«The Best of Sherlock Holmes» is a collection of twenty of the very best tales from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fifty-six short stories featuring the arch-sleuth. Basing his selection around the author’s own twelve personal favourites, David Stuart Davies has added a further eight sparkling stories to Conan Doyle’s ‘Baker Street Dozen’ creating a unique volume which distils the pure essence of the world’s most famous detective.Издание на английском языке.

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James Bowen was a homeless musician, busking on the streets of London to survive. But the moment he met an injured stray cat with ginger fur and big…

Interest in supernatural phenomena was high during Charles Dickens’ lifetime. He had always loved a good ghost story himself, particularly at Christmas time, and was open-minded, willing to accept, and indeed put to the test, the existence of spirits.His natural inclinations toward drama and the macabre made him a brilliant teller of ghost tales, and in the twenty stories presented here, which include his celebrated A Christmas Саrol, the full range of his gothic talents can be seen.Chilling as some of these stories are, Dickens has managed to inject characteristically grotesque comedy as he writes of revenge, insanity, pre-cognition and dream visions, he indulges also in some debunking of contemporary credulity.

Introduction and Notes by Norman Vance, Professor of English, University of Sussex. Far from the Madding Crowd is perhaps the most pastoral of Hardy’s Wessex novels. It tells the story of the young farmer Gabriel Oak and his love for and pursuit of the elusive Bathsheba Everdene, whose wayward nature leads her to both tragedy and true love. It tells of the dashing Sergeant Troy whose rakish philosophy of life was ‘…the past was yesterday; never, the day after’, and lastly, of the introverted and reclusive gentleman farmer, Mr Boldwood, whose love fills him with ‘…a fearful sense of exposure’, when he first sets eyes on Bathsheba. The background of this tale is the Wessex countryside in all its moods, contriving to make it one of the most English of great English novels.

Generally considered to be F.Scott Fitzgerald’s finest novel, «The Great Gatsby» is a consummate summary of the «roaring twenties» and a devastating expose of the «Jazz Age». Through the narration of Nick Carraway, the reader is taken into the superficially glittering world of the mansions which lined the Long Island shore of the American seaboard in the 1920s, to encounter Nick’s cousin Daisy, her brash but wealthy husband Tom Buchanan, Jay Gatsby and the dark mystery which surrounds him.»The Great Gatsby» is an undisputed classic of American literature from the period following the First World War and is one of the great novels of the twentieth century.Издание на английском языке.

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The Brothers Grimm rediscovered a host of Fairy Tales, telling of princes and princesses in their castles, witches in their towers and forests, of giants and dwarfs, of fabulous animals and dark deeds. This selection of their folk tales was made and translated by Lucy Crane, and includes firm favourites such as Rapunzel, The Goose Girl, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel and Snow White. It is illustrated throughout by Walter Crane’s charming line drawings.

Tins collection brings together Jane Austen’s earliest experiments in the art of fiction and novels that she left incomplete at the time of her premature death in 1817. Her fragmentary juvenilia show Austen developing her own sense of narrative form whilst parodying popular kinds of fiction of her day. Lady Susan is a wickedly funny epistolary novel about a captivating but unscrupulous widow seeking to snare husbands for her daughter and herself. The Watsons explores themes of family relationships, the marriage market, and attitudes to rank, which became the hallmarks of her major novels. In Sanditon, Austen exercises fashionable seaside resort. These novels are here joined by shorter fictions that survive in Austen’s manuscripts, including critically acclaimed works like Catharine, Love and Freindship, and The History of England.

Издание на английском языке.Полный, неадаптированный текст произведения.Adultery is not a typical Jane Austen theme, but when it disturbs the relatively peaceful household ..»it Mansfield Park, it has quite unexpected results. The diffident and much put-upon heroine Fanny Price has to struggle to cope with the results. re-examining her own feelings while enduring the cheerful amorality, old-fashioned indifference and priggish disapproval of those around her.

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The Moonstone, a priceless Indian diamond which had been brought to England as spoils of war, is given to Rachel Verrinder on her eighteenth birthday. That very night, the stone is stolen. Suspicion then tails on a hunchbacked housemaid, on Rachel’s cousin Franklin Blake, on a troupe of mysterious Indian jugglers, and on Rachel herself.The phlegmatic Sergeant Cuff is called in, and with the help of Betteredge, the Robinson Crusoe-reading loquacious steward, the mystery of the missing stone is ingeniously solved.Издание полностью на английском языке.

«Northanger Abbey» tells the story of a young girl, Catherine Morland who leaves her sheltered, rural home to enter the busy, sophisticated world of Bath in the late 1 790s. Austen observes with insight and humour the interaction between Catherine and the various characters whom she meets there, and tracks her growing understanding of the world about her. In this, her first full-length novel, Austen also fixes her sharp, ironic gaze on other kinds of contemporary novel, especially the Gothic school made famous by Ann Radcliffe. Catherine’s reading becomes intertwined with her social and romantic adventures, adding to the uncertainties and embarrassments she must undergo before finding happiness.Издание на английском языке.

Dickens had already achieved renown with «The Pickwick Papers». With «Oliver Twist» his reputation was enhanced and strengthened. The novel contains many classic Dickensian themes — grinding poverty, desperation, fear, temptation and the eventual triumph of good in the face of great adversity.
«Oliver Twist» features some of the author’s most enduring characters, such as Oliver himself (who dares to ask for more), the tyrannical Bumble, the diabolical Fagin, the menacing Bill Sykes, Nancy and «the Artful Dodger».
For any reader wishing to delve into the works of the great Victorian literary colossus, «Oliver Twist» is, without doubt, an essential title.
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With an Introduction and Notes by John M.L. Drew, University of Buckingham.Wilde’s only novel, first published in 1890, is a brilliantly designed puzzle, intended to tease conventional minds with its exploration of the myriad interrelationships between art, life, and consequence. From its provocative Preface, challenging the reader to believe in ‘art for art’s sake’, to its sensational conclusion, the story self-consciously experiments with the notion of sin as an element of design.Yet Wilde himself underestimated the consequences of his experiment, and its capacity to outrage the Victorian establishment. Its words returned to haunt him in his court appearances in 1895, and he later recalled the ‘note of doom’ which runs like ‘a purple thread’ through its carefully crafted prose.

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Полный, неадаптированный текст знаменитой трагедии Вильяма Шекспира «Ромео и Джульетта». Издание выполнено современным, удобным для чтения шрифтом.Рекомендуется для лиц владеющих основами английского языка.

Первый опубликованный роман знаменитой английской писательницы Джейн Остен представляет собой комедию нравов Англии конца XVIII — начала XIX века. Две сестры, олицетворяющие собой противоположные начала, здравомыслие и чувственность, борются за свое место под солнцем, пытаясь устроиться в жизни за счет притворства и приспособленчества. Издание рассчитано на лиц, владеющих основами английского литературного языка и желающих усовершенствовать свои знания.

«Tender is the Night» is a story set in the hedonistic high society of Europe during the ‘Roaring Twenties’. A wealthy schizophrenic, Nicole Warren, falls in love with Dick Diver — her psychiatrist. The resulting saga of the Divers’ troubled marriage, and their circle of friends, includes a cast of aristocratic and beautiful people, unhappy love affairs, a duel, incest, and the problems inherent in the possession of great wealth. Despite cataloguing a maelstrom of interpersonal conflict, «Tender is the Night» has a poignancy and warmth that springs from the quality of Fitzgerald’s writing and the tragic personal experiences on which the novel is based. Six years separate «Tender is the Night» and «The Last Tycoon», the novel Fitzgerald left unfinished at his death in December 1940. Fitzgerald lived in Hollywood more or less continuously from July 1937 until his death, and a novel about the film industry at the height of ‘the studio system’ centred on the working life of a top producer was begun in 1939. Even in its incomplete state «The Last Tycoon» remains the greatest American novel about Hollywood and contains some of Fitzgerald’s most brilliant writing.

With a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex.Guy de Maupassant was a master of the short story. This collection displays his lively diversity, with tales that vary in theme and tone, ranging from tragedy and satire to comedy and farce.In a lucidly direct style, he provides unflinching realism and sceptical irony. He depicts the deceptions, hypocrisies and vanities at different levels of society. Prostitution is frankly described, while the harshness of war is deftly exposed.His tales have been televised and have influenced films, operas and rock music. Unillusioned but humane, Maupassant remains our contemporary.

‘Surely no man would take up my profession if it were not that danger attracts him.’In The Casebook, you can read the final twelve stories that Sir Arthur Gonan Doyle wrote about his brilliant detective. They are perhaps the most unusual and the darkest that he penned. Treachery, mutilation and the terrible consequences of infidelity are just some of the themes explored in these stories, along with atmospheric touches of the gothic, involving a bloodsucking vampire, crypts at midnight and strange bones in a furnace.The collection His Last Bow features some of Sherlock Holmes’ most dramatic cases, including the vicious revenge intrigue connected with ‘The Red Circle’ and the insidious murders in ‘The Devil’s Foot’. The title story recounts how Sherlock Holmes is brought out of retirement to help the government foil a German plot on the eve of the First World War.These two fascinating sets of stories make a glorious farewell to the greatest detective of them all and his erstwhile companion, Dr Watson.

It is 1757. Across north-eastern America the armies of Britain and Prance struggle for ascendancy. Their conflict, however, overlays older struggles between nations of native Americans for possession of the same lands and between the native peoples and white colonisers. Through these layers of conflict Cooper threads a thrilling narrative, in which Cora and Alice Munro, daughters of a British commander on the front line of the colonial war, attempt to join their father. Thwarted by Magua, the sinister ‘Indian runner’, they find help in the persons of Hawk-eye, the white woodsman, and his companions, the Mohican Chingachgook and Uncas, his son, the last of his tribe.Cooper’s novel is full of vivid incident — pursuits through wild terrain, skirmishes, treachery and brutality — but reflects also on the interaction between the colonisers and the native peoples. Hawk-eye’s moral code is dictated neither by white nor by native notions of honour and self-interest, and through him Cooper raises lasting questions about the practises of the American frontier and the eclipse of the indigenous cultures.Издание на английском языке.

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Far from fading with time, Kenneth Grahame`s classic tale of fantasy has attracted a growing audience in each generation. Rat, Mole, Badger, and the preposterous Mr. Toad (with his `Poop-poop-poop` road-hogging new motor-car), have brought delight to many through the years with their odd adventures on and by the river, and at the imposing residence of Toad Hall. Grahame`s book was later dramatised by A.A.Milne, and became a perennial Christmas favourite, as `Toad of Toad Hall`. It continues to enchant and, above all perhaps, inspire great affection.

Gaskell’s last novel, widely considered her masterpiece, follows the fortunes of two families in nineteenth century rural England. At its core are family relationships — father, daughter and step-mother, father and sons, father and step-daughter — all tested and strained by the romantic entanglements that ensue.Despite its underlying seriousness, the prevailing tone is one of comedy. Gaskell vividly portrays the world of the late 1820s and the forces of change within it, and her vision is always humane and progressive.The story is full of acute observation and sympathetic character-study: the feudal squire clinging to old values, his naturalist son welcoming the new world of science, the local doctor and his scheming second wife, the two girls brought together by their parents’ marriage.

This selection of Carroll’s works includes Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel. Through die Looking-Glass, both containing the famous illustrations by Sir John Tenniel. No greater books for children have ever been written. The simple language, dreamlike atmosphere, and fantastical characters are as appealing to young readers today as they ever were.Meanwhile, however, these apparently simple stories have become recognised as adult masterpieces, and extraordinary experiments, years ahead of their time, in Modernism and Surrealism. Through wordplay, parody and logical and philosophical puzzles, Carroll engenders a variety of sub-texts, teasing, ominous or melancholy. For all the surface playfulness there is meaning everywhere. The author reveals himself in glimpses.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the most important and innovative figures of the European Middle Ages. Writing his Comedy (the epithet ‘Divine’ was added by later admirers) in exile from his native Florence, he aimed to address a world gone astray both morally and politically. At the same time, he sought to push back the restrictive rules which traditionally governed writing in the Italian vernacular, to produce a radically new and all-encompassing work.The Comedy tells the story of the journey of a character who is at one and the same time both Dante himself and Everyman. In The Inferno, Dante’s protagonist — and his reader — is presented with a graphic vision of the dreadful consequences of sin, and encounters an all-too-human array of noble, grotesque, beguiling, ridiculous and horrific characters.