Peter Washington

Two hundred love letters by fictional characters and historic figures, includes Eloise's exchange of romantic vows with Abelard, Mozart's teasing exchange with his wife, Franz Kafka's pining for Felice, and a sampling of Anais Nin's erotic writings

Love Letters

Jane Austen

Readers of Jane Austen's six great novels are left hungering for more, and more there is: the marvelous unpublished manuscripts she left behind, collected here. Sanditon might have been Austen's greatest novel had she lived to finish it. Its subject matter astonishes: here is Austen observing the birth pangs of the culture of commerce, as her country-bred heroine, a foolish baronet, a family of hypochondriacs, and a mysterious West Indian heiress collide against the background hum of real-estate development at a seaside resort. The Watsons, begun in 1804 but never completed, tells the story of a young woman who was raised by a rich aunt and who finds herself shipped back to the comparative poverty and social clumsiness of her own family. The novella Lady Susan is a miniature masterpiece, featuring Austen's only villainous protagonist. Lady Susan's subtle, single-minded, and ruthless pursuit of power makes the reader regret that Austen never again wrote a novel with a scheming widow for its heroine. The special joy of this collection lies in Austen's juvenilia-tiny novels, the enchantingly funny Love and Freindship, comic fragments, and a (very) partial history of England-romping miniatures that she wrote in her teens. Their high spirits, hilarity, and control offer delicious proof that Austen was an artist "born, not made." (Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

Sanditon and Other Stories

Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (Maulana)

A collection of poetry by the medieval Persian sage reflects the author's Sufi beliefs, a mystic tradition within Islam, in works that speak of a yearning for ecstatic union with the divine Beloved and describe divine love in sensuous human terms. 10,000 first printing.

Poems

Rumi

George Gordon Byron Baron Byron

Gathers together the works of the nineteenth-century English poet

This volume gathers together some of the most powerful poems from the greatest Russian poets of the 19th and 20th centuries. Arranged by theme and presented in the best available translations, this collection offers an ideal introduction to the mastery of Russian poetry.

Russian Poets

Poets have always drawn inspiration from the wild fancies of dream life. We spend a third of our lives asleep, and throughout history our nocturnal visions have engaged the interpretive talents of our greatest writers. This treasury of poets–Sidney, Donne, Blake, Keats, Wordsworth, Whitman, Rilke, Plath, Graves, Roethke, Bishop, Moore, Updike, and many more–encompasses lullabies, invocations, aubades, songs, epigrams, and stories, in every conceivable mood from the broadly comic to the tragic. It includes poems about daydreams and nightmares, about falling asleep and about waking up, about insomnia, night thoughts, monsters of the dark, twilight, dawn, and the rebirth of morning. From Auden’s “Lullaby” to Rossetti’s “Nuptial Sleep,” from Salvatore Quasimodo’s “Insomnia” to Thom Gunn’s “Annihilation of Nothing,”Poems of Sleep and Dreamsevokes the whole haunting, magical spectrum of sleep and dream.

Poems of Sleep and Dreams

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.

Ghost Stories

Provides a history of spiritualism in America and discusses the development of theosophy

A History of the Mystics, Mediums, and Misfits who Brought Spiritualism to America

Madame Blavatsky's Baboon

It is often said that Rumi (aka Jalal al-Din, 1207-73) is now the most popular poet in the United States. This conquest of the new world by a middle-eastern medieval writer who died before Chaucer was even born has been achieved with extraordinary speed in less than thirty years.The main key to Rumi's success is the spiritual appeal of his work. It combines lyrical beauty with philosophical profundity, a sense of rapture and an acute awareness of human suffering in ways which speak directly to contemporary audiences. Like the metaphysical poets, Donne, Vaughan and Herbert, Rumi yokes together everyday images with complex ideas. He talks about divine love in vivid human terms. As a religious teacher of the Dervish order, he expounds the mystical doctrines of Sufism which focus on the notion of union with the Beloved to whom many of the poems are addressed. Persian poetry of this period is not easy to translate. In order to give the greatest possible access to a wonderful poet this selection draws on avariety of translations from the early 20th century to the present, ranging from scholarly renderings to free interpretations.

Rumi Poems

Andrew Marvell

A complete edition of English lyric pieces by the seventeenth-century metaphysical poet explores period issues, the inner life, and famous people from his era, in a volume that includes "The Garden," "The Definition of Love," and "To His Coy Mistress." 15,000 first printing.

Still llittle known in the West, Persian poetry offers extradordinary riches. While celebrating the beauty of the world in poems about love, wine and poetry itself, or telling annecdotes of everyday life, Persian poetry set these themes in the woder religious and philosophical context of Islam, Omar, Rumi, Saadi, Sanai, Attar, Hafez and Jami - the great lyric and didactic poets of medieval Persia - are all represented in this selection of translations spanning almost two hundred and fifty years.

Persian Poems

This anthology of comic verse is drawn from sources which range from the Greek Anthology to the present day. Divided into thematic sections (to be determined) for case of use, it covers a wide range of forms including limericks, clerihews, ballads, sonnets and nonsense verse. The prevailing tone is light, but satire and ridicule - even passion - have not been excluded.

Comic Poems

Japanese Haiku Poems

Tales about ghosts are as old as human culture itself but the ghost story as a distinguished literary form reached its apogee in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As traditional religions declined in the West during those years, people looked for new ways of describing the spiritual realities explained by religion. The ghost story is a literary expression of this need, its rise corresponding to the growing popularity of Spiritualism. Ghost stories balance the increasingly powerful scientific materialism of the age with intimations that there are other orders of experience which we cannot define and only glimpse. The Everyman selection of ghost stories includes examples from this period by major writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson, Guy de Maupassant, Henry James and Edith Wharton. M. R. James is featured as a specialist in the genre. Later writers include Elizabeth Bowen, Penelope Lively and Ray Bradbury. One feature of this collection is to show that there is more to the ghost story than the thrill of horror, important though that is. These stories include comedy and tragedy, pathos, drama and even poetry. Each is a masterpiece in its own right, irrespective of whether or not we believe in the realm of spectres.

It has often been said that love, both sacred and profane, is the only true subject of the lyric poem. Nothing better justifies this claim than the splendid poems in this volume, which range from the writings of ancient China to those of modern-day America and represent, at its most piercing, a universal experience of the human soul.

Love Poems

These poems, selected from most of the cultures and histories of world literature, provide magnificent witness to the fact that love is as much an act of the imagination as it is of the body. From fourth-century Li Ch'ung's "Parody of a Lover" to John Betmeman's "Late-Flowering Lust, " they re-create, through the revelations of language, that experience of the erotic. Other poets include Theodore Roethke, Robert Graves, Octavio Paz, Joseph Brodsky, Sylvia Plath, Frederico Garcia Lorca, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and many others.

Erotic Poems

Victor Hugo

Tolstoy is said to have called Les Miserables the greatest novel ever written, and it exerted a powerful influence on the creation of War and Peace. At one level a detective story in which the relentless Inspector Javert obsessively pursues the escaped convict Jean Valjean, culminating in a dramatic chase through the sewers of Paris, at another level Hugo's masterpiece is a drama of crime, punishment and rehabilitation set against a panoramic description of French society in the years after Napoleon's fall from power. But this book is also about the metaphysical struggle between good and evil in the soul of every man and every community. Coloured by Hugo's distinctive philosophy, it is a plea for social justice, political enlightenment and personal charity which continues to speak with the undiminished authority more than a century after its first appearance.

Les Misérables

Now, in the appealing and collectible Pocket Classics format, an anthology of beloved, classic detective stories—riveting and irresistibly addictive tales of crimes and those who unravel them. Beginning with modern masters such as Sara Paretsky, Ruth Rendell, and Ian Rankin, this collection works its way back through the golden age of the 1920s and ’30s to the genre’s source in Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. The famous detectives who stalk these pages range from the brilliant and eccentric (Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin) to the deceptively unlikely (G. K. Chesterton’s humble priest, Father Brown; and Agatha Christie’s tweedy spinster, Miss Marple); from the tough-guy private eyes created by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler to accidental bystanders, such as the perceptive neighbors in Susan Glaspell’s haunting “A Jury of Her Peers.” From classic whodunits featuring Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason and Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret to Jorge Luis Borges’s postmodern tribute to Poe in “Death and the Compass,” the stories in this volume will tantalize, perplex, and amaze.

Detective Stories

In a volume which follows on from and complements the Everyman Pocket LOVE POEMS, we have assembled a wide range erotic verse from ancient India and China to present-day Britain. Though these are poems of the body, and bawdy verse is represented by such writers as Rochester, the volume is in no sense pornographic. The emphasis is on the tender, sensuous, witty and passionate aspects of erotic poetry. The poems follow a loose narrative sequence in which all aspects of erotic love are represented.

William Wordsworth

In the long history of English literature William Wordsworth (1770-1850) is the writer who achieved the most dramatic transformations of the poetic scene almost singlehanded. A leading figure among the Romantic generation which included Coleridge and Scott, he created out of his personal communion with nature a new poetic which had a profound moral and spiritual influence on the entire nineteenth century. The present selection includes all his famous lyrics and substantial extracts from narrative poems including The Prelude.

Peter Washington

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