Amateur detectives Eliza Doolittle and Professor Henry Higgins are off to the races in the latest in this charming mystery series featuring characters from George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion

After winning Professor Henry Higgins' bet that he could pass off a Cockney flower girl as a duchess at an Embassy Ball, Eliza Doolittle becomes an assistant to his chief rival Emil Nepommuck. When Emil takes credit for transforming Eliza into a lady, an enraged Higgins submits proof to a London newspaper that Nepommuck is a fraud. Then Emil is found with a dagger in his back - making Henry Higgins Scotland Yard's prime suspect.

This Norton Critical Edition includes four stories—two set on stormy seas, two on calm seas, all four based on the same incident—that speak to each other in interesting ways. The stories in this Norton Critical Edition maintain the connection and sequencing that Joseph Conrad saw among them. In his “Author’s Note” to ‘Twixt Land and Sea, Conrad writes of his two “Calm-pieces” (“The Secret Sharer” and The Shadow-Line) and his two “Storm-pieces” (The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and “Typhoon”). This edition is based on the first English book edition for the stories and the first American edition for the “Author’s Note” for The Shadow-Line, “Typhoon,” and “The Secret Sharer.” The stories are accompanied by explanatory annotations, a note on the texts (including a list of textual emendations), and a preface. “Backgrounds and Contexts” brings together relevant correspondence and contemporary reviews from both British and American sources. Also included are documents related to Conrad’s sources for the stories, among them Charles Arthur Sankey’s “Ordeal of the Cutty Sark: A True Story of Mutiny, Murder on the High Seas.” To help readers navigate, the editor includes a glossary of nautical terms as well as diagrams of the kinds of ships that appear in the stories. “Criticism” includes fifteen essays representing both new and established voices. The essays are arranged by story, with the focus on Conrad’s major themes—colonialism, narrative, gender, and race. Albert J. Guerard, Lillian Nayder, Mark D. Larabee, Fredric Jameson, F. R. Leavis, and John G. Peters are among the contributors. A chronology of Conrad’s life and work and a selected bibliography are also included.

An unforgettable tale of a village that descends into a sleepwalking spell as the sun threatens to never rise again, by the author of Discovering Fiction. Yan Lianke has secured his place as contemporary China’s most essential and daring novelist, “with his superlative gifts for storytelling and penetrating eye for truth” (New York Times Book Review). His newest novel, The Day the Sun Died—winner of the Dream of the Red Chamber Award, one of the most prestigious honors for Chinese-language novels—is a haunting story of a town caught in a waking nightmare. In a little village nestled in the Balou mountains, fourteen-year-old Li Niannian and his parents run a funeral parlor. One evening, he notices a strange occurrence. Instead of preparing for bed, more and more neighbors appear in the streets and fields, carrying on with their daily business as if the sun hadn’t already set. Li Niannian watches, mystified. As hundreds of residents are found dreamwalking, they act out the desires they’ve suppressed during waking hours. Before long, the community devolves into chaos, and it’s up to Li Niannian and his parents to save the town before sunrise. Set over the course of one increasingly bizarre night, The Day the Sun Died is a propulsive, darkly sinister tale from a world-class writer. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Named Best Book of the Year at Publishers Weekly Named Best Fiction in Translation Selection by Kirkus Reviews An Amazon Best Book of the Month “[The Day the Sun Died is] the creepiest book I’ve read in years: a social comedy that bleeds like a zombie apocalypse . . . Yan’s understated wit runs through these pages like a snake through fallen leaves . . . Invokes that fluid dream state in which everything represents something else, something deeper . . . A wake-up call about the path we’re on.” —Ron Charles, Washington Post “Floats between surrealism, sci-fi, horror, and absurdism, while never letting go of its satirical eye. Yet the language and structure of the novel reads more like Samuel Beckett or James Joyce than it does The Handmaid’s Tale.” —Ploughshares