Скачать книгу (размер 1 136 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 224) Аннотация: The story of Oedipus has captured the human imagination as few others. It is the story of a man fated to kill his father and marry his mother, a man who by a cruel irony brings these things to pass by his very efforts to avoid them. But these plays are not about fate, and not about irony. They are about character, choice and consequence. In Antigone, we see a woman who will defy human law, and…
Скачать книгу (размер 7 337 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 1440) Аннотация: Jane Austen is without question, one of England's most enduring and skilled novelists. With her wit, social precision, and unerring ability to create some of literature's most charismatic and believable heroines, she mesmerises her readers as much today as when her novels were first published. Whether it is her sharp, ironic gaze at the Gothic genre invoked by the adventures of Catherine Morland…
Скачать книгу (размер 5 624 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 1104) Аннотация: With a word of warning to those of nervous a disposition, Wordsworth presents this spellbinding collection of chilling Celtic tales of the macabre, all drawn from the rich and varied literary tradition of a culture long enchanted by things supernatural, 'a land where ghosts and ghost-seers are so common'. Featuring the imaginative writing of such towering masters of the genre as Sheridan Le Fanu,…
Скачать книгу (размер 2 441 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 480) Аннотация: With an Introduction by Joanna Trollope. Trollope's delightful novel recounts the fortunes of Doctor Thorne, an upright and principled country doctor, and his niece Mary. She falls in love with Frank Gresham, heir to the heavily mortgaged Greshambury estate, but he is constrained in his choices by the need to marry well so that he can restore the family fortunes. The vicissitudes of Mary and…
Скачать книгу (размер 4 318 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 848) Аннотация: 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…
Скачать книгу (размер 1 462 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 288) Аннотация: With its four-letter words and its explicit descriptions of sexual intercourse, Lady Chatterley’s Lover is the novel with which D.H. Lawrence is most often associated. First published privately in Florence in 1928, it only became a world-wide best-seller after Penguin Books had successfully resisted an attempt by the British Director of Public Prosecutions to prevent them offering an unexpurgated…
Скачать книгу (размер 682 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 135) Аннотация: Eight of the twelve tales in this book are from the master hand of Charles Perrault (1628-1703). Although Perrault enjoyed much distinction in the French literary circle of the late seventeenth century, his fame today rests upon his authorship of the traditional Tales of Mother Goose, or Stories of Olden Times. And it is true to say that as long as there are children to listen spellbound to the…
Скачать книгу (размер 1 554 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 306) Аннотация: Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) is, for Russians, their greatest writer; Eugene Onegin is his greatest work. Yet it remains little known outside Russia. Attempts to render Pushkin's Russian stanzas into verse have tried in vain to imitate the most inimitable features of the original, while masking many of its other glories. This prose version, for the first time, gives us a Eugene Onegin that is…
Скачать книгу (размер 7 256 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 1424) Аннотация: «Adam Bede» was George Eliot's first full-length novel. Set in the English Midlands of farmers and village craftsmen at the turn of the eighteenth century, the book tells a story of seduction, and is also a pioneering record of a long lost rural world. «Middlemarch» is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an…
Скачать книгу (размер 6 848 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 1344) Аннотация: «Tales from Shakespeare», written by Charles and Mary Lamb as an 'introduction to the study of Shakespeare', are much more entertaining than that. All of Shakespeare's best-loved plays, comic and tragic, are retold in a clear and robust style. Illustrated by Arthur Rackham. «Tales from King Arthur», edited by Andrew Lang, takes the reader into the romantic world of the gallant Knights of the…
Скачать книгу (размер 4 400 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 864) Аннотация: «The Jungle Book» introduces Mowgli, the boy foundling adopted by a family of wolves, Shere Khan the tiger, Bagheera the black panther and Baloo the sleepy brown bear. How did the Leopard get his spots? How did the Elephant get his trunk? In Just So Stories Kipling wittily supplies the answers to these and other questions. «Puck of Pook's Hill» relates how Dan and Una's magical meeting with Puck,…
Скачать книгу (размер 1 381 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 272) Аннотация: Lawrence's uncompromisingly candid novel deals in poetic and sexually explicit language with the passionate relationship between Lady Constance Chatterly and her husband's forthright and powerfully masculine gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors. Trapped in a marriage which has become sterile and joyless since her husband's return from the trenches of the First World War, partially paralyzed and confined to…
Скачать книгу (размер 1 789 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 352) Аннотация: «Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) is, for Russians, their greatest writer; «Eugene Onegin» is his greatest work. Yet it remains little known outside Russia. Attempts to render Pushkin's Russian stanzas into verse have tried in vain to imitate the most inimitable feature of the original, while masking many of its glories. This prose version, for the first time, gives us a «Eugene Onegin» that is easy…
Скачать книгу (размер 7 011 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 1376) Аннотация: Lord Jim, first published in 1900, confirmed Conrad's place in literature as one of the first 'modernists' of English letters. Set in the Malay Archipelago, not only does the novel provide a gripping account of maritime adventure and romance, but also an exotic tale of the East. Nostromo is the only man capable of the decisive action needed to save the silver of the San Tome mine and secure…
Скачать книгу (размер 7 011 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 1376) Аннотация: «Jane Eyre» ranks as one of the greatest and most popular works of English fiction. Although Charlotte Brontë's heroine is outwardly plain, she possesses an indomitable spirit, and great courage. Forced to battle against the exigencies of a cruel guardian, a harsh employer and a rigid social order which circumscribes her life when she becomes governess to the daughter of the mysterious,…
Скачать книгу (размер 5 909 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 1160) Аннотация: «»...it is an universal phenomenon of our nature that the mournful, the fearful, even the horrible, allures with irresistible enchantment.» — Chaucer Burr, Memoir, 1850. «The Wordsworth Book of Horror Stories» is a superb collection of some of the greatest tales of the genre, many are classics while others are lesser-known gems unearthed from this vintage era of the supernatural. From time…
Скачать книгу (размер 4 563 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 896) Аннотация: These Comedies are among the best loved of Shakespeare's plays. In each a problem emerges, is then intensified to a point of maximum confusion and potential upset, before the chaos is resolved, however improbably, into general goodwill and a spate of marriages. The triumph of these plays lies in the way they mingle humorous stage business and dexterous word play with a more serious study of…
Скачать книгу (размер 1 462 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 288) Аннотация: «Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) is best known for «War and Peace» and «Anna Karenina», commonly regarded as amongst the greatest novels ever written. He also, however, wrote many masterly short stories, and this volume contains four of the longest and best in distinguished translations that have stood the test of time. In the early story 'Family Happiness', Tolstoy explores courtship and marriage…
Скачать книгу (размер 2 197 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 432) Аннотация: «The Last Man» is Mary Shelley's apocalyptic fantasy of the end of human civilisation. Set in the late twenty-first century, the novel unfolds a sombre and pessimistic vision of mankind confronting inevitable destruction. Interwoven with her futuristic theme, Mary Shelley incorporates idealised portraits of Shelley and Byron, yet rejects Romanticism and its faith in art and nature. Mary…
Скачать книгу (размер 1 217 Kb , формат fb2, страниц 240) Аннотация: «These stories of myth and resurrection, of uncanny events and violent impulse, were with one exception written and published in the latter half of the 1920s, coinciding with the composition of Lawrence's controversial masterpiece «Lady Chatterley's Lover». At this time Lawrence declared himself to be 'really awful sick of writing'; yet here we find some of his most beautiful, hauntingly…