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‘The body was cold as ice; the heart had long ceased to beat: yet there were no other signs of death.’ The phantoms and ghouls of Japanese folklore are in this book driven back into the world of the living. Mysterious brides melt into mist, paintings come alive, and man-eating goblins barter for redemption. Traditional Japanese folktales and legends, infused with memories of Lafcadio Hearn’s own haunted childhood, are here masterfully retold.
What does it mean to live a virtuous life? How can we rise above pain and anguish? In these teachings from Book 1 of his Discourses, ancient philosopher Epictetus outlines a practical approach to Stoicism that has inspired thinkers for centuries, from Marcus Aurelius to Theodore Roosevelt, offering enduring wisdom on resilience, virtue and the pursuit of meaning.
Few artists’ letters are as self-revelatory as Vincent van Gogh’s. From the humanistic inspiration behind The Potato Eaters to his long-time obsession with painting the vision that eventually became ‘The Starry Night’, the letters in this selection paint an intense personal narrative of his artistic development and creative process across the years. They reveal a man of great spiritual and emotional depths who – in his own words – did everything ‘for art and for life itself’.
In the city of Lisbon, Requiem’s narrator has an appointment to meet someone on a quay by the Tagus at twelve. Misunderstanding twelve to mean noon as opposed to midnight, he is left to wait. As the day unfolds he has many unexpected encounters – with a young drug addict, a disorientated taxi driver, a cemetery keeper, the mysterious Isabel and the ghost of the late great poet Fernando Pessoa – each meeting travelling between the real and illusionary.
‘How I Came To Know Fish’ is Ota Pavel’s magical memoir of his childhood in Czechoslovakia. Fishing with his father and his Uncle Prosek – the two finest fisherman in the world – he takes a peaceful pleasure from the rivers and ponds of his country.
Baron Bagge, a cavalry officer stationed in Eastern Europe during the First World War, receives orders to ride into a platoon of Russian machine guns. But instead of meeting certain death, he and his brigade pass, unscathed, into a strangely peaceful land where festivities are in full swing. There he meets Charlotte Szent-Kiraly, and finds himself falling in a strange, enchanted love – a love harrowed at its edges by the threat of the enemy, and the peculiar fragility of this country’s otherworldly peace. ‘Baron Bagge’ is both a perfect ghost story and a perfect love story – a tale to which the word ‘haunting’ can be applied in every possible permutation. This edition includes a new introduction, and an exchange between Lernet-Holenia and Stefan Zweig.
In these exquisite stories from the genius of English modernism, everyday objects acquire profound significance: a lump of buried green glass leads to a lifetime of obsession; a mark on the wall prompts a questioning of reality itself; a pale-yellow silk dress provokes a painful self-reckoning. Beautiful, strange and pioneering, each piece is a small precious stone to be held to the light and savoured.
Known as Ireland’s Chekhov, Frank O’Connor was a master of the modern short story, with an eye for capturing the spaces between our selves and our surroundings. ‘The Genius’ brings together some of his very best stories, often told from the perspective of young children and forming a revealing portrait of coming of age in postwar Ireland.
Longing shimmers from these spare but profoundly moving short stories by one of Denmark’s most fearless and sharp-eyed authors. In these tales of inarticulate desire and repression, Ditlevsen pulls to the surface our deepest interiorities in devastating, exacting prose.
One of the finest poets of the Victorian age, Christina Rosetti is known today for the directness, clarity and unmatched lyricism of her works. This selection brings together some of her finest verses, love lyrics and sonnets for the contemporary reader. Spanning themes like love, death, loss, womanhood and devotion to pleasures both earthly and divine, these are poems of startling beauty, as evocative and relevant today as when they were first published.
Rabindranath Tagore was one of the greatest authors to ever live. In these two short stories – ‘The Broken Nest’ and ‘Dead or Alive’ – he is at his devastating best, charting the slow, then fast, implosion of two perfect Bengali households. No-one understands each other; everything is misconstrued; all is lost.
Impassioned and profound, the poems in ‘Coal’ showcase Audre Lorde in all her dazzling elegance and multiplicity. Mournful, celebratory, politically conscious, this early collection is a testament to Lorde’s beloved and hugely influential lyric voice, which faithfully captures the complex interiority of the self. These timeless poems resonate down the years.
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