Selected and Introduced by David Stuart Davies. Prepare to take a step beyond reality into the fantastic realm of other worlds imagined by the pioneers of science fiction. This collection features a set of wide ranging and mind expanding tales created by the founding fathers of this most fascinating and exciting of literary genres. As well as the works of famous authors such as Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle and Jack London, there are some startlingly original gems by lesser known scribes. Thrill to the adventures of the first invisible man in Edward Page Mitchell's The Crystal Man; take part in Stanley G. Weinbaum's A Martian Odyssey; travel back in time to the prehistoric world of Atlantis in J. Leslie Mitchell's Three Go Back; be intrigued by Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland, the classic novella of the Fourth Dimension; witness the terrible disaster that besets London in Fred M. White's The Dust of Death; and be chilled by Robert Duncan Milne's cosmic disaster story Into the Sun. From the wonders of outer space, to the predictions of the future and the startling possibilities and dangers of scientific progress to the frightening potentials of human development, the writers of these pioneering scenarios provide thrilling and unique experiences for all those who love to journey beyond the familiar.

This title is selected by Rosemary Gray. When you think of Irish writers of supernatural tales, then the names Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker will figure prominently, but this does no more than scratch the surface of a rich vein of chilling and macabre fiction to be found on the Emerald Isle. This rich and diverse selection showcases some of the very best.

«This title includes an Introduction and Notes by Henry Claridge, Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of Kent at Canterbury. «Tender is the Night» is a story set in the hedonistic high society of Europe during the 'Roaring Twenties'. A wealthy schizophrenic, Nicole Warren, falls in love with Dick Diver — her psychiatrist. The resulting saga of the Divers' troubled marriage, and their circle of friends, includes a cast of aristocratic and beautiful people, unhappy love affairs, a duel, incest, and the problems inherent in the possession of great wealth. Despite cataloguing a maelstrom of interpersonal conflict, «Tender is the Night» has a poignancy and warmth that springs from the quality of Fitzgerald's writing and the tragic personal experiences on which the novel is based. Six years separate «Tender is the Night» and «The Last Tycoon», the novel Fitzgerald left unfinished at his death in December 1940. Fitzgerald lived in Hollywood more or less continuously from July 1937 until his death, and a novel about the film industry at the height of 'the studio system' centred on the working life of a top producer was begun in 1939. Even in its incomplete state «The Last Tycoon» remains the greatest American novel about Hollywood and contains some of Fitzgerald's most brilliant writing.»

This title includes an Introduction and Notes by Lionel Kelly. This Side of Paradise was Fitzgerald's first novel, and its instant success made him famous. The Beautiful and the Damned was Fitzgerald's second novel, and describes the beginning of what became known as 'The Jazz Age'. This title's publication date is 15 May 2011.

«This title includes a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex. In «The Prisoner of Zenda», Rudolf Rassendyll's close resemblance to the King of Ruritania leads him into intrigue, romance and perilous escapades. Enmeshed in a plot by the villainous Duke of Strelsau to depose the King, Rudolf is entranced by the beautiful Princess Flavia, and finds that both his life and his honour are imperilled. The sequel, «Rupert of Hentzau», tells how Rupert ('who feared neither man nor devil') seeks to ruin Flavia's reputation and wreak vengeance on Rudolf. Events accelerate to a dramatically violent climax. Both these swashbuckling novels offer the appeal of romantic adventure in a land now legendary. Numerous adaptations on screen and stage have extended the fame of Anthony Hope's 'Ruritania'. This title is complete and unabridged.»

Jules Verne (1828-1905) was internationally famous as the author of novels based on extraordinary voyages. His visionary use of new travel technologies inspired his readers to look to the industrial future rather than the remote past for their dreams of adventure. The popularity of his novels led directly to modern science fiction. In From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, Jules Verne turned the ancient fantasy of space flight into a believable technological possibility an engineering dream for the industrial age. Directly inspired by Verne s story, enthusiasts worked successfully at overcoming the practical difficulties, and within a century, human beings did indeed fly to the Moon. Curiously, however, Verne is unlikely to have thought it possible that a manned projectile could actually be fired out of a giant cannon, rising higher than the Moon, swinging around it, and then landing safely back on Earth. He had used the science of the day to construct a literary conjuring trick, a hoax, one of the most successful in all history. By skilful misdirection he drew the attention of readers away from weaknesses in the project. Read the book and you, too, will be fooled into accepting the realistic possibility in Verne s time of that dream of flying to the Moon.

David Hume (1711-1776) was the most important philosopher ever to write in English, as well as a master stylist. This volume contains his major philosophical works. A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740), published while Hume was still in his twenties, consists of three books on the understanding, the passions, and morals. It applies the experimental method of reasoning to human nature in a revolution that was intended to make Hume the Newton of the moral sciences. Disappointed with the Treatise's failure to bring about such a revolution, Hume later recast Book I as An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1751), and Book III as An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, which he regarded as 'incomparably the best' of all his works. Both Enquiries went through several editions in his lifetime. Hume's works, controversial in his day, remain deeply and widely influential in ours, especially for his contributions to our understanding of the nature of morality, political and economic theory, philosophy of religion, and philosophical naturalism. This volume also includes Hume's anonymous Abstract of Books I and II of the Treatise, and the short autobiographical essay, 'My Own Life', which he wrote just before his death.

The final letters and diary entries of Robert Falcon Scott — written in his last days, while hopelessly trapped in a tiny tent by a raging blizzard on the Great Ice Barrier — are among the most poignant and haunting passages ever penned. 'Had we lived', he wrote, 'I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman'. Scott's diaries, discovered with his body the next spring and then used as the essence of the book Scott's Last Expedition, caught the public imagination in a way few tales of exploration ever have. The account of Scott's second Antarctic expedition describes the near-disastrous voyage south, the dangers and beauties of the long, dark winter, and the brutal hardships of the trek to the South Pole. But it was the Polar Party's unflagging stamina, bravery, and spirit on their tragic return after finding they had been beaten to their goal by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen that so resonated with the British public. Scott's evocative telling of this story created a legend that would grip the world for generations.

This selection of Kafka's shorter prose writings includes one of the few works published during his lifetime: the harrowing story of Gregor Samsa's overnight transformation into a verminous insect, his record of the effect of this sudden metamorphosis on himself and the reaction of his family. It conveys with an unsettling mixture of subjective involvement and objective detachment the complex feelings of guilt, affection, responsibility and self-doubt that characterise Kafka's perception of intimate emotional relationships — themes that are continued in the quasi-fictional story The Judgement and the quasi-autobiographical Letter to his Father. Issues of guilt, punishment and penance are also treated with startling brutality in the story set in a tropical penal colony that describes in horrific detail a machine designed to inflict an ingenious and barbaric form of execution on victims of a summary and arbitrary justice — a machine, however, that in this instance destroys not its intended victim, but its zealous operator and, simultaneously, itself. Kafka's enigmatic fables deal, often in dark and quirkily humorous terms, with the insoluble dilemmas of a world in which there appears to be no reassurance, no reliable guidance to resolving our existential and emotional uncertainties and anxieties.

E.F.Benson (1867-1940) was a prolific English novelist. He wrote some very highly rated Supernatural fiction, but his most famous creations were the protagonists in the six novels known under the collective title of Mapp and Lucia, the comic exploits of two upper-middle-class ladies living in a seaside town, very like Rye in East Sussex, in the 1920 and 1930s. These stories, of enduring popularity, were made into a TV series in the 1980s. Volume One contains: Queen Lucia (1920); Miss Mapp (1922); and, Lucia in London (1927).

E.F.Benson (1867-1940) was a prolific English novelist. He wrote some very highly rated Supernatural fiction, but his most famous creations were the protagonists in the six novels known under the collective title of Mapp and Lucia, the comic exploits of two upper-middle-class ladies living in a seaside town, very like Rye in East Sussex, in the 1920 and 1930s. These stories, of enduring popularity, were made into a TV series in the 1980s. Volume Two contains: Mapp and Lucia (1931); Lucia's Progress (1935); and, Trouble for Lucia (1939).

«A spectre is haunting Europe (and the world). Not, in the twenty-first century, the spectre of communism, but the spectre of capitalism. Marx's prediction that the state would wither away of its own accord has proved inaccurate, and he did not foresee the tyrannies which have ruled large parts of the globe in his name. Indeed, he would have been appalled if he had witnessed them. But his analysis of the evils and dangers of raw capitalism is as correct now as when it was written, and some of his suggestions (progressive income tax, abolition of child labour, free education for all children) are now accepted with little question. In a world where capitalism is no longer held in check by fear of a communist alternative, «The Communist Manifesto» (with «Socialism Utopian and Scientific», Engels's brief and clear exposition of Marxist thought) is essential reading. «The Condition of the Working Class» in England is Engels's first, and probably best-known, book. With Henry Mayhew's «London Labour and the London Poor», it was and is the outstanding study of the working class in Victorian England.»

Murderous ghosts, horrific curses and monstrous beings haunt an unforgiving landscape into which travellers stray at their peril. Journey through the dark byways of Australia's Gothic past in the rare stories gathered in this memorable new collection. Work by acclaimed Australian writers such as Marcus Clarke, Henry Lawson and Edward Dyson appears alongside many lesser-known authors such as Beatrice Grimshaw, Mary Fortune and Ernest Favenc. Many of the stories collected here have never been reprinted since their first publication in 19th and early 20th century periodicals, and showcase the richness and variety of the Australian ghost and horror story. James Doig provides an authoritative introduction full of fresh insights into Australian Gothic fiction with detailed biographical notes on the authors represented.

«This title includes an introduction by A.D.P. Briggs and translated by Constance Garnett. In 1869 a young Russian was strangled, shot through the head and thrown into a pond. His crime? A wish to leave small group of violent revolutionaries, from which he had become alienated. Dostoevsky takes this real-life catastrophe as the subject and culmination of «Devils», a title that refers the young radicals themselves and also to the materialistic ideas that possessed the minds of many thinking people Russian society at the time. The satirical portraits of the revolutionaries, with their naivety, ludicrous single-mindedness and readiness for murder and destruction, might seem exaggerated — until we consider their all-too-recognisable descendants in the real world ever since. The key figure in the novel, however, is beyond politics. Nikolay Stavrogin, another product of rationalism run wild, exercises his charisma with ruthless authority and total amorality. His unhappiness is accounted for when he confesses to a ghastly sexual crime — in a chapter long suppressed by the censor. This prophetic account of modern morals and politics, with its fifty-odd characters, amazing events and challenging ideas, is seen by some critics as Dostoevsky's masterpiece.»

«This is translated by Constance Garnett, with an introduction by A. D. P. Briggs. As Fyodor Karamazov awaits an amorous encounter, he is violently done to death. The three sons of the old debauchee are forced to confront their own guilt or complicity. Who will own to parricide? The reckless and passionate Dmitri? The corrosive intellectual Ivan? Surely not the chaste novice monk Alyosha? The search reveals the divisions which rack the brothers, yet paradoxically unite them. Around the writings of this one dysfunctional family Dostoevsky weaves a dense network of social, psychological and philosophical relationships. At the same time he shows — from the opening 'scandal' scene in the monastery to a personal appearance by an eccentric Devil — that his dramatic skills have lost nothing of their edge. «The Karamazov Brothers», completed a few months before Dostoevsky's death in 1881, remains for many the high point of his genius as novelist and chronicler of the modern malaise. It cast a long shadow over D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus, and other giants of twentieth-century European literature.»

«With an Introduction by Alex Dolby Jules Verne (1828-1905) is internationally famous as the author of a distinctive series of adventure stories describing new travel technologies which opened up the world and provided means to escape from it. The collective enthusiasm of generations of readers of his 'extraordinary voyages' was a key factor in the rise of modern science fiction. In «The Mysterious Island» a group of men escape imprisonment during the American Civil War by stealing a balloon. Blown across the world, they are air-wrecked on a remote desert island. In a manner reminiscent of Robinson Crusoe, the men apply their scientific knowledge and technical skill to exploit the island's bountiful resources, eventually constructing a sophisticated society in miniature. The book is also an intriguing mystery story, for the island has a secret.»

«Complete and unabridged, this title comes with a new Introduction by Cedric Watts, Research Professor of English, University of Sussex. James Joyce's astonishing masterpiece, «Ulysses», tells of the diverse events which befall Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Dublin on 16 June 1904, during which Bloom's voluptuous wife, Molly, commits adultery. Initially deemed obscene in England and the USA, this richly-allusive novel, revolutionary in its Modernistic experimentalism, was hailed as a work of genius by W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway. Scandalously frank, wittily erudite, mercurially eloquent, resourcefully comic and generously humane, «Ulysses» offers the reader a life-changing experience.»

Chichikov is willing to relieve their owners of the tax burden by buying the titles for a song. What he does not say is that he then proposes to take out a huge mortgage against these fictitious citizens and buy himself a nice estate in Eastern Russia. Will he get away with it? Who will rumble him?

Offers a collection of stories in which: a wax museum in London boasts an exhibit, which no man has seen and remained sane; a businessman is trapped in a train carriage with a madman who claims to have created a new and efficient method of capital punishment; and, a doctor plans a horrible revenge, using an insect as his murder weapon.

Alexey Ivanovitch is a young tutor in the household of a general. He is both observer and actor in the tempest which surrounds his impoverished employer. Everyone is waiting for the death of Granny, the general's rich aunt, but so far from dying, she turns up alive and well, and makes her way to the casino...