The Lottery, one of the most terrifying stories written in the twentieth century, created a sensation when it was published in 1948. Today it is considered a classic work of short fiction, remarkable for its combination of subtle suspense and pitch-perfect descriptions of both the chilling and the mundane. This collection, the only one to appear during Shirley Jackson's lifetime, unites The Lottery with twenty-four equally unusual stories. Together they demonstrate Jackson's remarkable range — encompassing the hilarious and the horrible, the unsettling and the ominous — as well as her power as a storyteller.

Four seekers have arrived at the rambling old pile known as Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of psychic phenomena; Theodora, his lovely and lighthearted assistant; Luke, the adventurous future inheritor of the estate; and Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman with a dark past. As they begin to cope with chilling, even horrifying occurrences beyond their control or understanding, they cannot possibly know what lies ahead. For Hill House is gathering its powers — and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.

Australia is a lucky country, run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck. The phrase 'the lucky country' has become part of our lexicon; it's forever being invoked in debates about the Australian way of life, but is all too often misused by those blind to Horne's irony. When it was first published in 1964, The Lucky Country caused a sensation. Horne took Australian society to task for its philistinism, provincialism and dependence. The book was a wake-up call to an unimaginative nation, an indictment of a country mired in mediocrity and manacled to its past. Although it's a study of the confident Australia of the 1960s, the book still remains illuminating and insightful decades later. The Lucky Country is valuable not only as a source of continuing truths and revealing snapshots of the past, but above all as a key to understanding the anxieties and discontents of Australian society today.

This important piece of Australian fiction is republished for the first time as a Penguin Modern Classic. Elizabeth Jolley's award-winning novel is presented in a fresh, new format that is a must-have for lovers of Australian literature. Miss Hester Harper, middle-aged and eccentric, brings Katherine into her emotionally impoverished life. Together they sew, cook gourmet dishes for two, run the farm, make music and throw dirty dishes down the well. One night, driving along the deserted track that leads to the farm, they run into a mysterious creature. They heave the body from the roo bar and dump it into the farm's deep well. But the voice of the injured intruder will not be stilled and, most disturbing of all, the closer Katherine is drawn to the edge of the well, the farther away she gets from Hester.

A masterpiece of Russian prose, Lermontov's only novel was influential for many later nineteenth-century authors, including Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov. Lermontov's hero, Pechorin, is a dangerous man, Byronic in his wasted gifts and his cynicism, and desperate for any kind of action that will stave off boredom. In five linked episodes, Lermontov builds up a portrait of a man caught in and expressing the sickness of his times.

With old loyalties tested by new and unlikely alliances, Miss Temple, Doctor Svenson, and Cardinal Chang must call on every reserve of courage to face a new and desperate struggle — after all, the integrity of their very minds is at risk. From palace intrigue and a city in turmoil to wolf-haunted mountains, underground tunnels and a suspicious hidden factory, they must overcome war and heartache to battle old enemies and a host of new villains, all hoping to seize for themselves the power of the blue glass books. Now one glass book in particular drives them all, its deadly contents the key to controlling the secrets of the blue glass, or destroying it forever. Praise for The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters: A page-turner, a rollicking ride. As stupendous as it is stupefying — Giles Foden, Guardian. Fantastic... I was in seventh heaven... Somewhere between Dickens, Sherlock Holmes and Rider Haggard — Kate Mosse, author of Labyrinth.

Katie Drake was an affluent single mother living in Queen's Park — until someone cut her throat and tore out her tongue. Worse still, the killer has abducted her fourteen-year-old daughter, Naomi. Detective Chief Inspector Grant Foster quickly sees chilling parallels with the disappearance of teenager Leonie Stamey three years earlier. With hopes fading of finding Naomi alive, he calls on genealogist Nigel Barnes to piece together the links between the families of the two girls. The trail leads Nigel back to 1890, when a young couple arrived in the UK. A husband and wife fleeing a terrible crime in their past, and harbouring a secret that's now having bloody repercussions in the present.

Spot has fun on the beach in this classic lift-the-flap tale by Eric Hill. This is a reissue of the popular board book edition with a coloured cover.

«How did George Eliot's love life affect her prose? Why did Kafka write at three in the morning? In what ways is Barack Obama like Eliza Doolittle? Can you be over-dressed for the Oscars? What is Italian Feminism? If Roland Barthes killed the Author, can Nabokov revive him? What does 'soulful' mean? Is «Date Movie» the worst film ever made? Split into five sections — Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling and Remembering — «Changing My Mind» finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material both personal and cultural. This engaging collection of essays — some published here for the first time — reveals Smith as a passionate and precise essayist, equally at home in the world of great books and bad movies, family and philosophy, British comedians and Italian divas. Whether writing of Obama, Katherine Hepburn, Kafka, Anna Magnani or David Foster Wallace, she brings a practitioner's care to the art of criticism, with a style as sympathetic as it is insightful. «Changing My Mind» is journalism at its most expansive, intelligent and funny — a gift to readers and writers both. Within its covers an essay is more than a column of opinions: it's a space in which to think freely.»

When Lolita was first published in 1955 it created a sensation and established Nabokov as one of the most original prose writers of the twentieth century. This annotated edition, a revised and considerably expanded version of the 1970 edition, does full justice to the textual riches of Lolita, illuminating the elaborate verbal textures and showing how they contribute to the novel's overall meaning. Alfred Appel, Jr. also provides fresh observations on the novel's artifice, games and verbal patternings and a delightful biographical vignette of Nabokov. The annotations themselves were prepared in consultation with Nabokov while newly identified allusions were confirmed by him during the final years of his life.

Oh, if you were the kind of man I am … I loved the shame of depravity. I loved cruelty … In a word – a Karamazov!’ The murder of brutal landowner Fyodor Karamazov changes the lives of his sons irrevocably: Mitya, the sensualist, whose bitter rivalry with his father immediately places him under suspicion for parricide; Ivan, the intellectual, whose mental tortures drive him to breakdown; the spiritual Alyosha, who tries to heal the family’s rifts; and the shadowy figure of their bastard half-brother Smerdyakov. As the ensuing investigation and trial reveal the true identity of the murderer, Dostoyevsky’s dark masterwork evokes a world where the lines between innocence and corruption, good and evil blur, and everyone’s faith in humanity is tested. This powerful translation of The Brothers Karamazov features an introduction highlighting Dostoyevsky’s recurrent themes of guilt and salvation, with a new chronology and further reading.

Credited with inventing the modern horror tradition, H. P. Lovecraft remade the genre in the early twentieth century, discarding ghosts and witches and instead envisaging mankind at the mercy of a chaotic and malevolent universe. This selection of stories ranges from early tales of nightmares and insanity such as ‘The Outsider’ and ‘Rats in the Walls’, through the grotesquely comic ‘Herbert West – Reanimator’ and ‘The Hound’, to the extra-terrestrial terror of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, which fuses traditional supernaturalism with science fiction. Including the definitive corrected texts, this collection reveals the development of Lovecraft’s mesmerizing narrative style and establishes him as a hugely influential – and visionary – American writer. Edited with an Introduction by S. T. Joshi.

Chichikov, a mysterious stranger, arrives in the provincial town of 'N', visiting a succession of landowners and making each a strange offer. He proposes to buy the names of dead serfs still registered on the census, saving their owners from paying tax on them, and to use these 'souls' as collateral to re-invent himself as a gentleman. In this ebullient masterpiece, Gogol created a grotesque gallery of human types, from the bear-like Sobakevich to the insubstantial fool Manilov, and, above all, the devilish con man Chichikov. Dead Souls, Russia's first major novel, is one of the most unusual works of nineteenth-century fiction and a devastating satire on social hypocrisy.

Remember when cereal boxes came with a free prize inside? You already liked the cereal, but once you saw that there was a free prize inside — something small yet precious — it became irresistible. In his new book, Seth Godin shows how you can make your customers feel that way again. Free Prize Inside is jammed with practical ideas you can use right now to MAKE SOMETHING HAPPEN, no matter what kind of company you work for. Something irresistible. Something that markets itself. Because everything we do is marketing — even if you're not in the marketing department. Here's a step-by-step way to get your organization to do something remarkable: quickly, cheaply and reliably. You don't need an MBA or a huge budget. All you need is a strategy for finding great ideas and convincing others to help you make them happen.

The Wilson family was torn apart the night little Christopher was almost killed ... Though the two year-old survives the brutal attack by his drunken father, his older sister Kaitlyn is convinced it's all her fault. Christopher is taken into care and never returns to the family home on the notorious Roxford estate in South London. But the bond between the siblings remains strong, and as Kaitlyn gets older she dreams of a new life away from the violence of the estate and her mother's dangerous addictions. But most of all, she dreams of being reunited with her little brother. Will Kaitlyn's dreams ever come true? And if they do, could they really turn into a nightmare? Kaitlyn is the heart-rending story of a family ripped apart by tragedy and reunited by a twist of fate that threatens to destroy all their lives — and of a girl who has to choose between everything she has worked for, and the only family she has every known.

An indispensable companion to this country of inspiring landscapes and rich culture. The map covers every corner, taking in the handsome architecture of Prague to the spa towns of West Bohemia and the alpine splendour of the high Tatra mountains. for those travelling by car, there is detail of the road surfaces, distances between towns, road numbers, petrol stations and places of interest from castles to viewpoints. For the visitor reliant on public transport, the map details train lines and stations. The scale of 1:350,000 allows for details of the smallest hamlet and unsurfaced track or path, enabling the visitor to get off the beaten path without getting lost.

Kerstin Kvist enters crumbling Lydstep Old Hall to live with the Cosways and to act as nurse to John: a grown man fed drugs by his family to control his lunatic episodes. But John's strangeness is grotesquely mirrored in that of his four sisters who roam the dark, mazy Essex country house under the strict gaze of eighty-year-old Mrs Cosway. Despite being treated as an outsider, Kerstin is nevertheless determined to help John. But she soon discovers that there are others in the family who are equally as determined that John remain isolated, for sinister reasons of their own ...

Audacious, controversial and hilarious, The Monkey Wrench Gang is Edward Abbey's masterpiece — a big, boisterous and unforgettable novel about freedom and commitment that ignited the flames of environmental activism. Throughout the vast American West, nature is being vicitimized by a Big Government / Big Business conspiracy of bridges, dams and concrete. But a motley gang of individuals has decided that enough is enough, A burnt-out veteran, a mad doctor and a polygamist join forces in a noble cause: to dismantle the machinery of progress through peaceful means, or otherwise.