Daedalus Books

F. E. Halliday presents in vivid detail what we know about Shakespeare's life after three centuries of discovery, and illuminates and animates the story with illustrations of Elizabethan personalities, pages from the early folios, maps, and photographs of Stratford-upon-Avon. Much of the great playwright's biography is mysterious, but Halliday (an authority on Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, and especially on Shakespeare) documents the Bard's life and work — reassuring us, incidentally, that William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon really was the author of the plays attributed to him.

An intellectual thriller set in the Oxford of the 1660s, a time of great ferment — intellectual, religious and political. The action takes place around the suspicious death of Robert Grove, a Fellow of New College.

Brilliant in conception, rich in scope, this splendid book confronts the mystery of the human attraction to violence: What draws our species to war and even makes us see it as a kind of sacred undertaking? «A fascinating perspective on our staunch devotion to mass, mutual slaughter».

In her latest installment of The Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice brings readers the story of Armand — eternally young, with the face of a Botticelli angel — who first appeared in his dark glory in «Interview with the Vampire». Moving through scenes of luxury, of ambush, fire, and devil worship to 19th-century Paris and toady's New Orleans, this romantic hero is forced to choose between his twilight immortality and the salvation of his immortal soul.

In a sweeping and vivid survey, renowned historian Bernard Lewis charts the history of the Middle East over the last 2,000 years, from the birth of Christianity through the modern era, focusing on the successive transformations that have shaped it. Elegantly written, scholarly yet accessible, The Middle East is the most comprehensive single volume history of the region ever written from the world's foremost authority on the Middle East.

In the grand manner of Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice's new novel moves across time and the continents, from nineteenth-century Vienna to a St. Charles Greek Revival mansion in present-day New Orleans to the dazzling capitals of the modern-day world, telling a story of two charismatic figures bound to each other by a passionate commitment to music as a means of rapture, seduction, and liberation. At the novel's center: a uniquely fascinating woman, Triana — who once dreamed of becoming a great musician — and the demonic fiddler Stefan, tormented ghost of a Russian aristocrat, who begins to prey upon her, using his magic violin first to enchant, then to dominate and draw her into a state of madness through the music she loves. But Triana understands the power of the music perhaps even more than does Stefan — and she sets out to resist Stefan and to fight not only for her sanity but for her life. The struggle draws them both into a terrifying supernatural realm where they find themselves surrounded by memories, by horrors, and by overwhelming truths. Battling desperately, they are at last propelled towards the novel's astonishing and unforgettable climax. Violin is crowded with the history, the drama, the invention, and the romantic intensity that have become synonymous with Anne Rice at her incomparable best.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's extraordinary career as a novelist ended abruptly and unhappily, but it began with one of the most brilliant first novels in the history of American literature. Published when its author was just twenty-three, This Side of Paradise is about the education of a youth, and to this universal story Fitzgerald brought the promise of everything that was new in the vigorous, restless America during the years following World War I. Amory Blaine-egoistic, versatile, callow, and imaginative-inhabits a book that is interwoven with songs, poems, playscripts, and questions and answers. His growth from self-absorption to sexual awareness and personhood is described by means of a continuous improvisatory energy and delight. Far from being distracting, Fitzgerald's formal inventiveness and verve only heighten our sense that the world being described is our own modern world. A profound coherence informs This Side of Paradise — a coherence born of its author's uncanny ability to revel in the fragmented surfaces of human life while exploring and comprehending its serene depths.

Africa belongs to the Africans; the sooner they take it back the better. But — a country also belongs to those who feel at home in it. Perhaps it may be that love of Africa the country will be strong enough to link people who hate each other now. Perhaps... Going Home is Doris Lessing's account of her first journey back to Africa, the land in which she grew up and in which so much of her emotion and her concern are still invested. Returning to Southern Rhodesia in 1956, she found that her love of Africa had remained as strong as her hatred of the idea of white supremacy espoused by its ruling class. Going Home evokes brilliantly the experience of thepeople, black and white, who have shaped and will shape a beloved country.

The first encyclopedic illustrated guide to the world of Middle Earth and the Undying Lands, this book brings together every important aspect of Tolkien's vast cosmology. More than five hundred alphabetical entries cover five major subject areas: history, geography, sociology, natural history and biography. The maps, genealogies and time-charts, together with the illustrations of characters, places adn events, reveal to the reader the full dramatic sweep and splendor of Tolkien's world.

Introduction by Simon Franklin; Translation by Michael Glenny.

This is the first novel in Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, a three-part masterwork that was later expanded to a seven-part series. It won the Hugo Award for Best All-Time Novel Series — a special award created to recognize this central work of science fiction. The book describes a far future in which humanity numbers in the quadrillions, spread across millions of worlds, governed by the vast and presumably eternal Empire. But mathematician Hari Seldon, who has developed the study of psychohistory, or the dynamics of very large numbers of humans, has predicted the Empire's certain downfall. In order to forestall the chaos that would follow, he proposes a Foundation of all human knowledge at the edge of the galaxy.

In Anne Rice's new novel, the Vampire Lestat — outsider, canny monster, hero-wanderer — is at last offered the chance to be redeemed. He is brought into direct confrontation with both God and the Devil, and into the land of Death. We are in New York. The city is blanketed in snow. Through the whiteness Lestat is searching for Dora, the beautiful and charismatic daughter of a drug lord, the woman who arouses Lestat's tenderness as no mortal ever has. While torn between his vampire passions and his overwhelming love for Dora, Lestat is confronted by the most dangerous adversaries he has yet known. He is snatched from the world itself by the mysterious Memnoch, who claims to be the Devil. He is invited to be a witness at the Creation. He is taken like the ancient prophets into the heavenly realm and is ushered into Purgatory. He must decide if he can believe in the Devil or in God. And finally, he must decide which, if either, he will serve.

This boon to logophiles, culled from Buckley: The Right Word, presents the author's most erudite, outre, and interesting words — from prehensile and sciolist to rubric and histrionic — complete with definitions, examples, and usage notes. Introduction by Jesse Sheidlower; illustrations by Arnold Roth.

Murder is hardly the best way for Lord Peter and his bride, the famous mystery writer Harriet Vane, to start their honeymoon. It all begins when the former owner of their newly acquired estate is found quite nastily dead in the cellar. All too quickly, what Lord Peter had hoped would be a very private and romantic stay in the country has turned into a most baffling case, with a misspelled «notise» to the milkman at its center and a dead man who's been discovered in a most intriguing condition: with not a spot of blood on his smashed skull and not a penny less than six hundred pounds in his pocket.

These Previously uncollected stories and letters are essential to the understanding of Babel's life and works.

Brilliant stories that show the growth of a novelist's mind, and the raw material that fed the wild surrealism of Bulgakov's later fiction. With the ink still wet on his diploma, the twenty-five-year-old Dr. Mikhail Bulgakov was flung into the depths of rural Russia which, in 1916-17, was still largely unaffected by such novelties as the motor car, the telephone or electric light. How his alter-ego copes (or fails to cope) with the new and often appalling responsibilities of a lone doctor in a vast country practice — on the eve of Revolution — is described in Bulgakov's delightful blend of candid realism and imaginative exuberance.

An unconventional woman trapped in a conventional marriage, Martha Quest struggles to maintain her dignity and her sanity through the misunderstandings, frustrations, infidelities, and degrading violence of a failing marriage. Finally, she must make the heartbreaking choice of whether to sacrifice her child as she turns her back on marriage and security. A Proper Marriage is the second novel in Doris Lessing's classic Children of Violence series of novels, each a masterpiece on its own right, and, taken together, an incisive and all-encompassing vision of our world in the twentieth century.

Netsuke are small toggles or buckles carved from wood or ivory. The Japanese in the seventeenth century used them to fasten pouches to their kimono belt, since kimonos had no pockets. This lavishly illustrated book takes the reader on an exciting tour of one type of netsuke—those carved to look like the masks used by stage actors.

Following the National Book Award–winning All the Pretty Horses, this second part of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy is not a sequel but a parallel story, set in the boot heel of New Mexico, hard on the frontier. «Sixteen-year-old Billy Parham is obsessed with trapping a renegade wolf that has crossed the border from Mexico to raid his father's cattle ranch. By the time he finally succeeds, Billy has formed such a close bond with his prey that he decides to return the wolf to its home, and the two head off into the mountains. Billy returns months later to find that his parents have been murdered by horse thieves. He abducts his kid brother from a foster home, and they ride into Mexico to retrieve their property, encountering gypsies, desperadoes, and itinerant philosophers along the way... McCarthy's luminous prose style, spare as the desert landscapes it describes, is almost Beckett-like in its blend of deadpan humor and existential despair. An exceptionally vivid and rewarding novel».

Meet Mr. Ash, quiet-spoken, tall, unfailingly kind — sole survivor of an ancient species, the Taltos — thriving among humankind as he has always done, now the head of a great corporate empire. As the novel opens, he is stunned to learn from an old and mysterious friend that another Taltos has been seen — in the very same Scottish glen where centuries ago, long before the coming of the Romans, Ash ruled his clan. At once he is propelled into the world of Rowan Mayfair, and into the mysteries of the Mayfair family — the New Orleans dynasty of witches forever besieged by ghosts, spirits, and the dizzying powers of his own species — a family intimately involved with the heritage of the Taltos, a family of unique, brilliant, and troubled souls struggling as they have for centuries to use both science and magic in their battle for greatness, even survival. At the heart of the novel is the Talamasca, a secular order of psychic scholars, the only organization in existence which may understand Ash, his Taltos past, and the dilemma of the Mayfair witches. The story of the Mayfair family continues, moving from London to Donnelaith, Scotland, to New Orleans, back and forth through time — from the origins of the Taltos and their mythic Lost Land to the moral crises of the present day.

This is Ernest Hemingway's lyrical journal of a month on safari in the great game country of East Africa, where he and his wife Pauline journeyed in December 1933. Hemingway's well-known interest in — and fascination with — big game hunting is magnificently captured in this evocative account of his trip. It is an examination of the lure of the hunt and an impassioned portrait of the glory of the African landscape and of the beauty of a wilderness that was, even then, being threatened by the incursions of man.

From the day her first Vampire Chronicle was published, critics and readers — readers by the hundreds of thousands — have been mesmerized by the writings of Anne Rice. And with the publication of The Witching Hour, she created for us yet another world and legend, and both the chorus of praise and the multitudes of her readers once more increased. Now, Anne Rice brings us again — even more magically — into the midst of the dynasty of witches she introduced in The Witching Hour. At the center: the brilliant an beautiful Rowan Mayfair, queen of the coven, and Lasher, the darkly compelling demon whom she finds irresistible and from whose evil spell and vision she must now flee. She takes with her their terrifying and exquisite child, one of «a brood of children born knowing, able to stand and talk on the first day». Rowan's attempt to escape Lasher and his pursuit of her and their child are at the heart of this extraordinary saga. It is a novel that moves around the globe, backward and forward through time, and between the human and demonic worlds. Its many voices — of women, of men, of demons and angels, present and past — haunt and enchant us. With a dreamlike power, the novel draws us through twilight paths, telling a chillingly hypnotic story of occult and spiritual aspirations and passion.

It's very easy to get a little disheartened when your planet has been blown up, the woman you love has vanished in a misunderstanding about the nature of space-time, the spaceship you are on crashes in flames on a remote and Bob-fearing planet and all you have to fall back on are a few simple sandwich-making skills. However, instead of being disheartened, Arthur Dent makes the terrible mistake of starting to enjoy life a bit and, immediately, all hell breaks loose. Hell takes a number of forms: there is the usual Ford Prefect form of hell, fresh hell in the form of an all-new version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which behaves in an altogether more mysterious, sinister and airborn manner, and a totally unexpected hell that arrives in the form of a teenage girl who utterly startles Arthur Dent by being his daughter when he didn't even know he had one. Much as Arthur would love to stay in his rural sandwich-making idyll, he is forced to set off on his travels once again, this time on the back of a mysterious Perfectly Normal Beast. Can he save the Earth from total destruction throughout all dimensional probabilities? Can he save the Guide from a hostile alien takeover? Can he save the Grebulons from completely myopic junked-up idiocy? Can he save his daughter Random from herself? Of course not. He never even works out what is going on, exactly. Will you? Mostly Harmless: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Part Five: The book that gives a whole new meaning to the world trilogy.

Martha really does speak in this book and audio CD set, which features two readings — one with page-turn cues for reading along, and one without — by Kathy Najimy, who voices Martha's many, many comments about the world around her. It all begins when young Helen gives her lovable mutt Martha a bowl of alphabet soup, and the letters bypass the dog's stomach and go directly to her brain. Not only does Martha start talking, she can't shut up, and eventually drives her family crazy. The inaugural title in Susan Meddaugh's delightful series for readers up to 8, this New York Times Best Illustrated Book for 1992 is reminiscent of William Steig's quirky children's stories.