«Henry Morton Stanley's greeting to the Scottish medical missionary David Livingstone — Dr Livingstone, I presume? — is to exploration what Holmes' Elementary, my dear Watson is to detective fiction. It took place in a remote African settlement when a travelling correspondent for the «New York Herald» successfully concluded an assignment to find the renowned explorer. But the meeting, and the events surrounding it, proved to be more than just a simple news story. Stanley's accounts of his expedition not only helped transform Livingstone into one of the great Victorian heroes, but were also the springboard from which Stanley himself became the most accomplished of all African explorers. «How I Found Livingstone» was written in six weeks, published in November 1872, and had sold through three printings by Christmas. For Stanley was not only a great explorer, he was also one of the most talented writers ever to tell the tale of travel and discovery in Africa. His account of his journey through East Africa, and his time spent investigating Lake Tanganyika with Livingstone, is one of the classics of African exploration.»

'Who could read the programme for the excursion without longing to make one of the party'? So Mark Twain acclaims his voyage from New York City to Europe and the Holy Land in June 1867. His adventures produced The Innocents Abroad, a book so funny and provocative it made him an international star for the rest of his life. He was making his first responses to the Old World — to Paris, Milan, Florence, Venice, Pompeii, Constantinople, Sebastopol, Balaklava, Damascus, Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem. For the first time he was seeing the great paintings and sculptures of the 'Old Masters'. He responded with wonder and amazement, but also with exasperation, irritation, disbelief. Above all he displayed the great energy of his humour, more explosive for us now than for his beguiled contemporaries.

Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good persuade Allan Quatermain to help them find Sir Henry's brother George, who has gone missing in the unexplored African interior while searching for the legendary treasure trove of a lost kingdom. Quatermain agrees to lead the expedition, though he has little hope they will return alive.

Offers a series of vaguely connected stories that is linked by the presence of a monstrous and suppressed book which brings fright, madness and spectral tragedy to all those who read it. An air of futility and doom pervade these pages like a sweet insidious poison. Dare you read it?

The Little Prince is a modern parable for our time, of equal appeal to children and adults. This much loved story is joined by the following classic titles, to give a collection that has something for everyone, whatever their age: Black Beauty Little Women Alice in Wonderland The Secret Garden Robin Hood The Wind in the Willows The Railway Children The Jungle Book Peter Pan.

Who could have tried to murder Mademoiselle Stangerson, beautiful daughter of a famous radium scientist? And how could they have entered and escaped from a completely locked and watched room? With the Surete's top sleuth vying against him, Rouletabille is determined to prove only he can solve the case.

Once they had settled the eastern seaboard, the founding fathers of the great North American continent encouraged others to follow them to the land of opportunity. So the refugees, the poor and the oppressed, the adventurous and the foolhardy packed their all, they left the old-world shadows and set out with their hopes and dreams.

The exploits of Sweeney Todd, 'The Demon Barber of Fleet Street', have been recounted many times in plays, films and musicals. One great mystery that has surrounded the book is who the author was — or was it possibly the work of more than one man? The author has established finally the identity of the creator of this legendary figure.

This title is edited with an introduction by William Breeze Foreword by David Tibet. This volume brings together the uncollected short fiction of the poet, writer and religious philosopher Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). Crowley was a successful critic, editor and author of fiction from 1908 to 1922, and his short stories are long overdue for discovery. Of the forty-nine stories in the present volume, only thirty were published in his lifetime. Most of the rest appear here for the first time. Like their author, Crowley's stories are fun, smart, witty, thought-provoking and sometimes unsettling. They are set in places he had lived and knew well: Belle Epoque Paris, Edwardian London, pre-revolutionary Russia and America during the first World War. The title story The Drug stands as one of the first — if not the first-accounts of a psychedelic experience. His Black and Silver is a knowing early noir discovery that anticipates an entire genre. Atlantis is a masterpiece of occult fantasy, a dark satire that can stand with Samuel Butler's Erewhon. Frank Harris considered The Testament of Magdalen Blair the most terrifying tale ever written. Extensive editorial end-notes give full details about the stories.

This title includes an introduction by David Stuart Davies. Oliver Onions is unique in the realms of ghost story writers in that his tales are so far ranging in their background and substance that they are not easily categorised. His stories are powerfully charged explorations of psychical violence, their effects heightened by detailed character studies graced with a powerful poetic elegance. In simple terms Oliver Onions goes for the cerebral rather than the jugular. However, make no mistake, his ghost stories achieve the desired effect. They draw you in, enmeshing you in their unnerving and disturbing narratives. This collection contains such masterpieces as The Rosewood Door, The Ascending Dream, The Painted Face, and The Beckoning Fair One, a story which both Algernon Blackwood and H. P. Lovecraft regarded as one of the most effective and subtle ghost stories in all literature. Long out of print, these classic tales are a treasure trove of nightmarish gems.

This title features Introduction by David Stuart Davies. 'A grey cloud formed on the summit of the altar, diminishing, thickening and turning into a Shape, a shape of evil and fear. The silent group by the fire once more broke forth into wild gesticulations and cries, Stella prostrated herself, the Form on the altar grew clearer and with a cry of horror Mr Fowke turned away and rushed madly across the moor'. Amyas Northcote's In Ghostly Company is a rare and splendid collection of strange and disturbing tales from the golden age of ghost stories. His style is akin to that of the master of the genre M.R. James: it is measured and insidiously suggestive, producing unnerving chills rather than shocks and gasps. Northcote's tales make the reader unsettled and uneasy. This is partly due to the fact that the hauntings or strange occurrences take place in natural or mundane surroundings — surroundings familiar to the reader but never before thought of as unusual or threatening. Long out of print, this book remains an enthralling and chilling read.

Despite his insignificant appearance, Reeder is a cold and ruthless detective who credits his success to his 'criminal mind' which allows him to solve a series of complex and audacious crimes and outwit the most cunning of villainous masterminds.

The Good Soldier is a masterpiece of twentieth-century fiction, an inspiration for many later, distinguished writers, including Graham Greene. Set before the First World War, it tells the tale of two wealthy and sophisticated couples, one English, one American, as they travel, socialise, and take the waters in the spa towns of Europe. They are 'playing the game' in style. That game has begun to unravel, however, and with compelling attention to the comic, as well as the tragic, results the American narrator reveals his growing awareness of the sexual intrigues and emotional betrayals that lie behind its facade.

Here is a book no Christmas stocking should be without, a book that positively distils the spirit of the season. The title poem, familiar to children and adults the world over, introduces a collection of stories and verse with a Christmas theme, guaranteed to engage and amuse readers young and old. Likely to provoke laughter and sometimes to bring a sentimental tear to the driest eye, this festive treasure trove is ideal for reading aloud or curling up with in a comfy corner. Scrooge himself would have found it difficult to resist distributing copies on Christmas morning!

This title is selected and introduced by M.J. Elliott. 'They were removing the stones quietly, one by one, from the centuried wall. And then, as the breach became large enough, they came out into the laboratory in single file; led by a stalking thing with a beautiful head made of wax'. From the dark, mind-expanding imagination of H P Lovecraft, Wordsworth presents a third volume of tales penned by the greatest horror writer of the 20th Century. Here are some of Lovecraft's weirdest flesh-creeping masterpieces, including Pickman's Model, The Shunned House, his famous serial Herbert West — Reanimator, and several classic tales from the Cthulhu Mythos, in which mankind is subjected to the unimaginable terrors known only to those who have read from the forbidden Necronomicon. Also included in this compelling collection are the complete Randolph Carter stories, chronicling his adventures in this world and the realm of his dreams, where he faces perils beyond comprehension.

This title includes an introduction and notes by Professor Roger Cardinal. The author of dozens of adventure novels and fantastical tales, Robert Louis Stevenson was also an enthusiast of travel, whether wandering on foot through France in the company of a donkey, crossing the plains of North America in a train crammed with emigrants, or cruising under sail with his wife in the waters of the Pacific. A lively curiosity stimulated his observations of distant places and unknown people: and this selection from his travel writings bears the imprint of a generous and plucky spirit, always eager to embrace the unfamiliar and the exotic. 'There are no foreign lands', Stevenson once wrote, 'it is the traveller only who is foreign'. This volume includes the well-known Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879), along with The Amateur Emigrant (1895), Across the Plains (1892) and The Silverado Squatters (1883), and other material from Stevenson's American journeys. Roger Cardinal is Emeritus Professor of Literary & Visual Studies at the University of Kent, Canterbury, England. He is the author of Figures of Reality (1981) and The Landscape Vision of Paul Nash (1989). He has also written extensively on German Romanticism, Expressionism, Surrealism and Outsider Art.

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 patricide? 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 writhings of this one distunctional 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 David Stuart Davies. Here are two great, neglected horror novels by Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, together in one volume for the first time. It is a double treat for lovers of blood-curdling fantasy fiction.The Lady of the Shroud, published here in its full and unabridged form, is a fascinating and engrossing concoction of a vampire tale, Ruritanian adventure story and science fiction romance.The novel fully demonstrates the breadth and ingenuity of Stokers imagination. The spine-chilling The Lair of the White Worm features a monstrous worm secreted for thousands of years in a bottomless well and able to metamorphose into a seductive woman of a reptilian beauty who survives on her victims life blood. The novel contains some of Stokers most graphic and grisly moments of horror.

«When people use the adjective 'Kafkaesque', it is «The Trial» they have in mind – the nightmarish world of Joseph K., where the rules are hidden from even the highest officials, and any help there may be comes from unexpected sources. K. is never told what he is on trial for, and when he says he is innocent, he is immediately asked 'innocent of what?' Is he perhaps on trial for his innocence? Could he have freed himself from the proceedings by confessing his guilt as a human being? Has the trial been set up because he is incapable of admitting his guilt, and hence his humanity? «The Tria»l is a chilling and at the same time blackly amusing tale that maintains, to the very end, a constant, relentless atmosphere of disorientation and quirkiness. Superficially the subject-matter is bureaucracy, but the story's great strength is its description of the effect on the life and mind of Josef K. It is in the last resort a description of the absurdity of 'normal' human nature.»

«Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the most important and innovative figures of the European Middle Ages. Writing his «Comedy» (the epithet «Divine» was added by later admirers) in exile from his native Florence, he aimed to address a world gone astray both morally and politically. At the same time, he sought to push back the restrictive rules which traditionally governed writing in the Italian vernacular, to produce a radically new and all-encompassing work. The «Comedy» tells of the journey of a character who is at one and the same time both Dante himself and Everyman through the three realms of the Christian afterlife: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. He presents a vision of the afterlife which is strikingly original in its conception, with a complex architecture and a coherent structure. On this journey Dante’s protagonist – and his reader – meet characters who are variously noble, grotesque, beguiling, fearful, ridiculous, admirable, horrific and tender, and through them he is shown the consequences of sin, repentance and virtue, as he learns to avoid Hell and, through cleansing in Purgatory, to taste the joys of Heaven.»