Alma Books Ltd

Only edition in printAfter leaving his job with the BBC Eastern Service in November 1943, George Orwell became literary editor of Tribune magazine, penning a regular column called “As I Please” between 3rd December 1943 and 4th April 1947. Encompassing political opinion, literary criticism and social critique, Orwell’s editorials represent an invaluable commentary on the major cultural issues that preoccupied Britain during and after the war. Collected here in one volume, and fully annotated, these opinion pieces showcase Orwell’s polemical brilliance and cement his reputation as one of the finest journalists and literary writers in the English language.

As the ageing Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous author who has recently been ennobled in recognition of his literary achievements, arrives in Venice for a holiday and checks into his Lido hotel, he is struck by the arresting good looks of Tadzio, an aristocratic Polish youth of around fourteen who is sojourning there with his family. Gradually, what starts as a feeling of intense curiosity develops into a profound passion, until Aschenbach begins to follow the adolescent secretly through the streets of the Serenissima and becomes utterly infatuated with his beauty. Considered by many to be Mann’s masterpiece, Death in Venice, first published in 1912 and based on the author’s own stay in Venice the previous year, is presented here in a sparkling new translation by Sander Berg. ABOUT THE SERIES: Alma Classics Evergreens is a series of popular classics. All the titles in the series are provided with an extensive critical apparatus and extra reading material, including a section of photographs and notes. The texts are based on the most authoritative edition (or collated from the most authoritative editions or manuscripts) and edited using a fresh, intelligent editorial approach. With an emphasis on the production, editorial and typographical values of a book, Alma Classics aspires to revitalize the whole experience of reading the classics.

The 1860 Expedition of the Thousand, in which a group of volunteers led by Giuseppe Garibaldi sailed from Quarto, near Genoa, landing on the west coast of Sicily and advancing to its capital Palermo in a bid to liberate the island from Bourbon rule, is perhaps the defining moment of the unification of Italy, and a testament to the bravery, resilience and vision of the country’s last condottiere. Drawing on a wealth of contemporary diaries and other first-hand accounts by the protagonists of the events, and interspersing them with his own penetrating remarks, best-selling author Tim Parks retraces the journey of the “Mille” through the ragged landscape of Sicily under the blazing summer heat, bringing back to life an entire world in all its intricate complexity. Along the way he revisits old controversies and provides answers to many unresolved questions – as well as offering a vivid commentary on the Italy of today.

The most important Swiss poet of the nineteenth century, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer is regarded as a crucial figure in the transition of German-language poetry from the Romanticism of Heine, Novalis and Eichendorff to the Symbolism of Rilke and Stefan George.In poems that took years and sometimes decades to reach a final version, he worked within a limited set of themes and images – high mountains, gloomy lakes, sinister boats, nocturnal ghosts, reflected clouds, dark woods, golden sunsets, lightning, harvesting, lost lovers – to present his own symbolic world with a vividness and intensity that few poets can match. In these sensitive and accurate versions by acclaimed translator Anthony Mortimer, Meyer’s achievement is available to anglophone readers for the first time.

Having just moved into a fine, six-roomed residence, “the Laurels”, the Pooters are ready to begin a new life. Charles, the paterfamilias, a lowly clerk in a City of London firm, begins to keep a diary, one that, over the next fifteen months, will provide a record of the small trials and tribulations – as well as the preoccupations, aspirations and social anxieties – of a late-Victorian family. Serialized in Punch between 1888 and 1889, and later expanded and illustrated for publication in volume form in 1892, The Diary of a Nobody, the Grossmith brothers’ highest achievement, is a comic masterpiece and arguably one of the greatest artistic collaborations of all time.

Famous for seminal poems such as ‘Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night’, ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’ and ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’, Dylan Thomas was the author of a substantial body of poetry, which he began writing as a teenager and continued to expand until the end of his short and troubled life.This is the most complete edition ever published of Dylan Thomas''s poetry. The texts are based on the first published editions of the poems or on manuscript notebook versions. All of his Swansea Grammar School poems are here reproduced, many of them reprinted for the first time since their original appearance in the student magazine. For a precocious genius such as Thomas, they are important as they show his early interest in the ludic aspect of language and his rapid development into a more serious poet. The book contains over a thousand notes, with textual variants.

Divided into fifty-five sections, ‘Hometown’ is an extraordinary work in the long tradition of the Great American Poem. The author’s own compositions, interspersed with quotations from other famous writers and excerpts from historical documents and articles, including an old restaurant bill, create a living tapestry of the city of Denver from its pre-colonial days to its foundation and beyond, woven together by the poet’s unifying gaze and psychedelic imagination.Thirty years in the making, ‘Hometown’ was left unpublished at the death of its author, who regarded it as his most important work. Published here for the first time, alongside the rest of his poetry, including some uncollected pieces, this poem will restore Lyman Andrews’s place among the great American poets of the twentieth century.

The titular story in this collection, ‘Man on a Road’ – which famously led to the 1936 congressional hearings that exposed the worst industrial disaster in American history – is a snapshot of appalling capitalist exploitation from the perspective of a walking-dead miner slowly suffocating from silicosis. ‘The Happiest Man on Earth’, winner of the 1938 O. Henry Award, is about a man who, desperate to feed his family and regain his dignity, embarks on a long journey on foot in his quest for a job, while ‘The Way Things Are’ renders the terrors of the Jim Crow South with unflinching realism, foreshadowing the aesthetics and politics of the civil-rights movement.Albert Maltz, one of the “Hollywood Ten” of the McCarthy era, spent ten months in prison and twenty years on the blacklist as a banned artist forced to write under a pseudonym. With this collection of stories, spanning forty years of his career and including previously uncollected works, his long-silenced voice returns, re-establishing him as a master of hard-hitting but compassionate short fiction.

A determined young woman, Shirley shows indomitable courage from the outbreak of the Second World War, working in the Air Raids Precaution patrol, as well as keeping house, in the time of severe rationing, for her father and her brother. While on duty, she throws herself into dangerous situations to protect and rescue the residents in her area, without thought for her own well-being. Her physical and mental state are severely compromised by a visit to relatives during the autumn of 1940, but her salvation comes in an unforeseen form, which allows her to return to her lifelong dream of becoming a ballerina. The Fiery Pillars of War takes the reader across the battle fronts in Europe and beyond, where innovations in armaments put entire populations at risk, their reach extending to London and much of the rest of the country, highlighting the brutal effects of the war on the battlefield, on civilian populations and on prisoners of war. The Fiery Pillars of War is the third book in the 'Immortal Souls' series which includes Cry to Dream Again and Silent Music.

In the field of supernatural and fantastic literature, certain names come readily to mind – E.T.A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft – but the name of Fitz-James O’Brien has been unjustly overlooked and nearly forgotten since his premature death in 1862 during the American Civil War.‘The Diamond Lens’, O’Brien’s most famous short story, can be regarded as a forerunner of the science-fiction genre; ‘What Was It?’ is alleged to have served as a model for H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man; and ''The Wondersmith’ is a marvellous tale of Hoffmannesque invention. Taken together, O’Brien’s few surviving stories give him an important place in the development of American fiction and remain as fresh today as when they first written more than a hundred and fifty years ago.Contents: The Diamond Lens, The Lost Room, What Was It?, The Wondersmith, The Pot of Tulips, The Dragon Fang possessed by the Conjurer Piou-Lou

The son of a heinous sinner, Medardus is brought up in a monastery to atone for his father’s wicked ways. However, after succumbing to temptation, Medardus himself is lured into a life of sin. A labyrinthine plot sees him embarking on a fantastical journey into the world, meeting his doppelganger, involving himself in a game of double impersonation, and becoming embroiled in murderous intrigues at the Vatican, before the mysterious curse hanging over him and his family is finally explained.First published in 1815, The Devil’s Elixirs is a macabre masterpiece of German literature, and is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the Romantic movement, or the genres of fantasy and horror which it spawned.

Trapped in an unhappy marriage with a boorish, inattentive and socially ambitious husband, Julie de Chaverny enjoys a flirtatious dalliance with the elegant Major de Châteaufort. However, the sudden reappearance of an old admirer, M. Darcy, who has returned from Turkey with a tale of breathtaking derring-do and chivalry to add to his charms, reawakens in Julie a forgotten passion, and convinces her to pursue a rash and dangerous course, one that will have tragic consequences.Described as a masterpiece of psychological insight and a minutely observed social satire, A Slight Misunderstanding is here accompanied by other short stories: The Etruscan Vase, The Vision of Charles XI, Tamango, The Blue Room, A Hanging.

A romantic tale of an old man reminiscing about his youth and unfulfilled love, ‘Immensee’ is considered by many to be Theodor Storm’s most accomplished work, evoking a reality which is veiled and haunted by dreams and illusion.This volume, which also contains ‘Viola Tricolor’, the delightful story of a woman coming to terms with her stepdaughter, and ‘Curator Carsten’, a sombre account of a young man falling into a life of debauchery, provides a vivid introduction to one of the finest storytellers of German Romanticism.