The Man Who Wouldn T Get Up And Other Stories

The first collection of short stories from one of Britain's finest novelists and critics A nameless man who has fallen out of love with life, refuses to get out of bed, with unexpected consequences. A sociologist recalls how he learned his first and formative lesson about the oppressive power of capitalism selling newspapers and magazines up and down the platforms of Waterloo station. Some years before the era of the Pill and the Permissive Society, four university friends travel to the Mediterranean for their first holiday together, where the climate is sultry and sex is on everyone’s mind. And a strong-willed young woman defies adverse circumstances to pursue the perfect wedding at all costs. These are some of the characters that populate David Lodge’s shrewd, funny and delightfully entertaining short stories, collected here for the very first time. What prompted their publication in this form is a short story in itself, told by the author in his Foreword. LONGLISTED FOR THE EDGE HILL SHORT STORY PRIZE 2017

Featuring nineteen sweet and humorous works of short fiction, P.G Wodehouse’s The Man Upstairs and Other Stories is filled with depictions of peculiar and sometimes disastrous methods of courtship. In Something to Worry About a young woman named Sally is forced to live with her aunt and uncle after her film obsession is deemed “unladylike”. When the young men of the village hear of this, they begin to shower Sally with gifts and attention, all hoping to be her suitor, but none are more persistent than the shy neighbor boy, Tom. Deep Waters follows a playwright and skilled swimmer named George who, despite his career success, goes to the pier to pout. There, he notices Mary, who is swimming in the water below. In an effort to keep her in his sight, George falls off the pier into the water, and Mary swims to his rescue. When they get back to shore, Mary offers George swimming lessons, which George decides to accept despite his skills in order to spend time with Mary. Finally, the title story, The Man Upstairs depicts Annette, a short-tempered composer who is bothered by a knocking on her apartment ceiling. After her investigation, she begins a close friendship with her upstairs neighbor, who is an artist, unaware that he is being dishonest about his identity. With the classic and witty prose of P.G Wodehouse, each story within The Man Upstairs and Other Stories is carefully crafted with humor and sentiment. While providing a simple and fun reading experience, The Man Upstairs and Other Stories also explores the culture of British high society, allowing contemporary readers a glimpse into a privileged historic class. This edition of The Man Upstairs and Other Stories by P.G Wodehouse features a new, eye-catching cover design and is printed in an easy-to-read font, making the classic both readable and modern.

A postman who develops close friendships with everyone on his postal route, an old man who stops buying the coal he needs to heat his flat so he can afford Christmas presents for his granddaughters, a senile old Holocaust survivor who’s suspicious of almost all her neighbours, two young sisters who are fed up with their baby brother, and an old woman squabbling with her tailor while a suit is being sewn for her to wear at her own funeral – these are just some of the intriguing characters we meet in Doctor Bianco and Other Stories. Written in terse, spare, unaffected prose devoid of sentimentality, the nineteen stories in this collection gradually reveal the portraits of various people inhabiting one particular apartment building in an unspecified Polish town. The gritty, harsh realities faced by Bielawski’s protagonists are at times darkly funny and other times gut-wrenchingly sad. Bielawski sets up a magnifying glass on a small corner of Polish life and allows us to glimpse fascinating, surreal scenes from a tangle of human lives whose heartbreak, despair and various anxieties might feel surprisingly familiar to readers from any walk of life. Brilliant, insightful snapshots of everyday reality. Olga Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Literature Bielawski's characters circulate in a greyish humdrum world, but their hopes and concerns bleed out of the page and become ours in these strange and endearing fictions. Jonathan Gibbs, author of The Large Door

'no one pitied him as he would have liked to be pitied' As Ivan Ilyich lies dying he begins to re-evaluate his life, searching for meaning that will make sense of his sufferings. In 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich' and the other works in this volume, Tolstoy conjures characters who, tested to the limit, reveal glorious and unexpected reserves of courage or baseness of a near inhuman kind. Two vivid parables and 'The Forged Coupon', a tale of criminality, explore class relations after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the connection between an ethical life and worldly issues. In 'Master and Workman' Tolstoy creates one of his most gripping dramas about human relationships put to the test in an extreme situation. 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich' is an existential masterpiece, a biting satire that recounts with extraordinary power the final illness and death of a bourgeois lawyer. In his Introduction Andrew Kahn explores Tolstoy's moral concerns and the stylistic features of these late stories, sensitively translated by Nicolas Pasternak Slater. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

One of Twain's most celebrated novellas, 'The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg' is a satirical retelling of the Garden of Eden story in the Bible, in which the author, mocking the supposed honesty and incorruptibility of the inhabitants of an imaginary American town, shows how man is fundamentally bad and cannot resist the temptations of gold. This collection also includes another acclaimed novella, 'A Double-Barrelled Detective Story', a spoof of the mystery genre featuring Sherlock Holmes in the American West, as well as lesser-known narratives such as 'The Belated Russian Passport' and 'The Death Disk'. Together, these tales are a testament to Twain's inexhaustible gift for invention and his skills as a storyteller.

If he had been with me everything would have been different... I wasn't with Finn on that August night. But I should've been. It was raining, of course. And he and Sylvie were arguing as he drove down the slick road. No one ever says what they were arguing about. Other people think it's not important. They do not know there is another story. The story that lurks between the facts. What they do not know—the cause of the argument—is crucial. So let me tell you...