The twelfth-century French poet Chrétien de Troyes is a major figure in European literature. His courtly romances fathered the Arthurian tradition and influenced countless other poets in England as well as on the continent. Yet because of the difficulty of capturing his swift-moving style in translation, English-speaking audiences are largely unfamiliar with the pleasures of reading his poems. Now, for the first time, an experienced translator of medieval verse who is himself a poet provides a translation of Chrétien’s major poem, Yvain, in verse that fully and satisfyingly captures the movement, the sense, and the spirit of the Old French original. Yvain is a courtly romance with a moral tenor; it is ironic and sometimes bawdy; the poetry is crisp and vivid. In addition, the psychological and the socio-historical perceptions of the poem are of profound literary and historical importance, for it evokes the emotions and the values of a flourishing, vibrant medieval past.

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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 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.

Ghostly coaches shuttling the mildewed cadavers of its ill-fated occupants; a young orphan being lured to a frosty death by a pale, little girl with a mangled shoulder; a man spends the night in a room with a fatal past; a restless ne'er-do-well recognizes his fiancee with her throat cut in a twilit vision; a beautiful woman is sold by her uncle to a corpse living beneath a church... These are the images that haunted their authors' brains and found their way into the Golden Age of the British ghost story... As industrial Britain steamed away from its feudal-agrarian past, a sense of self-deceit and insecurity - a lingering of violent potential and national shame - pervaded the collective unconscious of the world's preeminent empire. This psychological malaise manifested itself in the English ghost story, which saw its golden era in the Victorian Age. The unsettling works of Dickens, Gaskell, Blackwood, Hardy, Nesbit, Conan Doyle, M. R. James, Braddon, Broughton, Oliphant, Wells, and Le Fanu grace this brief homage to that unique literary era of elegance, mystique, and horror.

While the three ghosts that visited Ebenezer Scrooge was Charles Dickens' most famous apparitions, his interest in the supernatural did not end there. Three Ghost Stories is just that: a collection of three different stories that are true Gothic classics. The three stories, The Signal Man, The Haunted House and The Trial for Murder were sensational for their time and continue to hold up well, thanks to Charles Dickens' superb skills at storytelling. The Signal Man is the most well known of the three, chronicling the haunting of a railroad signal man who is visited by a ghost just before a tragic event is to happen on the railway. If you like Dickens and tales of spectres and the supernatural, you'll love Three Ghost Stories. In "The Haunted House," a new homeowner discovers he is sharing his bed with the skeleton of the house's former master. In "The Trial for Murder," a revengeful ghost haunts a juror serving at his killer's trial. In "The Signal-Man," an apparition warns a man of impending disaster. These strange and frightening occurrences unfold in grim and gripping detail in this collection of 3 Victorian ghost stories that puts Charles Dickens's first-rate storytelling on display.