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Here, collected for the first time in Everyman's Library, are the three internationally acclaimed classic novels that comprise what has come to be known as Chinua Achebe's "African Trilogy.”Beginning with the best-selling Things Fall Apart—on the heels of its fiftieth anniversary—The African Trilogy captures a society caught between its traditional roots and the demands of a rapidly changing world. Achebe's most famous novel introduces us to Okonkwo, an important member of the Igbo people, who fails to adjust as his village is colonized by the British. In No Longer at Ease we meet his grandson, Obi Okonkwo, a young man who was sent to a university in England and has returned, only to clash with the ruling elite to which he now believes he belongs. Arrow of God tells the story of Ezuelu, the chief priest of several Nigerian villages, and his battle with Christian missionaries.In these masterful novels, Achebe brilliantly sets universal tales of personal and moral struggle in the context of the tragic drama of colonization.

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.

This beloved novel tells the story of Edmond Dantès, wrongfully imprisoned for life in the supposedly impregnable sea fortress, the Château d'If. After a daring escape, and after unearthing a hidden treasure revealed to him by a fellow prisoner, he devotes the rest of his life to tracking down and punishing the enemies who wronged him.Though a brilliant storyteller, Dumas was given to repetitions and redundancies; this slightly streamlined version of the original 1846 English translation speeds the narrative flow while retaining most of the rich pictorial descriptions and all the essential details of Dumas's intricately plotted and thrilling masterpiece.Alexandre Dumas's epic novel of justice, retribution, and self-discovery-one of the most enduringly popular adventure tales ever written-in a newly revised translation.

This wide-ranging collection of the stories by the renowned Nobel Laureate-spanning more than two decades of her astonishing career-highlights her singular gifts for portraying the complex lives of men and women in a modern, often alienating world. Included are seminal stories like "To Room Nineteen," in which a woman reacts against the oppression of her banal marriage with dreadful results; "One off the Short List," which traces the surprising conclusion to a seduction gone awry; "The Habit of Loving," in which a lonely older man who takes a vivacious, young wife witnesses an unexpected reversal of intimacy. Here are two classic novellas as well: The Temptation of Jack Orkney and The Other Woman, which exemplify Lessing's grasp of the most essential human psychology. Rich and various in mood and background-the settings range across England and France-these stories powerfully convey the uncompromising insight, intelligence, and vision of one of the most ardently admired writers of our time.

For the poet, even the most minute details of the natural world are starting points for flights of the imagination, and the pages of this collection celebrating the four seasons are brimming with an extraordinary range of observation and imagery. Here are poets past and present, from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Wordsworth to Whitman, Dickinson, and Thoreau, from Keats, Blake, and Hopkins to Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, Amy Clampitt, Mary Oliver, and W. S. Merwin. Here are poems that speak of the seasons as measures of earthly time or as states of mind or as the physical expressions of the ineffable. From Robert Frost's tribute to the evanescence of spring in "Nothing Gold Can Stay” to Langston Hughes's moody "Summer Night” in Harlem, from the "stopped woods” in Marie Ponsot's "End of October” to the chilling "mind of winter” in Wallace Stevens's "The Snow Man,” the poems in this volume engage vividly with the seasons and, through them, with the ways in which we understand and engage the world outside ourselves.

The Age of Innocence, one of Edith Wharton's most renowned novels and the first by a woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, exquisitely details the struggle between love and responsibility through the experiences of men and women in Gilded Age New York. The novel follows Newland Archer, a young, aristocratic lawyer engaged to the cloistered, beautiful May Welland. When May's disgraced cousin Ellen arrives from Europe, fleeing her marriage to a Polish Count, her worldly, independent nature intrigues Archer, who soon falls in love with her. Trapped by his passionless relationship with May and the social conventions that forbid a relationship with Ellen, Archer finds himself torn between possibility and duty. Wharton's profound understanding of her characters' lives makes the triangle of Archer, May, and Ellen come to life with an irresistible urgency. A wry, incisive look at the ways in which love and emotion must negotiate the complex rules of high society, The Age of Innocence is one of Wharton's finest, most illuminative works. With an introduction by Peter Washington

Now joining Everyman's Library-the most extensive and distinguished collectible library of the world's greatest works-is an appealing new collection in a small Pocket Classics format, perfect for gift giving and reading pleasure. Christmas Stories is a treasury of short fiction by great writers of the past two centuries-from Dickens and Tolstoy to John Updike and Alice Munro. As a literary subject, Christmas has inspired everything from intimate domestic dramas to fanciful flights of the imagination, and the full range of its expression is represented in this wonderfully engaging anthology. Goblins frolic in the graveyard of an early Dickens tale and a love-struck ghost disrupts a country estate in Elizabeth Bowen's "Green Holly." The plight of the less fortunate haunts Chekhov's "Vanka" and Willa Cather's "The Burglar's Christmas" but takes a boisterously comic turn in Damon Runyon's "Dancing Dan's Christmas" and in John Cheever's "Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor." From Vladimir Nabokov's intensely moving story of a father's grief in "Christmas" to Truman Capote's hilarious yet heartbreaking "A Christmas Memory," from Grace Paley's Jewish girl starring in the Christmas pageant in "The Loudest Voice" to the dysfunctional family ski holiday in Richard Ford's "Crèche"-each of the stories gathered here is imbued with Christmas spirit (of one kind or another), and all are richly and indelibly entertaining.

The ancient Chinese tradition of erotic poetry has been largely ignored in the west. Now, a vast continent of sensual verse is opened to us with this glorious collection spanning nearly three thousand years and including many poems never before translated into English. Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping have brought together poems about deep love and pure lust, enticement and seduction, ecstasy and disappointment. Here are poems that express need, hunger, grief, and longing—for husbands and wives and for concubines and lovers; poems by turns explicit or subtle, light-hearted or desperate, written from both men's and women's points of view. The editors have drawn on a wide range of sources from 600 BCE to the present, including highly literary poems, popular verse, and folk songs, as well as poems that appeared in ancient Daoist sex manuals, in classical novels of the Ming Dynasty, and in collections of erotic prints. The result is a dazzling array of voices that speak the universal language of desire.For the first time, all the major works of this beloved writer are gathered together in one hardcover volume.

The most essential of the immortal poems and songs of Scotland's beloved national bard are collected in this volume. With the publication of his first book of poems in 1786, Robert Burns—the twenty-seven-year-old son of a farmer—became a national celebrity, hailed as the "Ploughman Poet." When he died ten years later, ten thousand people came to pay their respects at his funeral, and in the two centuries since then he has inspired a cultlike following among Scots and poetry lovers around the world.A pioneer of the Romantic movement, Burns wrote in a light Scots dialect with brio, emotional directness, and wit, drawing on classical and English literary traditions as well as Scottish folklore—and leaving a timeless legacy. All of his most famous lyrics and poems are here, from "A Red, Red Rose," "To a Mouse," and "To a Louse" to Tam o'Shanter, "Holy Willie's Prayer," and "Auld Lang Syne."

The Double, written in Dostoevsky's youth, was a sharp turn away from the realism of his first novel, Poor Folk. The first real expression of his genius, The Double is a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare in which a minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelgänger-a man who has his name and his face and who gradually and relentlessly begins to displace him with his friends and colleagues. In the dilemma of this increasingly paranoid hero, Dostoevsky makes vividly concrete the inner disintegration of consciousness that would become a major theme of his work.The Gambler was written twenty years later, under the pressure of crushing debt. It is a stunning psychological portrait of a young man's exhilarating and destructive addiction, a compulsion that Dostoevsky-who once gambled away his young wife's wedding ring-knew intimately from his own experience. In the disastrous love affairs and gambling adventures of his character, Alexei Ivanovich, Dostoevsky explores the irresistible temptation to look into the abyss of ultimate risk that he believed was an essential part of the Russian national character.The two strikingly original short novels brought together here-in new translations by award-winning translators-were both literary gambles of a sort for Dostoevsky.

A literary sanctuary for what Shakespeare called "sessions of sweet silent thought,” this exquisite gathering of poems speaks to the consolations of solitude. Here is Wordsworth wandering "lonely as a cloud”; Poe confiding "all I loved, I loved alone”; Yeats's communion with "the deep heart's core”; and Han Shan's heart of a hermit, "clean as a white lotus.” From Sir Edward Dyer's "My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is,” to the spiritual searching of the Transcendentalists, to the meditative verse of Jorie Graham, some of the most indelible poems from every time and culture have grown out of the aloneness inherent in the poet's art. The poems collected here, whether reflecting on the soul or on nature, addressing an absent loved one, or honoring the self, form a book of respite and contemplation, and a beautiful tribute to the interior life.

A delightfully ghoulish array of specters and sorceresses, witches and ghosts, hags and apparitions haunt these pages-a literary parade of phantoms and shades to add to the revelry of All Hallow's Eve.From Homer to Horace, Pope to Poe, Randall Jarrell to James Merrill, Poems Bewitched and Haunted draws on three thousand years of poetic forays into the supernatural. Ovid conjures the witch Medea, Virgil channels Aeneas's wife from the afterlife, Baudelaire lays bare the wiles of the incubus, and Emily Dickinson records two souls conversing in a crypt, in poems that call out to be read aloud, whether around the campfire or the Ouija board. From ballads and odes, to spells and chants, to dialogues and incantations, here is a veritable witches' brew of poems from the spirit world.

Ever since its first flowering, jazz has had a powerful influence on American poetry; this scintillating anthology offers a treasury of poems that are as varied and as vital as the music that inspired them.From the Harlem Renaissance to the beat movement, from the poets of the New York school to the contemporary poetry scene, the jazz aesthetic has been a compelling literary force—one that Jazz Poems makes palpable. We hear it in the poems of Langston Hughes, E. E. cummings, William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara, and Gwendolyn Brooks, and in those of Yusef Komunyakaa, Charles Simic, Rita Dove, Ntozake Shange, Mark Doty, William Matthews, and C. D. Wright. Here are poems that pay tribute to jazz's great voices, and poems that throb with the vivid rhythm and energy of the jazz tradition, ranging in tone from mournful elegy to sheer celebration.

George Herbert (1593-1633) has come to be one of the most admired of the metaphysical poets. Though he is a profoundly religious poet, even secular readers respond to his quiet intensity and exuberant inventiveness, which are amply showcased in this selection.Herbert experimented brilliantly with a remarkable variety of forms, from hymns and sonnets to pattern poems, the shapes of which reveal their subjects. Such technical agility never seems ostentatious, however, for precision of language and expression of genuine feeling were the primary concerns of this poet, who admonished his readers to "dare to be true.” An Anglican priest who took his calling with deep seriousness, he brought to his work a religious reverence richly allied with a playful wit and with literary and musical gifts of the highest order. His best-loved poems, from "The Collar” and "Jordan” to "The Altar” and "Easter Wings,” achieve a perfection of form and feeling, a rare luminosity, and a timeless metaphysical grandeur.

Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls is the great comic masterpiece of Russian literature-a satirical and splendidly exaggerated epic of life in the benighted provinces.Gogol hoped to show the world "the untold riches of the Russian soul" in this 1842 novel, which he populated with a Dickensian swarm of characters: rogues and scoundrels, landowners and serfs, conniving petty officials-all of them both utterly lifelike and alarmingly larger than life. Setting everything in motion is the wily antihero, Chichikov, the trafficker in "dead souls"-deceased serfs who still represent profit to those clever enough to trade in them.This lively, idiomatic English version by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky makes accessible the full extent of the novel's lyricism, sulphurous humor, and delight in human oddity and error.

Born in African American work songs, field hollers, and the powerful legacy of the spirituals, the blues traveled the country from the Mississippi delta to "Sweet Home Chicago,” forming the backbone of American music. In this anthology-the first devoted exclusively to blues poems-a wide array of poets pay tribute to the form and offer testimony to its lasting power.The blues have left an indelible mark on the work of a diverse range of poets: from "The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes and "Funeral Blues” by W. H. Auden, to "Blues on Yellow” by Marilyn Chin and "Reservation Blues” by Sherman Alexie. Here are blues-influenced and blues-inflected poems from, among others, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, June Jordan, Richard Wright, Nikki Giovanni, Charles Wright, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Cornelius Eady. And here, too, are classic song lyrics-poems in their own right-from Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, Ma Rainey, and Muddy Waters.The rich emotional palette of the blues is fully represented here in verse that pays tribute to the heart and humor of the music, and in poems that swing with its history and hard-bitten hope.

New York City has always been a larger-than-life, half-mythical place, and this collection offers an appropriately stunning mosaic of its many incarnations in poetry-ranging from Walt Whitman's exuberant celebrations to contemporary poets' moving responses to the September 11 attack on the city. All the icons of this greatest of cities swirl and flash through these pages: taxis and subways, bridges and skyscrapers, ghettos and roof gardens and fire escapes, from the South Bronx to Coney Island to Broadway to Central Park, and from Langston Hughes's Harlem to James Merrill's Upper East Side. Wallace Stevens, e. e. cummings, W. H. Auden, Dorothy Parker, Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Ginsberg, and Audre Lorde are just a few of the poets gathered here, alongside a host of new young voices. Encompassing as many moods, characters, and scenes as this multifaceted, ever-changing metropolis has to offer, Poems of New York will be treasured by literary lovers of New York everywhere.

Set in mid 19th-century Russia, Demons examines the effect of a charismatic but unscrupulous self-styled revolutionary leader on a group of credulous followers.Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horrified Russians in 1869, Fyodor Dostoevsky conceived of Demons as a "novel-pamphlet" in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. What emerged was a prophetic and ferociously funny masterpiece of ideology and murder in pre-revolutionary Russia-a novel that is rivaled only by The Brothers Karamazov as Dostoevsky's greatest.The award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky continue their acclaimed series of Dostoevsky translations with this novel, also known as The Possessed.

Considered the greatest 20th century novel written in English, in this edition Walter Gabler uncovers previously unseen text. It is a disillusioned study of estrangement, paralysis and the disintegration of society. "From the Trade Paperback edition.