"Last Post", the fourth and final volume of Parade's End, is set on a single post-war summer's day. Valentine Wannop and Christopher Tietjens share a cottage in Sussex with Tietjens' brother and sister-in-law. Through their differing perspectives, Fo...

"A Man Could Stand Up", the third volume of "Parade's End", brings Ford's characters to the "crack across the table of History", across which lie their uncertain post-war futures. Divided into three parts, the novel is a kaleidoscopic vision of socie...

"No more Hope, no more Glory, no more parades for you and me any more. Nor for the country... Nor for the world, I dare say...", says Christopher Tietjens to a war-damaged fellow officer, under fire on the Western Front. "No More Parades" continues "...

"Some Do Not...", the first volume of "Parade's End", introduces the central characters: Christopher Tietjens, a brilliant mathematician; his dazzling, unfaithful wife Sylvia; and the young Suffragette Valentine Wannop. It starts with the cataclysmic...

"Hearing the click behind him, Parker threw his glass straight back over his right shoulder, and dove off his chair to the left". When a job looks like amateur hour, Parker walks away. But even a squad of seasoned professionals can't guarantee agains...

The Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) is acknowledged as among the major writers of our time. The seven stories in this collection capture Bernhard's distinct darkly comic voice and vision – often compared to Kafka a...

Beneath the unassuming surface of a progressive women's college lurks a world of intellectual pride and pomposity awaiting devastation by the pens of two brilliant and appalling wits. Randall Jarrell's classic novel was originally published to overwh...

Ford Madox Ford spent his last years in the south of France, near Toulon. In "Provence" (1935), written four years before his death, he explores both the place and the idea of it: "not a country nor the home of a race, but a frame of mind". Suffused...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! Novelist Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia and spent decades working at a variety of laboring jobs before turning to writing in his late forties. From that point,...

Parade's End is the title Ford Madox Ford gave to his greatest work, the four Tietjens novels which, in Graham Greene's words, tell "the terrifying story of a good man tortured, pursued, driven into revolt, and ruined as far as the world is concerned...