Everyman

Samuel Beckett is the greatest Irish novelist of the later twentieth century, and this trilogy of novels is his masterpiece -which makes it perhaps the outstanding literary work of our time. This book deals with his life and work.

A brilliant and much admired novelist, Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) surpassed herself as a writer of short fiction: 'the supreme genius of her time', writes John Banville in his introduction;

Includes tales such as 'Sound of Thunder', 'The Veldt', and 'The Fog Horn'. This title also contains the Irish stories, the Martian stories and the Mexican stories.

Daniel Radcliffe. The devil with his retinue, a poet incarcerated in a mental institution for speaking the truth, and a startling re-creation of the story of Pontius Pilate, constitute the elements out of which Mikhail Bulgakov wove The Master and Margarita, the unofficial masterpiece of twentieth-century Soviet fiction.

Albert Camus' laconic masterpiece about a Frenchman who murders an Arab in colonial Algeria is famous in its time for diagnosing a state of alienation and spiritual exhaustion which summed up the mood of the mid-twentieth century.

In The Bloody Chamber, Carter's famous collection of deeply unsettling stories inspired by fairy tales, a Beauty is turned into a Beast and Little Red Riding's grandmother is stoned to death as a witch; The early collection, Fireworks, reveals Carter taking her first forays into the fantastic writing that was to become her unforgettable legacy.

Philip Marlowe, a private detective inhabiting the seamy side of Los Angeles in the 1930s, as he takes on a case involving a paralysed California millionaire, two psychotic daughters, blackmail and murder.

Creator of the famous Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler elevated the American hard-boiled detective genre to an art form.The Little Sister takes Marlowe to Hollywood, where he tries to find a sweet young thing's missing brother, uncovering on the way a little blackmail, a lot of drugs, and more than enough murder.

The only complete collection of shorter fiction by the undisputed master of detective literature, assembled here for the first time in one volume, includes stories unavailable for decades.