Helen Simpson

Set against the backdrop of modern-day London, a collection of nine entertaining short stories captures the joys, tribulations, triumphs, and annoyances of domestic life as it explores the worlds of two female teachers exchanging drunken confidences at a small cafT, a teenage poetry lover who resolves to build a future far different from her career-oriented mother, and others. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

Stories

Getting a Life

Cockfosters is a funny, frank and forceful story collection dealing with ageing, ambition and the patterns of repetition and renewal found in long friendships and marriages. It opens irresistible new windows onto the world from Arizona to Dubai and from Moscow to Berlin. Turning both a panoramic and a zoom lens on the way we live now, these stories range through hitch-hiking in Bohemian forest-land to cresting the waves of the Aegean to the mending of hearts and the recovery of lost property at the end of the Piccadilly Line. Helen Simpson writes with great warmth, wit and candour about the complexities of modern life, and this new collection shows why she is hailed as one of the best short story writers at work in the world today.

Cockfosters

Angela Carter

From familiar fairy tales and legends â Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires and werewolves â Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories.

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

Welcome to motherhood - a land of aching fatigue, constant self-sacrifice and thankless servitude, a land of bottomless devotion, small hands and feet like warm pink roses, and velvet kisses. Here is a land where men and women, once carefree and engrossed in work and sex, now try to solve age-old arguments and search fruitlessly for another hour in the day. Perhaps you know this land well, or perhaps you're entering it for the first time - either way, you need these honest, sharply funny, humane stories from an expert guide.Selected from Helen Simpson's short story collections Dear George, Hey Yeah Right Get a Lifeand ConstitutionalVINTAGE MINIS- GREAT MINDS. BIG IDEAS. LITTLE BOOKS.A series of short books by the world's greatest writers on the experiences that make us humanAlso in the Vintage Minis series-Language by Xiaolu GuoFatherhood by Karl Ove KnausgaardEating by Nigella Lawson Drinkingby John Cheever

Motherhood

A Bunch of Fives: Selected Stories

In-flight entertainment

Briefly traces the history of tea drinking, describes different kinds of tea, and presents recipes for sandwiches, tarts, crumpets, English muffins, scones, tea cakes, shortbread, gingerbread, and jams

London Ritz Book of Afternoon Tea

Ruth Rendell

Unguarded Hours

In this collection of short stories, Helen Simpson explores the spaces we inhabit - both physical and mental - and delves into the relationships between change, memory and experience, exposing the gulf dividing youth and middle age and the line between life and death.

Constitutional

Helen Simpson's third collection is a bold, honest exploration of the trials and the rewards of motherhood. 'Her stories are - for those who, like me, recognise the truth in every word - like a reprieve... Sharp, poetic and marvellously witty' Kate Kellaway, Observer Here are tales of a highflyer stuck at an interminable Burns Night celebration, increasingly aware of the babysitter waiting for her at home; an exhausted mother longing for adult conversation but whose son unwittingly precludes it; and a teenage girl whose fraught encounter with a harried mum of one brings newfound appreciation for her own capable mother of four. Most strikingly of all we meet Dorrie, whose efforts to calm her tinderbox of a family leave her struggling to contain her own emotions. Hey Yeah Right Get a Life is a singular achievement: relatable, perceptive and utterly poignant. 'It's a brilliant, painful, funny and courageous book' Esther Freud, Guardian

Hey Yeah Right Get a Life

In this stellar collection of short stories, Helen Simpson explores independence, solitude, marriage, sex and babies with her characteristic blend of comedy and lyricism. Here are tales of young love - successful or thwarted, intense or comic. From a wedding day for one, through the knotty problems of babies, their conception, arrival and impact on adult lives, to a Lothario receiving his just deserts, and the title story, where a schoolgirl's erotic daydreams during her Shakespeare homework go on to produce blushes of horror.

Dear George and Other Stories

Brilliant, funny and tragic, Four Bare Legs in a Bed is an outstanding and invigorating collection of short stories. In Simpson's singular and opulent voice, we hear of the mixed blessings of independence and marriage, of sex and babies. From a bed that transforms the lives of a struggling couple to a chorus of midwives telling the dramatic story of a birth, this is a playful, unique set of stories to treasure.

Four Bare Legs In a Bed

Clemence Dane

Enter Sir John

Jeremy D. Popkin

Louis-Sébastien Mercier

Panorama of Paris offers English-language readers an introduction to one of the forgotten masterpieces of French literature, Louis-S&ébastien Mercier's twelve-volume Le Tableau de Paris (published from 1781 to 1788), an important and original work that helped shape many kinds of French writing. Colorfully written, the text provides a fascinating portrait of everyday life in Paris on the eve of the French Revolution, describing the interactions of workers, street peddlers, prostitutes, police spies, actresses, noblemen, parish priests, servants, and criminals. Based on Helen Simpson's lively 1933 abridged translation, this edition includes seven newly translated chapters and an introduction by Jeremy D. Popkin. Earlier authors had described Paris's monuments and the lives of its wealthy elites, but Mercier was the first to try to capture in words the texture of its everyday life. His text, contemporary with Rousseau's Confessions, is the first attempt to write the autobiography of a unique urban community. His writing deeply influenced Balzac and other nineteenth-century French novelists and continues to serve as a major source of social and cultural history for French historians. Panorama of Paris will fascinate all lovers of Paris and its history. It should be of special interest to students of French literature and history, and to anyone interested in the origins of modern attitudes toward city life.

Selections from Le Tableau de Paris

Panorama of Paris

Since the 1990 publication of her first collection, Four Bare Legs in a Bed, Helen Simpson has been hailed as one of the best short story writers at work in the world today. These wonderfully funny and penetrating stories take on the full stretch, from birth to death and everything in between, in writing of remarkable originality and clarity.

A Bunch of Fives

Short Interest and Stock Retuns

Saraband for Dead Lovers

Young man tries to cure friend's wife of her dipsomania. A tale of Australia in 1831.

Under Capricorn

Alan Patrick Herbert

Francis Sladen-Smith

Beatrice Mayor

Double Demon, and Other One-act Plays

A collection of short stories following the lives of single women and wives during various phases of midlife deals with the themes of time and change as it addresses such topics as the Iraq war, a smoker's reprieve from death by lung cancer, and a woman who finds grief for her lost lover assuaged by involvement in some carpentry repair work. 35,000 first printing.

Helen Simpson

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