Sylvia Townsend Warner's final collection of short stories contains sixteen sly and enchanting stories of Elfindom.

In revolutionary Paris, a disaffected Victorian wife becomes enraptured by her husband’s mistress—a “brilliantly entertaining” historical fiction novel that was “far ahead of its time” (Guardian). “One of the great under-read British novelists of the 20th century . . . my favorite of her novels.” —Sarah Waters, author of Fingersmith Sophia Willoughby, a young Englishwoman from an aristocratic family and a person of strong opinions and even stronger will, has packed her cheating husband off to Paris. He can have his tawdry mistress. She intends to devote herself to the serious business of raising her two children in proper Tory fashion. Then tragedy strikes: the children die, and Sophia, in despair, finds her way to Paris, arriving just in time for the revolution of 1848. Before long she has formed the unlikeliest of close relations with Minna, her husband’s sometime mistress, whose dramatic recitations, based on her hair-raising childhood in czarist Russia, electrify audiences in drawing rooms and on the street alike. Minna, “magnanimous and unscrupulous, fickle, ardent, and interfering,” leads Sophia on a wild adventure through bohemian and revolutionary Paris, in a story that reaches an unforgettable conclusion amidst the bullets, bloodshed, and hope of the barricades. Sylvia Townsend Warner was one of the most original and inventive of twentieth-century English novelists. At once an adventure story, a love story, and a novel of ideas, Summer Will Show is a brilliant reimagining of the possibilities of historical fiction.

In this new selection of Warner's fantasy short fiction the remaining four Elfin stories are gathered together with the remarkable forgotten tales of The Cat's Cradle Book (1940), eighty years after its first publication.

Never fall for a dark elf assassin. Before tonight, Cassie Tate’s biggest concerns were whether she could pass Algebra and how she was going to keep Elora, her emo best friend, from dressing her in a skimpy fairy costume for Halloween. Then Cassie saw something no human was ever supposed to see ... an elf in its true form. The penalty for such a transgression ... death. The only one who can save Cassie now is the person most unlikely to do so. Triktaptic--assassin, spy, and the most feared warrior in the entire dark elf army. Known to his associates as Trik, the dark elf assassin is the best to ever do the job. He kills who he must, has mercy on no one, and never tires of seeing his prey fall. The dark elf king has plans to expand his kingdom into the human world, and Trik will lead the charge. But when a chance encounter brings the assassin face-to-face with the most beautiful human he's ever seen, Trik faces uncertainty for the first time in his life. He knows the girl is much more than a simple human, but he fears the truth of her identity will slay him faster than an army of light elves. Now, Trik has a choice. Will he continue to follow the darkness in his soul that has led him so faithfully his entire life, or will the light and goodness within a simple human girl be enough to overcome the darkness in his heart. Editorial Reviews ★Winner of UtyopYA Best Novel of the Year!★ "OMG!!!! Totally and utterly freakin blown away!!!! I just can't put it all in words yet... But FAN-FREAKING-TASTIC....".~Young at Heart blog spot "This book was great! It kept me interested through every chapter and I wanted more!! Quinn knows how to keep a story going!!" ~Book needs across America blogspot Fans of Cassandra Clare, Richelle Mead, and Laini Taylor will love Elfin. It's time to choose your side in the centuries-old war between light and dark elves!

A unique novel about life in a 14th-century convent by one of England's most original authors. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them is a historical novel like no other, one that immerses the reader in the dailiness of history, rather than history as the given sequence of events that, in time, it comes to seem. Time ebbs and flows and characters come and go in this novel, set in the era of the Black Death, about a Benedictine convent of no great note. The nuns do their chores, and seek to maintain and improve the fabric of their house and chapel, and struggle with each other and with themselves. The book that emerges is a picture of a world run by women but also a story—stirring, disturbing, witty, utterly entrancing—of a community. What is the life of a community and how does it support, or constrain, a real humanity? How do we live through it and it through us? These are among the deep questions that lie behind this rare triumph of the novelist’s art.

A spiritual journey, a lush travelogue, a parable of sports and philosophy—John Updike called this unique novel “a golf classic if any exists in our day.” When an American traveler on his way to India stops to play a round on one of the most beautiful and legendary golf courses in Scotland, he doesn’t know that his game—and his life—are about to change forever. He is introduced to Shivas Irons, a mysterious golf pro whose sublime insights stick with him long after the eighteenth hole. From the first swing of the Scotsman’s club, he realizes he is in for a most extraordinary day. By turns comic, existential, and semiautobiographical, Michael Murphy’s tale traces the arc of twenty-four hours, from a round of golf on the Links of Burningbush to a night fueled by whiskey, wisdom, and wandering—even a sighting of Seamus MacDuff, the holy man who haunts the hole they call Lucifer’s Rug. “Murphy’s book is going to alter many visions,” The New York Times Book Review declared. More than an unforgettable approach to one of the world’s most popular sports, Golf in the Kingdom is a meditation on the power of a game to transform the self.