Jane Austen chronicles the subtleties and nuances of- and theaspirations and machinations at work in - her own social milieu.Through the stories of her spirited heroines and their circles,their interactions and rituals, their movements from ballrooms todrawing rooms, from London and Bath to parklands and gardens, sherecreates the life of The English gentry that she observed in thelate eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Each of her novels is a love story and a story about marriage -marriage for love, for financial security, for social status. Butthey are not romances; ironic, comic, wise and penetrating, theyare brilliant portrayals of the society Jane Austen knew.
Vladimir Nabokov was hailed by Salman Rushdie as the mostimportant writer ever to cross the boundary between one languageand another. A Russian emigre who began writing in English afterhis forties, Nabokov was a trilingual author, equally competent inRussian, English, and French. A gifted and tireless translator, hebridged the gap between languages nimbly and joyously. Here,collected for the first time in one volume as Nabokov alwayswished, are many of his English translations of Russian verse,presented next to the Russian originals. Here, also, are some ofhis notes on the dangers and thrills of translation. With anintroduction by Brian Boyd, author of the prize-winning biographyof Nabokov, "Verses and Versions" is a momentous and authoritativecontribution to Nabokov's published works.
Arthur Rackham s artworks bring a distinctive vein of dark humour to the many classic works he graced in the Golden Age of Illustration. His energetic, dense creations are perfectly suited to the powerful tales of the early Celts, and the later stories of an Ireland of mighty hearths, dreaming of battlefield glory, ancient gods and mystical isles.
