This is volume one of a multi-volume collected works series featuring G.K. Chesterton's writings between 1891-1922. Enjoy his wit and humor mingled with deep insights within this volume through four of his fictional works: The Ball and the Cross, MANALIVE, Napoleon of Notting Hill, and The Flying Inn.

Americans hunger for something real to believe in—leaders and ideas that actually work to make their lives better. The current political system is not satisfying this hunger and people are rebelling. Polished, experienced candidates in both the Democrat and Republican parties are facing stiff competition from radical, but more authentic, candidates. Jim DeMint and Rachel Bovard make a rock-solid case for why the principles that made America the freest, most prosperous nation in world history must be reclaimed to prevent our demise. Conservative is the simple truth on which this book is built; we all tend to keep what works. This exploration delivers the goods on what has and will work for America.

Nihilism, Modernism, and Value consists of three jargon-free lectures addressed to the general reader. It explores a variety of ways in which writers responded to the phenomenon of nihilism in the 19th and early 20th centuries, By "nihilism" here is meant a sense, at times paralyzing, of the instability and perhaps groundlessness of all values. The book goes into some of the factors— psychological, sociological, philosophical—involved in that destabilizing. But its principal focus is on reintegration, and it draws freely on real-world experiences to illuminate concepts and strategies. Among the writers whose names figure in it are Conrad, Nietzsche, Beckett, Woolf, Heidegger, Rhys, Pushkin, Baudelaire, Hemingway, Lessing, Stevens, Valéry, and James (William), with particular attention at one point to Kafka and Borges. But no prior knowledge of them is required for following the argument, with its numerous lively quotations. The author himself is advancing heuristically, not just performing an academic exercise. The problems confronted are as relevant still as they were generations ago. A reviewer of John Fraser's first book spoke of "an extremely agile and incessantly active mind which illuminates almost every subject it touches." A reviewer of the second one, both of them published by Cambridge University Press, called it "a brilliant and utterly absorbing work," and said that "There are not many learned books which have the unputdownable quality of a thriller; this is one of them."

This is the first book to offer a comprehensive survey of the phenomenon of the absurd in a full literary context (that is to say, primarily in fiction, as well as in theatre).

The contributors to this volume all pay tribute to, and seek to account for, the astonishing durability of the detective story as a narrative genre. The essays range generously, taking a variety of theoretical approaches and including detective fiction in languages other than English, but particular attention is paid to the `Golden Age' of English detective story writing and to the `hard-boiled' American version on the genre. This is a collection that will appeal to the scholar and to the devotee alike, to all those, in fact, who can never resist the lure of finding out whodunnit.

There passes before us a drama of modern life and pleasure, of glorious youth and love, of tragedy and triumph, of human nature at its worst and best in the challenging personalities of Julian Verrers and the Masterful Monk. Originally published in 1929, The Masterful Monk by English author Owen Francis Dudley was the third of a series of six volumes dealing with problems of human happiness. The first book, Will Men be like Gods?, was an answer to the slanderers of Religion; the second, The Shadow on the Earth, to the slanderers of God. In The Masterful Monk, Dudley endeavours “to meet the modern attack upon Man and his moral nature launched by those who would degrade him to the level of an animal.”

Four members of a London club relate their former careers in crime

Australia has been seen as a land of both punishment and refuge. Australian literature has explored these controlling alternatives, and vividly rendered the landscape on which they transpire. Twentieth-century writers left Australia to see the world; now Australia’s distance no longer provides sanctuary. But today the global perspective has arrived with a vengeance. In Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead, Nicholas Birns tells the story of how novelists, poets and critics, from Patrick White to Hannah Kent, from Alexis Wright to Christos Tsiolkas, responded to this condition. With rancour, concern and idealism, modern Australian literature conveys a tragic sense of the past yet an abiding vision of the way forward. Birns paints a vivid picture of a rich Australian literary voice – one not lost to the churning of global markets, but in fact given new life by it. Contrary to the despairing of the critics, Australian literary identity continues to flourish. And as Birns finds, it is not one thing, but many. "In this remarkable, bold and fearless book, Nicholas Birns contests how literary cultures are read, how they are constituted and what they stand for … In examining the nature of the barriers between public and private utterance, and looking outside the absurdity of the rules of genre, Birns has produced a redemptive analysis that leaves hope for revivifying a world not yet dead." - John Kinsella