This freshly edited collection--the fullest one-volume selection in English--includes all but one of the longer poems, from Queen Mab onwards, in their entirety. Only Laon and Cythna is excerpted, in a generous selection. As well as works such asPrometheus Unbound, The Mask of Anarchy, and Adonais, the volume includes a wide range of Shelley's shorter poems and much of his major prose, including A Defence of Poetry and almost all of A Philosophical View of Reform. Shelley emerges from these pages as a passionate and eloquent opponent of tyranny and a champion of human possibility.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum 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, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves--and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives--and destroyed them.

Now, Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization, and helped make us who we are. Penguin's Great Ideas series features twelve groundbreaking works by some of history's most prodigious thinkers, and each volume is beautifully packaged with a unique type-drive design that highlights the bookmaker's art. Offering great literature in great packages at great prices, this series is ideal for those readers who want to explore and savor the Great Ideas that have shaped the world.

Whether puncturing the lies of politicians, wittily dissecting the English character or telling unpalatable truths about war, Orwell's timeless, uncompromising essays are more relevant, entertaining and essential than ever in today's era of spin.

J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional universe is as vast as the human imagination, so an atlas is a helpful tool to get around. Consider this book your navigational guide to Middle-earth and the Undying Lands. Maps, images, and vivid descriptions in full color create an enchanting reference to all the fantastical places and creatures that sprung from Tolkien's mind. The deluxe, heat-burnished cover makes this a charming addition to your Tolkien library.

This work is unofficial and is not authorized by the Tolkien Estate or HarperCollins Publishers.

Do Jane Austen novels truly celebrate--or undermine--romance and happy endings?

How did Jane Austen become a cultural icon for fairy-tale endings when her own books end in ways that are rushed, ironic, and reluctant to satisfy readers' thirst for romance? In Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness, Austen scholar Inger Sigrun Bredkj r Brodey journeys through the iconic novelist's books in the first full-length study of Austen's endings. Through a careful exploration of Austen's own writings and those of the authors she read during her lifetime--as well as recent cultural reception and adaptations of her novels--Brodey examines the contradictions that surround this queen of romance.

Brodey argues that Austen's surprising choices in her endings are an essential aspect of the writer's own sense of the novel and its purpose. Austen's fiercely independent and deeply humanistic ideals led her to develop a style of ending all her own. Writing in a culture that set a monetary value on success in marriage and equated matrimony with happiness, Austen questions these cultural norms and makes her readers work for their comic conclusions, carefully anticipating and shaping her readers' emotional involvement in her novels.

Providing innovative and engaging readings of Austen's novels, Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness traces her development as an author and her convictions about authorship, novels, and the purpose of domestic fiction. In a review of modern film adaptions of Austen's work, the book also offers new interpretations while illustrating how contemporary ideas of marriage and happiness have shaped Austen's popular currency in the Anglophone world and beyond.

This excellent book has over two hundred facts that will surprise and amaze you in equal measure. Sections cover all aspects of the Harry Potter universe and include:

• Harry Potter and Daniel Radcliffe
• Quidditch
• Hermione Granger and Emma Watson
• The Ministry of Magic
• The Triwizard Tournament
• Hogwarts
• ...and many more

If you love Harry Potter and want to expand your knowledge of the series, this is the perfect way to do so - you could even use these fantastic facts to make the ultimate quiz for your friends. Harry Potter: The Ultimate Book of Facts is the perfect addition to any true fan's bookshelf.

This book explores the fascinating influence of intelligence work during World War II on spy fiction, as well as the important roles many spy novelists played during the war and the sustained influence of spy fiction on intelligence operations after World War II and during the Cold War.

Over sixty years after Virginia Woolf drowned in the River Ouse, Olivia Laing set out one midsummer morning to walk its banks, from source to sea. Along the way, she explores the roles that rivers play in human lives, tracing their intricate flow through literature, mythology and folklore.

Lyrical and stirring, To the River is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape - and how ghosts never quite leave the places they love.

To learn more about J.R.R. Tolkien visit

Wh ile nothing can equal or replace the adventure in reading Tolkien's masterwork, The Lord of the Rings, Peter Kreeft says that the journey into its underlying philosophy can be another exhilarating adventure.
Thus, Kreeft takes the reader on a voyage of discovery into the philosophical bones of Middle earth. He organizes the philosophical themes in The Lord of the Rings into 50 categories, accompanied by over 1,000 references to the text of Lord.Since many of the great questions of philosophy are included in the 50-theme outline, this book can also be read as an engaging introduction to philosophy. For each of the philosophical topics in Lord, Kreeft presents tools by which they can be understood. Illustrated.

A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of Fierce Attachments and The End of the Novel of Love

All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the I who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth.

How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks--and answers. Taking us on a reading tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras.

This book, which grew out of fifteen years teaching in MFA programs, is itself a model of the lucid inteligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of ninfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own.

The classic guide to the tongues of elves, dwarves, hobbits, and men--and an examination of the fourteen languages created by J.R.R. Tolkien and spoken throughout his beloved Middle-earth

J.R.R. Tolkien is known worldwide as writer of the fantasy classics The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, among many others. But he was a linguist first and a writer second, and in many ways his stories served as vessels for the many intricate languages he created and that appeared throughout his works.

This beautifully illustrated book will delight fans of Middle-earth with its deep dive into Tolkien-as-linguist, his languages, comprehensive guides to the stark runes and flowing Elvish script he created for writing them, and an English-to-Elvish dictionary for all of the words he invented. A must-have for every Tolkien library!

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum 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, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Written by the famed English occultist Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies was first published in 1913. But later, around 1921, Crowley wrote a separate text of short commentary on each of the chapters to assist the reader in the qabalistic interpretation. That commentary is included in this edition from Weiser Books.

The book includes 93 chapters, each of which consists of one page of text. The chapters consist of rituals, instructions, obscure allusions, and cryptograms. The subject of each chapter is generally determined by its number and its corresponding qabalistic meaning.

Sometimes the text is serious and straightforward, writes Crowley of The Book of Lies, sometimes its obscure oracles demand deep knowledge of the Qabalah for interpretation, others contain obscure allusions, play upon words, secrets expressed in cryptogram, double or triple meaning which must be combined in order to appreciate the full flavor; others again are subtly ironical or cynical. At first sight the book is a jumble of nonsense intended to insult the reader. It requires infinite study, sympathy, intuition and initiation. Given this I do not hesitate to claim that in none other of my writings have I given so profound and comprehensive an exposition of my philosophy.

Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett was one of the most profoundly original writers of the 20th century. He gave expression to the anguish and isolation of the individual consciousness with a purity and minimalism that have altered the shape of world literature. A tremendously influential poet and dramatist, Beckett spoke of his prose fiction as the important writing, the medium in which he distilled his ideas most powerfully. Here, for the first time, his short prose is gathered in a definitive, complete volume by leading Beckett scholar S. E. Gontarski.