This selection of Poe's critical writings, short fiction and poetry demonstrates an intense interest in aesthetic issues and the astonishing power and imagination with which he probed the darkest corners of the human mind.

The stories in this volume demonstrate Dostoyevsky's genius for fusing caricature, irony and the grotesque to create a powerful dark humour. Jessie Coulson's introduction examines the personal and financial dramas that influenced Dostoyevsky.

Sarah is a narcoleptic who has dreams so vivid she mistakes them for real events; Robert has had his life changed for ever by the misunderstandings arising from her condition; Terry, the insomniac, spends his wakeful nights fuelling his obsession with movies; and the increasingly unstable Dr Gregory Dudden sees sleep as a life-shortening disease which must be eradicated. A group of students sharing a house. They fall in and out of love, they drift apart. Yet a decade later they are drawn back together by a series of coincidences involving their obsession with sleep — and each other...

Nina Landry has given up city life for the isolated community of Sandling Island, lying off the bleak east coast of England. At night the wind howls. Sometimes they are cut off by the incoming tide. For Nina though it is home. It is safe. But when Nina's teenage daughter Charlie fails to return from a sleepover on the day they're due to go on holiday, the island becomes a different place altogether — a place of secrets and suspicions where no one — friends, neighbours or the police — believes Nina's instinctive fear that her daughter is in terrible danger. Alone, she undergoes a frantic search for Charlie. And as day turns to night, she begins to doubt not just whether they'll leave the island for their holiday — but whether they will ever leave it again.

Hewn into the towering cliffs of central Greece, the Meteora monasteries are all but inacessible. The Holy Trinity is the most isolated, its sacred brotherhood the guardians of a long-forgotten secret. In the dead of night, the sanctity of the holy retreat is shattered by an elite group of warriors, carrying ancient weapons. One by one, they hurl the silent monks from the cliff-top — the holy men taking their secret to their rocky graves. Halfway across Europe, a terrified academic fears for his life. Richard Byrd has nearly uncovered the location of one of the Seven Ancient Wonders — the statue of Zeus and his mighty throne. But Byrd's search has also uncovered a forbidden conspiracy, and there are those who would do anything to conceal its dark agenda...

Assassin, art-restorer and spy, Gabriel Allon, is summoned once more by his masters to undertake what appears to be a routine assignment: travel to Amsterdam to purge the archives of a murdered Dutch terrorism analyst. But once in Amsterdam, Gabriel soon discovers there is a conspiracy of terror festering in the city's Islamic underground, a plot that is about to explode on the other side of the English Channel, in the middle British capital.

The Shooting Party wraps a story of concealed love and fatal jealousy into a classic murder mystery. When a young woman dies during a shooting party at the country estate of a dissolute count, a magistrate is called to investigate. But suspicion descends upon virtually everyone, for, as we soon learn, the victim was at the center of a tangled web of relationshipsawith her elderly husband, with the lecherous count, and with the magistrate himself. One of Anton Chekhovas earliest experiments in fiction, this short, riveting novel prefigures the mature style he would develop in his magnificent stories and plays.

Alexander Pushkin was Russia's first true literary genius. Best known for his poetry, he also wrote sparkling prose that revealed his national culture with elegance and understated humour. Here, his gift for portraying the Russian people is fully revealed. The Tales of Belkin, his first prose masterpiece, presents a series of interlinked stories narrated by a good-hearted Russian squire — among them The Shot, in which a duel is revisited after many years, and the grotesque The Undertaker. Elsewhere, works such as the novel-fragment Roslavlev and the Egyptian Nights, the tale of an Italian balladeer seeking an audience in St. Petersberg, demonstrate the wide range of Pushkin's fiction. A Journey to Arzrum, the final piece in this collection, offers an autobiographical account of Pushkin's own experiences in the 1829 war between Russia and Turkey, and remains one of the greatest of all pieces of journalistic adventure writing.

«Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's «One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest» is the seminal novel of the 1960s that has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the awesome powers that keep them all imprisoned.»

A spy, a killer, an imposter, and three extraordinary heroes are featured in one unique novel. In The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters...three most-unlikely but nevertheless extraordinary heroes become inadvertently involved in the diabolical machinations of a cabal bent upon enslaving thousands through a devilish 'process': Miss Temple is a feisty young woman with corkscrew curls who wishes only to learn why her fiance Roger broke off their engagement...Cardinal Chang was asked to kill a man, but finding his quarry already dead he is determined to learn who beat him to it and why...And Dr Svenson is chaperone to a dissolute Prince who has become involved with some most unsavoury individuals...An adventure like no other, in a mysterious city few have travelled to, featuring a heroine and two heroes you will never ever forget.

Lucy stole her friend Rose's 'happily ever after' because she wanted Rose's husband, Peter, and Lucy always gets what she wants. Big mistake. Rose was the ideal wife and is the ideal mother; Lucy was the perfect mistress. Connie — best friend to both Lucy and Rose — is stuck in the middle. She's got Lucy's worries about being wife, mother and career bitch in one ear and Rose's struggle at being a plain old single mum in the other. But Connie has her own troubles: she's just got the hang of family life when an old flame pops up to rekindle a bit of passion...on the side. For Rose, Lucy and Connie — young wives all — it looks like there's a few more twists in the marriage tale still to come.

The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels is the ultimate companion to the expanding world of the 'literary comic book'. Written by comic industry insider Danny Fingeroth, it includes the mediums' history, from sequential art in Egyptian tombs, through the superhero boom of the 1940s to the birth of the graphic novel movement and the latest online offerings. All you need to know about the best and rest with 60 must-read graphic novels, including the genre-defining Maus and A Contract with God, plus modern classics-in-the-making Fun Home and Alice in Sunderland. The guide profiles the movements legends including Harvey Pekar, Chris Ware, Denis Kitchen and other amazing illustrators, writers and publishers who've helped win respect for this once marginalised art form. And everything else you need to know from 'how to make a graphic novel' to Persepolis and the latest film and television offerings, manga, documentaries, conventions, books, magazines and websites.

The Agatha Award winner debuts a 1930s London mystery series, featuring a penniless member of the extended royal family. When an arrogant Frenchman, who wants her family's estate for himself, winds up dead, Victoria's most important job is to clear her family name.

«The Queen of Paranormal Romance («USA Today») continues her breathtaking GhostWalkers series. Saber Wynter is running from her past when she meets former Navy SEAL and GhostWalker Jess Calhoun. The riddles of both their pasts are about to collide, shattering the promise of their future with the ultimate betrayal.»

«In what may be her most unsettling novel to date, Grafton's «T Is for Trespass» is also her most direct confrontation with the forces of evil. Beginning with the day-to-day life of a private eye, Grafton suddenly shifts from the voice of Kinsey Millhone to that of Solana Rojas, introducing readers to a chilling sociopath.»

In 1811, murder has jarred London's elite. The sons of prominent families have been found at dawn in public places, their bodies mutilated and strange objects stuffed into their mouths. Although Sebastian St. Cyr is distracted by his seemingly doomed relationship with actress Kat Boleyn, the oddness of these murders nags at him — and he becomes determined to track down the assassin, even at the risk of his own life.

«Contains three tales to introduce readers to the delights of «Arabian Nights» — «Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves Killed by the Slave Girl», «Judar and his Brothers», and «Ma'rus the Cobbler».»

In a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, nameless numbers, survivors of a devastating war, live out lives devoid of passion and creativity. Until D-503, a mathematician who dreams in numbers, makes a discovery: he has an individual soul. Reputedly the inspiration for Orwell's 1984.

«This volume contains a selection of early works by Yevgeny Alexandrovich Yevtushenko who blazed a trail for a generation of Soviet poets with a confident poetic voice that moves effortlessly between social and personal themes. «Zima Junction» vividly describes his idyllic childhood in Siberia and his impressions of home after a long absence in Moscow. Private moments are captured in «Waking», on the joys of discovering the unexpected in a lover, and «Birthday», on a mother's concern for her son, while «Encounter» depicts an unexpected meeting with Hemingway in Copenhagen. «The Companion» and «Party Card» show war from a child's eye, whether playing while oblivious to German bombs falling nearby or discovering a fatally wounded soldier in the forest, while Yevtushenko's famous poem, «Babiy Yar», is an angry expose of the Nazi massacre of the Jews of Kiev.»

Hired to find a boy who has gone missing in Doraville, North Carolina, Harper Connelly discovers that he is one of several boys who have disappeared over the years. As she uncovers the town's dark secrets, Harper becomes the next person likely to rest in an ice-cold grave...