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Presents an analysis of the structures of social encounters from the perspective of the dramatic performance. This title shows us how people use such 'fixed props' as houses, clothes, and job situations; how they combine in teams resembling secret societies; and, how they adopt discrepant roles and communicate out of character.

Asylums is an analysis of life in "total institutions"--closed worlds like prisons, army camps, boarding schools, nursing homes and mental hospitals. It focuses on the relationship between the inmate and the institution, how the setting affects the person and how the person can deal with life on the inside.

The dwarf, the disfigured, the blind man, the homosexual, the ex-mental patient and the member of a racial or religious minority all share one characteristic: they are all socially "abnormal". This a study of of the ways in which a stigmatized person can develop a more positive social identity.

If you can't prove something, it is literally senseless - so argues Ayer in this irreverent and electrifying book. Statements are either true by definition (as in maths), or can be verified by direct experience. Ayer rejected metaphysical claims about god, the absolute, and objective values as completely nonsensical. Ayer was only 24 when he finished LANGUAGE, TRUTH & LOGIC, yet it shook the foundations of Anglo-American philosophy and made its author notorious. It became a classic text, cleared away the cobwebs in philosophical thinking, and has been enormously influential.

'A wonderful, unsparing epic ... an intimate human story of loss and love' New Statesman, Books of the YearThe epic novel of love, war and revolution from Mikhail Sholokhov, winner of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureAn extraordinary Russian masterpiece, And Quiet Flows the Don follows the turbulent fortunes of the Cossack people through peace, war and revolution - among them the proud and rebellious Gregor Melekhov, who struggles to be with the woman he loves as his country is torn apart. Borne of Mikhail Sholokhov's own early life in the lands of the Cossacks by the river Don, it is a searing portrait of a nation swept up in conflict, with all the tragic choices it brings.

A story of the troubled life of an introspective historian, Antoine Roquentin, and an exposition of one of the most influential and significant philosophical attitudes of modern times - existentialism. It chronicles Antoine's struggle with the realisation that he is an entirely free agent in a world devoid of meaning.

'Masterly ... dazzlingly intelligent and subtle' Sunday Times'Deighton's best novel to date - sharp, witty and sour, like Raymond Chandler adapted to British gloom and the multiple betrayals of the spy' ObserverEmbattled agent Bernard Samson is used to being passed over for promotion as his younger, more ambitious colleagues - including his own wife Fiona - rise up the ranks of MI6. When a valued agent in East Berlin warns the British of a mole at the heart of the Service, Samson must return to the field and the city he loves to uncover the traitor's identity. This is the first novel in Len Deighton's acclaimed, Game, Set and Match trilogy.A BERNARD SAMSON NOVEL

'A heart-breaker . . . it has the kind of indefinably powerful impact of The Great Gatsby' Observer'The surprise bestseller ... read, loved and wept over by men and women of all ages' Guardian'A tale of young love and disenchantment, of missed opportunities and passion's elusive, flickering flame' Financial TimesHer dark eyes were lost in thought, absently staring into the distance, drawing on a last wisp of hope as she searched for something that she was almost certain she would never find.'The magical novel about a Turkish man who falls in love with an artist in 1920s Berlin ... recreates a vanished era and dramatises a doomed relationship with verve, depth and poignancy. The result is a miniature masterpiece' The National'Moving and memorable, full of yearning and melancholy' The Times'A tale of young love and disenchantment, of missed opportunities and passion's elusive, flickering flame' Financial Times'A gorgeously melancholic romance' Irish Times

In 1907 J. M. Synge achieved both notoriety and lasting fame with The Playboy of the Western World. The Aran Islands, published in the same year, records his visits to the islands in 1898-1901, when he was gathering the folklore and anecdotes out of which he forged The Playboy and his other major dramas. Yet this book is much more than a stage in the evolution of Synge the dramatist. As Tim Robinson explains in his introduction, "e;If Ireland is intriguing as being an island off the west of Europe, then Aran, as an island off the west of Ireland, is still more so; it is Ireland raised to the power of two."e; Towards the end of the last century Irish nationalists came to identify the area as the country's uncorrupted heart, the repository of its ancient language, culture and spiritual values. It was for these reasons that Yeats suggested Synge visit the islands to record their way of life. The result is a passionate exploration of a triangle of contradictory relationships between an island community still embedded in its ancestral ways but solicited by modernism, a physical environment of ascetic loveliness and savagely unpredictable moods, and Synge himself, formed by modern European thought but in love with the primitive.

The narrator is a scientist hideously deformed in a laboratory accident - a man who has lost his face and, with it, connection to other people. Even his wife is now repulsed by him. His only entry back into the world is to create a mask so perfect as to be undetectable. But soon he finds that such mask is more than a disguise.

Fez, 1954, and American ex-pat Stenham reluctantly accepts a guide for his night-time walk home through the streets of the Medina. A nationalist uprising is transforming the country, much to the annoyance of Stenham, who enjoys the trappings of the old city. His path soon crosses with the young, illiterate son of a healer, another outsider to the newly politicised life of Morocco, in this brutally honest novel of life in the midst of terrorism, violence and the ugly opportunism that accompanies both.Bowles's most masterly novel combines his classic themes: the conflict of Eastern and Western cultures and the trials of otherness.

Mr Marble is in serious debt, desperate for money to pay his family's bills, until the combination of a wealthy relative, a bottle of Cyanide and a shovel offer him the perfect solution. In fact, his troubles are only just beginning. Slowly the Marble family becomes poisoned by guilt, and caught in an increasingly dangerous trap of secrets, fear and blackmail. Then, in a final twist of the knife, Mrs Marble ensures that retribution comes in the most unexpected of ways ...First published in 1926, C. S. Forester's gritty psychological thriller took crime writing in a new direction, portraying ordinary, desperate people committing monstrous acts, and showing events spiralling terribly, chillingly, out of control.

Deadly forces are about to be awakened In the degenerate, unliked backwater of Dunwich, Wilbur Whately, a most unusual child, is born. Of unnatural parentage, he grows at an uncanny pace to an unsettling height, but the boy s arrival simply precedes that of a true horror: one of the Old Ones, that forces the people of the town to hole up by night, fearful for their lives, by day able only to trace the wreckage wrought by the gigantic, unseen monster.In this and other tales of the macabre, H. P. Lovecraft weaves unearthly fantasies of creatures beyond conception existing between the spaces of the dimensions we know.

'One of the great writers of the twentieth century' GuardianIt is June in 1939, and the inhabitants of a country house prepare to host the annual village pageant in its grounds. It will tell the stories of English history, as it does every year. Yet the coming of war broods over the whole community, changing the meaning of past and present, and heralding a new act. Through her characters' passionate musings and private dramas, and through the enigmatic figure of the pageant's author, Miss La Trobe, Virginia Woolf's playful final novel both celebrates and mocks Englishness, and re-creates the elusive role of the artist.Edited by Stella McNichol with an Introduction and Notes by Gillian Beer

Richard Hannay has just returned to England after years in South Africa and is thoroughly bored with his life in London. But then a murder is committed in his flat, just days after a chance encounter with an American who had told him about an assassination plot which could have dire international consequences. An obvious suspect for the police and an easy target for the killers, Hannay goes on the run in his native Scotland where he will need all his courage and ingenuity to stay one step ahead of his pursuers.

'Woolf is modern ... With Joyce and Eliot she has shaped a literary century' Jeanette WintersonVirginia Woolf tested the boundaries of fiction in these short stories, developing a new language of sensation, feeling and thought, and recreating in words the 'swarm and confusion of life'. Defying categorization, the stories range from the more traditional narrative style of 'Solid Objects' through the fragile impressionism of 'Kew Gardens' to the abstract exploration of consciousness in 'The Mark on the Wall'.Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Sandra Kemp

Sam Selvon s Moses Ascending depicts West Indian Immigration in England. Moses, a Trinidadian who has been in England for some years now represents immigrants who come from all corners of the world to seek a better life. Like many immigrants he is hard-working. After years of living in a dingy basement he saves up enough money to buy a house. Moses calls this his dream house in the beginning of the book but later on he realizes that the house is a piece of garbage.

Joyce's first major work, written when he was only twenty-five, brought his city to the world for the first time. His stories are rooted in the rich detail of Dublin life, portraying ordinary, often defeated lives with unflinching realism. He writes of social decline, sexual desire and exploitation, corruption and personal failure, yet creates a brilliantly compelling, unique vision of the world and of human experience.

'A landmark of feminist thought and a rhetorical masterpiece' GuardianRanging from the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted imaginary sister to Jane Austen, Charlotte Bront and the effects of poverty and sexual constraint on female creativity, A Room of One's Own, based on a lecture given by Woolf at Girton College, Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics. Published almost a decade later, Three Guineas breaks new ground in its discussion of men, militarism and women's attitudes towards war. These two pieces reveal Virginia Woolf's indomitable spirit, sophisticated wit and genius as an essayist.Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Mich le Barrett