Radical, witty and inventive, Katherine Mansfield is one of the twentieth century’s most accomplished short-story writers and this selection of stories showcases her dazzling skill. Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. Prelude & Other Stories is edited and introduced by Professor Meg Jensen. This selection of stories by Katherine Mansfield showcases her remarkable ability to delve into the human mind; in stories such as ‘The Garden Party’ she reveals the tension between innocence and corruption, the dark side of love and romance are explored in ‘Bliss’ and ‘Love à la Mode’, and in the title story, ‘Prelude’, inspired by her own childhood, her concern is for the isolated and the lonely. Collected together for the first time, this selection of short stories by Katherine Mansfield showcase her remarkable ability to delve deep into human psychology.

"There was not an inch of room for Lottie and Kezia in the buggy. When Pat swung them on top of the luggage they wobbled; the grandmother’s lap was full and Linda Burnell could not possibly have held a lump of a child on hers for any distance." The seemingly perfect Burnell family is moving from one house to another, and on the surface, everything appears idyllic. But as the story develops, the tension grows, threating to explode and expose their true nature. ‘Prelude’ (1922) is evidence of Katherine Mansfield’s short fiction genius, and it was the first short story that Virginia Wolf commissioned for her publishing house. Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was short story writer and poet from New Zealand, who settled in England at the age of 19. Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence were among her literary friends and admirers. She died of tuberculosis at the age of 34.

The narration delves on the living and values of a large family in New Zealand. With trivial details of characters such as personality, gestures and attitudes, Mansfield has managed to delve into the psychology of characters and produce individuals that instantly capture attention. A must-read....

“Though absent long, These forms of beauty have not been to me, As is a landscape to a blind man's eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din Of towns in cities, I have owed to them, In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart” William Wordsworth's verse was the embodiment of the Romantic age, with its evocation of a unifying spirit running through all things. This collection brings together a rich and diverse selection of his works, from the epic autobiographical masterpiece The Prelude to much-loved shorter poems such as 'I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud' and 'She Was a Phantom of Delight'. Alongside his more personal and introspective compositions, poems such as 'Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey', 'She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways' and 'The Idiot Boy' demonstrate, in an era of political and social ferment, the manner in which Wordsworth, together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, forged a revolutionary new poetic style through the publication of Lyrical Ballads – one that embraced the vernacular and subjects previously deemed unworthy of poetry – and thus changed the literary landscape of England for ever.

Bliss and Other Stories is a 1920 collection of short stories by the New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield.

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. "No one has written a finer, stranger, more enjoyably various and intelligent long poem than Jason's Koo's 'No Longer See,' the central poem in his splendid new book, MORE THAN MERE LIGHT. Schuyler and Knausgaard, Proust and Ashbery, to name just a few, meld into a poetic performance that is joyfully bent, and as gloriously funny as it is self-castigating. Underscoring all this is a sorrowing sense of self that can't shake free of time--time as it drags or stops or flies during romance and sex and the passage from domestic happiness to failure, and as it marks off the progress of a poetry and a life coming into its full, vital strength. With a cool-eyed detachment from his own drama, Koo has written a book that is unforgettable in its candor, its disabused self-knowledge, and its generosity of spirit."--Tom Sleigh "This book is about falling, a lot. There are good falls and uncomfortable falls and quiet falls and in-between falls and falling in and out of love with other people and yourself--as Koo aptly writes, 'That was a falling.' Koo is brilliant at mastering the often anxious way we talk to ourselves in our heads, as a way to recall moments and construct memories, justify behavior to oneself, and explore the roles of gender dynamics and sexuality within a world full of distractions in an often strange modern technological landscape. Throughout the collection, Koo is wonderfully narrative, bringing us into the speaker's world, full of jazz and biking and Brooklyn and girlfriends and students and conversations with both an overload of self-consciousness and a lack of it all at the same time ('What's okay, okay?'). The speaker's unabashed ability to be excessive while also having the reader rely on silence, on what isn't told, creates a captivating world for the reader to explore--and most importantly, see themselves fully immersed in as they navigate their own bizarre lives and landscapes. Read it over and over and over again, so you can, as Koo says, drop back 'against the light.'"--Joanna C. Valente