This carefully edited collection has been designed and formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. Table of Contents: Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) was an English short story writer and novelist, one of the most prolific writers of ghost stories in the history of the genre. Blackwood wrote a number of horror stories. His most work seeks less to frighten than to induce a sense of awe. Blackwood's best known stories are "The Willows" and "The Wendigo". Contents: The Willows The Insanity of Jones Ancient Sorceries The Man Who Found Out The Wendigo The Glamour of the Snow The Man Whom the Trees Loved Sand

By turns bizarre, unsettling, spooky, and sublime, Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories showcases nine incomparable stories from master conjuror Algernon Blackwood. Evoking the uncanny spiritual forces of Nature, Blackwood's writings all tread the nebulous borderland between fantasy, awe, wonder, and horror. Here Blackwood displays his best and most disturbing work-including "The Willows," which Lovecraft singled out as "the single finest weird tale in literature"; "The Wendigo"; "The Insanity of Jones"; and "Sand." For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Adventures come to the adventurous, and mysterious things fall in the way of those who, with wonder and imagination, are on the watch for them; but the majority of people go past the doors that are half ajar, thinking them closed, and fail to notice the faint stirrings of the great curtain that hangs ever in the form of appearances between them and the world of causes behind. For only to the few whose inner senses have been quickened, perchance by some strange suffering in the depths, or by a natural temperament bequeathed from a remote past, comes the knowledge, not too welcome, that this greater world lies ever at their elbow, and that any moment a chance combination of moods and forces may invite them to cross the shifting frontier.

This collection assembles four of Blackwood's greatest stories: "The Insanity of Jones," "The Man Who Found Out," "The Glamour of the Snow," and "Sand." Algernon Blackwood was truly one of the progenitors of the weird fiction/fantasy genre!

The writer of this book was well-known for his tales of the supernatural and horror. The book begins with a series of diary entries, describing the author's search for accommodation in London. We learn that he is of limited means and sells the occasional piece for a magazine. The rooms are described as ramshackle and dusty. He is the only occupant in the whole house and previous tenants have gone. Without saying so, there is a sense of unease even in the opening pages.

This horror story has a man unable to distinguish between what is real and not real in a museum and finding out in a very horrific way. Stephen King said "H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale."

The acclaimed author’s first collection of stories “Gayl Jones’s work represents a watershed in American literature. From a literary standpoint, her form is impeccable . . . and as a Black woman writer, her truth-telling, filled with beauty, tragedy, humor, and incisiveness, is unmatched.” —Imani Perry Gayl Jones has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century and was recently a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and The National Book Award. This collection of short fiction was her third book, originally edited and published by Toni Morrison in 1977, and is reissued now alongside her second collection, BUTTER, in paperback for the first time. The collection contains twelve provocative tales that explore the emotional and mental terrain of a diverse cast of characters, from the innocent to the insane. In each, Jones displays her unflinching ability to dive into the most treacherous of psyches and circumstances: the title story examines the identity and relationship conundrums of a black man who can pass for white, earning him the name “White Rat” as an infant; “The Women” follows a girl whose mother brings a line of female lovers to live in their home; “Jevata” details eighteen-year-old Freddy’s relationship with the fifty-year-old title character; “The Coke Factory” tracks the thoughts of a mentally handicapped adolescent abandoned by his mother; and “Asylum” focuses on a woman having a nervous breakdown, trying to protect her dignity and her private parts as she enters an institution. In uncompromising prose, and dialect that veers from northern, educated tongues to down-home southern colloquialisms, Jones illuminates lives that society ignores, moving them to center stage.

Pity represents a combination of fear, helplessness and overwhelming agitation. It is a term which suffuses our everyday lives; it is also a dangerous term hovering between approval of sympathy and disapproval of emotional wallowing (as in 'self-pity'). This book traces an entire history of pity, as an emotion and as an element in the arts, engaging as it does so with a wealth of theoretical ideas including Freud, Derrida, Levinas and others. It begins with an 'Introduction: Distinguishing Pity', followed by chapters on the Aristotelian framework; Buddhism and pity; the pieta in the Middle Ages and Renaissance; Shakespeare on pity; Milton's pitiless Christianity; pity and charity in the early novel; Blake's views on pity; the Victorian debate, from Austen to Dickens and George Eliot; Brecht and Chekhov on pity and self-pity; 'war, and the pity of war'; Jean Rhys and Stevie Smith; pity, immigration and the colony; and finally three contemporary texts by Michel Faber, Kazuo Ishiguro and Cormac McCarthy.Features* Original treatment of the concept of pity providing detailed textual criticism and speculative argument* Wide-ranging: running from ancient Greek theory to the present day* Covers a wide variety of texts, including fiction, poetry and drama* Engages with the most recent theoretical debates about literature and the emotions

This carefully crafted ebook: "Ancient Sorceries and Other Tales" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Table of Contents: Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) was an English short story writer and novelist, one of the most prolific writers of ghost stories in the history of the genre. Blackwood wrote a number of horror stories. His most work seeks less to frighten than to induce a sense of awe. Blackwood's best known stories are "The Willows" and "The Wendigo". Contents: The Willows The Insanity of Jones Ancient Sorceries The Man Who Found Out The Wendigo The Glamour of the Snow The Man Whom the Trees Loved Sand