Synopsis In print since 1948, this is a single-volume collection of Oscar Wilde's texts. It contains his only novel, "The Portrait of Dorian Gray" as well as his plays, stories, poems, essays and letters. Illustrated with many photographs, the book includes introductions to each section by Wilde's grandon, Merlin Holoand, Owen Dudley Edwards, Declan Kibertd and Terence Brown. A comprehensive bibliography of works by and about Oscar Wilde together with a chronological table of his life and work are also included.

The first novel by the great American novelist, now the subject of a major new film, Genius, starring Jude Law, Colin Firth, Dominic West and Nicole Kidman. Eugene Gant, born in 1900 to hard-drinking stone-cutter Oliver and entrepreneurial Eliza, grows up in small-town America. Both lonely outsider and passionate chronicler of American life, Eugene experiences upheaval and family tragedy before coming to realise that he must leave his home behind if he is to forge his own path in the world. This is the dazzlingly rich first novel from one of the most brilliant and mercurial voices of early twentieth-century, who was a major influence on writers including Hunter S. Thompson, Ray Bradbury, Philip Roth and the Beats. This new edition includes an introduction by Elizabeth Kostova, author of The Historian. Wolfe's second novel, Of Time and the River, continuing the story of Eugene Gant, is also now available in Penguin Classics.

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK “Salman Rushdie’s great grasp of the human tragicomedy–its dimensions, its absurdities and horrors–has made him one of the most intelligent fiction writers in the English language.” –Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe “Fury is a profoundly, ecstatically affirmative work of fiction. It reaffirms Rushdie’s standing . . . at the very front rank of contemporary literary novelists.” –Baltimore Sun Malik Solanka, historian of ideas and world-famous dollmaker, steps out of his life one day, abandons his family in London without a word of explanation, and flees for New York. There’s a fury within him, and he fears he has become dangerous to those he loves. He arrives in New York at a time of unprecedented plenty, in the highest hour of America’s wealth and power, seeking to “erase” himself. But fury is all around him. An astonishing work of explosive energy, Fury is by turns a pitiless and pitch-black comedy, a love story of mesmerizing force, and a disturbing inquiry into the darkest side of human nature. “Rushdie’s ideas–about society, about culture, about politics–are embedded in his stories and in the interlocking momentum with which he tells them. . . . All of Rushdie’s synthesizing energy, the way he brings together ancient myth and old story, contemporary incident and archetypal emotion, transfigures reason into a waking dream.” –Los Angeles Times Book Review “Well, here it is, then, his first 3-D, full-volume American novel, finger-snapping, wildly stupefying, often slyly funny, red-blooded and red-toothed. [Fury] twinkles brightly in tragicomic passages.” –The Miami Herald

Language makes us human, but how do we use it and how do children learn it? Talking the Talk is an introduction to the psychology of language. Written for the reader with no background in the area or knowledge of psychology, it explains how we actually "do" language: how we speak, listen, and read. This book provides an accessible and comprehensive introduction to psycholinguistics, the study of the psychological processes involved in language. It shows how it’s possible to study language experimentally, and how psychologists use these experiments to build models of language processing. The book focuses on controversy in modern psycholinguistics, and covers the all the main topics, including how children acquire language, how language is related to the brain, and what can go wrong – and what can be done when something does go wrong. Structured around questions that people often ask about language, the emphasis of Talking the Talk is how scientific knowledge can be applied to practical problems. It also stresses how language is related to other aspects of psychology, particularly in whether animals can learn language, and the relation between language and thought. Lively and amusing, the book will be essential reading for all undergraduate students and those new to the topic, as well as the interested lay reader.

When the love of your life dies, the problem is not that some part of you dies too, which it does, but that some part of you is still alive. The death of legendary jazz trumpeter Joss Moody exposes an extraordinary secret. Unbeknown to all but his wife Millie, Joss was a woman living as a man. The discovery is most devastating for their adopted son, Colman, whose bewildered fury brings the press to the doorstep and sends his grieving mother to the sanctuary of a remote Scottish village. Winner of the Guardian Fiction Prize, Trumpet is a starkly beautiful modern classic about the lengths to which people will go for love. It is a moving story of a shared life founded on an intricate lie, of loving deception and lasting devotion, and of the intimate workings of the human heart.

Tracing a quest that begins in the halls of Cambridge University, descends to the forbidden spaces of an isolated asylum, and moves on to the sunbaked shores of the south of France, Hallucinating Foucault brings to life a love affair like no other. "The love between a writer and a reader is never celebrated, " Duncker writes. "It cannot be proven to exist. Yet we often talk with extraordinary intensity about a writer we've discovered, loved, read, and re-read. Reading is an eerie, alien, intimate experience. We know that there is someone on the other side of writing. They are sometimes close, terrifyingly present. We listen hard." As the book builds toward its startling conclusion, Duncker probes and unravels the intriguing connections between Paul Michel - an extraordinary writer who is sexually irresistible - and the philosopher Michel Foucault, who claimed he wrote his brilliant texts to attract boys. A riveting mystery as well as a meditation on the gender-transcending nature of love, Hallucinating Foucault is an unforgettable novel that goes to the very heart of the creative act.

Iris Murdoch's first novel is set in a part of London where struggling writers rub shoulders with successful bookies, and film starlets with frantic philosophers. Its hero, Jake Donaghue, is a drifting, clever, likeable young man who makes a living out of translation work and sponging on his friends. A meeting with Anna, an old flame, leads him into a series of fantastic adventures. Jake is captivated by a majestic philosopher, Hugo Belfounder, whose profound and inconclusive reflections give the book its title - under the net of language.

The Remains of the Day is a profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world postwar England. At the end of his three decades of service at Darlington Hall, Stevens embarks on a country drive, during which he looks back over his career to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving ;a great gentleman. ; But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington's ;greatness ; and graver doubts about his own faith in the man he served. A tragic, spiritual portrait of a perfect English butler and his reaction to his fading insular world in post-war England. A wonderful, wonderful book.

Published in 1916, James Joyce's semiautobiographical tale of his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, is a coming-of-age story like no other. A bold, innovative experiment with both language and structure, the work has exerted a lasting influence on the contemporary novel. 'Joyce dissolved mechanism in literature as effectively as Einstein destroyed it in physics,' wrote Alfred Kazin. 'He showed that the material of fiction could rest upon as tense a distribution and as delicate a balance of its parts as any poem. Joyce's passion for form, in fact, is the secret of his progress as a novelist. He sought to bring the largest possible quantity of human life under the discipline of the observing mind, and the mark of his success is that he gave an epic form to what remains invisible to most novelists.... Joyce means many things to different people; for me his importance has always been primarily a moral one. He was, perhaps, the last man in Europe who wrote as if art were worth a human life.... By living for his art he may yet have given others a belief in art worth living for.'

The focus of this edition is not on the nostalgic appeal of SCUM. Rather, in a characteristically brilliant and erudite introduction, renowned scholar Avita Ronell reconsiders Solanas's infamous text in light of the social milieu in which it was written, and reinterprets its status as a cult classic. Ronell writes, "Maybe the Solanas tract was payback: it was clocked to strike the time of response to all shameless woman-hating manifestos and their counterparts, the universalizers." She conjures Derrida's "The Ends of Man" (written in the same year), Judith Butler's Excitable Speech, Nietzsche's Ubermensch, and the notorious feminist icons from Medusa, Medea, and Antigone, to Lizzie Borden, Lorenna Bobbitt and Aileen Wournos, illuminating the evocative exuberance of Solana's dark tract. "IsSCUM ever marches, it will be over the President's stupid, sickening face; if SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade..." - Valerie Solanas "Sometimes you have to scream to be heard." - Avital Ronell

A philosopher dons a wet suit and journeys into the depths of consciousness. Peter Godfrey-Smith is a leading philosopher of science. He is also a scuba diver whose underwater videos of warring octopuses have attracted wide notice. In this book, he brings his parallel careers together to tell a bold new story of how nature became aware of itself. Mammals and birds are widely seen as the smartest creatures on earth. But one other branch of the tree of life has also sprouted surprising intelligence: the cephalopods, consisting of the squid, the cuttlefish, and above all the octopus. New research shows that these marvellous creatures display remarkable gifts. What does it mean that intelligence on Earth has evolved not once but twice? And that the mind of the octopus is nonetheless so different from our own? Combining science and philosophy with first-hand accounts of his cephalopod encounters, Godfrey-Smith shows how primitive organisms bobbing in the ocean began sending signals to each other and how these early forms of communication gave rise to the advanced nervous systems that permit cephalopods to change colours and human beings to speak. By tracing the problem of consciousness back to its roots and comparing the human brain to its most alien and perhaps most remarkable animal relative, Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds sheds new light on one of our most abiding mysteries.

The private Andy Warhol talks: about love, sex, food, beauty, fame, work, money, success; about New York and America; and about himself--his childhood in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, good times and bad times in the Big Apple, the explosion of his career in the sixties, and life among celebrities.

A new volume of stories from A. S. Byatt is always a joy, and this one is rich and rare indeed. In the same distinctive format as The Matisse Stories and The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye , this collection deals with betrayal and loyalty, quests and longings, loneliness and passion — the mysterious absences at the heart of the fullest lives. A woman walks away from her previous existence and encounters an ice-blond stranger from a secretive world; a schoolgirl draws a blood-filled picture of the biblical heroine Jael; a swimming pool reveals a beauteous monster in its depths. The settings of Elementals range from the heat of Provence in summer to the cold forests of Scandinavia, from chalk-strewn classrooms to herb-scented hillsides, from suburban streets to rocky wilds. A marvelous present for all A. S. Byatt fans, this magical collection will also serve as a perfect introduction to one of our finest contemporary writers.

A meticulously-observed drama of class warfare, E.M. Forster's "Howards End" explores the conflict inherent within English society, unveiling the character of a nation as never before. This "Penguin Classics" edition includes an introduction and notes by David Lodge. 'Only connect...' A chance acquaintance brings together the preposterous bourgeois Wilcox family and the clever, cultured and idealistic Schlegel sisters. As clear-eyed Margaret develops a friendship with Mrs Wilcox, the impetuous Helen brings into their midst a young bank clerk named Leonard Bast, who lives at the edge of poverty and ruin. When Mrs Wilcox dies, her family discovers that she wants to leave her country home, Howards End, to Margaret. Thus as Forster sets in motion a chain of events that will entangle three different families, he brilliantly portrays their aspirations to personal and social harmony. David Lodge's introduction provides an absorbing and eloquent overture to the 1910 novel that established Forster's reputation as an important writer, and that he himself later referred to as 'my best novel'. This edition also contains a note on the text, suggestions for further reading, and explanatory notes. E. M. Forster (1879-1970) was a noted English author and critic and a member of the Bloomsbury group. His first novel, "Where Angels Fear To Tread" appeared in 1905. "The Longest Journey" appeared in 1907, followed by "A Room With A View" (1908), based partly on the material from extended holidays in Italy with his mother. "Howards End" (1910) was a story that centered on an English country house and dealt with the clash between two families, one interested in art and literature, the other only in business. "Maurice" was revised several times during his life, and finally published posthumously in 1971. If you enjoyed "Howard's End", you might like Forster's "A Room with a View", also available in "Penguin Classics".

A searing account of George Orwell's observations of working-class life in the bleak industrial heartlands of Yorkshire and Lancashire in the 1930s, "The Road to Wigan Pier" is a brilliant and bitter polemic that has lost none of its political impact over time. His graphically unforgettable descriptions of social injustice, cramped slum housing, dangerous mining conditions, squalor, hunger and growing unemployment are written with unblinking honesty, fury and great humanity. It crystallized the ideas that would be found in Orwell's later works and novels, and remains a powerful portrait of poverty, injustice and class divisions in Britain.

Six months after losing his wife and two young sons, Vermont Professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours mired in a blur of alcoholic grief and self-pity. Then one night, he stumbles upon a clip from a lost film by silent comedian Hector Mann. His interest is piqued, and he soon finds himself embarking on a journey around the world to research a book on this mysterious figure, who vanished from sight back in 1929. When the book is published the following year, a letter turns up in Zimmer’s mailbox bearing a return address from a small town in New Mexico inviting him to meet Hector. Zimmer hesitates, until one night a strange woman appears on his doorstep and makes the decision for him, changing his life forever.

You should read Fires now. These stories and poems...show the enormous talent of Raymond Carver beginning to take hold. -- San Francisco Chronicle "Seminal in Carver studies...A disparate collection of work bound by a unity of vision and obsession." -- Los Angeles Herald Examiner "Carver's most revealing book...This collection confirms the worth of Raymond Carver's work...Like bright birds in distant trees, Carver's stories appear in flashes, glimpses; Fires reveals the arc of his purposeful flight." -- Boston Globe