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A beautiful hardcover anthology of short stories about music by a remarkable array of literary greats, selected by someone who is both a musician and a writerMusic may be a universal language that transcends words, but that hasn't stopped our most accomplished writers from trying to capture its essence on the page, paying homage to one art form through another. The dazzling examples collected here range from Virginia Woolf's "The String Quartet" to Langston Hughes's "The Blues I'm Playing" and Donald Barthelme's "The King of Jazz," and from Ivan Turgenev's "The Song of Triumphant Love" to Katherine Mansfield's "The Singing Lesson" and Ian McEwan's "A Duet." Here are melodious scenes from E. M. Forster's Howards End and Vikram Seth's An Equal Music, and stories by James Joyce, Gustave Flaubert, and Marcel Proust in harmony with pieces by Vladimir Nabokov, Maya Angelou, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Philip K. Dick. Together these twenty-four musical tales make up a gorgeous symphony of literary delights. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

A beautifully jacketed hardcover selection of 53 darkly witty, whimsical, and macabre short stories by an acknowledged master of the form.Saki's dazzling tales manage the remarkable feat of being anarchic and urbane at the same time. Studded with Wildean epigrams and featuring well-contrived plots and surprise endings, his stories gleefully skewer the pompous hypocrisies of upper class Edwardian society. But they go beyond mere satire, raising dark humor to extremes of entertaining outrageousness that have rarely since been matched. Saki's elegantly mischievous young heroes sow chaos in their wake without breaking a sweat, and are occasionally joined by werewolves, tigers, eavesdropping house pets, and casually murderous children. This selection includes such famous stories as "Tobermory," "The Open Window," "Sredni Vashtar," "Mrs. Packletide's Tiger," "The Schartz-Metterklume Method," and many more.

London has the greatest literary tradition of any city in the world. Its roll call of storytellers includes cultural giants like Shakespeare, Defoe, and Dickens, and an innumerable host of writers of all sorts who sought to capture the essence of the place. Acclaimed historian Jerry White has collected some twenty-six stories to illustrate the extraordinary diversity of both London life and writing over the past four centuries, from Shakespeare's day to the present. These are stories of fact and fiction and occasionally something in between, some from well-known voices and others practically unknown. Here are dramatic views of such iconic events as the plague, the Great Fire of London, and the Blitz, but also William Thackeray's account of going to see a man hanged, Thomas De Quincey's friendship with a teenaged prostitute, and Doris Lessing's defense of the Underground. This literary London encompasses the famous Baker Street residence of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and the bombed-out moonscape of Elizabeth Bowen's wartime streets, Charles Dicken's treacherous River Thames and Frederick Treves's tragic Elephant Man. Graham Greene, Jean Rhys, Muriel Spark, and Hanif Kureishi are among the many great writers who give us their varied Londons here, revealing a city of boundless wealth and ragged squalor, of moving tragedy and riotous joy.

Two centuries of literary homages to the fascinating feline: stories by writers of every stripe-from P.G. Wodehouse to Doris Lessing, from Damon Runyon to Steven Millhauser.The essential unknowableness of cats has inspired many flights of fancy: Italo Calvino's secret city of cats in "The Garden of Stubborn Cats," the disappearing feline in Ursula K. Le Guin's mind-twisting "Schrödinger's Cat," the cartoon rodent and his cartoon nemesis in Steven Millhauser's "Cat 'n' Mouse." Cats flaunt their superiority in Angela Carter's bawdy retelling of "Puss-in-Boots" and in Stephen Vincent Benét's "The King of the Cats," in which two impossibly suave foreigners are revealed as even more exotic than they pretend to be. In "The Islands" by Alice Adams and "I See You, Bianca" by Maeve Brennan we see how much cats can mean to their humans. And the inimitable Saki lets us hear what cats really think of us in "Tobermory," his tale of a tactless talking animal.In these and other stories, this delightful book offers cat lovers a many- faceted tribute to the beguilingly mysterious objects of their affection.

Stories of Art and Artists gathers two centuries of classic stories from around the world. From Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Artist of the Beautiful" and Albert Camus's "The Artist at Work" to Bernard Malamud's "Rembrandt's Hat" and Aimee Bender's "The Color Master," the tales collected here range from haunting fables about the power of art to vivid portraits of those who create. Writers have long been fascinated by the idea of artistic genius, the relationship between portraits and their subjects, the inspirational role of muses, and the effects on artists of ambition, failure, and success. Art forms featured in these pages include sculpture, pottery, architecture, miniatures, landscapes, portraits, and abstract painting, illumined in brilliant stories by such great writers as Honoré de Balzac, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka, Marguerite Yourcenar, John Berger, William Boyd, Doris Lessing, Valerie Martin, Julian Barnes, Orhan Pamuk, and A. S. Byatt. Their dazzling literary evocations of the visual arts-using one art form to reflect on another-make Stories of Art and Artists an irresistible gift for lovers of art of all kinds.

As Scheherezade proved long ago, good stories make the best bedtime entertainment. The tales collected here represent the essence of the storyteller's art, with its ancient roots in fantastical legends and tales told around a fire. In Bedtime Stories, great writers of the past two centuries explore the boundaries between the real and the unreal, between waking and dreaming. From the surreal night visions of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" to the unspeakable horror that haunts two little girls in A. S. Byatt's "The Thing in the Forest," from Washington Irving's comical "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" to Ursula K. LeGuin's sly perspective on Sleeping Beauty in "The Poacher," these spellbinding stories transform the stuff of fables and fairy tales into high art. Isak Dinesen, Vladimir Nabokov, Angela Carter, Julio Cortázar, Steven Millhauser, Neil Gaiman, Haruki Murakami, and many more mingle their voices in this one-volume gateway to dreams--the perfect bedside companion for fiction lovers everywhere.

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.

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.