The ​Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings

Edgar Allan Poe - The ​Fall of the House of Usher
‘And ​much of Madness and more of Sin And Horror the Soul of the Plot’ This selection of Poe’s critical writings, short fiction and poetry demonstrates an intense interest in aesthetic issues and the astonishing power and imagination with which he probed the darkest corners of the human mind. The Fall of the House of Usher describes the final hours of a family tormented by tragedy and the legacy of the past. In the Tell Tale Heart, a murderer’s insane delusions threaten to betray him, while stories such as The Pit and the Pendulum and the Cask of Amontillado explore extreme states of decadence, fear and hate. These works display Poe’s startling ability to build suspense with almost nightmarish intensity. David Galloway’s introduction re-examines the myths surrounding Poe’s life and reputation. This edition includes a new chronology and further reading by Tatiana Rapatzikou. Originally published under the title Selected Writings

Edgar Allan Poe - The ​complete illustrated works of Edgar Allan Poe
Here ​in one superb volume are tales, adventures and poems from the world's master of the mysterious - Edgar Allan Poe. Famous for his horror stories and brooding poetry, Poe is credited with the invention of the modern detective story and a distinctive style of science fiction writing. Included in this collection are: _The Complete Tales of Mystery and Imagination_ - contains all 70 of the remarkable stories of terror and fantasy that established Poe as the supreme craftsman of the short story and a great American author. _The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket_ - is Poe's only full-length work and a masterful blending of science and romance. W.H. Auden described it as 'one of the finest adventure stories ever written'. _The Raven and Other Poems_ - reflects Poe's obsession with the macabre and solitude. The stories are complemented with illustrations by Arthur Rackham, Aubrey Beardsley, Edouard Manet and others.

Edgar Allan Poe - The ​Complete Tales and Poems
All ​of the tales by the master of the detective and the macabre story. 53 of his best-known poems plus essays and criticisms. Edgar Allan Poe self-published his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, in 1827. In 1830, Poe embarked on a career as a writer and began contributing reviews and essays to popular periodicals. He also wrote sketches and short fiction and in 1833 published his only completed novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Over the next five years he established himself as a master of the short story form through the publication of "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Tell-tale Heart" and other well-known works. In 1841, he wrote "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," generally considered the first modern detective story. The publication of The Raven and Other Poems in 1845 brought him additional fame as a poet.

Raymond Carver - What ​We Talk About When We Talk About Love
In ​his second collection of stories, as in his first, Carver's characters are peripheral people--people without education, insight or prospects, people too unimaginative to even give up. Carver celebrates these men and women.

Charles Bukowski - The ​Most Beautiful Woman in Town
‘One ​of those writers whom each new reader discovers with a transgressive thrill’The New Yorker ‘Funny and sharp, observant, clever with details and honest’ Times Literary Supplement This collection of short stories propels the reader into the lowlife of America’s underworld, full of drunks, bums and gamblers, where sex and violence are everywhere and the most beautiful woman in town drinks and fights. Bukowski writes with brutal honesty and sardonic humour of the things he experienced in life; poverty, hard women and chronic hangovers. Charles Bukowski was one of America’s best-known and most prolific writers. During his lifetime he published more than forty-five books of poetry and prose including the novels Post Office (1971), Factotum (1975) and Pulp (1994), all available from Virgin Books.

Raymond Carver - Will ​You Please Be Quiet, Please?
With ​this, his first collection of stories, Raymond Carver breathed new life into the American short story. Carver shows us the humor and tragedy that dwell in the hearts of ordinary people; his stories are the classics of our time.

e. e. cummings - Complete ​Poems
At ​the time of his death in 1962, E. E. Cummings was, next to Robert Frost, the most widely read poet in America. Combining Thoreau's controlled belligerence with the brash abandon of an uninhibited bohemian, Cummings, together with Pound, Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, helped bring about the twentieth-century revolution in literary expression. He is recognized on the one hand as the author of some of the most beautiful lyric poems written in the English language, and on the other as one of the most inventive American poets of his time in the worlds of Richard Kostelanetz, "the major American poet of the middle-twentieth-century."

Charles Bukowski - Tales ​of Ordinary Madness
In ​these tales of ordinary madness, Charles Bukowski ingeniously mixes high and low culture, from prostitutes and the philosophy of Kant to despair and classical music, to create his modern dystopia. Inspired by D.H. Lawrence, John Fante and Hemingway, Bukowski’s writing is passionate, extreme and relentlessly realistic. These are angry yet tender, humorous and haunting portrayals of life in the underbelly of America. Charles Bukowski was one of America’s best-known and most prolific writers. During his lifetime he published more than forty-five books of poetry and prose including the novels Post Office (1971), Factotum (1975), Women (1978), and Pulp (1994) all available from Virgin Books.

Edgar Allan Poe - Great ​Tales and Poems
Born ​to an unfortunate heritage, orphaned, unsympathetically raised, and then abandoned, Edgar Allan Poe struggled for greatness in an adverse social and economic climate -- a setting not improved by his fiery temperament and caustic criticism of others. Poe's melancholy brilliance, his passionate lyricism, and his tormented soul would make him one of the most widely read and original writers in American literature. Here, in one volume, are his classic short works: masterpieces of horror, terror, humor, and adventure -- and the finest lyric and narrative poetry of this ill-fated genius whose influence on both prose and verse continues to this day. Pocket Books' Enriched Classics present the great works of world literature enhanced for the contemporary reader. This edition of Great Tales And Poems Of Edgar Allan Poe contains the original Pocket Books introduction, first published in 1951, along with an updated selection of critical excerpts, and suggestions for further readings.

Raymond Carver - Cathedral
Raymond ​Carver said it was possible 'to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language and endow these things - a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring - with immense, even startling power'. Nowhere is this alchemy more striking than in the title story of _Cathedral_ in which a blind man guides the hand of a sighted man as together they draw the cathedral the blind man can never see. Many view this story, and indeed this collection, as a watershed in the maturing of Carver's work to a more confidently poetic style.

Raymond Carver - Where ​I'm Calling From
The ​last story collection published during Carver's life (he died in 1988) contains most of his greatest hits from his earlier books, as well as seven stories that hadn't been collected up to that point. The breadth of the collection makes these 37 stories an extremely complete map of Carver territory, of a particular area of America and of the specific texture of the people Carver writes about -- their difficult attempts at survival in a world where happiness does not arrive wrapped up in neat packages but comes in far more peculiar parcels, if it comes at all.

T. S. Eliot - The ​Waste Land
The ​text of Eliot's 1922 masterpiece is accompanied by thorough explanatory annotations as well as by Eliot's own knotty notes, some of which require annotation themselves. For ease of reading, this Norton Critical Edition presents The Waste Land as it first appeared in the American edition (Boni & Liveright), with Eliot's notes at the end. "Contexts" provides readers with invaluable materials on The Waste Land's sources, composition, and publication history. "Criticism" traces the poem's reception with twenty-five reviews and essays, from first reactions through the end of the twentieth century. Included are reviews published in the Times Literary Supplement, along with selections by Virginia Woolf, Gilbert Seldes, Edmund Wilson, Elinor Wylie, Conrad Aiken, Charles Powell, Gorham Munson, Malcolm Cowley, Ralph Ellison, John Crowe Ransom, I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, Delmore Schwartz, Denis Donoghue, Robert Langbaum, Marianne Thormählen, A. D. Moody, Ronald Bush, Maud Ellman, and Tim Armstrong. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are included.

Jane Yolen - Once ​Upon a Time (She Said)
This ​volume contains a collection of over 40 short stories, 30 poems, and 6 essays of Jane Yolen. It is being produced for her Guest of Honourship at Interaction, the 2005 World Science Fiction Convention.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - Tales ​of the Jazz Age
Though ​most widely known for the novella The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald gained a major source of income as a professional writer from the sale of short stories. Over the course of his career, Fitzgerald published more than 160 stories in the period's most popular magazines. His second short fiction collection, Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), includes two masterpieces as well as several other stories from his earlier career. One, "May Day," depicts a party at a popular club in New York that becomes a night of revelry during which former soldiers and an affluent group of young people start an anti-Bolshevik demonstration that results in an attack on a leftist newspaper office. "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" is a fantastic satire of the selfishness endemic to the wealthy and their undying pursuit to preserve that way of life. All of these stories, like his best novels, meld Fitzgerald's fascination with wealth with an awareness of a larger world, creating a subtle social critique. With his discerning eye, Fitzgerald elucidates the interactions of the young people of post-World War I America who, cut off from traditions, sought their place in the modern world amid the general hysteria of the period that inaugurated the age of jazz. This new edition reproduces in full the original collection, stories that represent a clear movement in theme and character development toward what would become The Great Gatsby. In introducing each story, Fitzgerald offers accounts of its textual history, revealing decisions about which stories to include.

Aimee Bender - The ​Girl In The Flammable Skirt
A ​grief-stricken librarian decides to have sex with every man who enters her library. A half-mad, unbearably beautiful heiress follows a strange man home, seeking total sexual abandon: He only wants to watch game shows. A woman falls in love with a hunchback; when his deformity turns out to be a prosthesis, she leaves him. A wife whose husband has just returned from the war struggles with the heartrending question: Can she still love a man who has no lips? Aimee Bender's stories portray a world twisted on its axis, a place of unconvention that resembles nothing so much as real life, in all its grotesque, beautiful glory. From the first line of each tale she lets us know she is telling a story, but the moral is never quite what we expect. Bender's prose is glorious: musical and colloquial, inimitable and heartrending. Here are stories of men and women whose lives are shaped--and sometimes twisted--by the power of extraordinary desires, erotic and otherwise. The Girl in the Flammable Skirt is the debut of a major American writer.

Edgar Allan Poe - Kegyetlen ​mesék / Cruel tales
A ​világ nem kedveli a szabálytalan géniuszokat. Legszívesebben csörgősipkát húzna rájuk, vagy ketrecbe zárva mutogatná őket. Edgar Allan Poe is megelőzte korát, semmiképpen sem illett a hangsúlyozott realitások és az érzelgős útszéliség Amerikájába. Más volt: tragikusan, félreértetten, kiemelkedően, nyugtalanítóan más. Élete misztikus zarándoklat a rettegés birodalmán át. Mintha nem is bölcsőben, hanem játékkoporsóban ringatták volna, mintha a temetők fölött lebegő őszi holdfény lenne számára a napfény. Alakjáról és életművéről máig sem született megnyugtató értékelés. Túlságosan is egyéni volt. Túlságosan nehéz lett volna vele bármelyik kortársat is egy lapon emlegetni. Az ő prózájában soha nincs üresjárat. Finoman rezdülő, de acélvázkánt feszes novelláiban olykor az utolsó szó a poén. A Poe összes műveit felölelő kétnyelvű sorozat ötödik kötetében található `kegyetlen mesék` - felnőtt mesék. Kegyetlen helyzetek (_Kutyaszorító_), megpróbáltatások (_A kút és az inga_, _A Maelström poklában_), szenvedélyek (_A találka_), tréfák (_Jeruzsálemi mese_, _Pestiskirály_), módszerek (_Dr. Kátrány és Toll Professzor_), feltételek (_Három vasárnap egy hétben_), rejtvények (_Az aranybogár_) és átverések (_Légből kapott koholmány_) sorakoznak a kötetben. A novellák a léleknek a halál és őrület határán tátongó mélységeit, a tudomány és iszonyat találkozásait tárják fel költői szavakban, az emelkedett előadás hideg nyugalmában.

Serj Tankian - Cool ​Gardens
Serj ​Tankian, a System Of A Down énekesének versei. "In this previously self-published book of poems, the lead singer of the Grammy-nominated metal band, System of a Down, gives readers a glimpse into his life and thoughts over the past eight years. Includes original artwork by Sako Shahinian, a young Los Angeles-based artist. Full color."

Sylvia Plath - Johnny ​Panic and the Bible of Dreams
"What ​I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination.... If I sit still and don't do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine."-- Sylvia Plath, from Notebooks, February 1956 Renowned for her poetry, Sylvia Plath was also a brilliant writer of prose. This collection of short stories, essays, and diary excerpts highlights her fierce concentration on craft, the vitality of her intelligence, and the yearnings of her imaginaton. Featuring an introduction by Plath's husband, the late British poet Ted Hughes, these writings also reflect themes and images she would fully realize in her poetry. Jonny Panic and the Bible of Dreams truly showcases the talent and genius of Sylvia Plath.

J. D. Salinger - For ​Esmé with Love and Squalor
A ​collection of nine exceptional short stories from the author of 'The Catcher in the Rye', J D Salinger. The book includes two of Salinger's most famous and critically acclaimed pieces, which helped to establish him among contemporary literary greats. The title story - a soldier's recollection of his meeting with a young girl, Esmé, before being sent into combat - prompted a flood of readers - letters when it was first published in The New Yorker in 1950. The haunting, 'A Perfect Day for Bananafish' is the first of the author's many stories to feature the Glass family and follows eldest sibling, Seymour Glass, and his wife, Muriel, as they honeymoon in Florida.

Julie Orringer - How ​to Breathe Underwater
Julie ​Orringer's How to Breathe Underwater is a stunning collection of nine heartbreakingly delicate and honest tales of the confusion, mortification, and loneliness only experienced in the tender years of youth. Each story features a girl or young woman dealing with the lonesomeness of isolation, the loss of childhood innocence, and the struggle to thrive in spite of neglect, overwhelming grief, or cruel treatment from others. Orringer offers adult narrative on uniquely adolescent experiences, which seem to be lifted out of our collective recollection of youth - or at least magnified or intensified versions of our youth. Told with the grace and focus of a "grown-up" perspective, How to Breathe Underwater remains strikingly sincere to the nuances of the genuine feelings of youth.