The nocturnes (night pieces) are among the most introspective and personal of Chopin's works, as he was influenced by John Field's pieces of the same title. This complete collection of the nocturnes includes a useful thematic index and footnotes citing the differences between the manuscripts and the first editions. The pedaling, tempos and other musical markings are Chopin's.

Combining lush Gothic lyricism with postmodern experimentation, Oliver Sheppard's second collection of verse, Thirteen Nocturnes, presents a nightmare vision of a world in the grip of apocalypse and shadow-a world where "a nighttime of years never-ending" becomes "a darkness severe and unbending," and where life is relentlessly "gathered up against the towering shadow of decay." Taking cues from the dark Romanticism of Poe, the decadent Symbolism of Baudelaire, and the apocalyptic tradition of William Blake-as well as the existential doominess of 20th century cosmic horror-Oliver Sheppard's Thirteen Nocturnes presents a verse vision of collapse, announcing a cold poetics of disintegration in the new dark age of the Anthropocene. "Reading Sheppard's poetry is a little like listening to a conversation between Nietzsche and William Blake during a showing of Peckinpah's Cross of Iron. Using a wide range of forms and cultural references, Sheppard illustrates the human condition in ways that take as much account of its absence as its presence... Given the chance, Sheppard will lead you down dark and unfamiliar paths, to moments of weird beauty." -from the foreword by John Foster

DVD contains 30 minutes of video excerpts and 16 audio tracks, keyed to the text.

Bestselling author John Connolly's first collection of short fiction,Nocturnes,now features five additional stories -- never-before published for an American audience -- in a dark, daring, utterly haunting anthology of lost lovers and missing children, predatory demons, and vengeful ghosts. In "The New Daughter," a father comes to suspect that a burial mound on his land hides something very ancient, and very much alive; in "The Underbury Witches," two London detectives find themselves battling a particularly female evil in a town culled of its menfolk. And finally, private detective Charlie Parker returns in the long novella "The Reflecting Eye," in which the photograph of an unknown girl turns up in the mailbox of an abandoned house once occupied by an infamous killer. This discovery forces Parker to confront the possibility that the house is not as empty as it appears, and that something has been waiting in the darkness for its chance to kill again.

The three nocturnes in this collection were selected because they are technically the easiest to play, and they should be quite accessible to most late-intermediate students. For teachers who are looking for pathway literature to the Chopin nocturnes, these three nocturnes by Field are not only an excellent introduction to the romantic style, but masterworks in their own right.