Near the close of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel 'The Great Gatsby' the narrator, Carraway, believes Gatsby to be dead, but the death and funeral have been faked and Gatsby has escaped to Havana. There he builds a new career and some years later sets out to put the record straight and counter Carraway's misinterpretation of events and people. In the course of his story he expands on his early life, his experience in the War, his time at Oxford, his hoodlum years and his relationships with Arn...

Fiction can be a powerful force to educate students and employees in ways that lectures, textbooks, articles, case studies, and other traditional teaching approaches cannot. This anthology includes articles from a number of individuals from a range of different disciplines and perspectives. All of the contributors to Capitalism and Commerce in Imaginative Literature are committed to treating literary texts with integrity and believe that business should have a larger claim upon people’s li...

Norman Wisdom's early years could easily have come straight from the pages of a Dickens novel. Left by their frightened mother, ill-treated by a brutal father, Norman and his brother were forced to fend for themselves, sleeping rough in London and stealing food to survive. This is a rags to riches tale of the man Charlie Chaplin said would take his mantle and who went on to make millions laugh around the world for over five decades. Here are the hardships, tragedies and triumphs that gave ...

What does a football hooligan firm do outside football? In the case of Mark Chester and the infamous Stoke City Naughty Forty, the answer was: live off their wits and burn the candle at both ends. Chester left Stoke in the mid-Eighties in search of something more than the buzz of terrace violence. He lived in North Africa with a pickpocket gang called The Hawks and dealt hash and coke in the Spanish coastal resorts, fighting off rival Moroccan dealers. After returning to London as a down-a...

A hilarious anthology of comic treasures written by Britain's "comic genius"—the former editor of Punch and beloved regular on BBC's Radio 4 ( The Times).Alan Coren was one of contemporary Britain's most prolific humorists. Over his forty-year career, Coren wrote comic and satirical pieces for The New Yorker, The Times, Observer, Tatler, Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, and Punch, and publi...

It's 1924, and New York is the centre of the universe.Henry Smart, on the run from Dublin, lands on his feet. After the 1916 Rebellion, Henry Smart is running from the Republicans for whom he committed murder and mayhem. Lying to the immigration officer, avoiding Irish eyes that might recognise him, hiding the photograph of himself with his wife because it shows a gun across his lap, he throws his passport into the river and forges a new identity. He's a handsome man with a sandwic...

Revealing himself to be a consummate storyteller, stage and screen star Everett (My Best Friend's Wedding) pens a delightfully witty memoir in which he reveals his life experiences as an up-and-coming actor, detailing everything from the eccentricities of the British upper class to the madness of Hollywood.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) remains England's best-loved poet - a writer matchlessly capable of evoking his native land and of touching all readers from the most sophisticated intellectual to the proverbial common reader. The late John Betjeman observed that 'this tenderly observant poet writes clearly, rhythmically, and thoughtfully about what all of us can understand'. Behind this modest description lies a poet who made greatness look, in Milton's prescription, 'simple, sensuous and passio...

Here is Niven at his best. He and Errol Flynn were filming The Charge of the Light Brigade for a director, Michael Curtiz, 'whose Hungarian-orientated English was a joy to us all'. High on the rostrum he decided the moment had come to order the arrival on the scene of a hundred riderless chargers. "Okay," he yelled into a megaphone, "Bring on the empty horses!" 'BRING ON THE EMPTY HORSES is the second part of David Niven's internationally bestselling autobiography, following the su...

Will what happens on holiday ... stay on holiday? And can they learn to live with the consequences?Every year, a close-knit group of friends spend two sun-filled weeks in a Spanish villa. For Derek and Sharonne, Conor and Maeve, Rory and Trish, and Liam, it's the perfect way to end the summer and escape their high-pressured lives in Dublin. No children, no responsibilities, and no distractions.This year, however, the group befriends Agneta and Anna Maria, t...

In November 1960, Frank Sinatra gave Marilyn Monroe a dog. His name was Maf. He had an instinct for the twentieth century. For politics. For psychoanalysis. For literature. For interior decoration. This is his story.Maf (short for Mafia) the dog was with Marilyn Monroe for the last two years of her life. Not only a picaresque hero himself, Maf was also a scholar of the adventuring rogue in literature and art—witnessing the rise of America's new liberalism, civil rights, the space r...

A classic of Canadian literature, here is the A List edition of Daphne Marlatt’s utterly original novel about rescuing a forgotten woman from obscurity. Featuring a new introduced by celebrated author Lynn Crosbie.Ana Historic is the story of Mrs. Richards, a woman of no history, who appears briefly in 1873 in the civic archives of Vancouver. It is also the story of Annie, a contemporary, who becomes obsessed with the possibilities of Mrs. Richards’s life.