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Joseph Conrad was a native of Poland, yet many critics regard him as one of the greatest English novelists. This is all the more remarkable, since he did not learn to speak English fluently until he was in his 20s. He became a naturalized British citizen in 1886. He wrote many books and stories, but the two that remain most popluar are Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Lord Jim is both an adventure story and a story of tragedy and repentence.

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. They can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere. Some you may disagree with but they will get you thinking; about our choices and about those you would have made. If this volume takes you on a path to discover more of these miniature masterpieces then we have all gained something.

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is an expose of the cruelty that the author observed when he worked briefly in the Belgian Congo. The story is based on a journey that Conrad took up the Congo River in 1890, during King Leopold II of Belgium’s abusive rule of the area. The main thread follows the journey of the ferry-boat captain, Marlow, who must return Kurtz, an ivory trader, to Europe. The severely ill Kurtz dies on the journey after handling Marlow a collection of papers. Back in Europe, Marlow gives these to a journalist instead of those for which they were intended.

Secret agent Mr. Adolph Verloc operates from a seedy Soho shop, where he deals in pornography and espionage. Idle, treacherous, and self-righteous, he makes the life of his wife, Winnie, one of silent misery. When Verloc is assigned to plant a bomb at Greenwich Observatory, his plans go terribly awry, and his family has to deal with the tragic repercussions of his actions. Joseph Conrad's dark satire on English society, while rooted in the Edwardian period, remains strikingly contemporary.

Calm, stoic captain Mac Whirr has just been given command of a new steamship, the Nan-Shan. He and his crew are transporting Asian workers across the China Sea when a sudden drop in atmospheric pressure alerts Whirr of "some uncommonly dirty weather knocking about". Soon the steamship is caught in the midst of a vicious typhoon. The impending disaster brings out the best and the worst in Whirr; Jukes, the chief mate; Solomon, the wise engineer; and the rest of the crew.

Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London's Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be "a simple tale" proves to involve politicians, policemen, foreign diplomats, and London's fashionable society in the darkest and most surprising interrelations.

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.

It is 1813 in Northern Spain. The crew of a British warship is attempting to make contact with the local resistance fighters who are battling the French. They send a brave crewman, known as Cuba Tom, to try to make contact with the local chief of the Guerrillos, but he fails to return. So a young naval officer, Edgar Byrne, sets off to try to trace him. The trail leads him to a strange inn which is run by two very sinister old women...

Two colonial officers extol the benefits they are bringing to an African village in the form of "quays and warehouses, and barracks-and billiard-rooms". A French republican who has fathered three idiot sons makes his peace with the Church: only to have an idiot daughter. A woman chooses not to leave her husband...but he leaves her. Such are the ironies of Conrad's earliest short stories.

In the 1870s, supporters of the pretender to the throne of Spain take advantage of a young man's attraction to the sea to persuade him to run dangerous missions on their behalf, with the financial support of a beautiful but exceedingly baffling young heiress, with whom the young man is soon giddily in love. Told largely in the first person, the novel is unusual, for Conrad, in focusing largely on the evolving psychology of a young man in the throes of a great romantic passion.

Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. He came to be regarded a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote stories and novels, many with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of what he saw as an impassive, inscrutable universe. Conrad is considered a literary impressionist by some and an early modernist by others, though his works also contain elements of 19th-century realism.

Country doctor Kennedy tells the story of Amy Foster, a tender-hearted country girl, who alone takes pity on a starving and bewildered foreign castaway, feared and shunned by the rest of her community. The castaway proves to be amiable and intelligent, but this is not enough to overcome the prejudice aroused by his alienness.

This classic tale, set in the jungle of the Belgian Congo, tells the story of Marlow's search for the powerful and possibly deranged Kurtz, in an atmosphere of evil. This novel was later adapted and updated by Francis Ford Coppola as his film Apocalypse Now.

First published in 1902, Heart of Darkness has clearly earned its place in literary history. The story is based on Conrad’s personal experiences in Central Africa and closely parallels many of the events that occurred while he worked his way up the Congo River, and back, on a steam wheeler. Those events inspired him to create characters and a story line that deals with the early greedy exploitation of the Congo by the Europeans, in this case, through the ivory trade.

Jim is a young and naive clerk on a cargo ship plying Asian waters. He harbors romantic fantasies of adventure and heroism that are promptly scuttled one night when the ship collides with an obstacle and begins to sink. Stripped of his seaman's license, convinced of his own cowardice, Jim sets out on a tragic and transcendent search for redemption.

Conrad’s Lord Jim is the iconic story of a romantic young man and his struggle with guilt and self-loathing. The novel begins with Jim’s earlier life as a ship’s officer. He and the other crew members abandon an imperiled vessel and its passengers after a mysterious collision reveals a dangerous bulge below the water line. But the ship does not sink and Jim survives to face an official inquiry. He is stripped of his license and faces universal scorn and the reality of his own guilt.

Nostromo is Conrad's masterwork, a forerunner of Modernism, and one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. A profoundly dark moral fable set in the surroundings of a silver mine, it is a story of power, love, and revolution in the fictional South American country of Costaguana.

Love has many forms, many needs. Some fall into the dark, into the shadows. Forbidden love has connotations of desire, of possession but also of matters far more unsavoury. It’s a delicate facet of love that our classic authors explain with careful words and superbly crafted narratives.

Born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857 in Poland, Joseph Conrad had a difficult childhood due to his family's involvement in Polish nationalism, which led to their persecution by the Russian authorities. Conrad started his career as a sailor and traveled extensively, which inspired his literary work. In 1895, he published his first novel "Almayer's Folly," which was followed by a string of successful works, including "Heart of Darkness," which was published in 1899.

Joseph Conrad was born on 3rd December 1857 in Berdychiv in the Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire. His birthplace had been part of Poland which its neighbours dismembered into their own Empires. Conrad brought to English Literature both narrative mastery, compelling prose and fully formed characters as well as a deeper examination of the human psyche in a wealth of work. He wrote many novels, short stories, nonfiction, and memoirs which are rightly regarded today as some of the finest in English literature. Jospeh Conrad died on the 3rd August 1924 at Bishopsbourne, Kent in England.