This smart new paperback edition contains the fully-reset text of three medieval English poems, translated by Tolkien for the modern-day reader and containing romance, tragedy, love, sex and honour. It features a beautifully decorated text and includes as a bonus the complete version of Tolkien's acclaimed lecture on Sir Gawain. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl are two poems by an unknown author written in about 1400. Sir Gawain is a romance, a fairy-tale for adults, full of life and colour; but it is also much more than this, being at the same time a powerful moral tale which examines religious and social values. Pearl is apparently an elegy on the death of a child, a poem pervaded with a sense of great personal loss: but, like Gawain it is also a sophisticated and moving debate on much less tangible matters. Sir Orfeo is a slighter romance, belonging to an earlier and different tradition. It was a special favourite of Tolkien's. The three translations represent the complete rhyme and alliterative schemes of the originals, and are uniquely accompanied with the complete text of Tolkien's acclaimed 1953 W.P. Ker Memorial Lecture that he delivered on Sir Gawain.

Subtitled A Study of Provincial Life, George Eliot's novel Middlemarch is a chronicle of the titular nineteenth-century Midlands town in the midst of political and social change. Eliot explores the upheaval and transformation brought about by these changes through their impact on the lives of a richly varied cast of characters that includes the pious young Dorothea Brooke, her suitor the Reverend Edward Casaubon, the ambitious doctor Tertius Lydgate, and the mysterious schemer John Raffles.

This volume features the first two novels of L. Frank Baum's classic Oz series. In `The Wonderful Wizard of Oz', Dorothy Gale and her dog Toto are transported to the magical land of Oz, where they team up with the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman and Cowardly Lion to seek the help of the Wizard of Oz himself. In `The Marvelous Land of Oz', Tip, Jack Pumpkinhead, the Saw-Horse and the Woggle-Bug work together to help to save the Scarecrow's besieged city.

As Good and Evil sit precariously weighing in the balance, swaying back and forth with the whims and spirit of humanity, many continue to ask: what is it that gives us purpose? Who truly matters in this age of adversity? Are we coincidental masses of flesh and blood, or were we put on this earth for a reason? Such impassable questions have been debated, answered, reexamined, and refuted since the very dawn of time. With the seemingly ever mounting confusion, it's easy to see why many have simply given up the search. Ebenezer Makinde, however, may be the exception. On December 9th, 2019, he sent a request to Heaven for answers to the existential questions humans have been asking for centuries. He wrote a note, sealed it away in his desk, and left the uncertainty in another world's hands. On December 31st, one day shy of the dawn of the new decade, someone answered. Light of Darkness tells the story of a fateful interaction between Ebenezer and two agents from opposing worlds, one from Heaven and one from Hell. Realizing he's been entangled in a cosmic plot putting the fate of humanity in his very own hands, it soon becomes clear that the balance between light and darkness has never reached a more critical point... will the world bask in the light of redemption or be forever doomed to a never-ending darkness? Ebenezer finds himself caught between the forces at work in that dilemma; providing him access to information that will soon be impacting all of humanity.

In a landscape worthy of Cormac McCarthy, the river runs septic with blood. Edgar Wilson makes the sign of the cross on the forehead of a cow, then stuns it with a mallet. He does this over and over again, as the stun operator at Senhor Milo's slaughterhouse: reliable, responsible, quietly dispatching cows and following orders, wherever that may take him. It's important to calm the cows, especially now that they seem so unsettled: they have begun to run in panic into walls and over cliffs. Bronco Gil, the foreman, thinks it's a jaguar or a wild boar. Edgar Wilson has other suspicions. But what is certain is that there is something in this desolate corner of Brazil driving men, and animals, to murder and madness.