by huge commercial success - on both sides of the Atlantic. It was a bestseller that earned praise from, among many others, JM Barrie, John Galsworthy, AA Milne, Cyril Connolly, and Thomas Hardy. It is a clever, poetic novel, emotionally shrewd and sardonically observant, dealing elegantly with grand themes and contrasts: love and lust, beauty and cruelty, jealousy and trust, art versus ''culture'', security versus freedom. "It completely changed my life because it showed me a world that I became obsessed by - the world of Bohemia." - Alexandra Pringle "It''s a novel about ideas ... as well as the sort of delicious and merciless emotions that can make people exuberant or desperate" - The Atlantic "One foresees Nabokov [in] Margaret Kennedy''s ''outrageous'' bestseller of 1925." - Washington Post "Brilliant portraiture ... the clash between two incompatible worlds. Kennedy finds herself well to the front among novelists." - New York Times "Utterly fascinating ... a singularly beautiful experience " - The New York Times "Kennedy is not only a romantic but an anarchist, and she knows the ways of men and women very well indeed" - Anita Brookner "The Constant Nymph is startlingly modern in its outlook, the bohemian world it conjures being in many ways more progressive than the society we find ourselves inhabiting almost a century later ... This is a strange, wonderful and unforgettable novel. As a study of human nature, The Constant Nymph is ageless." - Joanna Briscoe ABOUT THE AUTHOR Margaret Kennedy (1896-1967) was one of the most successful and prolific British novelists of the twentieth century. Her first novel, The Ladies of Lyndon, was published in 1923. Her second novel, The Constant Nymph, became an international bestseller - it sold copies in the millions and spawned no fewer than three screen adaptations. She also produced literary criticism, plays, screenplays, and a biography of Jane Austen. Margaret Kennedy died in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, in 1967.
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The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall : The First Feminist Novel - The First Feminist Novel

by Anne Brontë

2,64€ + 10% CARD

 "Bold ... shocking." - The New York Times"Anne might have been the most radical Brontë of all ... The Tenant of Wildfell Hall might be one of the first truly feminist novels." - Vox"The title of ''the first feminist novel'' has been awarded to other books, perhaps with less justice." - The Guardian When The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was published in 1848, critics condemned its portrayal of male violence and alcoholic abuse, recommending that no woman should read it. Anne Brontë was the author, and she saw review after review attacking her novel as too coarse. Crushing it further, her sister Charlotte wrote, ''at this I cannot wonder, the choice of subject was an entire mistake.'' And yet in recent decades, this work by the youngest Brontë has taken its place alongside those of her sisters as one of the great novels in English, and perhaps the first feminist novel. Helen is beautiful, talented and eighteen when she meets, fall in love with and marries the handsome but dissolute Arthur Huntingdon against the advice of her family and friends. She soon discovers the real nature of her husband and finally is forced to abandon him to save herself and her child. She becomes the new tenant of Wildfell Hall. Everyone is thrilled to have someone new to talk about, but infuriated by the secrecy that surrounds her. Nasty rumours circulate. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is Anne''s masterpiece, a wildly modern, daring, and provocative book, and one of the first feminist novels - attacking marriage laws, double standard of sexual morality and the education of men and women. "The heart of this book is a portrait of a woman surviving and flourishing after abuse, and in that, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall feels unnervingly modern. It is fresh, shocking, and wholly new today, 200 years after the birth of its author." - Vox "So revolting are many of the scenes, so coarse and disgusting the language put into the mouths of some of the characters, that the reviewer to who we entrusted it to returned it to us ... our object here is to warn our readers, and more especially our lady readers, against being induced to peruse it." - Sharpe''s London Magazine (1848) "Anne might have been the most radical Brontë of all ... The Tenant of Wildfell Hall might be one of the first truly feminist novels." - Vox "Thanks to #MeToo, Anne Brontë''s time is finally here" - The Sydney Morning Herald "Anne''s book was far more radical than anything her more famous sisters ever wrote" - The Times "Fiercely passionate. And wholly revolutionary" - Telegraph About the author Anne Brontë was born in 1820, the youngest of the Brontë family. Her father was curate of Haworth, Yorkshire, and her mother died when she was 20 months old. Anne was educated at home, and then attended boarding school between 1836 and 1837. Between 1839 and 1845, Anne worked as a governess, an experience that inspired her debut novel, Agnes Grey, first published in 1847 under the pseudonym Acton Bell. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, now considered Anne''s masterpiece and one of the first feminist novels, appeared in 1848. It was an immediate success, but following Anne''s death from tuberculosis in 1849, Charlotte suppressed subsequent printings. The novel did not appear again until 1854. She was the youngest of the Brontë sisters, whose extraordinary gifts are only now receiving just appraisal.
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Lorenzo In Taos : The Inspiration Behind Rachel Cusk'S International Bestseller Second Place - The Inspiration Behind Rachel Cusk''S International Bestseller Second Place

by Mabel Dodge Luhan

6,61€ + 10% CARD

 "An intricate web of dependence, manipulation, and appropriation." - The New Yorker"Second Place owes a debt to Lorenzo in Taos, Mabel Dodge Luhan''s 1932 memoir of the time D. H. Lawrence came to stay with her in Taos, New Mexico" - Rachel Cusk"It''s the most serious ''confession'' that ever came out of America and perhaps the most heart-destroying revelation of the American life-process that ever has or ever will be produced." - D.H LawrenceWritten in direct address to the poet Robinson Jeffers, "Lorenzo in Taos" is dedicated "To Tony and All Indians," but Tony and the Indians are a sideshow. The memoir''s raison d''être is the arrival of D.H Lawrence, whom Mabel has mystically "summoned" to Taos to articulate the beauty of the Indian way of life. When Lawrence is keener on depicting Mabel''s romance with Tony, she does not object, framing it in symbolic terms. "Of course it was for this I had called him from across the world," she writes, "to give him the truth about America: the false, new, external America in the east, and the true, primordial, undiscovered America that was preserved, living, in the Indian bloodstream." She intends Lawrence to write a parable about her escape from a fallen civilization to an American Eden.From Luhan''s first encounter with the Lawrences, which she reports as a "vibratory disturbance," Luhan and Frieda Lawrence are suspicious of one another. After Luhan wears a dressing gown to her first planning session with Lawrence, and listens sympathetically as he gripes about his wife ("the hateful, destroying female"), Frieda bans their one-on-one meetings, and Lawrence''s novel is dropped.Their relationship, though, is just getting started. Over the course of "Lorenzo in Taos," Lawrence attends Hopi ceremonies, steals some plausibly-deniable physical contact with Luhan (fingers meeting under soap suds, thighs brushing on horseback), berates Tony, pelts Frieda with stones, and sagely advises Luhan''s son to beat his new wife. He and Frieda are in and out of Taos - whenever Lawrence is absent, Luhan feels a "psychic emptiness." She loves him, gives him up, then can''t leave him alone. He spreads the rumour that she attempted to seduce him, and promises to "destroy" her, then assures her that she''s no longer his enemy, and that, even when she was, he "never really forsook" her. She sends him a letter ending their friendship, because "his core was treacherous." To him, she will always be, in Luhan''s words, "that greatest living abomination, the dominating American woman."
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Victorine

by Maude Hutchins

10,59€ + 10% CARD

 "Victorine has its own feral brilliance ... Hutchins can write with perverse and often disquieting power." - The London Review of Books Victorine is a sly, shocking, one-of-a-kind novel that explores sex and society with wayward and unabashedly weird inspiration, a drive-by snapshot of the great abject American family in its suburban haunts by a literary maverick whose work looks forward to - and sometimes outstrips - David Lynch''s Blue Velvet and the contemporary paintings of Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin. The eponymous Victorine is thirteen, and she can''t get the unwanted surprise of her newly sexual body, in all its polymorphous and perverse insistence, out of her mind: it is a trap lying in wait for her at every turn (and nowhere, for some reason, more than in church). Meanwhile, Victorine''s older brother Costello is struggling to hold his own against the overbearing, mean-spirited, utterly ghastly Hector L''Hommedieu, a paterfamilias who collects and discards mistresses with scheming abandon even as Allison, his wife, drifts through life in a narcotic daze. Profoundly human and recognizable - yet discomforting, chilling and disturbing. "The writing here is brilliant, glittering and exciting ... scented decadence and surrealistic bizarrerie reveal a special talent and a very special taste ... precious and perverse" - Kirkus "Maude Hutchins, an all but forgotten American writer, brings an extraordinary clarity to her descriptions. Her prose is sparse and vivid. She writes as if her nerve endings are in her pen. Colours, tastes, smells, sounds, touches pour onto the page." - The Irish Times ''Maude Hutchins has a forcefully genuine talent... She is among the most imaginatively creative women writing in English.'' - The New York Times ''Victorine established [Hutchins] reputation as a richly ironical imagist'' - Time Magazine About the author Maude Phelps McVeigh Hutchins is considered one of the foremost practitioners of nouveau roman in the English language. Hutchins is best known today for her sexual coming-of-age novel Victorine. Hutchins published several experimental poems and plays in the 1930s and 1940s - including Diagrammatics (1932) with Mortimer Adler, professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. Hutchins first novel, Georgiana, appeared in 1948, the year of her divorce, and was quickly followed by A Diary of Love (1950), Love Is a Pie (1952), My Hero (1953), The Memoirs of Maisie (1955), Victorine (1959), Honey on the Moon (1964), Blood on the Doves (1965) and The Unbelievers Downstairs (1967). She published stories and poems in the New Yorker, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Harper''s Bazaar and other popular magazines, and later collected some of her short fiction in The Elevator (1962). As a trained and popular artist, Hutchins had many gallery shows, including several at the Albert Roullier Galleries in Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Wilderstein and America Fine Arts society galleries in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Grand Central Art Galleries, the St. Louis Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Toledo Museum of Art, the New Haven Paint and Clay club, and others. She also was picked, along with two others, to represent Illinois at the third annual National Exhibition of American Art. In addition to this honor, some of her work was exhibited at a show of modern art at the 1933 Chicago World''s Fair. Maude Phelps McVeigh Hutchins died on March 28, 1991 in Fairfield, Connecticut.
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The Gadfly : The Revolutionary Best-Seller Which Inspired Adam Curtis'S Can'T Get You Out Of My Head - The Revolutionary Best-Seller Which Inspired Adam Curtis''S Can''T Get You Out Of My Head

by E.L. Voynich, Ethel Lilian Boole e Ethel Voynich

2,64€ + 10% CARD

 "The most exciting novel I have ever read" - Bertrand Russell "At the end of the nineteenth century, Ethel Boole [Voynich] had gone to Russia as a young girl and become involved with the revolutionaries in Saint Petersburg. She wrote a novel called The Gadfly - it told a powerful, romantic story of a young girl who sacrificed everything for revolution. Without realising it, [Voynich] had become a hero of the Russian revolution ... her novel inspired millions of young revolutionaries in the 1920s to rise up and fight for the revolution, inspired by the idea of surrendering themselves to a grand historic cause. Then the same had happened in China - again, millions of young revolutionaries had carried The Gadfly in their backpacks, as they fought to create a new kind of future." - Adam Curtis, Can''t Get You Out of My Head; An Emotional History of the Modern World"Masterpiece of story telling" - The New York Times
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Odd Women

by George Gissing

3,96€ + 10% CARD

 ''One of the great feminist novels of the 19th century'' - Vivian GornickGeorge Gissing''s intensely modern The Odd Women is one of the truly great novels of nineteenth-century fiction. The impoverished Madden sisters are ill-equiped to support themselves when their father dies, and Monica sees her only chance of escape from a life of grinding misery in marriage. When she is befriended by two independent women, who strive to educate single women to take control of their destinies, the choices that lie ahead of them are starkly defined.The Odd Women is a dramatic exploration of the dilemmas facing the single woman at the turn of the century. Set in grimy, fog-ridden London, the novel paints a vivid portrait of the hardships and inequalities in and outside of marriage, and of a society whose values are in flux.A novel of social realism, The Odd Women reflects the major sexual and cultural issues of the late nineteenth century. Gissing portrays contemporary society''s blatant ambivalence towards its own period of transition. Judged by contemporary critics to be as provocative as Zola and Ibsen, Gissing produced an intensely modern work, and the issues it raises remain the subject of contemporary debate. Praise for The Odd Women''In The Odd Women there is not a single major character whose life is not ruined either by having too little money, or by getting it too late in life, or by the pressure of social conventions which are obviously absurd but which cannot be questioned ... the disaster lies in obeying the accepted social code, or in not having enough money to circumvent it ... I am ready to maintain that England has produced very few better novelists ... Gissing was not a writer of picaresque tales, or burlesques, or comedies, or political tracts: he was interested in individual human beings, and the fact that he can deal sympathetically with several different sets of motives, and makes a credible story out of the collision between them, makes him exceptional among English writers.'' - George Orwell''The Odd Women has gained considerable circulation as an early treatment of feminism ...'' - The New York Times''[The Odd Women] is an 1893 novel by George Gissing that deals with the first breaths of the modern feminist movement in England.'' - The New Yorker''One of the great feminist novels of the 19th century ... In this novel - published in 1893 - I could see and hear the characters as if they were women and men of my own acquaintance. I knew intimately what was tearing these people apart. What''s more, I recognized myself as one of the ''odd'' women. Every fifty years from the time of the French Revolution, feminists had been described as ''new'' women, ''free'' women, ''liberated'' women - but Gissing had gotten it just right. We were the ''odd'' women.'' - Vivian Gornick''No one who has read this book will ever forget it - no woman at least'' - Pierre Coustillas, Gissing: The Cultural Heritage Astonishingly ahead of its time, The Odd Women is a pioneering work of early feminism, as provocative as Zola and Ibsen.
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Bashan And I - A Man And His Dog

by Thomas Mann

3,96€ + 10% CARD

 ''Termed the finest study of the mind of a dog ever written, a few boldly assert that it is no doubt one of the greatest portrayals of a man''s mind'' - New York Times In Bashan and I (sometime referred to as A Man and His Dog), Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice, writes in the most remarkable way of the unique relation that links a dog with his master. These memoirs read as a novel, and describe in fierce detail the behavior, feelings and psychology of Mann''s dog Bashan, and of Mann himself. Mann tells how he acquired Bashan, details traits of his character, and describes how they go on harmless and bucolic hunts. Written in 1918 at the end of the First World War, Bashan and I is an ode to life, to nature, to simple joys, and to a dog. Praise "Termed the finest study of the mind of a dog ever written, a few boldly assert that it is no doubt one of the greatest portrayals of a man''s mind ... An extremely lovable story ... An enchanting classic." - New York Times "The life of a dog is a simple and strangely marvelous thing; and that finally may be what sets Bashan and I apart: it is true to the life of a dog."-Gary Amdahl, Ruminator Review About the author Thomas Mann (1875-1955), author of many novels and stories, including Magic Mountain, Death in Venice, Buddenbrooks, and Doctor Faustus, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. An ardent antifascist, he left Germany in 1933 and became a U.S. citizen in 1944.
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Oblomov

by Ivan Alexandrovitch Goncharov

2,64€ + 10% CARD

 "Emotional quicksand ... illuminating a spiritual and social condition." - The New YorkerOblomov is a timeless novel and a monument to human idleness. From the pen of Ivan Goncharov (1812-1891) emerged a portrait of a young man - Ilya Ilyitch Oblomov - a dreamer, content above all to spend most of the day in bed. Rich in situational comedy, psychological complexity and social satire, Oblomov is a masterpiece of skilled and imaginative literature; comparable in its stature to Gogol''s Dead Souls, Tolstoy''s Anna Karenina and Dostoevsky''s Brothers Karamazov. This vivacious translation by Natalie Duddington captures all the subtle comedy and near-tragedy of the original.For fans of Ottessa Moshfegh''s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, the classic Russian novel about an indolent aristocrat who spends most of his days in bed. Praise"From the start, Oblomov was recognized as a masterpiece. ''Goncharov is ten heads above me in talent,'' said Chekhov. ''I am in rapture over Oblomov and keep rereading it,'' said Tolstoy. And Dostoevsky came to rank it with Dead Souls and War and Peace. Who are we to disagree?" - Robert Gottlieb "In each of us there resides a significant part of Oblomov." - Nikolay Dobrolyubov "Emotional quicksand ... illuminating a spiritual and social condition." - The New Yorker "In its particular sensitivity to the subtlety of Goncharov''s Russian, in its liveliness and its elegance [Duddington''s translation has] a freshness of manner that admirably matches the same enduring quality in the original." - Richard Freeborn, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of London. "Goncharov is ten heads above me in talent." - Anton Chekhov "I am in raptures over Oblomov and keep re-reading it." - Leo Tolstoy About the authorIvan Aleksandrovich Goncharov (1812-1891) was a Russian novelist and travel writer, whose highly esteemed novels dramatize social change in Russia and contain some of Russian literature''s most vivid and memorable characters. Goncharov''s most notable achievement lies in his three novels, of which the first was A Common Story (1847), a novel that immediately made his reputation when it was acclaimed by the influential critic Vissarion Belinsky. Oblomov (1859), a more mature work, generally accepted as one of the most important Russian novels, draws a powerful contrast between the aristocratic and capitalistic classes in Russia and attacks the way of life based on serfdom. Goncharov''s third novel, The Precipice (1869), is a brilliant work of psychological prose. In all three novels Goncharov contrasts an easygoing dreamer with an opposing character who typifies businesslike efficiency; the contrast illumines social conditions in Russia at a time when rising capitalism and industrialization uneasily coexisted with the aristocratic traditions of old Russia. Oblomov is an indisputable classic of Russian literature, the artistic stature and cultural significance of which may be compared only to other such masterpieces as Nikolai Gogol''s Dead Souls, Leo Tolstoy''s Anna Karenina, and Fyodor Dostoevsky''s Brothers Karamazov.
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Fortunes Of Richard Mahony

by Henry Handel Richardson

3,96€ + 10% CARD

 ''The Fortunes of Richard Mahony deserves the accolade of the Great Australian Novel'' - Peter CravenA superb, sprawling trilogy of a family fortune won and lost in gold-rush Australia. The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is Australia''s most significant nineteenth-century work. It tells the story of Richard Mahony, loosely based on the author''s own father, and his rise and tragic fall in Australia''s gold rush.All three volumes - Australia Felix, The Way Home and Ultima Thule - are included here. The trilogy stands as one of the great portraits of the Australian canon - and a vivid depiction of the migrant experience.''A work of huge ambition, power, pity and unflinching honesty'' - The Age''The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is an all but lost continent of a book. It is a novel about poverty and worldly failure, and the grind and nightmare of a life that is ruled by money, which does its best to ride roughshod over every impulse towards simplicity and delicacy and truth. It is a book written in defiance of materialism and complacency, full of hatred of the vision of Australia summed up by James McAuley''s words: "The people are kindly with nothing inside them."'' - Sydney Morning Herald''The Fortunes of Richard Mahony is a masterpiece, a great novel. Reading it was one of the most fulfilling literary experiences I''ve ever had.'' - Angela Meyer, LiteraryMinded''One of the greatest novels in the English language.'' - William Heinemann''More than any other novel in our literature, more than Voss, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony deserves the accolade of the Great Australian Novel...it is a mighty and moving work, this bursting at the seams anti-epic to the muse of a vanity which sees every golden bowl broken and every silver cord loosed.'' - Peter Craven About the author''Henry Handel Richardson'' was the pen-name of Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, who was born in Melbourne, Australia in 1870. Her father was a medical graduate of Edinburgh University, and her mother was the daughter of a Leicester solicitor; they married after migrating to Australia during the Victorian goldrushes. After her father''s death in 1879, her mother worked as a postmistress in country towns, but later she was able to take Ethel and her sister Lilian to Europe, to study music at Leipzig. Ethel, who became a skilled pianist, married John George Robertson, a science graduate turned philologist. Robertson was appointed Professor of German and Scandinavian Languages and Literatures at London University in 1903, where he became one of the foremost scholars of his day. By this time Ethel had begun to write, having given up all thought of a musical career. Her first novel, Maurice Guest, was published in 1908 and had a number of imitators. Her second, The Getting of Wisdom, published in 1910 was described by H. G. Wells as the best school story he knew. Her most important work was The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, published in three volumes, comprising Australia Felix, The Way Home and Ultima Thule, from 1917 to 1929.
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Under Western Eyes

by Joseph Conrad

2,64€ + 10% CARD

 ''We are in the world of Conrad''s Under Western Eyes.'' - The GuardianHailed as one of Joseph Conrad''s finest literary achievements, this is the story of a young man unwittingly caught in the political turmoil of pre-Revolutionary czarist Russia.A gripping novel that ultimately questions our capacity for moral strength and the depths of human integrity. This new edition includes commentary and a reading group guide.''A novel crowded with enigmas & transmuted personal history.'' - The New Yorker''The real question for the world''s future, in Conrad''s theory, wasn''t what would happen. It was when and how.'' - Maya Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch''We are in the world of Conrad''s Under Western Eyes.'' - The Guardian''Under Western Eyes is valuable not because it came true but because it rang true even at the time, only now we can better hear the deep, sad note.'' - Clive James About the authorJoseph Conrad was born in Berdichev, Ukraine, in 1857. After both of his parents died of tuberculosis, Conrad went to live with his uncle in Switzerland. After attending school in Kraków, he joined the French and then the British merchant marines, sailing to exotic destinations like the West Indies and the Congo, which would later become the backdrops for some of his fiction. In 1894 he settled down in England and began his literary career. In 1902 Conrad published his most famous work, Heart of Darkness, and continued to write until his death in 1924.
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Enchanted April

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

2,64€ + 10% CARD

 ''The Enchanted April is a pure wish-fulfillment story but there''s an acid edge to it ... hints of feminist revolt beneath the sparkly surface.'' - Los Angeles Times ''A genuine feeling for color and for beauty.'' - The New York Times An immediate bestseller upon its first publication The Enchanted April set off a craze for tourism to the Italian Riviera that continues today. A charming, slyly comic feminist novel of longing and transformation. The women at the center of The Enchanted April are alike only in their dissatisfaction with their everyday lives. They find each other - and the castle of their dreams - through a classified ad in a London newspaper one rainy February afternoon. The ladies expect a pleasant holiday, but they don''t anticipate that the month they spend in Portofino will reintroduce them to their true natures and reacquaint them with joy. Now, if the same transformation can be worked on their husbands and lovers, the enchantment will be complete. ''A particular kind of witty and well-constructed fiction, a sort of sparkling Euclid, which nobody else can touch.'' - Rebecca West ''Elizabeth von Arnim''s prose is textured with a dry and sometimes even acerbic wit, and her principle theme is a satirical questioning of the social order, underscored by her feminist tendencies and a skeptical view of the institution of marriage.'' - The New York Public Library ''A comedy of miscommunication ... a sun-washed fairytale, delicious in its contrivance '' - The Guardian About the author Elizabeth von Arnim was born on 31 August 1866 in Australia. She was cousin to the writer Katherine Mansfield. In 1890 she married her first husband, Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin, a Prussian aristocrat, with whom she had five children. Elizabeth and her German Garden, published anonymously in 1898, was a barely fictionalised account of Elizabeth''s life and the creation of her garden at the family home of Nassenheide in Pomerania, where Hugh Walpole and E. M. Forster were tutors to her children. Its instant success was followed by many more novels, including Vera (1921) and The Enchanted April (1922), and another almost-autobiography, All the Dogs of My Life (1936). She separated from Count von Arnim in 1908, and after his death two years later she built a house in Switzerland, marrying John Francis Stanley Russell in 1916. This marriage also ended in separation in 1919 when Elizabeth moved to America, where she died on 9 February 1941, aged 74.
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Middlemarch

by George Eliot

2,64€ + 10% CARD

 ''Many others have said it before, and more eloquently, but, man, is "Middlemarch" good. I mean, miss-your-stop-on-the-train and sneak-a-read-at-work good.'' - The New Yorker Considered one the masterpieces of realist fiction, George Eliot''s novel, Middlemarch is a masterly evocation of diverse lives and changing fortunes in a provincial community. Peopling its landscape are Dorothea Brooke, a young idealist whose search for intellectual fulfillment leads her into a disastrous marriage to the pedantic scholar Casaubon; the charming but tactless Dr Lydgate, whose marriage to the spendthrift beauty Rosamund and pioneering medical methods threaten to undermine his career; and the religious hypocrite Bulstrode, hiding scandalous crimes from his past. As their stories interweave, George Eliot creates a richly nuanced and moving drama, hailed by Virginia Woolf as ''one of the few English novels written for adult people''. ''What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory.'' - Emily Dickinson ''The most meaningful lives, I''ve learned, are often not the extraordinary ones. They''re the ordinary ones lived with dignity. There''s perhaps no better expression of that wisdom than George Eliot''s Middlemarch.'' - The New York Times About the author George Eliot was the pen name of the novelist Mary Anne Evans. Born in 1819 in rural Warwickshire, in 1841 she moved to Coventry, the city she would later use as inspiration for the fictional town of Middlemarch. There she joined a circle of free-thinking intellectuals and lost her Christian faith. After a period abroad, she settled in London to work as an editor at the left-wing Westminster Review. Eliot openly co-habited with the married philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes in defiance of contemporary notions of propriety. Lewes encouraged her to write fiction, for which she adopted her male pseudonym. Although female authors were published under their own names during her lifetime, she wanted to escape the stereotype of women''s writing being limited to lighthearted romances. She also wanted to have her fiction judged separately from her already extensive and widely known work as an editor and critic. Another factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny, thus avoiding the scandal that would have arisen because of her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes. She wrote seven novels, Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862-63), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871-72) and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of which are set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight. Middlemarch has been described by the novelists Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language - and triumphed in BBC Culture''s poll of the greatest British novels, as voted by the rest of the world.
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Journal Of A Disappointed Man

by W. N. P. Barbellion

3,96€ + 10% CARD

 ''A neglected classic.'' - The New York Times ''Among the most moving diaries ever created.'' - Ronald Blythe ''The 100-year-old multiple sclerosis diary that became a classic ... a furious, sometimes ecstatic, volatile little book.'' - The Guardian The life of Bruce Frederick Cummings (1889-1919), who wrote under the name of W. N. P. Barbellion, was tragically curtailed by multiple sclerosis. The Journal of a Disappointed Man begins as an ambitious teenager''s notes on the natural world, and then, following his diagnosis at the age of twenty-six, transforms into a deeply moving account of battling the disease. Barbellion''s diary is full of humour and fierce intelligence, and combines a passion for life with clear-sighted reflections on the nature of death. The Journal of a Disappointed Man caused a sensation upon publication in 1919. Barbellion was often likened to diarists like Samuel Pepys and Denton Welch; proclaimed a literary equal to Franz Kafka and James Joyce; and belongs alongside the biographical pages of Charles Darwin, Evelyn Waugh and Katherine Mansfield. Published shortly before the author''s death in 1919, The Journal of a Disappointed Man presents a remarkable memoir that addresses struggles with poverty, inadequate education, and the creeping paralysis of multiple sclerosis. Yet author W. N. P. Barbellion manages to write with uplifting eloquence and passion of his love for family, natural history, music, and literature. Told with a thoroughly modern voice, the unjustly overlooked Journal is reprinted here with a thoughtful Introduction by H. G. Wells, who writes of the book''s "unpremeditated and exquisite beauty." ''In this diary of an intensely egotistical young naturalist, tragically caught by the creeping approach of death, we have one of the most moving records of the youthful aspects of our universal struggle ... unpremeditated and exquisite beauty.'' - H.G Wells ''The Journal hit me like an explosion"- David Bradford, The Guardian ''If I had a friend who found life tedious, who was maybe even suicidal, and I had the power to make him or her read one book, it would be the soul-stirring diary of Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion'' - Noel Perrin ''This Journal is one of the great affirmations in our literature.'' - The Washington Post ''The greatest diary a man has written'' - Thomas Mallon ''Parallels with Kafka''s Diaries having been drawn but Barbellion is more than honest: his introspection has that supercharged quality, often found in German and Russian, but very seldom in English, literature - at all events since understatement became a national characteristic.'' - Edward Sackville-West About the authorW. N. P. Barbellion was the pseudonym of Bruce Frederick Cummings (1889-1919). He selected W. N. P. as the initials of three of ''the most wretched figures in history'': Kaiser Wilhelm, Emperor Nero and Pontius Pilate. Barbellion was the name of his favourite pastry-shop on Gloucester Road. Cummings was a keen naturalist who worked in the Entomology Department of London''s Natural History Museum. Upon attempting to enlist in the British Army during World War I, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The discovery of his disease intensified the tenor of his journal-keeping, and his frank and articulate reflections on coping with a fatal disease remain a powerful testament to his life and struggles.
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Dream Life Of Balso Snell

by Nathanael West

2,64€ + 10% CARD

 "The virtuoso performances of a sophisticated stylist ... compact, skilful, and hilarious." - Randall Reid American modernist Nathanael West''s first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, is an anti-künstleroman; it''s a portrait of a young artist discovering his powerlessness. The title character, a lyric poet, takes a nightmare tour through the bowels of the Trojan Horse, meeting a series of failed and frustrated writers along the way. Each surrealistic episode underscores the futility of the literary vocation and gleefully mocks the pipe dreams of amateurs who aspire to wealth and immortality. It was first published in 1931 in an edition of only 500 copies. "West''s aesthetic sensibilities transform ugly material into a beautiful composition ... that, by its very artistry, celebrates that which it wishes to destroy" - Deborah Wyrick "[Balso] undertakes not just a disavowal of high modernism and the idealism of its art-for-art''s sake aestheticism, but a critique of nothing less than the grand tradition of Western culture upon which it depends. That critique results in a thorough housecleaning, an operation that will dispense with everything from Plato to Picasso" - Jonathan Veitch ''Beneath this gloom that [West] was pouring at you, there was a streak of the most diabolical humor, you couldn''t imagine ...'' - John Fante "Scenes of extraordinary power ... vividly drawn grotesques." - F. Scott Fitzgerald "By applying the magpie aesthetics of Surrealism and T.S. Eliot to the ''American Grain,'' by delving into the popular culture and emerging not with surrender or refusal but a razor-cool critique, West became the great precursor to Heller, Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, George Saunders, and so much else." -Jonathan Lethem "[West''s] novels say more about the way we live now - and the things that brought us to our present pass - than any other work of fiction I can think of." - The New Yorker "Nathanael West''s stunning four novels are American tales, rooted in our transmogrifying soil. Morality plays they are, classified as comedies. They are indeed often funny. Funny as a crutch." - Elizabeth Hardwick, The New York Review of Books About the author Nathanael West published four novels during the thirty-six years of his life. The first, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, an experimental work written in the 1920s, was well-received but sales were poor. The second, the brilliant Miss Lonelyhearts, was published in 1933, a few months before his publisher went bankrupt. The third, A Cool Million, vanished into the depths of the Depression. It was at this point that West went to Hollywood to earn his living as a scriptwriter. From his Hollywood experience came The Day of the Locust. Publishing in 1939, the novel received very little recognition. The following year, on December 22nd, the day after his neighbour F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack, Nathanael West and his wife were killed in a California highway accident. When West died, at the age of thirty-seven, his originality and brilliance were little known outside an intensely admiring circle of fellow writers: William Carlos Williams, Edmund Wilson, S. J. Perelman, and others. Not until West''s four novels were reissued in the late 1950s was he acknowledged as one of the most gifted writers of his generation. His masterpieces blend manic farce and despairing compassion, and their vision of an America awash in its own mass-produced fantasies, read like a prophecy of much that was to come in American literature and life.
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Two Serious Ladies

by Jane Bowles

9,26€ + 10% CARD

 "Two Serious Ladies is a singular achievement - a modernist cult classic." - The Guardian"The most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters" - Tennessee WilliamsInspired by the author''s honeymoon in Mexico with her husband, the writer and composer Paul Bowles, Two Serious Ladies (1943) is the only novel by avant-garde literary star Jane Bowles. A modernist cult-classic - mysterious, profound, anarchic, and funny - that follows two upper-class women as they descend into debauchery; jettisoning sexual and cultural norms in search of happiness and liberation. Abandoning her family home, Miss Goering decamps to a dilapidated house on an island, but asceticism yields swiftly to increasingly sordid encounters with strange men. Mrs Copperfield dutifully accompanies her husband on a cruise to Panama, but falls in love with a prostitute and is swallowed up by a seedy world of bars and bordellos. When the two meet again, they are much changed - both have suffered the depredations of their deadbeat odysseys, but have found a new strength too."[Bowles] has a very special way of seeing things ... master of the unforgettable phrase that no one else could have written." - William S. Burroughs"Bowles''s spare, elliptical prose has a hallucinatory quality, pierced by moments of startling clarity and wit. Her characters retain a sphinx-like opacity, as unsettling as it is engrossing." - The Guardian"A modern legend" - Truman Capote"Bowles was a dizzyingly original stylist, and the texture of her writing and her dialogue in particular - staccato, self-confidently awkward - is unmistakably her own." - The New York TimesAbout the authorJane Bowles (born Jane Auer, 1917-1973) - a daring and stylish modernist - has long had an underground reputation as one of the truly original writers of this century. The author of a novel, Two Serious Ladies, a play, In the Summer House, and a volume of stories, Plain Pleasures. Her genius for spare prose and vivid dialogue had an outsized influence on her contemporaries. Tennessee Williams called her "the most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters"; Truman Capote said she was a "modern legend"; and for John Ashbery she was "one of the finest modern writers of fiction in any language." Jane Auer grew up in New York City, where as a teenager she became part of a bohemian, bisexual scene, along with the writer Paul Bowles. The pair married in 1938, somewhat impulsively, as both primarily pursued same-sex relationships (when she met Bowles, she told a friend, "He''s my enemy"). Jane Bowles belonged to the New York artistic circles of the 1940s before moving with Paul to Paris and Tangier, where she knew Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and Gertrude Stein, among others. Though her body of work was relatively small, Bowles has enjoyed a large literary influence, with Edmund White writing that "the luminous pages she left behind comprise some of the best American fiction we have." Besides her literary output, Bowles''s letters-to Virgil Thomson, Carl Van Vechten, Carson McCullers, and Paul Bowles, and about John Ashbery, William Burroughs, Aaron Copland, Ira Gershwin, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Paul Robeson, Susan Sontag, Alice Toklas, Gore Vidal, and Eudora Welty, among others-are by turns candid and heartbreaking, both serious and seriously funny. At the age of 40, Jane suffered a debilitating stroke, which brought an early end to her writing. She died in 1973."Her dark, furiously readable tales of self-destructive women are plainly influenced by the European existentialists. But her literary method was as American, and as deadly, as a Colt .45." - The Wall Street Journal
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In Youth Is Pleasure

by Denton Welch

5,29€ + 10% CARD

 "Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch''s In Youth Is Pleasure." - John WatersFlagrantly controversial on its first publication in 1945, In Youth Is Pleasure is a tender and fierce account of boyhood and nascent homosexual desire by Denton Welch (1915-48). Against the backdrop of an English country hotel in a languid pre-war summer, Denton Welch''s alter ego, Orvil Pym, examines his early life and formative experiences with a Proustian intensity. An adolescent voyeur, Orvil takes pleasure in the microscopic observation of his relatives and fellow guests, charting their eccentricities and love affairs as faithfully as he exposes his own obsessions.In Youth Is Pleasure was Welch''s second novel, a study of an adolescent who is hyper-sensitive and precocious (like the author himself), and who falls in love with nature and does not wish to return to school - but as in all of Welch''s work, what is most important are the details of his characters'' surroundings. "In Youth Is Pleasure couples the linguistic virtuosity of modernism with a manic cast of characters" - Los Angeles Review of Books''Denton Welch makes the reader aware of the magic that is right under his eyes ... If any writer has been neglected it is Denton.'' - William S. Burroughs
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Voice Through A Cloud

by Denton Welch

5,29€ + 10% CARD

 "Certainly the writer who most directly influenced my work." - William S. Burroughs A Voice Through A Cloud is Denton Welch''s unfinished masterpiece.Welch, one of the most gifted creative artists of his generation, died in 1948 at the age of thirty-one, leaving this, perhaps his finest work, almost but not quite completed. Under the thin disguise of fiction Welch recreates the world of hospitals and nursing homes in which he spent so many months after the accident which was eventually to prove fatal to him. The details of daily routine, the fellow patients, the nurses and doctors, the comedies and tragedies which loom so large in the confined existence of the sick, all are described so vividly, with so much humour and pathos, with so accurate a listening ear, so watchful and penetrating an eye, that it is almost impossible to believe that the experience on which it is based was one of long exhausting pain to the author himself, and that book was conceived in pain and carried through with failing physical powers."Rapt attention to the aesthetic ... essential." - The Paris Review"So deliciously subversive, it is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger." - John WatersAbout the authorDenton Welch (1915-1948) was born in Shanghai in 1915, the youngest of four boys, to a wealthy British-American family. After leaving his English boarding school (Repton), Welch decided to follow his dream of becoming a painter, and studied art at Goldsmiths in London. The physical injuries sustained in a cycling accident in 1935, however, saw him increasingly turn towards a hitherto secondary interest: writing. When Welch''s debut, Maiden Voyage, was published in 1942, it was an instant literary sensation (''I have been told that it reeks of homosexuality,'' wrote Winston Churchill''s secretary; ''I think I must get it''). This was followed by In Youth Is Pleasure in 1945 and, after his premature death from spinal tuberculosis in 1948, the publication of his unfinished masterpiece, A Voice Through A Cloud. ''If any writer has been neglected it is Denton'', wrote William Burroughs in 1985 - but Welch is also a writer who has attracted a firm coterie of admirers, ranging from W.H. Auden to Alan Bennett, Edith Sitwell to John Waters. Of his short life, Edmund White has noted, ''He had the power to generate interest out of even the most meagre materials. He had this gift from the beginning but suffering and illness refined it to a white-hot flame.''Praise''That rare being, a born writer.'' - Edith Sitwell''The real horror implicit in the book is that pain is the only reality.'' - Jocelyn Brooke ''Are we not all, emotionally, what Mr Welch is in fact - orphans, each traveling alone on a journey which, if it is headed in the direction of unknown dangers, at least is heading away from the fears one knows?'' - W.H. Auden ''An incomparable account of shattered flash and refracted spirit.'' - John Updike, The New Yorker''A Voice Through a Cloud is one of the saddest books in all fiction. It is also one of the most exquisite.'' - Lars Iyer''His best book.'' - The New York Review of Books''Rapt attention to the aesthetic ... His protagonists are misfits: alienated, implicitly gay, longing for love, frequently hard to be around, always fixated on small pleasures that compensate for an essential feeling of not belonging.'' - The Paris Review
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Herland

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

2,64€ + 10% CARD

 ''The forgotten feminist classic about a civilisation without men ... deeply, viscerally empowering.'' - The GuardianIn 1915, Charlotte Perkins Gilman - a feminist, futurist, and activist - published Herland, a story about an all-women utopian society hidden in a jungle. They shared all labor and child care equally and reproduced without men. For generations, they lived peacefully, communally, and happily-until three men barged in, disrupting the order.Gilman''s story was an allegory for her very real philosophy about what it would take for women to escape oppression: having full and equal opportunities to participate in all aspects of society, which meant turning all childcare and household work into a paid profession.About the authorCharlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), also known as Charlotte Perkins Stetson, her first married name, was a prominent American humanist, novelist, writer of short stories, poetry and nonfiction, and a lecturer for social reform. She was a utopian feminist and served as a role model for future generations of feminists because of her unorthodox concepts and lifestyle. She has been inducted into the National Women''s Hall of Fame. Her best remembered works today are her semi-autobiographical short story The Yellow Wallpaper, which she wrote after a severe bout of postpartum psychosis; and Herland, the rediscovered feminist classic about a civilisation without men.Praise for Herland''The forgotten feminist classic about a civilisation without men ... deeply, viscerally empowering.'' - The Guardian''A seriously funny book, related to the traditions of Utopian literature and set apart from that tradition by its extraordinary wit.'' - The New York Times''Charlotte Perkins Gilman''s vast writings on ideal societies were the catalyst for the feminist utopia Herland.'' - The New Yorker
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Jane Eyre

by Charlotte Brontë

2,64€ + 10% CARD

 ''Surprisingly radical.'' - The Atlantic ''A miniaturist of the soul, Brontë captured shades of emotion with a psychological subtlety that still feels exquisitely modern.'' - The New York TimesPassionate, poetic and revolutionary, Jane Eyre is a novel of naked emotional power. Its story of a defiant, fiercely intelligent woman who refuses to accept her appointed place in society - and instead finds love on her own terms - has become famous as one of the greatest romances ever written, but it is also a brooding Gothic mystery, a profound depiction of character and a transformative work of the imagination.Charlotte Brontë''s most beloved novel describes the passionate love between the courageous orphan Jane Eyre and the brilliant, brooding, and domineering Rochester. The loneliness and cruelty of Jane''s childhood strengthens her natural independence and spirit, which prove invaluable when she takes a position as a governess at Thornfield Hall. But after she falls in love with her sardonic employer, her discovery of his terrible secret forces her to make a heart-wrenching choice. Ever since its publication in 1847, Jane Eyre has enthralled every kind of reader, from the most critical and cultivated to the youngest and most unabashedly romantic. It lives as one of the great triumphs of storytelling and as a moving and unforgettable portrayal of a woman''s quest for self-respect.''Unless I have the courage to use the language of Truth in preference to the jargon of Conventionality, I ought to be silent ...'' - Charlotte BrontëAbout the authorCharlotte Brontë lived from 1816 to 1855. Jane Eyre appeared in 1847 and was followed by Shirley (1848) and Vilette (1853). In 1854, Charlotte Brontë married her father''s curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls. She died during her pregnancy on March 31, 1855, in Haworth, Yorkshire. The Professor was posthumously published in 1857.''At the end we are steeped through and through with the genius, the vehemence, the indignation of Charlotte Brontë.'' - Virginia Woolf''One of the reasons Jane Eyre continues to provoke so much discussion and theorising is that, like Jane herself, it eludes definition. It does one thing with its right hand while doing quite another with its left. - The Guardian''Charlotte Brontë''s 1847 novel helped introduce the idea of the "modern individual"-a surprisingly radical concept for readers at the time.'' - The Atlantic ''A miniaturist of the soul, Brontë captured shades of emotion with a psychological subtlety that still feels exquisitely modern." - The New York Times
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Picture Of Dorian Gray

by Oscar Wilde

2,64€ + 10% CARD

 ''What begins as an alluring fable ends as a full-on modernist nightmare.'' - The New YorkerFirst published in 1890, The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde''s only novel. At first the subject of intense controversy, it has endured as a classic for years.Dorian is a good-natured young man until he discovers the power of his own exceptional beauty. As he gradually sinks deep into a frivolous, glamorous world of selfish luxury, he apparently remains physically unchanged by the stresses of his corrupt lifestyle and untouched by age. But up in his attic, hidden behind a curtain, his portrait tells a different story...''Nasty and nauseous'' - The St. James Gazette''Wilde made clear from the outset that he wished to show not only the thrills and pleasures of a ruthlessly aesthetic life but also its limits and dangers ... What begins as an alluring fable ends as a full-on modernist nightmare.'' - The New Yorker''Wilde''s brilliantly allusive moral tale of youth, beauty and corruption'' - The Guardian''Unclean, poisonous, and heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction.'' - The Daily Chronicle of London''He towered above us all'' - Arthur Conan Doyle''Both a cautionary tale of a life of depravity and sham, and a tender portrait of the aesthetic urge unbridled and spinning out of control ... A dark, supernatural affair, its sparkling wit never completely conceals a Gothic layer that would have done justice to Edgar Allan Poe at his best.'' - Irvine WelshAbout the auhor:Oscar Wilde was known for his acclaimed works including The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest, as well as his brilliant wit, flamboyant style and infamous imprisonment for homosexuality.Author, playwright and poet, Oscar Wilde was a popular literary figure in late Victorian England. After graduating from Oxford University, he lectured as a poet, art critic and a leading proponent of the principles of aestheticism. In 1891, he published The Picture of Dorian Gray, his only novel which was panned as immoral by Victorian critics, but is now considered one of his most notable works. As a dramatist, many of Wilde''s plays were well received including his satirical comedies Lady Windermere''s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), his most famous play. Unconventional in his writing and life, Wilde''s affair with a young man led to his arrest on charges of "gross indecency" in 1895. He was imprisoned for two years and died in poverty three years after his release at the age of 46.
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