ALMA BOOKSA publisher with a soul

The Devil’s Dictionary

By Ambrose Bierce

£6.99 £5.59

A celebrated journalist in his lifetime, Ambrose Bierce was the author of sardonic, mischievous definitions of words that appeared in various San Francisco newspapers. Over several years these were compiled for a mock dictionary, originally published in 1906 as The Cynic’s Word Book and reissued in…

The Canterbury Tales

By Geoffrey Chaucer

£5.99 £3.00

“And specially from every shires ende Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende, The hooly blisful martir for to seke, That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.” Assembling at the Tabard Inn in Southwark, a group of pilgrims begin their journey to Canterbury Cathedral. To entertain themselves on t…

Moll Flanders

By Daniel Defoe

£5.99 £3.00

Born in Newgate Prison to an incarcerated mother, Moll Flanders is compelled from earliest childhood to make her own way in the world and to live off her wit and beauty. Her desire to climb the rungs of society leads her through a tangled web of incest, adultery, prostitution, deception and theft, b…

The Bérenger Plays: The Killer, Rhinocerous, Exit the King, Strolling in the Air

By Eugène Ionesco

£9.99 £5.00

This collection brings together the four plays that feature Ionesco’s everyman protagonist Jean Bérenger. In ‘The Killer’, he comes across a “radiant city”, an ideal civilization which is being terrorized by a killer, whom he tries to help apprehend. In ‘Rhinoceros’, he is the only person in a provi…

Politics and Literature

By Jean-Paul Sartre

£8.99 £4.50

First published in French magazines in the 1960s, the essays and interviews collected in this volume tackle two of Sartre’s most enduring concerns as a philosopher: politics and literature. With regard to the former, they develop the notion of the intellectual not only as an aloof theoretician, but…

Six Plays: Six Characters in Search of an Author, Henry IV, Cap and Bells, Honest as Can Be, The Vice, The Dream – or is it?

By Luigi Pirandello

£9.99 £5.00

This selection of plays by Luigi Pirandello contains some of his best-known works, such as Six Characters in Search of an Author – an absurdist piece in which the characters, actors and Pirandello himself interact during the rehearsal of a fictional play within the play – and Henry IV – a tragicomic…

The Four Little Girls and Desire Caught by the Tail

By Pablo Picasso

£5.99 £3.00

In the 1940s, Picasso wrote two plays in French: the first, Desire Caught by the Tail, was conceived during the German occupation of Paris and features a cast of grotesque allegorical characters such as the Onion, Silence or Fat Anxiety discussing the crucial wartime themes of hunger, cold and love;…

The Monk: A Romance

By Matthew Gregory Lewis

£7.99 £4.00

A masterpiece of the Gothic genre, The Monk tells the story of the Capuchin friar Ambrosio and his fall from grace through desire, greed and lust. Favourably reviewed at first, the novel was later so widely and raucously denounced for its perceived licentiousness, blasphemy and corrupting influence…

Prosecco: The Wine and the People Who Made it a Success

By Luigi Bolzon

£16.99 £8.50

Following in the footsteps of other illustrious Italian gastronomic successes – from pizza to pasta, from mozzarella to Parmesan and mortadella – Prosecco is the most recent “made in Italy” product to have colonized the world. But what is its history, and how did it come to be a global phenomenon? L…

Buster

By Alan Burns

£8.99 £4.50

Buster was the first, and arguably the most traditional, work of fiction by Alan Burns – dating from before his aleatoric style developed into “cutting up”, but displaying early examples of the trademark disjointed, brisk and biting style which earned him a cult following. Imbued with autobiographic…

Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman)

By Richard Wagner

£12.00 £9.60

Der fliegende Holländer is the first of Wagner’s operas that the author considered to be representative of his mature style. The Dutchman embodies one of the major themes that recur throughout Wagner’s work: that of a central character seeking redemption from a loving woman. Originally taken from a…

The Song of Roland

£8.99 £4.00

After years of fierce battle, the Emperor Charlemagne’s army is finally on the brink of victory over the Saracens in Spain. Having proposed his stepfather Ganelon for the perilous task of serving as Charlemagne’s envoy in the negotiations over the surrender of the Saracen king Marsile, Count Roland…