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This collection brings together all of W. B. Yeats s published prose writings on Irish folklore, legend and myth, with pieces on subjects including ghosts, kidnappers, fairies, ancient tribes, precious stones and Gaelic love songs. Through his researches on Irish folklore, Yeats attempted to create a movement in literature that was enriched by and rooted in a vital native tradition. In this volume Yeats s essays, introductions and sketches are presented chronologically, giving a clear picture of how his analysis developed, increasing in its depth and complexity in his quest to create an Ireland of the imagination.

Full grown with a long, smoke-coloured beard, requiring the services of a cane and fonder of cigars than warm milk, Benjamin Button is a very curious baby indeed. And, as Benjamin becomes increasingly youthful with the passing years, his family wonders why he persists in the embarrassing folly of living in reverse. In this imaginative fable of ageing and the other stories collected here including The Cut-Glass Bowl in which an ill-meant gift haunts a family s misfortunes, The Four Fists where a man s life shaped by a series of punches to his face, and the revelry, mobs and anguish of May Day F. Scott Fitzgerald displays his unmatched gift as a writer of short stories.

A golden Cadillac big enough to cross the ocean has been seen sailing along the streets of Harlem. A hit-and-run victim's been hit so hard she got embedded in the wall of a convent. A shootout with three heistmen dressed as cops has left an important politician in a coma - and a lot of money missing. And Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson are the ones who have to piece it all together.All Shot Up is chaotic, bloody - and completely unforgettable. Chester Himes wrote detective fiction darker, dirtier and more extreme than anyone else dared.

'One of the greatest football novels ever written and a comic masterpiece' DJ Taylor'But is this story believable? Ah, it all depends upon whether you want it to believe it.' J.L. CarrIn their new all-buttercup-yellow-stripe, Steeple Sinderby Wanderers, who usually feel lucky when their pitch is above water-level, are England's most obscure team. This uncategorizable, surreal and extremely funny novel is the story of how they start the season by ravaging the Fenland League and end it by going all the way to Wembley.Told through unreliable recollection, florid local newspaper coverage and bizarre committee minutes, How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the F.A. Cup is both entertaining and moving. There will never be players again like Alex Slingsby, Sid 'the Shooting Star' Swift and the immortal milkman-turned-goalkeeper, Monkey Tonks.

Jackson's woman has found him a foolproof way to make money - a technique for turning ten dollar bills into hundreds. But when the scheme somehow fails, Jackson is left broke, wanted by the police and desperately racing to get back both his money and his loving Imabelle.The first of Chester Himes's novels featuring the hardboiled Harlem detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, A Rage in Harlem has swagger, brutal humour, lurid violence, a hearse loaded with gold and a conman dressed as a Sister of Mercy.With a new Introduction by Luc Sante.

Detectives Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones have lost two criminals. Pinky ran off - but it shouldn't be hard to track down a giant albino in Harlem. Jake the dwarf drug dealer, though, isn't coming back - he died after Grave Digger punched him in the stomach. And the dwarf's death might cost them both their badges. Unless they can track down the cause of all this mayhem - like the African with his throat slit and the dog the size of a lion with an open head wound.Chester Himes's hardboiled tales of Harlem have a barely contained chaos and a visceral, macabre edge all their own.With a new Introduction by Noel 'Razor' Smith.

The night's over for Ulysses Galen. It started going bad for the big Greek when a knife was drawn, then there was an axe, then he was being chased and shot at. Now Galen is lying dead in the middle of a Harlem street. But the night's just beginning for detectives Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson. Because they have a smoking gun but it couldn't have killed Galen, and they had a suspect but a gang called the Real Cool Moslems took him. And as patrol cars and search teams descend on the neighbourhood, their case threatens to take a turn for the personal.The Real Cool Killers is loaded with grizzly comedy and with all the raucous, threatening energy of the streets it's set on.

'January 22nd - Robert startles me at breakfast by asking if my cold - which he has hitherto ignored - is better. I reply that it has gone. Then why, he asks, do I look like that? Feel that life is wholly unendurable, and decide madly to get a new hat'It's not easy being a Provincial Lady in Devonshire in the 1920s, juggling a grumpy husband, mischievous children and a host of domestic dilemmas - from rice mould to a petulant cook. But this Provincial Lady will not be defeated; not by wayward flower bulbs, not by unexpected houseguests, not even by the Blitz. She will continue to preside over the W.I., endure rain-drenched family picnics and succeed as a published author, all the while tending to her strawberries. The Diary of a Provincial Lady is a brilliantly observed comic novel, as funny and fresh today as when it was first written.Widely regarded as one of the funniest English authors and an heir to Jane Austen, E.M. Delafield was born in Sussex in 1890. She took the name Delafield to distinguish herself from her mother (De la Pasture), also a novelist, and wrote over 30 books which could be 'as laugh-out-loud funny as PG Wodehouse' before her death in 1943.

'Brilliant poems of complex, haunting power... Averno may be Glück's masterpiece' The New York Times Book ReviewAn acclaimed collection from the Nobel prize-winning poetThis startlingly original reworking of the Persephone myth takes us to the icy shores of Averno, the crater lake regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. Here, the consolations of rebirth and renewal are eclipsed by the immediacy of loss - by a mother's possessive grief, an abducted girl's equivocal memories, a farmer's lament for a lost harvest. This chorus offers neither comfort nor solace but deepened understanding, its sorrow textured by the poet's luminous wit. Together, the poems of Averno swell to a staggeringly powerful lamentation, through which the reader glimpses the ecstasy of the inevitable, only to find it resisted by the insistent, impersonal presence of the Earth.

Examines the causes, effects, and long-term consequences of America's infamous financial meltdown, showing how rampant speculation and blind optimism sustained a market mania, and led to its terrible downward spiral. This book describes the people and corporations at the heart of the financial community, and how they were affected by the disaster.

Covering child development, this work explores problems of the only child, of stealing and lying, shyness, sex education in schools and the roots of aggression. It provides insight into child behaviour and parental attitudes.

Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love is one of the funniest, sharpest novels about love and growing up ever written.'He was the great love of her life you know.''Oh, dulling,' said my mother, sadly, 'One always thinks that. Every, every time.' Longing for love, obsessed with weddings and let's not even mention the mysteries of sex, Linda and her sisters and cousin Fanny are on the hunt for the ideal lover. But finding the perfect match is much harder than any of the sisters had ever dreamed. Linda is first courted by a Tory MP and then becomes embroiled with a handsome but humourless communist, before she risks everything on a chance at real, head-over-heels love in war-torn Paris . . .'Peerless' Zoe Heller

Collecting the writings and interviews of Michel Foucault outside his published monographs, this work contains Foucault's summaries of the highly influential courses he taught at the College de France from 1970 to 1982, as well as engaging and unusally candid interviews and Foucault's key writings on ethics.

Offers an introduction to Foucault's thought.

This volume is a full transcript of the lectures given by Foucault in 1975-76. The main theme of the lectures is the contention that war can be used to analyze power relations. The book is coloured with historical examples, drawn from the early modern period in both England and France.

'An extraordinary storyteller' Bernardine Evaristo'People say that on the first night Francis Sancher spent in Rivière au Sel the wind in its temper screamed down from the mountains...'Francis Sancher always said he would come to an unnatural end. So when this handsome newcomer to the Guadeloupean village of Rivière au Sel is found dead, face down in the mud, no one is particularly surprised. Loved by some - especially women - and reviled by others, Francis was an enigmatic figure. Where did he come from? What caused his strange nocturnal wanderings? What devils haunted him? As the villagers come to pay their respects, they each reveal another piece of the mystery behind his life and death - and their own buried secrets and stories come to light.'The grand queen, the empress, of Caribbean literature' Fiammetta Rocco, Guardian