Anthologies

' "She's an adventuress. Yes, an adventuress, but an end-of-the-century one. She doesn't travel for profit, but for pleasure." ' Offering an entertaining introduction to the fin-de-siècle, this selection from the notorious magazine The Yellow Book includes stories and poems by famous writers such as Arnold Bennett and John Buchan, brilliant pieces by lesser-known writers such as Ada Leverson and Ella D'Arcy, and illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

First edition. Four page biography of Newton followed by a reprint of "What Might Have Been"," An Episode in the Life of Charles Lamb, an essay by Newton which originally appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and later in THE AMENITIES OF BOOK-COLLECTING. Pages 25-33. xxxviii, 682 pages. 1947, 8vo., cloth, dust jacket..

John Buchan is best remembered as the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, the famous spy novel and classic movie. Yet, between 1894 and 1940, he published a total of sixty books, of which seven were fantasy novels, including the author s favorite, Witch Wood, along with The Dancing Floor. In this period he also wrote twenty-one fantasy short stories, the finest of which are collected in this volume: No-Man s-Land (certainly an influence on Robert E. Howard), The Far Islands, The Outgoing of the Tide, Skule Skerry, The Grove of Ashtaroth, and The Wind in the Portico. Buchan was praised by Lovecraft and was an accomplished influence on the field.

Finding out how to fly was man's last great adventure, Frederick Forsyth writes, and in this wonderfully entertaining volume he gathers and introduces an extraordinary array of tales of our love affair with flight. H. G. Wells's "My First Aeroplane" hilariously evokes the days when a flying machine was a proper toy for a gentleman. "The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall" by Edgar Allan Poe is a weird fantasy―part Baron Munchhausen and part Rip Van Winkle. W. E. Johns's "Spads and Spandaus" recounts an American flier's baptism by fire at the hands of the famed Baron Richthofen. H. E. Bates, "Flying Officer X," contributes "How Sleep the Brave," the adventures of a bomber crew shot down over the North Sea and their struggle to survive in a pitching dinghy. Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, is represented by "Cat," in which a strange Persian cat keeps watch over the comings and goings of a USAF squadron. In "They Will Never Grow Old," Roald Dahl takes us into the tight circle of a British air squadron in the Middle East in World War II and spins the haunting story of a pilot who is given up for lost and returns, under the most mysterious circumstances, to describe a flight beyond this world. Rounding out the collection are tales by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Len Deighton, J. G. Ballard, F. Britten Austin, and John Buchan. In the words of Frederick Forsyth's stirring introduction, "The last of the lonely places is the sky, a trackless void where nothing lives or grows, and above it, space itself. Man may have been destined to walk upon ice or sand, or climb the mountains or take a craft upon the sea. But surely he was never meant to fly? But he does, and finding out how to do it was his last great adventure."

The first half of the Twentieth Century witnessed two catastrophic global conflicts, with suffering on a scale that - thankfully - later generations find hard to comprehend. The full story of what it was like to endure these wars might never be told, because many who survived chose not to speak - or could not speak - of what they saw and suffered. But some could turn to poetry, to try to make sense of what was happening. From the Line brings together the best of Scotland''s poetry from the two World Wars: 138 poems, from fifty-six poets, are represented here, from both men and women, from battlefields across the world and from the Home Front, too. There is dread in these lines as poets reflect on the loss of peace, or mourn the death of friends and comrades. Some tell of traumas that can never be shaken off, others of an intensity that would never be found again - but there is hope, too, and moments of humour, compassion and decency that survived the worst.

Scottish Stories is a treasury of great writing from a richly literary land, where the short story has flourished for over two centuries. Here are chilling supernatural stories from Robert Louis Stevenson, Eric Linklater and Dorothy K. Haynes; side-splittingly funny stories from Alasdair Gray and Irvine Welsh; a stylish offering from urban realist William McIlvanney. Iain Crichton Smith evokes the Gaelic-speaking highlands, George Mackay-Brown the Orkney islands, Andrew O'Hagan working-class Glasgow; while Leila Aboulela, originally from Sudan, ponders the relations between colonizers and colonized from her home in Aberdeen. Though there is no one 'Scottishness' that binds the authors together, writes editor Gerard Carruthers, each has a Scottish footprint or accent. And perhaps more importantly, all are masters of their form.