The Landlady's Master


Book Description

The story of three people: the owner of the land, those who rent the land, and the servant girl of the tenants. When their children reach adulthood, their class distinctions demand that they be driven apart.




The Landlady (A Roald Dahl Short Story)


Book Description

The Landlady is a brilliant gem of a short story from Roald Dahl, the master of the sting in the tail. In The Landlady, Roald Dahl, one of the world's favourite authors, tells a sinister story about the darker side of human nature. Here, a young man in need of room meets a most accommodating landlady . . . The Landlady is taken from the short story collection Kiss Kiss, which includes ten other devious and shocking stories, featuring the wife who pawns the mink coat from her lover with unexpected results; the priceless piece of furniture that is the subject of a deceitful bargain; a wronged woman taking revenge on her dead husband, and others. 'Unnerving bedtime stories, subtle, proficient, hair-raising and done to a turn.' (San Francisco Chronicle ) This story is also available as a Penguin digital audio download read by Tamsin Greig. Roald Dahl, the brilliant and worldwide acclaimed author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, and many more classics for children, also wrote scores of short stories for adults. These delightfully disturbing tales have often been filmed and were most recently the inspiration for the West End play, Roald Dahl's Twisted Tales by Jeremy Dyson. Roald Dahl's stories continue to make readers shiver today.




The Spy Master's Scheme


Book Description

USA Today Bestseller With knowledge of magic becoming more widespread in London, magicians find themselves highly sought after. Consumers want to buy their wares and so seek out magicians among their acquaintance. India’s rare magic is in demand from Matt’s family, the Collector’s Club, and other magicians who want her to extend their magic. But it’s wise to be wary of the attention. When the wool magician who helped India create a flying carpet spell disappears, his wife is worried for his life. India and Matt are worried for the country. If the person who stole the spell also kidnapped the wool magician, they could use flying carpets as vehicles of war. The closer they get to finding him, the more they realize they can’t trust anyone, not even the government. When it’s revealed that England’s spy master has plans for India’s talents, she refuses to cooperate. But Matt knows it’s not as simple as refusing. Every decision has a repercussion. And repercussions can be deadly.




A Good Man is Hard to Find


Book Description

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Eighteenth-Century Manners of Reading


Book Description

The market for print steadily expanded throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic world thanks to printers' efforts to ensure that ordinary people knew how to read and use printed matter. Reading is and was a collection of practices, performed in diverse but always very specific ways. These practices were spread down the social hierarchy through printed guides. Eve Tavor Bannet explores guides to six manners or methods of reading, each with its own social, economic, commercial, intellectual and pedagogical functions, and each promoting a variety of fragmentary and discontinuous reading practices. The increasingly widespread production of periodicals, pamphlets, prefaces, conduct books, conversation-pieces and fictions, together with schoolbooks designed for adults and children, disseminated all that people of all ages and ranks might need or wish to know about reading, and prepared them for new jobs and roles both in Britain and America.




The Master of Petersburg


Book Description

J.M. Coetzee's latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. In the fall of 1869 Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, lately a resident of Germany, is summoned back to St. Petersburg by the sudden death of his stepson, Pavel. Half crazed with grief, stricken by epileptic seizures, and erotically obsessed with his stepson's landlady, Dostoevsky is nevertheless intent on unraveling the enigma of Pavel's life. Was the boy a suicide or a murder victim? Did he love his stepfather or despise him? Was he a disciple of the revolutionary Nechaev, who even now is somewhere in St. Petersburg pursuing a dream of apocalyptic violence? As he follows his stepson's ghost—and becomes enmeshed in the same demonic conspiracies that claimed the boy—Dostoevsky emerges as a figure of unfathomable contradictions: naive and calculating, compassionate and cruel, pious and unspeakably perverse.




Madness


Book Description

PERFECT for fans of Roald Dahl. Think you know Dahl? Think again. There's still a whole world of Dahl to discover in a newly collected book of his deliciously dark tales for adults . . . 'There is a pleasure sure in being mad, which none but madmen know' Our greatest fear is of losing control - of our lives, but, most of all, of ourselves. In these ten unsettling tales of unexpected madness master storyteller Roald Dahl explores what happens when we let go our sanity. Among other stories, you'll meet the husband with a jealous fixation on the family cat, the landlady who wants her guests to stay forever, the man whose taste for pork leads him astray and the wife with a pathological fear of being late. Roald Dahl reveals even more about the darker side of human nature in seven other centenary editions: Cruelty, Lust, Deception, Innocence, Trickery, War and Fear.




The Young Master's New Wife


Book Description

Through some arrangement, she was married to a man with a crippled leg who wielded boundless influence. “I, Mason Yeich, will not accept a woman who bears the child of another man.”In what was initially thought to be a loveless marriage, she ended up accidentally giving her heart away. After a series of pushing and pulling, she eventually left him. Many years later a child who shares Mason’s face will be the one to land a slap on him.“Useless father, watch who you’re talking about!”







Overbearing Young Master's Sweetheart


Book Description

Life forced her to only shake her head, but she didn't expect to offend the big boss, Tian Hua. She was finally able to escape the clutches of the Demon Claw, and only found out later on that the story had just begun! He looked at her face, his blue eyes deep and long. The one with the surname of Luo, he was my contracted lover. She was both bitter and indignant, but there was nothing she could do about it. Who knew that love was a truth. She pretended to trick him: "What, you came back so early, did you miss me?" He was slightly startled, and his face had a hint of embarrassment written on it that seemed like it could see through anyone's heart: The one with the surname Luo! You're getting bolder and bolder!