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  Under the Volcano - A Novel

  Malcolm Lowry

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  “Lowry’s masterpiece” about a fateful Day of the Dead in a small Mexican town and one man’s struggle against the forces threatening to destroy him (Los Angeles Times). In what the New York Times calls “one of the towering novels of [the twentieth] century,” former British consul Geoffrey Firmin lives alone with his demons in the shadow of two active volcanoes in South Central Mexico. Gripped by alcoholism, Geoffrey makes one last effort to salvage his crumbling life on the day that his ex-wife, Yvonne, arrives in town.   It’s the Day of the Dead, 1938. The couple wants to revive their marriage and undo the wrongs of their past, but they soon realize that they’ve stumbled into the wrong place and time, where not only Geoffrey and Yvonne, but the world itself is on the edge of Armageddon.   Hailed by the Modern Library as one of the one hundred best English novels of the twentieth century, Under the Volcano stands as an iconic and richly drawn example of the modern novel at its most lyrical.

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  Dracula

  Bram Stoker

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  Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker. Famous for introducing the character of the vampire Count Dracula, the novel tells the story of Dracula's attempt to move from Transylvania to England so he may find new blood and spread undead curse, and the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and women led by Professor Abraham Van Helsing. Dracula has been assigned to many literary genres including vampire literature, horror fiction, the gothic novel and invasion literature. The novel touches on themes such as the role of women in Victorian culture, sexual conventions, immigration, colonialism, and post-colonialism. Although Stoker did not invent the vampire, he defined its modern form, and the novel has spawned numerous theatrical, film and television interpretations

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  Thoughts on Cheapness and My...

  H. G. Wells

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  "Thoughts on Cheapness and My Aunt Charlotte" by H. G. Wells is a short essay. H. G. Wells once different, humorous social satire and ironic.The world mends. In my younger days people believed in mahogany; some of my readers will remember it - a heavy, shining substance, having a singularly close resemblance to raw liver, exceedingly heavy to move, and esteemed on one or other count the noblest of all woods.

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  Mathilda

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

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  The second novel from Mary Shelley, written in 1819/20 but not published in full until 1959. The story deals with common Romantic themes, but also incest and suicide. 
  Narrating from her deathbed, Mathilda tells the story of her unnamed father’s confession of incestuous love for her, followed by his suicide by drowning; her relationship with a gifted young poet called Woodville fails to reverse Matilda’s emotional withdrawal or prevent her lonely death. The act of writing this short novel distracted Mary Shelley from her grief after the deaths of her one-year-old daughter Clara at Venice in September 1818 and her three-year-old son William in June 1819 in Rome. These losses plunged Mary Shelley into a depression that distanced her emotionally and sexually from Percy Shelley and left her, as he put it, “on the hearth of pale despair”. 
  The story may be seen as a metaphor for what happens when a woman, ignorant of all consequences, follows her own heart while dependent on her male benefactor. 
  Mary Shelley sent the finished Mathilda to her father in England, to submit for publication. However, though Godwin admired aspects of the novel, he found the incest theme “disgusting and detestable” and failed to return the manuscript despite his daughter’s repeated requests. In the light of Percy Shelley’s later death by drowning, Mary Shelley came to regard the novel as ominous; she wrote of herself and Jane Williams “driving (like Mathilda) towards the sea to learn if we were to be for ever doomed to misery”. The novel was published for the first time in 1959, edited by Elizabeth Nitchie from dispersed papers. It has become possibly Mary Shelley’s best-known work after Frankenstein.

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  She

  Henry Rider Haggard

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  Ludwig Horace Holly, a Cambridge professor, travels to Africa with his   adopted son Leo to investigate the death of Kallicrates, Leo’s ancestor, who was murdered by an unknown woman centuries before. 
  They encounter the Amahagger, a fierce tribe of cannibals who live in the caves of Kôr, a huge burial ground of an ancient civilisation decimated by plague.The tribe are ruled over by She-who-must-be-obeyed [Ayesha], a mysterious and ruthless Queen who has the secret of eternal life while still possessing the beauty and radiance of a young woman. She has lived, virtually alone, for 2,000 years awaiting the return of her lover Kallicrates, whom she killed in a fit of jealous rage. When Ayesha sees Leo she believes him to be the reincarnation of the man who spurned her. A bewitching temptress, naively flirtatious but capable of horrific acts of malevolence, she will not be thwarted a second time. They will both bathe in the Eternal Flame before their marriage! 
  Not without sudden flashes of humour She is an intriguing story set in the "Dark Continent" with a mix of sex and the supernatural which thrilled the Victorians and still - one hundred years later -  continues to enthrall.

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  The The Best of Saki Volume 3

  Saki Saki

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  The delicious, biting wit of Saki's short stories satirizing Edwardian high society are some of the funniest and most delightful of exquisite literary miniatures. In this third volume, there are 21 glittering examples.Saki was the pen name of Hector Hugh Monro. He was born in Burma in 1870, where his father was a senior official in the Burma Police. From the age of two, he lived with two maiden aunts and his grandmother in Devon, and was educated in Exmouth and at the Bedford Grammar School. Later he traveled in Europe with his father. He joined the Burma police, but resigned after a year because of ill health and returned to England where he began his writing career as a journalist and short story writer for magazines and newspapers. Saki is regarded as a master of the short story.At the start of the First World War he refused a commission, enlisted as a private, and went to France where - in November 1916 - he was killed by a shot to the head, his last words being "Put that bloody cigarette out."Public Domain (P)2016 Spiders' House Audio/Roy Macready

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