With their evocative settings amid mists and shadows, in ruinous houses, on lonely roads and wild moorlands, in abandoned churches and over-grown gardens, ghost stories have long exercised a universal fascination. Responding to people's overwhelming attraction to anything frightening, this marvelous anthology of some of the very best English ghost stories combines a serious literary purpose with the simple intention of arousing a pleasurable fear of the doings of the dead.

As the first volume to present the full range and vitality of the ghost fiction tradition, this selection of forty-two stories, written between 1829 and 1968, demonstrates the tradition's historical development, as well as its major themes and characteristics. Though the genre reached its peak in the nineteenth century, it enjoyed a second flowering between the two World Wars and even now still attracts dedicated practitioners and readers. The anthology includes stories by Walter Scott, M. R. James, Bram Stoker, Rudyard Kipling, Edith Wharton, Somerset Maugham, T. H. White, and many others.

According to Edith Wharton, we can judge the success of a story by what she called its "thermometrical quality; if it sends a cold shiver down the spine, it has done its job and done it well." A host of writers have taken up the challenge of succeeding at this most demanding form of literary art, including both "specialists" such as J.S. Le Fanu and Algernon Blackwood, and other writers such as Henry James and H.G. Wells, for whom ghost stories constituted only a portion of their literary output. Stressing the important contribution women writers have made to the genre, the collection also offers eight stories by women, ranging from Amelia Edward's "The Phantom Ghost" (1864) to Elizabeth Bowen's "Hand in Glove" (1952).

This collection features 42 crime stories by authors such as Margery Allingham, G.K. Chesterton, Edgar Wallace and L.P. Hartley.

Alexander Aciman, Emmett Rensin

Robert M. Adams, Scott McMillin

J.J. Anderson

Anthology

M. Ashley

Chris Baldick

Carolyn A. Barros, Johanna M. Smith

Richard W. Bevis

Michael R. Booth

Jennifer Breen

Elinor M. Brent-Dyer

Edited by Jerome K. Buckley

Rex Collings This is a book to be read by a blazing fire on a winter's night, with the curtains drawn close and the doors securely locked. The unquiet souls of the dead, both as fictional creations and as 'real' apparitions, roam the pages of this haunting new selection of ghost stories by Rex Collings. Some of these stories are classics while others are lesser-known gems unearthed from this vintage era of tales of the supernatural. There are stories from distant lands - Fisher's Ghost by John Lang is set in Australia and A Ghostly Manifestation by 'A Clergyman' is set in Calcutta. In this selection, Sir Walter Scott (a Victorian in spirit if not in fact), keeps company with Edgar Allen Poe, Sheridan Le Fanu and other illustrious masters of the genre.

Richard Dalby

William Coyle and Harvey G. Damaser

Kate Flint

John Gay

Robert Kay Gordon

Sir Edmund Gosse

Gordon Jarvie

Robert G. Lawrence

James Lees-Milne

Brander Matthews and Paul R. Lieder

Paddy Lyons

Alberto Manguel

Sybil Marshall

J.M. Morrell (edited)

Chosen and Edited with Notes By Iona and Peter Opie

Brian Patten A collection of verse for children by a wide range of the century's writers, from Michael Rosen to James Reeves and from Russell Hoban to Thomas Hardy. The editor compiled "Gargling With Jenny" and Michael Foreman won the Kate Greenaway medal 1991, for "War Boy".

Edited by Spiro Peterson

Anthony Powell

Martin Price

David Prothero, John Ward Roche

Catherine Reilly 'Your battle wounds are scars upon my heart' wrote Vera Brittain in a poem to her beloved brother, four days before he died in June 1918. The rediscovery of TESTAMENT OF YOUTH has reminded a new generation of the bitter sufferings of women as well as men in the terrible madness of the First World War. This, the first anthology of women war poets for over sixty years, will come as a surprise to many. It shows, for example, that women were writing protest poetry before Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and that the view of 'the women at home', ignorant and idealistic, was quite false. Many of these poems come out of direct experiences of nursing the victims of trench warfare, or the pain of lovers, brothers, sons lost. Poets include: Nancy Cunard, Rose Macaulay, Charlotte Mew, Alice Meynell, Edith Nesbit, Edith Sitwell, Marie Stopes, Katharine Tynan. Here, as elsewhere, 'the poetry is in the pity' - a moving record of women's experience of war.

Michael Roberts This volume covers the whole field of English comic verse, including nonsense, parody and comic satire, but excludes what is usually called "light verse". It includes authors such as Auden, Beerbohm, Belloc, Betjeman, Eliot, Thomas Hardy and William Blake.

John Wilmot Rochester

George Rowell

Paul Salzman

Horace Walpole William Beckford Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

William Duncan Taylor, Simon Trussler

Harold Bloom and Lionel Trilling

Harold Bloom, Lionel Trilling

Simon Trussler

Ethel Sybil Turner

Various, Jon Silkin The recent PBS 8-part miniseries THE GREAT WAR sparked renewed interest in the First World War. More than photographs or eyewitness reports, the poetry written during the embedded the horror of the war in our consciousness. Now, supplemented with five new poems, the works of 38 British, European, and American writers collected here include some of the most outstanding and poignant poems of this century.

Sidney Warhaft

Oscar Wilde, John Wyse Jackson This collection of writings comes from the neglected period of Oscar Wilde's output, before the great plays, when he was contributing for journals and editor of The Woman's World. Read together, these pieces illuminate the author's mode of life and thought, and that of his age.

Craig Williamson

David Wright

W.B. Yeats