Knighted for his service as a field doctor during the Boer War, Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930) is best remembered as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. In addition to his ever-popular tales of the Baker Street sleuth, Conan Doyle wrote many works of history and science fiction, as well as plays, poetry, and stories that reflected his interest in the occult. This anthology offers an excellent selection of tales from throughout the Scottish author's career. Sherlock Holmes's adventures include the novels The Hound of the Baskervilles and A Study in Scarlet, plus the stories "The Final Problem" and "A Scandal in Bohemia." The Lost World introduces the dinosaur-hunting Professor Challenger, and a duo of supernatural thrillers features "The Ring of Thoth" and "The Los Amigos Fiasco."

"The Irish poet and playwright's only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, appears in this splendid showcase of philosophy and wit. Additional selections include Wilde's ever-popular comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest; his essay on aestheticism, "The Decay of Lying: An Observation"; his prison letter, "De Profundis"; and other works of poetry and prose"--

Selections from the ever-popular English author's works include the complete text of two of her novels, Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, in addition to excerpts from her letters and Juvenilia.

Examines both academic and popular assessments of Conan Doyle's work, giving pride of place to the Holmes stories and their adaptations, and also attending to the wide range of his published work. Twenty-first-century readers, television viewers, and moviegoers know Arthur Conan Doyle as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the world's most recognizable fictional detective. Holmes's enduring popularity has kept Conan Doyle in the public eye. However, Holmes has taken on a life of his own, generating a steady stream of critical commentary, while Conan Doyle's other works are slighted or ignored. Yet the Holmes stories make up only a small portion of Conan Doyle's published work, which includes mainstream and historical fiction; history; drama; medical, spiritualist, and political tracts; and even essays on photography. When Doyle published - whatever the subject - his contemporaries took note. Yet, outside of the fiction featuring Sherlock Holmes, until recently relatively little has been done to analyze the reception Conan Doyle's work received during his lifetime and since his death. This book examines both academic and popular assessments of Conan Doyle's work, giving pride of place to the Holmes stories and their many adaptations for print, visual, and online media, but attending to his other contributions to turn-of-the-twentieth-century culture as well. The availability of periodicals and newspapers online makes it possible to develop an assessment of Conan Doyle's (and Sherlock Holmes's) reputation among a wider readership and viewership, thus allowing for development of a broader and more accurate portrait of Doyle's place in literary and cultural history.

The Reader's Guide to British History is the essential source to secondary material on British history. This resource contains over 1,000 A-Z entries on the history of Britain, from ancient and Roman Britain to the present day. Each entry lists 6-12 of the best-known books on the subject, then discusses those works in an essay of 800 to 1,000 words prepared by an expert in the field. The essays provide advice on the range and depth of coverage as well as the emphasis and point of view espoused in each publication.

Presents a collection of quotations about books and reading, from politcal figures, writers, and celebrities, including Mark Twain, Oprah Winfrey, W.H. Auden, Jerry Seinfeld, and Virginia Wolf, among others.

The dean of detectives is a master of disguise so his doll comes with 10 different costumes. This set also includes 5 colleagues and adversaries: the loyal Dr. Watson, the nefarious Professor Moriarty, Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard, Mrs. Hudson, and Irene Adler, the only woman to outwit Holmes. Sixty interchangeable heads portray a variety of actors who have played Holmes and Watson over the years.

Magic and conjuring inhabit the boundaries and the borderlands of performance. The conjuror’s act of demonstrating the apparently impossible, the uncanny, the marvellous, or the grotesque challenges the spectator’s sense of reality. It brings him or her up against their own assumptions about how the world works; at its most extreme, it asks the spectator to re-evaluate his or her sense of the limits of the human. Performing Dark Arts is an exploration of the paradox of the conjuror, the actor who pretends to be a magician. It aims to illuminate the history of conjuring by examining it in the context of performance studies, and to throw light on aspects of performance studies by testing them against the art of conjuring. The book examines not only the performances of individual magicians from Dedi to David Blaine, but also the broader cultural contexts in which their performances were received, and the meanings which they have attracted.

Arthur Conan Doyle's supernatural literature varied from Jamesian ghost stories to Lovecraftian cosmic horror and disturbing psychological thrillers, and included the introduction of a new type of monster, the reanimated Egyptian mummy. These five novelettes comprise his essential horror fiction. With introduction and notes by Rafe McGregor. Contains: "The Captain of the Pole-Star," "Lot No. 249," "A Pastoral Horror," "The Terror of Blue John Gap" and "The Parasite."