Серия книг «Everyman's Library Pocket Classics» — 20 книг

As Scheherazade proved long ago, good stories make the best bedtime entertainment. The tales collected here represent the essence of the storyteller's art, with its ancient roots in fantastical legends and tales told around a fire. From the surreal night visions of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" to the unspeakable horror that haunts two little girls in A. S. Byatt's "The Thing in the Forest", from Washington Irving's comical "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" to Ursula K. LeGuin's sly perspective on Sleeping Beauty in "The Poacher", these spellbinding stories transform the stuff of fables and fairy tales into high art. Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Isak Dinesen, Vladimir Nabokov, Angela Carter, Haruki Murakami and many more mingle their voices in this one-volume gateway to dreams - the perfect bedside companion for fiction lovers everywhere.

As Scheherazade proved long ago, good stories make the best bedtime entertainment. The tales collected here represent the essence of the storyteller's art, with its ancient roots…

Playful kittens and ruthless predators, beloved pets and witches' familiars - cats of all kinds come alive in these stories. Maeve Brennan and Alice Adams movingly explore what cats can mean to their humans, while writers as varied as Patricia Highsmith and Fritz Leiber imagine the intriguingly alien feline point of view. Cats flaunt their undeniable superiority in Angela Carter's bawdy retelling of "Puss-in-Boots" and Stephen Vincent Benet's uncanny "The King of the Cats", while humour abounds in tales by comic masters P. G. Wodehouse and Saki. The essential unknowableness of cats inspires the most exotic flights of fancy: Calvino's secret city of cats in "The Garden of Stubborn Cats", the disappearing animal in Ursula K. LeGuin's brain-teasing "Schrodinger's Cat", the cartoon rodent and his cartoon nemesis in Steven Millhauser's "Cat 'n' Mouse". In these and other stories, this delightful anthology offers cat lovers a many-faceted tribute to the beguilingly mysterious objects of their affection.

Playful kittens and ruthless predators, beloved pets and witches' familiars - cats of all kinds come alive in these stories. Maeve Brennan and Alice Adams movingly explore what…

As a literary subject, Christmas has inspired everything from intimate domestic dramas, to fanciful flights of the imagination, and the full range of its expression is represented in this wonderfully engaging collection. Goblins frolic in the graveyard of an early Dickens tale; a love-struck ghost disrupts a country estate in Elizabeth Bowen's "Green Holly"; devils, witches, Cossacks and peasants cavort in Gogol's "The Night Before Christmas". The plight of the less fortunate haunts Chekhov's "Vanka" and Willa Cather's "The Burglar's Christmas", but takes a boisterously comic turn in Damon Runyon's "Dancing Dan's Christmas" and John Cheever's "Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor".From Nabokov's intensely moving story of a father's grief in "Christmas" to Truman Capote's hilarious yet heartbreaking "A Christmas Memory", from Grace Paley's Jewish girl in the Christmas pageant in "The Loudest Voice" to the dysfunctional family ski holiday in Richard Ford's "Creche" - each of the stories is imbued with Christmas spirit of one kind or another, and all are richly and indelibly entertaining.

As a literary subject, Christmas has inspired everything from intimate domestic dramas, to fanciful flights of the imagination, and the full range of its expression is represented…

If every fiction is at heart a mystery, then the detective story is fiction distilled to its purest essence, combining the intellectual appeal of puzzles with the psychological fascination of human motivation. These sixteen classic tales of crimes and those who unravel them, collected from across the past two centuries, offer ample evidence of the form’s enduring allure. Beginning with modern masters such as Sara Paretsky, Ruth Rendell and Ian Rankin, Detective Stories works its way back through the golden age of the 1920s and ’30s to the genre’s iconic sources in Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. The famous detectives who stalk these pages range from the eccentric (Sherlock Holmes, C. Auguste Dupin) to the unlikely (Father Brown, Miss Marple), from the delightful (Inspectors Maigret and Ghote) to the absurd (Bret Harte’s Hemlock Jones). But among them all, whether in Chicago, New Delhi or London, the nineteenth century or the twenty-first, there is also an abiding human sympathy which engages the heart as well as the mind, making our favourite detectives and their prey not only diversions but also our lifelong imaginative companions.

If every fiction is at heart a mystery, then the detective story is fiction distilled to its purest essence, combining the intellectual appeal of puzzles with the psychological…

The unforgettable canines gathered here include Kipling's heroically faithful 'Garm', Bret Harte's irrepressible scoundrel of a 'yaller dog' and the aggressively affectionate three-legged pit bull who lives in a block of flats for dogs in Jonathan Lethem's 'Ava's Apartment'. Here are stories which touchingly illuminate the dog's role in the emotional lives of humans, such as Tobias Wolff's 'Her Dog', where a widower shares his grief for his wife with her grieving pet. Here, too, are humorous glimpses of the canine point of view, from O. Henry's tale of a dissatisfied lapdog's escape to P. G. Wodehouse's cheerfully naive watchdog who simply wants everybody to get along. These writers and others - Ray Bradbury, JamesThurber and Penelope Lively among them - offer imaginative, lyrical and empathetic portraits of man and woman's most devoted companion.

The unforgettable canines gathered here include Kipling's heroically faithful 'Garm', Bret Harte's irrepressible scoundrel of a 'yaller dog' and the aggressively affectionate…

Fishing Stories nets an abundant catch of wonderful writing in a wide variety of genres and styles. The moods range from the comedy of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘On Dry-Cow Fishing as a Fine Art’ and Jerome K. Jerome’s ‘Fishy’ to the rural gothic of Annie Proulx’s ‘The Wer-Trout’ and the haunting elegy of Norman Maclean’s ‘A River Runs Through It’.
Many of these tales celebrate human bonds forged over a rod, including Guy de Maupassant’s ‘Two Friends’, Jimmy Carter’s ‘Fishing with My Daddy’ and Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden. Some deal in reverence and romance, as in Roland Pertwee’s ‘The River God’, and some in adventure and the stuff of legend, as in Zane Grey’s ‘The First Thousand-Pounder’ and Ron Rash’s ‘Their Ancient, Glittering Eyes’. There are narratives that confront the heartbreaks and frustrations of the sport, from Thomas McGuane’s ‘The Longest Silence’, a meditation on long spells of inaction as the essence of fishing, to Raymond Carver’s masterpiece about a boy’s deflated triumph in ‘Nobody Said Anything’. And alongside the works of literary giants are the memories of people both great and humble who have found meaning and fulfilment in fishing, from a former American president to a Scottish gamekeeper’s daughter.
Whether set on the open ocean or by a mountain stream, in ancient China, tropical Tahiti, Paris under siege, the English seaside or the vast Canadian wilderness, these stories cast wide and strike deep into the universal joys, absurdities, insights, and tragedies of life.

Fishing Stories nets an abundant catch of wonderful writing in a wide variety of genres and styles. The moods range from the comedy of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘On Dry-Cow Fishing as a…

A new anthology of classic ghost stories—the second volume in the beautiful and collectible Pocket Classics format.

The chilling classic stories gathered here offer a remarkable variety of approaches to the theme of haunting. Revenge comes from beyond the grave in Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Body-Snatcher,” while visions of the dead come between the living in Henry James’s “The Friends of the Friends.” P. G. Wodehouse gives us a farcical take on the haunted house in “Honeysuckle Cottage,” and in L. P. Hartley’s “W.S.,” a writer is fatally stalked by his own aggrieved creation.

Here are ghosts of every stripe and intent in stories from writers as varied as Elizabeth Bowen and Jorge Luis Borges, Eudora Welty and Vladimir Nabokov, Ray Bradbury and Edith Wharton, among others. In the hands of these masters, the ghost story ranges far beyond mere horror to encompass comedy and tragedy, pathos and drama, and even a touch of poetry.

A new anthology of classic ghost stories—the second volume in the beautiful and collectible Pocket Classics format.

The chilling classic stories gathered here offer a…

Golf Stories is a wonderful gathering of short fiction about the famously addictive pastime. Here are literary classics by such golf-loving writers as P. G. Wodehouse, Ring Lardner and John Updike, with some surprises thrown in – an appearance by Ian Fleming’s James Bond and a little crime on the links from mystery master Ian Rankin. Humorists and sportswriters ranging from E. C. Bentley to Dan Jenkins and Rick Reilly weigh in as well, alongside a tale of romance on the greens from F. Scott Fitzgerald, a little-known gem by famous golf architect A. W. Tillinghast and a story by Rex Lardner (Ring’s nephew) that just may be the single funniest thing ever written about golf. The resulting anthology is as enticing, provocative and entertaining as the game of golf itself.

Golf Stories is a wonderful gathering of short fiction about the famously addictive pastime. Here are literary classics by such golf-loving writers as P. G. Wodehouse, Ring…

A perfect Christmas gift—a beautifully jacketed Everyman's Library Pocket Classics hardcover anthology of two centuries of short fiction about our most majestic companion animal. With full-cloth binding and a silk ribbon marker.
Annie Proulx and Bret Harte transport us to the ranches of the Old West and Rudyard Kipling to the polo fields of India. Arthur Conan Doyle makes a famous Thoroughbred disappear, and Raymond Carver gives us a vision of runaway horses in the mist. Jane Smiley, Margaret Atwood, Isaac Babel, and Ted Hughes explore the human passions horses can unleash. From the rollicking racetrack humor of Damon Runyon to the poignant lyricism of John Steinbeck's "The Red Pony" to the wild recklessness of adolescence in William Saroyan's "The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse" and Lydia Peelle's "Sweethearts of the Rodeo," these stories testify to our varied and timeless fascination with the noble animal.

A perfect Christmas gift—a beautifully jacketed Everyman's Library Pocket Classics hardcover anthology of two centuries of short fiction about our most majestic companion animal.…

"Love Stories" brings together a captivating assortment of short stories inspired by romantic entanglement in its many forms: first love, infatuation, obsession, unrequited love, marriage, adultery, jealousy, and the complicated bonds of those who have spent their lives together. An array of writers evoke a variety of moods, from the raw, erotic passion of Lawrence and Colette to the wickedlycynical comedy of Dorothy Parker and Roald Dahl; from the agonizing madness of jealousy in Nabokov's "That in Aleppo Once ..." to romantic illusions in Scott Fitzgerald's "Winter Dreams".Objects of passion range from a glamorous silent-movie star in Elizabeth Bowen's haunting "Dead Mabelle" to a faithful ghost in Kawabata's "Immortality" and a successful heart surgeon and serial husband in Margaret Atwood's "Bluebeard's Egg". Jhumpa Lahiri plumbs the depths of a couple sundered by tragedy while Lorrie Moore movingly portrays a husband and wife brought together by it. Katherine Mansfield, Tobias Wolff and William Trevor explore the intricacies of long-term relationships, while Maupassant, Calvino and T. C. Boyle convey the elemental force of love in extremely different ways. Together these nineteen stories make an enticing gift for lovers at any stage of life. It is perfect for Valentine's Day.

"Love Stories" brings together a captivating assortment of short stories inspired by romantic entanglement in its many forms: first love, infatuation, obsession, unrequited love,…

Writers have always been uniquely inspired by New York City, and the classic stories collected here provide a kaleidoscopic vision of the metropolis in all its grittiness and glamour. Acclaimed writers past and present, ranging from Truman Capote, Bernard Malamud, John Cheever and Shirley Jackson to Jay McInerney, Edwidge Danticat and Junot Diaz, introduce us to starry-eyed tourists and ambitious immigrants, starving artists and hedonistic yuppies, Jewish matchmakers in the Bronx and Haitian nannies in Central Park. Colourful characters of all kinds come alive in these pages, nursing their dreams in the tiny apartments, the lonely cafes, and the bustling streets of the city that never sleeps.

Writers have always been uniquely inspired by New York City, and the classic stories collected here provide a kaleidoscopic vision of the metropolis in all its grittiness and…

Stories of Motherhood gathers more than a century of literary celebrations of mothers of all ages. These short stories by a wide range of great writers illuminate the many facets of our most elemental human relationship, from birth to death and everything in between.
Lydia Davis and Harold Brodkey explore dizzying encounters between young mothers and their newborn babies, while Colm Tóibín and Lorrie Moore portray adult children grieving for their lost mothers. Ron Carlson probes the forging of a bond with an adopted infant, Barbara Kingsolver gives us a sparring mother-and-daughter pair whose overlapping pregnancies lead them to common ground, and Aimee Bender offers a loopy fable of maternal connection in which a woman gives birth to her own mother. Willa Cather, Ernest Gaines, and Louise Erdrich dramatize the strength and sacrifices of mothers in very different walks of life, while Anita Desai and Amy Tan chart the gulf of misunderstanding and cultural change that can divide mothers and their offspring in any time or place—and the ways love can sometimes find to cross it.
These and such other masters of the short story as Sherwood Anderson, Hortense Calisher, and Alice Munro write memorably about mothers—having, losing, leaving, and loving them—in modes that range from lyrical to satirical, from heartbreaking to hilarious.

Stories of Motherhood gathers more than a century of literary celebrations of mothers of all ages. These short stories by a wide range of great writers illuminate the many facets…

A gathering of the best maritime fiction from the last two hundred years: tales of shipwrecks and storms at sea, of creatures from the deep, of voyages that test human limits on the wild and limitless waters.
Classic adventures stories by Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, Stephen Crane, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack London mix with marvelously imaginative tales by Isak Dinesen, Patricia Highsmith, and J. G. Ballard. Robert Olen Butler explores the memories of a Titanic victim who has become part of the sea that swallowed him; Ray Bradbury’s “The Fog Horn” summons something primeval and lonely from the ocean depths; John Updike’s vacationing lovers retrace the route of Homer’s Odyssey on a cruise ship. From Edgar Allan Poe’s dramatic “A Descent into the Maelstrom” to Ernest Hemingway’s chilling “After the Storm” to Mark Helprin’s heartbreaking “Sail Shining in White,” the stories here are as wide-ranging and entrancing as the sea itself.

A gathering of the best maritime fiction from the last two hundred years: tales of shipwrecks and storms at sea, of creatures from the deep, of voyages that test human limits on…

These eighteen classic stories from across John Updike’s career form a luminous chronicle of the life and times of one marriage in all its rich emotional complexity. In 1956, Updike published a story, ‘Snowing in Greenwich Village’, about a young couple, Joan and Richard Maple, at the beginning of their marriage. Over the next two decades, he returned to these characters again and again, tracing their years together raising children, finding and losing moments of romantic rapport, and facing the heartbreak of infidelity and estrangement. Now these stories appear in a single volume in hardcover for the first time, with the addition of a later story ‘Grandparenting’, which returns us to the Maples long after their wrenching divorce. Together, The Maples Stories offers a nuanced portrait of a flawed marriage between two sympathetic, well-intentioned practitioners of twentieth-century family life.

These eighteen classic stories from across John Updike’s career form a luminous chronicle of the life and times of one marriage in all its rich emotional complexity. In 1956,…

Stories of Art and Artists

Paris Stories gathers classic stories about the City of Light by a wide range of writers across four centuries.

Perhaps no other European city has so captured the imagination of the artistically and romantically minded. Laurence Sterne explores the temptations of the French capital in a teasing study of foreign mores, and Restif de la Bretonne provides an eyewitness account of the horrors and glories of the French Revolution. Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola offer fascinating portraits of the growing metropolis’s teeming humanity; the Goncourt brothers chronicle its glittering literary circles; and Huysmans describes a memorable evening at the Folies Bergère. Colette recounts the sensual adventures of a young girl in the decadent Paris of the early twentieth century, while F. Scott Fitzgerald revels in its urban glamour. Jean Rhys’s lost heroines wander from café to café, James Baldwin celebrates the city’s sexual freedoms, and Raymond Queneau gleefully reinvents the language of the street. In more recent decades, Michel Tournier’s North African immigrant walks a camel along the boulevards and Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano nostalgically maps the famed Parisian arrondissements. Theatrical and elegant, seamy and intellectual, Paris has never lost its alluring power, richly evoked in these compelling and seductive tales.

Paris Stories gathers classic stories about the City of Light by a wide range of writers across four centuries.

Perhaps no other European city has so captured the imagination…

A gorgeously jacketed hardcover anthology of stories set in Prague, by an international array of brilliant writers.

The Golden City of Prague has long been an intellectual center of the western world. The writers collected here range from the early nineteenth century to the present and include both Prague natives and visitors from elsewhere. Here are stories, legends, and scenes from the city’s past and present, from the Jewish fable of the golem, a creature conjured from clay, to tales of German and Soviet invasions. The international array of writers ranges from Franz Kafka to Ivan Klíma to Bruce Chatwin, and includes the award-winning British playwright Tom Stoppard and former American Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, both of whom have Czech roots. Covering the city’s venerable Jewish heritage, the glamour of the belle-époque period, World War II, Communist rule, the Prague Spring, the Velvet Revolution, and beyond, Prague Stories weaves a remarkable selection of fiction and nonfiction into a literary portrait of a fascinating city.A gorgeously jacketed hardcover anthology of stories set in Prague, by an international array of brilliant writers.

A gorgeously jacketed hardcover anthology of stories set in Prague, by an international array of brilliant writers.

The Golden City of Prague has long been an intellectual…

The sublime city of Venice has long offered inspiration to the world's storytellers. This anthology gathers a dazzling variety of stories with Venetian settings, including Daphne du Maurier's haunting "Don't Look Now," Anthony Trollope's wartime romance "The Last Austrian Who Left Venice," Vernon Lee's spine-chilling "A Wicked Voice," and a scene from The Wings of the Dove, Henry James's tale of passion and betrayal in a Gothic palazzo on the Grand Canal. The famed Venetian adventurer Giacomo Casanova weighs in with escapades from his notorious Memoirs, alongside enthralling selections by Baron Corvo, Marcel Proust, Camillo Boito, and Jeanette Winterson. In its multifaceted portrait of La Serenissima, Venice Stories showcases a lineup of literary classics worthy of the magnificent city they celebrate.

The sublime city of Venice has long offered inspiration to the world's storytellers. This anthology gathers a dazzling variety of stories with Venetian settings, including Daphne…

A beautiful hardcover anthology of short stories about music by a remarkable array of literary greats, selected by someone who is both a musician and a writer

Music may be a universal language that transcends words, but that hasn't stopped our most accomplished writers from trying to capture its essence on the page, paying homage to one art form through another. The dazzling examples collected here range from Virginia Woolf's "The String Quartet" to Langston Hughes's "The Blues I'm Playing" and Donald Barthelme's "The King of Jazz," and from Ivan Turgenev's "The Song of Triumphant Love" to Katherine Mansfield's "The Singing Lesson" and Ian McEwan's "A Duet." Here are melodious scenes from E. M. Forster's Howards End and Vikram Seth's An Equal Music, and stories by James Joyce, Gustave Flaubert, and Marcel Proust in harmony with pieces by Vladimir Nabokov, Maya Angelou, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Philip K. Dick. Together these twenty-four musical tales make up a gorgeous symphony of literary delights.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

A beautiful hardcover anthology of short stories about music by a remarkable array of literary greats, selected by someone who is both a musician and a writer

Music may be a…

An enchanting book about books: a beautiful hardcover Pocket Classics anthology of stories that testify to the irresistible power of the written word

The characters in the delightful stories collected here range all the way from the ink-stained medieval monks in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose to the book-besotted denizens of Ali Smith’s Public Library and Other Stories. In these pages readers are invited to enter the interior lives of librarians in Lorrie Moore’s “Community Life” and Elizabeth McCracken's "Juliet" and are ushered into a host of unusual libraries, including the infinite rooms of Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel” and a secret library in Helen Oyeyemi’s “Books and Roses.”

Books exert their power in mysterious ways: an attempt by the military leaders of an imaginary nation to censor all of literature goes awry in Italo Calvino’s “A General in the Library” and Julio Cortázar’s mesmerizing “The Continuity of Parks” dramatizes the merging of the world inside and outside of a book. In Stories of Books and Libraries, a dazzling array of writers including Evelyn Waugh, Colette, Walter Benjamin, Isaac Babel, Teffi, and Ray Bradbury pay tribute to books and the magical places that house them.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

An enchanting book about books: a beautiful hardcover Pocket Classics anthology of stories that testify to the irresistible power of the written word

The characters in the…