MVR 350
An anthology of literary love stories—in a beautiful hardcover Pocket Classics edition—perfect for Valentine’s Day.
Here are nineteen stories from a rich array of writers. The objects of passion in these stories range from a glamorous silent-movie starlet in Elizabeth Bowen’s haunting “Dead Mabelle” and a faithful ghost in Yasunari Kawabata’s “Immortality” to a heart surgeon in Margaret Atwood’s “Bluebeard’s Egg” who spends his days penetrating the mysteries of the human heart but who seems oddly emotionally opaque himself. Jhumpa Lahiri plumbs the despair of a husband and wife sundered by tragedy while Lorrie Moore movingly portrays a couple brought together by it. Katherine Mansfield, Tobias Wolff, and William Trevor explore the intricacies of long-term relationships, while Guy de Maupassant, Italo Calvino, and T. C. Boyle portray the elemental force of love in extremely different ways.
As alluring, moving, and intoxicating as its timeless theme, this collection makes an enticing gift for lovers at any stage of life.
Published in 2009.
ISBN: 9780307270870
MVR 280
Drawing on history, literature, and his own experience of unrequited passion, Love is a thinly disguised picture of the author’s innermost feelings.
Stendahl’s obsession with Mathilde Viscontini Dembowski is at the heart of this book. For her part, she neither returned his love nor understood him. In an attempt to expain his feelings to her—and to exorcise his love—he dissects his passion.
Bringing together the conflicting sides of his nature, the deeply emotional and the coolly analytical, Stendhal constructed a work that is both acutely personal and universally applicable.
Published in 1975.
ISBN: 9780140443073
MVR 350
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.
Includes poems by John Donne, Christina Rossetti, W. H. Auden, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Graves, e. e. cummings, Dorothy Parker, William Shakespeare, Sappho, Bhartrhari, Anna Akhmatova, and W. B. Yeats, among many others.
Published in 1993.
ISBN: 9780679429067
MVR 350
Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are without parallel in the nineteenth century: celebrated poets, they became equally famous for their marriage. Still popular more than a century after their deaths, their poetry vividly reflects the unique nature of their relationship.
This collection presents the Brownings’ work in the context of their lives: the early years and their initial friendship, their courtship and marriage, the fifteen happy years they spent living in Italy until Elizabeth’s death. Whether in short poems such as Elizabeth’s “Hector in the Garden” and Robert’s “Natural Magic,” or in extracts from longer works such as Aurora Leigh and Pauline, the great themes they shared are all represented: love, marriage, illicit passion, England and Italy, childhood, religion, poetry, and nature. Elizabeth’s famous Sonnets from the Portuguese, based on their love affair, is included in its entirety.
The poems are augmented with a generous selection of the marvelous letters the Brownings wrote to each other.
Published in 2003.
ISBN: 9781400040223
MVR 290
When lovelorn Annie McDee stumbles across a dirty painting in a junk shop while looking for a present for an unsuitable man, she has no idea what she has discovered.
Soon she finds herself drawn unwillingly into the tumultuous London art world, populated by exiled Russian oligarchs, avaricious Sheikas, desperate auctioneers and unscrupulous dealers, all scheming to get their hands on her painting - a lost eighteenth-century masterpiece called 'The Improbability of Love'.
Delving into the painting's past, Annie will uncover not just an illustrious list of former owners, but some of the darkest secrets of European history - and in doing so she might just learn to open up to the possibility of falling in love again.
Published on 31 March 2016.
ISBN: 9781408862476
MVR 350
A sparkling collection of poems about virtually every aspect of matrimony.
Here are marriages made in many cultures and eras, delightfully evoked by poets ranging from Shakespeare to Omar Khayyám to D.H. Lawrence and Mona Van Duyn.
Published in 1997.
ISBN: 9780679455158
MVR 300
Curious Alice, the bossy White Rabbit, the formidable Queen of Hearts and the Mad Hatter are among the best-loved, most iconic literary creations of all time.
This beautiful, celebratory, edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has a gorgeous cover with shiny red foil, and is packed full of fun bonus material, including a quiz, wordsearch and a glossary. Lewis Carroll's classic is brought to life like never before.
Published in 2015.
ISBN: 978-1447279990
MVR 300
Having crash-landed in the Sahara desert, a pilot comes across a young boy who introduces himself as the Little Prince and tells him the story of how he grew up on a tiny asteroid before travelling across the galaxies and coming to Earth. His encounters and discoveries, seen through childlike, innocent eyes, give rise to candid reflections on life and human nature.
First published in 1943 and featuring the author’s own watercolour illustrations, The Little Prince has since become a classic philosophical fable for young and old, as well as a global publishing phenomenon, selling tens of millions of copies worldwide and being translated into dozens of languages.
Published in 2015.
ISBN: 9781847494238
MVR 300
Depicting the adventures of Rat, Mole, Badger and the pretentious Mr Toad, The Wind in the Willows sees these four animals getting into all sorts of trouble as they wander along the river, through the Wild Wood and around the grand Toad Hall.
When shy Mole climbs out of his hole and into the fresh spring air, he meets Ratty. The two set off for a day on the river, and thus begins this classic tale of deep friendship and adventure.
Published in 2017.
ISBN: 9781847496386
MVR 300
After her parents die of cholera in India, Mary Lennox is sent to live with her uncle in his gloomy house in Yorkshire, where she leads a lonely and neglected life, with nothing to do apart from exploring her surroundings. One day she discovers a walled garden which has been locked up, and becomes determined to enter it and find out its secret and the source of the mysterious crying sound that can be heard nearby.
Published in 2016.
ISBN: 9781847495730
MVR 300
After a wonderful early life as a young colt on Farmer Gray’s meadows, the stallion Black Beauty is sold to Squire Gordon of Birtwick Hall and joins the gentleman’s stables. While his existence is no longer as carefree as before and he has to be trained by humans, he enjoys the company of the other horses there, such as the fiery Ginger and the kind Merrylegs.
Unfortunately, one day he is sold on to new owners, and a new chapter opens in his life, full of uncertainty, hardship and cruelty. Will Black Beauty ever make it back home, or reconnect with the people and horses that cared about him?
Published in 2016.
ISBN: 9781847495860
MVR 380
Part of Penguin’s beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design.
When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula with the purchase of a London house, he makes a series of horrific discoveries about his client.
Soon afterwards, various bizarre incidents unfold in England: an apparently unmanned ship is wrecked off the coast of Whitby; a young woman discovers strange puncture marks on her neck; and the inmate of a lunatic asylum raves about the ‘Master’ and his imminent arrival.
In Dracula, Bram Stoker created one of the great masterpieces of the horror genre, brilliantly evoking a nightmare world of vampires and vampire hunters and also illuminating the dark corners of Victorian sexuality and desire.
Published in 2011.
ISBN: 9780141196886
MVR 330
Part of Penguin’s beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design.
Shipwrecked and cast adrift, Lemuel Gulliver wakes to find himself on Lilliput, an island inhabited by little people, whose height makes their quarrels over fashion and fame seem ridiculous. His subsequent encounters – with the crude giants of Brobdingnag, the philosophical Houyhnhnms and brutish Yahoos – give Gulliver new, bitter insights into human behaviour. Swift’s savage satire views mankind in a distorted hall of mirrors as a diminished, magnified and finally bestial species, presenting us with an uncompromising reflection of ourselves.
Published in 2011.
ISBN: 9780141196640
MVR 350
Part of Penguin’s beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design.
The story grew out of a map that led to imaginary treasure, devised during a holiday in Scotland by Stevenson and his nephew. The tale is told by an adventurous boy, Jim Hawkins, who gets hold of a treasure map and sets off with an adult crew in search of the buried treasure.
Among the crew, however, is the treacherous Long John Silver who is determined to keep the treasure for himself. Stevenson’s first full-length work of fiction brought him immediate fame and continues to captivate readers of all ages.
Published in 2010.
ISBN: 9780141192451
MVR 440
These sumptuous new hardback editions mark the 70th anniversary of Fitzgerald’s death.
Anthony and Gloria are the essence of Jazz Age glamour. A brilliant and magnetic couple, they fling themselves at life with an energy that is thrilling. New York is a playground where they dance and drink for days on end.
Their marriage is a passionate theatrical performance; they are young, rich, alive and lovely and they intend to inherit the earth. But as money becomes tight, their marriage becomes impossible. And with their inheritance still distant, Anthony and Gloria must grow up and face reality; they may be beautiful but they are also damned.
Published in 2011.
ISBN: 9780141194073
MVR 340
Left by harrowing circumstances to fend for herself in the great capital of a foreign country, Lucy Snowe, the narrator and heroine of Villette, achieves by degrees an authentic independence from both outer necessity and inward grief.
Charlotte Brontë’s last novel, published in 1853, has a dramatic force comparable to that of her other masterpiece, Jane Eyre, as well as strikingly modern psychological insight and a revolutionary understanding of human loneliness. With an introduction by Lucy Hughes-Hallet.
Published in 1992.
ISBN: 9780679409885
MVR 380
These two classic novels, together with Brontë’s well-known Jane Eyre and Villette, comprise a magnificent oeuvre, each one a singular achievement of characterization, human understanding, and narrative elegance and drama.
Shirley is the story of a complicated friendship between two very different women: shy and socially constrained Caroline, the poor niece of a tyrannical clergyman; and the independent heiress Shirley, who has both the resources and the spirit to defy convention. The romantic entanglements of the two women with a local mill owner and his penniless brother pit the claims of passion against the boundaries of class and society.
The Professor—the first novel Brontë completed, the last to be published—is both a disturbing love story and the coming-of-age tale of a self-made man. At its center is William Crimsworth, who has come to Brussels to work as an instructor in a school for girls. When he becomes entangled with Zoräide Reuter, a charismatic and brilliantly intellectual woman, the fervor of her feelings threatens both her own engagement and William’s chance of finding true love.
Published in 2008.
ISBN: 9780307268211
MVR 250
Having moved into an abandoned haunted house, the narrator, undaunted by the warnings of the locals, invites a party of friends over, setting them the task of driving out the ghosts from the various rooms and reporting back on Twelfth Night. The resulting ghost stories form the basis of a thrilling narrative.
For this work, commissioned for his periodical All the Year Round, Dickens enlisted some of the period's most famous writers, including Elizabeth Gaskell and Wilkie Collins, to collaborate with him on this Victorian supernatural classic.
Published in 2015.
ISBN: 9781847494337
MVR 300
Regarded as one of the most influential horror stories of all time and the inspiration for countless literary spin-offs, the tale of the young Englishman Jonathan Harker's journey into the very heart of Count Dracula's evil realm remains a compelling read to this day.
A thriller of hypnotic power, a dark exploration of human passion, mythology and the paranormal, and a plain old-fashioned masterpiece of storytelling, the nightmarish saga of Dracula is one of the enduring classics of supernatural fiction.
Published in 2015.
ISBN: 9781847494870
MVR 450
The Curse of Dracula is back in this deluxe new hardcover edition.
A mysterious, charismatic figure is moving amongst the circles of San Francisco's political elite. When Jonathan Van Helsing and his team of vampire hunters come to town investigating a string of grisly murders, they know it's only a matter of time before they come face to face with the master of the dark.
Contains previously unseen sketches by the legendary Gene Colan.
Publication Date: February 13, 2013
ISBN: 9781616550646
