Provides a comprehensive reference to short fiction from Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Commonwealth, featuring some of the most popular writers and works.

This anthology is in many was a ‘best of the best’, containing gems from thirty-four of Britain's outstanding contemporary writers. It is a book to dip into, to read from cover to cover, to lend to friends and read again. It includes stories of love and crime, stories touched with comedy and the supernatural, stories set in London, Los Angeles, Bucharest and Tokyo. Above all, as you will discover, it satisfies Samuel Butler's anarchic pleasure principle: 'I should like to like Schumann's music better than I do; I daresay I could make myself like it better if I tried; but I do not like having to try to make myself like things; I like things that make me like them at once and no trying at all ...'

Praise for the print edition:" ... comprehensive ... Recommended."

A comprehensive reference to short fiction from Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Commonwealth. With approximately 450 entries, this A-to-Z guide explores the literary contributions of such writers as Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, D H Lawrence, Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde, Katherine Mansfield, Martin Amis, and others.

The short story was a commercial phenomenon which took off in the late nineteenth century and lasted through to the rise of television and film. Baldwin uses a wide variety of sources to show how economic factors helped to dictate how and what a wide variety of authors wrote.

A valuable survey and reference resource It is hard to imagine a more needed and more useful literary reference work than this one, which gives students and readers quick access to the lives and work of a wide range of notable female writers from England and the Continent, from Aphra Behn to Emily Bronte, from Simone de Beauvoir to Isak Dinesen, from Bridget of Sweden to Hannah Arendt. Writers in more than 30 languages are included: French, Czech, Greek, Italian, Swedish, Spanish, German, Russian, Portuguese, Serbian, Catalan, Arabic, Hebrew, Dutch, Bulgarian, Croatian, Slovak, and more. Covers 1,500 years and all major genres Going back 15 centuries, the Encyclopedia covers the authors of novels, short stories, poetry, plays, criticism, social commentary, feminist manifestos, romances, mysteries, memoirs, children's literature, biography, and other genres. In signed entries, some of which are mini-essays, experts in the field examine writers' lives and achievements, comment on individual works, place artistic efforts in historical context, provide insights and analyses, and present more information than can be easily found elsewhere without undertaking more exhaustive research. Each entry is followed by a bibliography of primary works. Indexed by language, nationality, genre, and century. Spotlights the interesting lives of notable writers In these pages students and readers will meet hundreds of interesting women writers who made lasting contributions to the intellectual and popular culture of their countries while often leading fascinating lives, among them: * AGATHA CHRISTIE , who wrote her first book in response to her sister's demand for a detective story that was harder to solve than the popular fiction of her day, and whose work has been translated in more languages than Shakespeare's. * HILDEGARD VON BINGEN , the 12th-century German mystic, who wrote profusely as a prophet, a poet, a dramatist, a physician, and a political moralist, often communicated with popes and princes, and exerted a tremendous influence on the Western Europe of her time * MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY, whose 1818 masterpiece Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus became a literary sensation around the world * ILSE BLUMENTHAL-WEISS, one of the few concentration camp survivors to memorialize the victims of the Holocaust in German verse * LINA WERTMULLER, who in addition to her work in films, has written plays for the stage and a novel, and who once was a member of a short-lived puppet theater that staged the works of Kafka. Special features: Ideal for quick reference and student research * Multicultural-covers over 30 languages and 15 centuries * Includes many contemporary writers * Provides essential biographic data on each writer * Each entry is followed by a chronological listing of the writer's published book-length works * Offers critical evaluations of major works * Indexes help find writers by country...research by time period...survey genres...focus on languages

This materialist study of the short story’s development in three diverse magazines reveals how, at the dawn of modernism, commercial pressures prompted modernist formal innovation in popular magazines, whilst anti-commercial opacity paradoxically formed the basis of an effective marketing strategy that appealed to elitism. Integrating methods of cultural studies with formal analyses, this study builds upon recent work challenging Andreas Huyssen’s provocative formation, the "great divide" of modernism.

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • "Unforgettable tales of families and lovers—from Haiti to Miami, Brooklyn, and beyond—often struggling with grief, loss, and missed connections.” —Vanity Fair • A TODAY Show Read with Jenna Book Club Pick! A romance unexpectedly sparks between two wounded friends. A marriage ends for what seem like noble reasons, but with irreparable consequences. A young woman holds on to an impossible dream even as she fights for her survival. Two lovers reunite after unimaginable tragedy, both for their country and in their lives. A baby’s christening brings three generations of a family to a precarious dance between old and new. A man falls to his death in slow motion, reliving the defining moments of the life he is about to lose. Set in locales from Miami and Port-au-Prince to a small unnamed country in the Caribbean and beyond, here are eight emotionally absorbing stories, rich with hard-won wisdom and humanity. At once wide in scope and intimate, Everything Inside explores with quiet power and elegance the forces that pull us together or drive us apart, sometimes in the same searing instant.

This book represents a contribution to both border studies and short story studies. In today’s world, there is ample evidence of the return of borders worldwide: as material reality, as a concept, and as a way of thinking. This collection of critical essays focuses on the ways in which the contemporary British short story mirrors, questions and engages with border issues in national and individual life. At the same time, the concept of the border, as well as neighbouring notions of liminality and intersectionality, is used to illuminate the short story’s unique aesthetic potential. The first section, “Geopolitics and Grievable Lives”, includes chapters that address the various ways in which contemporary stories engage with our newly bordered world and borders within contemporary Britain. The second section examines how British short stories engage with “Ethnicity and Liminal Identities”, while the third, “Animal Encounters and Metamorphic Bodies”, focuses on stories concerned with epistemological borders and borderlands of existence and identity. Taken together, the chapters in this volume demonstrate the varied and complex ways in which British short stories in the twenty-first century engage with the concept of the border.

Bowett charts the species, sources, and history of the woods used in British furniture making from medieval times to the twentieth century. The main dictionary section of the book has 460 entries that cover 477 species of hardwoods and softwoods and detail the history of each wood, describe its uses, and provide cross references to other woods. Extensively illustrated with examples of historic furniture, this book also includes an introductory survey of the historic timber trade and several appendices, including over 160 illustrated wood samples from the Economic Botany collection at Kew Gardens. The layout and accompanying photographs make this a valuable and accessible read that will interest furniture and antique enthusiasts, collectors, restorers, curators, and botanists, among others.