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This selection, which includes early love poems, songs from the novels, landscape poems from The Lay of the Last Minstrel and The Lady of the Lake, and the complete narrative poems "William and Helen" and "Marmion," reveals Sir Walter Scott as a poet speaking for a people.

This Modern Library edition contains all of John Donne's great metaphysical love poetry. Here are such well-known songs and sonnets as "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," "The Extasie," and "A Nocturnall Upon S. Lucies Day," along with the love elegies "Jealosie," "His Parting From Her," and "To His Mistris Going to Bed." Presented as well are Donne's satires, epigrams, verse letters, and holy sonnets, along with his most ambitious and important poems, the Anniversaries. In addition, there is a generous sampling of Donne's prose, including many of his private letters; Ignatius His Conclave, a satiric onslaught on the Jesuits; excerpts from Biathanatos, his celebrated defense of suicide; and his most famous sermons, concluding with the final "Death's Duell." "We have only to read [Donne]," wrote Virginia Woolf, "to submit to the sound of that passionate and penetrating voice, and his figure rises again across the waste of the years more erect, more imperious, more inscrutable than any of his time."

To travel through these stories is to cross a landscape of stunning beauty and terrific cruelty, where expectations are subverted, where moral certainties are shattered, where gorgeously wrought surfaces beguile at the same time that acts of incredible brutality horrify.

It is no wonder that Yu Hua’s stories caused a sensation when they first appeared in the 1980s. His work represents a sophisticated and often disturbing revolution in the Chinese literary tradition, reminiscent of the fiction of modernists like Kafka, Kawabata, Borges, and Robbe-Grillet, but drawing inspiration from several strains of traditional Chinese narrative as well.

This is the first collection of short fiction by Yu Hua to appear in English. It takes us on a haunting and harrowing journey from classical China through the Cultural Revolution and into the new era of economic reform, exploding along the way our preconceived notions of what Chinese literature and culture are all about in the 1990s.

An influential seventeenth-century fable, by a pathbreaking woman writer, about the fall of a black prince.

The first woman in England to make her living by writing, Aphra Behn (1640-1689) combines memoir, exotic travel narrative, and romance to tell the story of the noble Oroonoko, a black man who begins life as a prince and ends it as a slave. The tale depicts the overthrow of a hero by a civilization that considers itself superior to him.

Taken up by reformers in the long battle against the slave trade, reprinted and imitated countless times, Oroonoko remains a popular tale that introduces powerful themes onto the literary stage.

Martin Buber - social activist, teacher and religious writer - was one of the 20th century's most important and passionate representatives of the human spirit. Two of his most influential works - The Way Of Man and Ten Rungs - resonate to this day. As enlightening and redemptive as they were more than 50 years ago, they are published here in a single volume for the first time. The tales and aphorisms retold by Buber in Ten Rungs are drawn from Hasidic lore, where the various ways in which individuals learn to perfect themselves are the "rungs" on a ladder leading up to a higher realm. The Way Of Man is a masterwork of economy in which Buber relates and interprets six traditional Hasidic stories that offer guidance and wisdom for any age. With a recognisable debt to the Hasidic emphasis on joyful worship, Buber's thoughts on spirituality are as inspirational and valid today as they were in the mid-20th century.

Are trees social beings? How do trees live? Do they feel pain or have awareness of their surroundings? In The Hidden Life of Trees Peter Wohlleben makes the case that the forest is a social network. He draws on groundbreaking scientific discoveries to describe how trees are like human families: tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow, share nutrients with those who are sick or struggling, and even warn each other of impending dangers. Wohlleben also shares his deep love of woods and forests, explaining the amazing processes of life, death and regeneration he has observed in his woodland.

A walk in the woods will never be the same again.

When Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun's ground-breaking anthology After Ovid (also Faber) was published in 1995, Hughes's three contributions to the collective effort were nominated by most critics as outstanding. He had shown that rare translator's gift for providing not just an accurate account of the original, but one so thoroughly imbued with his own qualities that it was as if Latin and English poet were somehow the same person. Tales from Ovid, which went on to win the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, continued the project of recreation with 24 passages, including the stories of Phaeton, Actaeon, Echo and Narcissus, Procne, Midas and Pyramus and Thisbe. In them, Hughes's supreme narrative and poetic skills combine to produce a book that stands, alongside his Crow and Gaudete, as an inspired addition to the myth-making of our time.

The Mahabharata is some 3,500 years old and is the longest poem in any language. It is one of the founding epics of Indian culture and, with its mixture of cosmic drama and profound philosophy (one small section forms the BHAGHAVAD GITA) it holds aunique place in world literature. In this drastically shortened prose rendering, Narayan uses all his extraordinary talents to convey to a modern reader why this is such a great story. Filled with vivid characters, obsessed with the rise and fall of gods, empires and heroes, Narayan's MAHABHARATA is an enormously enjoyable experience and the perfect introduction to the otherwise bewildering Indian cosmology.

This text contains the first three volumes of Christopher Logue's recomposition of Homer's Iliad - Kings, The Husbands and War Music.

When Michael Herr went to Vietnam in 1967 he was virtually unknown as a writer. Since then Dispatches has been recognised as the most terrifyingly powerful account of what it was like to fight in, and survive, the war in Vietnam.

Horatio Nelson was a national hero who secured a century of maritime supremacy for his country and became the focus of British identity and aspiration. Generous and brave, sometimes vain and occasionally weak, he is still the butt of half-admiring jokes: bawdy when his name is coupled with that of Emma Hamilton; respectful in relation to his great naval achievements.

Izaak Walton (1593-1683) is best known for his graceful, lucid if not always practical book The Compleat Angler. It has stayed in print since it first appeared in 1653.
More than just a writer of devout pastoral, Walton is one of the fathers of modern literary biography. This selection includes his lively portraits of Donne, Herbert and others, and reminiscences of Jonson written in old age. A devoted churchman, in his writing Walton helps define what it was to be Anglican at a time when the Church was in upheaval. One historian said Walton `invented Anglicanism'. He certainly shaped it in ways which are potent today.
Walton is here set in a context which complicates and then corrects the reductive view of him, encapsulated by Gosse, as `that immortal piscatory linen-draper'.

Five years after the death of Joseph Brodsky, the heir of the generation of Pasternak, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva and especially Akhmatova, this Collected Poems in English for the first time gathers all his translated and original poems in English. It confirms his unique place in our literature. His abiding addiction to the English language, and particularly to the Metaphysical poets, was manifest in the industry with which he read and translated in both directions. His own efforts to translate his work, and the poems he wrote directly in English, are ambitious: the poetic conceit is for him functional, as it was in the 17th century, a tool for prising open difficult truths, making vertiginous connections.

Old Europe's new crisis.

Europe, the charming continent of windmills and gondolas. But lately, Europe has become the continent of endless strikes and demonstrations, bombs on the trains and subways, radical Islamic cells in every city, and ghettos so hopeless and violent even the police won't enter them. In Spain, a terrorist attack prompts instant capitulation to the terrorists' demands. In France, the suburbs go up in flames every night. In Holland, politicians and artists are murdered for speaking frankly about Islamic immigration.
This isn't the Europe we thought we knew. What's going on over there?
Traveling overland from London to Istanbul, journalist Claire Berlinski shows why the Continent has lately appeared so bewildering--and often so thoroughly obnoxious--to Americans. Speaking to Muslim immigrants, German rock stars, French cops, and Italian women who have better things to do than have children, she finds that Europe is still, despite everything, in the grip of the same old ancient demons. Anyone who knows the history can sense it: There is something ugly--and familiar--in the air.
But something new is happening as well. Indeed, Europe now confronts--and seems unable to cope with--an entirely new set of troubles. Tracing the ancient conflicts and newly erupting crises, "Menace in Europe" reveals:
- Why Islamic radicalism and terrorist indoctrination flourish as Europe fails to assimilate millions of Muslim immigrants
- How plummeting birthrates hurtle Europe toward economic and cultural catastrophe
- Why hatred of America has become ubiquitous--on Europe's streets, in its books, newspapers, and music, and at the highest levels of government
-How long-repressed destructive instincts are suddenly reemerging
- How the death of religious faith has created a hopeless, morally unmoored Europe that clings to anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and other dangerous ideologies
- Why the notion of a united Europe is a fantasy and what that means for the United States
In the end, these are not separate issues. Berlinski provocatively demonstrates that Europe's political and cultural crisis mirrors its profound moral and spiritual crisis.
But this is not just Europe's problem." Menace in Europe" makes clear that the spiritual void at the heart of Europe is ultimately our problem too. And America will pay a terrible price if we continue to ignore it.

Beyond its importance as a literary work of unvarnished genius, Geoffrey Chaucer's unfinished epic poem is also one of the most beloved works in the English language-and for good reason: It is lively, absorbing, perceptive, and outrageously funny. But despite the brilliance of Chaucer's work, the continual evolution of our language has rendered his words unfamiliar to many of us. Esteemed poet, translator, and scholar Burton Raffel's magnificent new unabridged translation brings Chaucer's poetry back to life, ensuring that none of the original's wit, wisdom, or humanity is lost to the modern reader. This Modern Library edition also features an Introduction that discusses Chaucer's work as well as his life and times. An illustrated retelling of Geoffrey Chaucer's famous work in which a group of pilgrims in fourteenth-century England tell each other stories as they travel on a pilgrimage to the cathedral at Canterbury.

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER, January 2022
A TIMES HISTORICAL FICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR
SHORTLISTED FOR WATERSTONES BOOK OF THE YEAR
A BBC HISTORY MAG BOOK OF THE YEAR
A DAILY EXPRESS BOOK OF THE YEAR

Soaked in mist and old magic, Storyland is a new illustrated mythology of Britain, set in its wildest landscapes.

It begins between the Creation and Noah's Flood, follows the footsteps of the earliest generation of giants from an age when the children of Cain and the progeny of fallen angels walked the earth, to the founding of Britain, England, Wales and Scotland, the birth of Christ, the wars between Britons, Saxons and Vikings, and closes with the arrival of the Normans.

These are retellings of medieval tales of legend, landscape and the yearning to belong, inhabited with characters now half-remembered: Brutus, Albina, Scota, Arthur and Bladud among them. Told with narrative flair, embellished in stunning artworks and glossed with a rich and erudite commentary. We visit beautiful, sacred places that include prehistoric monuments like Stonehenge and Wayland's Smithy, spanning the length of Britain from the archipelago of Orkney to as far south as Cornwall in a vivid, beautiful tale of our land steeped in myth.

In Storyland, Jeffs reimagines these myths of homeland, exile and migration, kinship, loyalty, betrayal, love and loss in a landscape brimming with wonder.

PRAISE FOR STORYLAND
'Expressive, bold and quite beautiful' The Lady
'[a] delight of a book' Antonia Senior, The Times
'ravishingly lovely' The Times Ireland
'[a] lively retelling of British myths' Apollo Magazine

The extraordinary new novel from the acclaimed author of "Bad Behavior" and "Two Girls, Fat and Thin, " "Veronica" is about flesh and spirit, vanity, mortality, and mortal affection. Set mostly in Paris and Manhattan in the desperately glittering 1980s, it has the timeless depth and moral power of a fairy tale.
As a teenager on the streets of San Francisco, Alison is discovered by a photographer and swept into the world of fashion-modeling in Paris and Rome. When her career crashes and a love affair ends disastrously, she moves to New York City to build a new life. There she meets Veronica--an older wisecracking eccentric with her own ideas about style, a proofreader who comes to work with a personal "office kit" and a plaque that reads "Still Anal After All These Years." Improbably, the two women become friends. Their friendship will survive not only Alison's reentry into the seductive nocturnal realm of fashion, but also Veronica's terrible descent into the then-uncharted realm of AIDS. The memory of their friendship will continue to haunt Alison years later, when she, too, is aging and ill and is questioning the meaning of what she experienced and who she became during that time.
Masterfully layering time and space, thought and sensation, Mary Gaitskill dazzles the reader with psychological insight and a mystical sense of the soul's hurtling passage through the world. A novel unlike any other, "Veronica" is a tour de force about the fragility and mystery of human relationships, the failure of love, and love's abiding power. It shines on every page with depth of feeling and formal beauty.

The Taiping rebellion in mid-nineteenth century China, led by Hong Xiuquan, was one of the strangest and most violent events in human history, costing at least twenty million lives. From his capital in Nanjing, Hong ruled over his 'Heavenly Kingdom' for eleven years, establishing absolute power over a vast area of northern China. Historian Spence recalls some of the historical epics of the nineteenth century here, adding insight into the minds of the participants, Hong himself in particular, in a book that is both intimately detailed and epic in scope--From publisher description.

The report that Brodeck is writing into the lynching of an artist, an outsider, a flamboyant Other figure who has deeply disturbed the fragile equilibrium of the town he briefly settled in, becomes a report into the catastrophe of his own life. Brodeck, it seems, himself also an outsider, has lately returned from a concentration camp. In the course of his investigation into the death of the artist, he uncovers the truth about his distant origins, about his having been rounded up when the Germans came to the town, and all that happened to his family when he was gone. This immensely powerful chronicle of a community's fear and loathing of what is strange, what is from the outside, has been hailed as one of the outstanding European novels of the last decade.

engengThe 18th-century landscape garden is the only art form to have originated wholly in Britain. This book tells the extraordinary story of the gang of eccentrics who created these gardens, a small group of politicians and poets, farmers and businessmen, and others whose obsession with their gardens changed the course of artistic history.

Eric Gill was the greatest English artist-craftsman of the twentieth century: a typographer and lettercutter of genius and a master in the art of sculpture and wood-engraving. He was a devoted family man and key figure in three Catholic art and craft communities: yet he also believed in complete sexual freedom. In her controversial, landmark biography, originally published in 1989, biographer Fiona MacCarthy delves into the complex, dark, and contradictory sides of the man and the artist for the first time and the result is his definitive portrait.

Born in 1728, French aristocrat Charles d'Eon de Beaumont had served his country as a diplomat, soldier, and spy for fifteen years when rumors that he was a woman began to circulate in the courts of Europe. D'Eon denied nothing and was finally compelled by Louis XVI to give up male attire and live as a woman, something d'Eon did without complaint for the next three decades. Although celebrated as one of the century's most remarkable women, d'Eon was revealed, after his death in 1810, to have been unambiguously male. Gary Kates's acclaimed biography of d'Eon recreates eighteenth-century European society in brilliant detail and offers a compelling portrait of an individual who challenged its conventions about gender and identity.

It would be impossible to overstate the influence of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. A work with one metaphorical foot planted in the Florentine Renaissance literary tradition of Boccaccio’s Decameron and the other in works ranging from John Bunyan, Voltaire, and Mark Twain to the popular entertainments of our own time, The Canterbury Tales stands astride the cultures of Great Britain and America, and much of Europe, like a benign colossus.

Beyond its importance as a cultural touchstone and literary work of unvarnished genius, Chaucer’s unfinished epic poem is also one of the most beloved works in the English language–and for good reason: It is lively, absorbing, perceptive, and outrageously funny–an undisputed classic that has held a special appeal for generations of readers. Chaucer has gathered twenty-nine of literature’s most indelible archetypes–from the exalted Knight to the bawdy Wife to the besotted Miller to the humble Plowman–in a vivid group portrait that captures the full spectrum of late-medieval English society and both informs and expands our discourse on the human condition.

Presented in these pages in a new unabridged translation by the esteemed poet, translator, and scholar Burton Raffel–whose translation of Beowulf has sold more than a million copies–this Modern Library edition also features an Introduction by the well-known and widely influential medievalist and author John Miles Foley that discusses Chaucer’s work as well as to his life and times.

Despite the brilliance of Geoffrey Chaucer’s work, the continual evolution of our language has rendered his words unfamiliar to many of us. Burton Raffel’s magnificent new translation brings Chaucer’s poetry back to life, ensuring that none of the original’s wit, wisdom, or humanity is lost to the modern reader.

A new version of John Payne's Victorian translation, with an Introduction by Cormac O Cuilleanain.

1348. The Black Death is sweeping through Europe. In Florence, plague has carried off one hundred thousand people. In their Tuscan villas, seven young women and three young men tell tales to recreate the world they have lost, weaving a rich tapestry of comedy, tragedy, ribaldry and farce.

Boccaccio's Decameron recasts the storytelling heritage of the ancient and medieval worlds into perennial forms that inspired writers from Chaucer and Shakespeare down to our own day. Boccaccio makes the incredible believable, with detail so sharp we can look straight into the lives of people who lived six hundred years ago. His Decameron hovers between the fading glories of an aristocratic past - the Crusades, the Angevins, the courts of France, the legendary East - and the colourful squalor of contemporary life, where wives deceive husbands, friars and monks pursue fleshly ends, and natural instincts fight for satisfaction.

Here are love and jealousy, passion and pride - and a shrewd calculation of profit and loss which heralds the rise of a dynamic merchant class. These stories show us early capitalism during a moment of crisis and revelation.