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A gripping tale of human unrelieved horror, of survival and resilience, and of the ways in which humankind confronts death, The Plague is at once a masterfully crafted novel, eloquently understated and epic in scope, and a parable of ageless moral resonance, profoundly relevant to our times. In Oran, a coastal town in North Africa, the plague begins as a series of portents, unheeded by the people. It gradually becomes an omnipresent reality, obliterating all traces of the past and driving its victims to almost unearthly extremes of suffering, madness, and compassion.

The Divine Comedy describes Dante's descent into Hell with Virgil as a guide; his ascent of Mount Purgatory and encounter with his dead love, Beatrice; and finally, his arrival in Heaven. Examining questions of faith, desire and enlightenment, the poem is a brilliantly nuanced and moving allegory of human redemption. Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265 and belonged to a noble but impoverished family. His life was divided by political duties and poetry, the most of famous of which was inspired by his meeting with Bice Portinari, whom he called Beatrice,including La Vita Nuova and The Divine Comedy. He died in Ravenna in 1321.

Written in 1914 but not published until 1925, a year after Kafka’s death, The Trial is the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and must defend himself against a charge about which he can get no information. Whether read as an existential tale, a parable, or a prophecy of the excesses of modern bureaucracy wedded to the madness of totalitarianism, The Trial has resonated with chilling truth for generations of readers.

Paul Thomas Mann (UK: MAN, US: MAHN; German: [ˈpaʊ̯l ˈtoːmas ˈman]; 6 June 1875 – 12 August 1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas are noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized versions of German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer.
Mann was a member of the Hanseatic Mann family and portrayed his family and class in his first novel, Buddenbrooks. His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann and three of Mann's six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became significant German writers. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he moved to the United States, then returned to Switzerland in 1952. Mann is one of the best-known exponents of the so-called Exilliteratur, German literature written in exile by those who opposed the Hitler regime.

Leo Tolstoy embodies the most extraordinary contradictions. He was a wealthy aristocrat who preached the virtues of poverty and the peasant life, a misogynist who wrote Anna Karenina, and a supreme writer who declared, "Literature is rubbish." From Tolstoy's famously bad marriage to his enormously successful career, Troyat presents a brilliant portrait that reads like an epic novel written by Tolstoy himself.

From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day and When We Were Orphans, comes an unforgettable edge-of-your-seat mystery that is at once heartbreakingly tender and morally courageous about what it means to be human.Hailsham seems like a pleasant English boarding school, far from the influences of the city. Its students are well tended and supported, trained in art and literature, and become just the sort of people the world wants them to be. But, curiously, they are taught nothing of the outside world and are allowed little contact with it.Within the grounds of Hailsham, Kathy grows from schoolgirl to young woman, but it’s only when she and her friends Ruth and Tommy leave the safe grounds of the school (as they always knew they would) that they realize the full truth of what Hailsham is.Never Let Me Go breaks through the boundaries of the literary novel. It is a gripping mystery, a beautiful love story, and also a scathing critique of human arrogance and a moral examination of how we treat the vulnerable and different in our society. In exploring the themes of memory and the impact of the past, Ishiguro takes on the idea of a possible future to create his most moving and powerful book to date.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind themIn ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, the Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages it fell by chance into the hands of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins.From Sauron's fastness in the Dark Tower of Mordor, his power spread far and wide. Sauron gathered all the Great Rings to him, but always he searched for the One Ring that would complete his dominion.When Bilbo reached his eleventy-first birthday he disappeared, bequeathing to his young cousin Frodo the Ruling Ring and a perilous quest: to journey across Middle-earth, deep into the shadow of the Dark Lord, and destroy the Ring by casting it into the Cracks of Doom.The Lord of the Rings tells of the great quest undertaken by Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring: Gandalf the Wizard; the hobbits Merry, Pippin, and Sam; Gimli the Dwarf; Legolas the Elf; Boromir of Gondor; and a tall, mysterious stranger called Strider.

Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and he becomes determined not only to escape, but also to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration. Dumas’ epic tale of suffering and retribution, inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment, was a huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s.Robin Buss’s lively English translation is complete and unabridged, and remains faithful to the style of Dumas’s original. This edition includes an introduction, explanatory notes and suggestions for further reading.

The Hobbit, or There and Back Again is a children's fantasy novel by English author J. R. R. Tolkien. It was published on 21 September 1937 to wide critical acclaim, being nominated for the Carnegie Medal and awarded a prize from the New York Herald Tribune for best juvenile fiction. The book remains popular and is recognized as a classic in children's literature.The Hobbit is set within Tolkien's fictional universe and follows the quest of home-loving Bilbo Baggins, the titular hobbit, to win a share of the treasure guarded by Smaug the dragon. Bilbo's journey takes him from light-hearted, rural surroundings into more sinister territory.The story is told in the form of an episodic quest, and most chapters introduce a specific creature or type of creature of Tolkien's geography. Bilbo gains a new level of maturity, competence, and wisdom by accepting the disreputable, romantic, fey, and adventurous sides of his nature and applying his wits and common sense. The story reaches its climax in the Battle of Five Armies, where many of the characters and creatures from earlier chapters re-emerge to engage in conflict.

In these first five stories about Poe's detective Auguste Dupin, he establishes many of the traditions or motifs we know from classic detective fiction. The eccentric but brilliant detective who solves the mystery merely by analysing the facts from his armchair, the mystery of how a murder was committed in a closed room, laying a false trail with false clues or "red herrings" for the reader to follow are just three of his original tropes, which are now so familiar that they are almost cliches. On its publication, the first story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, written in 1841, was highly praised for its inventiveness and new style of storytelling. A murder was committed on the fourth floor, the windows were closed from the inside, the chimney was too narrow for even a cat to get through, so how did the murderer escape? Such a clever conundrum had never before been presented to readers, implicitly inviting them to solve the mystery. Interestingly, Poe also establishes the convention of the "bumbling policeman", who is outwitted by Dupin, in this story. However Poe is sometimes criticised for the "twist" ending, which nobody could reasonably be expected to imagine. The ending of this story is a metaphor for brains against brawn. Perhaps Poe preferred to sacrifice the burgeoning rationality and method of analysis by his character Dupin, in order to make this metaphor more explicit, to make the reader aware that the intellect will always win over violence. The second story The Mystery of Marie Roget is a lesser story about Dupin. It is subtitled as its sequel, but is a bit of a disappointment after the brilliant conception of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."Poe described his third story, The Purloined Letter, written in 1844, as "perhaps the best of my tales of ratiocination". In other words he was deliberately inventing a detective who used his powers of reasoning, who made conscious deliberate inferences in order to arrive at valid and rational conclusions. Dupin also recognises the importance of reading and the written word as evidence. By such descriptions in the narrative, the reader can follow Dupin's thoughts and reasoning and reach the conclusion for themselves. The answers to the mysteries are all there, but only a clever person can see them. The Gold Bug  is yet another fascinating departure - an extremely readable story about the Secret Service involving the use of cyphers.In the fifth story Thou Art the Man red herrings abound, and the guilty party is perhaps the most least likely suspect. This is yet another literary device which is well used and popular in contemporary mystery fiction.It is worth remembering that the word "detective" did not exist at the time when Poe wrote The Murders in the Rue Morgue. He established the prototype of Dupin even before Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. It is easy to criticise a work in retrospect, but these early stories paved the way for a genre which is one of the most popular even today.

"Steadman's text here is as witty as his drawings, both illustrating not only Freud's classification of jokes, but also the events of Freud's life." --The North Carolina Review of Books"Earlier chapters of Freud's life, characterized by intellectual as well as physical vigorousness aided by the 19th-century 'miracle drug' of cocaine, give the illustrator rich material to work with." --Open CultureOne genius takes on another.In what is a thoroughly atypical biography, Ralph Steadman examines Freud using his 1905 book The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious to illustrate his points with 75 illustrations. The result is a masterful interplay of text and illustration, visual and verbal puns, and unexpected insight.Sigmund Freud bursts defiantly and gleefully beyond the bounds of orthodox biography. It is a wildly humorous exercise in bending, stretching and speculating on the activities of the so-called Father of Psychoanalysis. Ralph Steadman wields his shrewd wit and fierce pen to highlight the ebbs and tides of Freud's life and career from early childhood to the moment of death.But there's a twist. Rich illustrations and witty text work hand in hand to transform each scene into a "joking situation," which the artist hilariously examines according to the techniques wielded by Freud himself in his 1905 book on humor and the unconscious mind. The result is a fantastic Freudian festival of visual and verbal puns, unexpected insights, and sheer intellectual enjoyment.Originally published in hardcover in 1979, released in paperback in 1997, and reprinted numerous times since then, we are presenting it again to remind buyers that Freud has not and will not leave the unconscious mind of the public (and he would likely have something to say about what books they buy).Sigmund Freud is superbly illustrated with more than 50 major drawings and 25 vignettes by a renowned master of the pen. It remains one of the most original illustrated books of our times and a Ralph Steadman classic.

Thomas Stearns Eliot (26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965), "one of the twentieth century's major poets", was also an essayist, publisher, playwright, and literary and social critic. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family, he moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25, settling, working, and marrying there. He became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39, renouncing his American passport.Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), which was seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement. It was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including The Waste Land (1922), "The Hollow Men" (1925), "Ash Wednesday" (1930), and Four Quartets (1943). He was also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry".

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol(31 March 1809 – 4 March 1852) was a Russian dramatist of Ukrainian origin.Although Gogol was considered by his contemporaries to be one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in his work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of surrealism and the grotesque ("The Nose", "Viy", "The Overcoat", "Nevsky Prospekt"). His early works, such asEvenings on a Farm Near Dikanka, were influenced by his Ukrainian upbringing, Ukrainian culture and folklore. His later writing satirised political corruption in the Russian Empire (The Government Inspector,Dead Souls). The novelTaras Bulba(1835) and the playMarriage(1842), along with the short stories "Diary of a Madman", "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich", "The Portrait" and "The Carriage", are also among his best-known works.

Sir Kazuo Ishiguro (born 8 November 1954) is a British novelist, screenwriter, and short-story writer. He was born in Nagasaki, Japan, but his family moved to the UK in 1960 when he was five.
Ishiguro is one of the most celebrated contemporary fiction authors in the English-speaking world. He has received four Man Booker Prize nominations and won the award in 1989 for his novel The Remains of the Day. Ishiguro's 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go, was named by Time as the best novel of the year, and was included in the magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.
In 2017, the Swedish Academy awarded Ishiguro the Nobel Prize in Literature, describing him in its citation as a writer "who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world". Ishiguro was knighted in the 2018 Queen's Birthday Honours List.

SAMUEL BECKETT is the first biography of the Nobel Prizewinning novelist and playwright. A monumental work of scholarship - arguably the most important book about Beckett ever published - SAMUEL BECKETT is also fascinating reading. Beckett's life has been as rich as his writing is spare, and Deirdre Bair tells his story superbly: the upper-middle-class Irish childhood; the early years in Paris and Beckett's complex relationship to Joyce; the psychological anguish of his apprenticeship, poured out by Beckett in more than 300 remarkable, heretofore-unknown letters to a confidant, Thomas McGreevy; Beckett's heroic service with the French Resistance, also unknown till now; "the siege in the room," that extraordinary period after the Second World War during which Beckett created the first masterpieces that would make him world famous; Beckett's increasing involvement with the theatre and his desperate attempts to guard his privacy against the encroachments of celebrity.SAMUEL BECKETT chronicles Beckett's tumultuous relationship with his family, recounts the psychosomatic illnesses that have often kept him from writing, and traces (where they exist) the autobiographical strains in his work. The book tells of his relationships with publishers, actors, directors, and friends. Above all, it portrays Beckett himself, the poet of despair, the angular, enigmatic artist who, in the words of his Nobel Prize citation, "has transmuted the destitution of modern man into his exaltation."When Deirdre Bair began the research for this book, Beckett said he would not authorize it nor would he read it before it was published. To friends he wrote, "I am sure Mrs. Bair is a serious scholar and is out to do a fine book. I will neither help nor hinder her." After literally hundreds of interviews and years of research in Ireland, England, France, Italy, Spain, Northern Ireland, Canada and the United States, after correspondence with people living on every continent, Deirdre Bair has produced a book that is everything a scholar or a reader could hope for: SAMUEL BECKETT is one of the remarkable literary biographies of our time.Deirdre Bair received her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and worked as a journalist on newspapers and magazines before returning to academic life and taking a M.A. and Ph.D. at Columbia University. She has taught at Trinity College (Connecticut) and Yale University, and teaches now in the English Department of the University of Pennsylvania. She is married, has two children, and lives in Connecticut. (Taken from the inside jacket material of the First Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Edition, 1978.) 

Alexandre Dumas (UK: , US: ; French: [alɛksɑ̃dʁ dymɑ]; born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie [dymɑ davi də la pajət(ə)ʁi]; 24 July 1802 – 5 December 1870), also known as Alexandre Dumas père (where père is French for 'father', thus 'the elder/senior'), was a French writer. His works have been translated into many languages, and he is one of the most widely read French authors. Many of his historical novels of high adventure were originally published as serials, including The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, Twenty Years After, and The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later. His novels have been adapted since the early twentieth century into nearly 200 films.Prolific in several genres, Dumas began his career by writing plays, which were successfully produced from the first. He also wrote numerous magazine articles and travel books; his published works totalled 100,000 pages. In the 1840s, Dumas founded the Théâtre Historique in Paris.

Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (UK: , US: ; French: [aʁtyʁ ʁɛ̃bo] (listen); 20 October 1854 – 10 November 1891) was a French poet who is known for his influence on modern literature and arts, which prefigured surrealism. Born in Charleville-Mézières, he started writing at a very young age and excelled as a student, but abandoned his formal education in his teenage years to run away from home to Paris amidst the Franco-Prussian War. During his late adolescence and early adulthood he began the bulk of his literary output, then completely stopped writing at the age of 21, after assembling one of his major works, Illuminations.
Rimbaud was known to have been a libertine and a restless soul, having engaged in an at times violent romantic relationship with fellow poet Paul Verlaine, which lasted nearly two years. After ending his literary career, he traveled extensively on three continents as a merchant before his death from cancer just after his thirty-seventh birthday. As a poet, Rimbaud is well known for his contributions to Symbolism and, among other works, for A Season in Hell, a precursor to modernist literature.

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) was a British writer and medical doctor. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 when he published A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and more than fifty short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are generally considered milestones in the field of crime fiction.Doyle was a prolific writer; other than Holmes stories, his works include fantasy and science fiction stories about Professor Challenger and humorous stories about the Napoleonic soldier Brigadier Gerard, as well as plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction and historical novels. One of Doyle's early short stories, "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" (1884), helped to popularise the mystery of the Mary Celeste.

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon is the debut non-fiction book by American author David Grann. The book was published in 2009 and recounts the activities of the British explorer Percy Fawcett who, in 1925, disappeared with his son in the Amazon while looking for an ancient lost city. For decades explorers and scientists have tried to find evidence of his party and of the "Lost City of Z".Grann also recounts his own journey into the Amazon, by which he discovered new evidence about how Fawcett may have died. He learned that Fawcett may have come upon "Z" without knowing it. The book claims as many as 100 people may have died or disappeared (and are presumed dead) searching for Fawcett over the years; however, the more historically accurate toll, according to John Hemming, is one. The Lost City of Z was the basis of a 2016 feature film of the same name, written and directed by James Gray.

Cluedo (), known as Clue in North America, is a murder mystery game for three to six players that was devised in 1943 by Anthony E. Pratt from Birmingham, England. The game was first manufactured by Waddingtons in the UK in 1949. Since then, it has been relaunched and updated several times, and it is currently owned and published by the American game and toy company Hasbro.The object of the game is to determine who murdered the game's victim, where the crime took place, and which weapon was used. Each player assumes the role of one of the six suspects and attempts to deduce the correct answer by strategically moving around a game board representing the rooms of a mansion and collecting clues about the circumstances of the murder from the other players.

A linguist works with the military to communicate with alien lifeforms after twelve mysterious spacecraft appear around the world.

2016 American science fiction drama film directed by Denis Villeneuve

When the creator of a virtual reality called the OASIS dies, he makes a posthumous challenge to all OASIS users to find his Easter Egg, which will give the finder his fortune and control of his world.

A psychologist is sent to a station orbiting a distant planet in order to discover what has caused the crew to go insane.

1972 cinema drama by Andrei Tarkovsky based on the eponymous science fiction novel by Stanislav Lem

Series inspired by the stories of GK Chesterton; a Catholic priest has a knack for solving mysteries in his English village.

Set in the 1960s, the show follows Endeavour Morse in his early years as a police constable. Working alongside his senior partner DI Fred Thursday, Morse engages in a number of investigations around Oxford.

In the 1890s, William Murdoch uses radical forensic techniques for the time, including fingerprinting and trace evidence, to solve some of the city's most gruesome murders.

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