New Releases by Rudyard Kipling

This is the first scholarly edition to bring together the best short stories and poems of Rudyard Kipling. Covering the full range of Kipling''s career from the 1880s to the 1930s it includes selections from Plain Tales from the Hills, Traffics and Discoveries, Just So Stories, Barrack-RoomBallads and Other Verses, and many more. A hugely inventive writer, Kipling displayed his comic mastery as well as bleak insights into human behaviour in his work, and stories such as ''Mary Postgate'', ''The Man who would be King'', and ''Mrs Bathurst'' established his reputation as an artist who stillhas the power to astonish his readers. In his introduction and notes Daniel Karlin addresses the social and political engagement of Kipling''s art, and the controversies over his critical and popular reputation. Two appendices consider Kipling''s attitude to British rule in India and to the army, and original illustrations include a mapof the Punjab from ''The Man who would be King''.

The Jungle Books can be regarded as classic stories told by an adult to children. But they also constitute a complex literary work of art in which the whole of Kipling''s philosophy of life is expressed in miniature. They are best known for the `Mowgli'' stories; the tale of a baby abandoned and brought up by wolves, educated in the ways and secrets of the jungle by Kaa the python, Baloo the bear, and Bagheera the black panther. The stories, a mixture of fantasy, myth, and magic, are underpinned by Kipling''s abiding preoccupation with the theme of self-discovery, and the nature of the `Law''.

For the modern reader of Kipling''s Barrack-Room Ballads - among the most enduringly popular poems ever published in England - some explanation of their contemporary expressions and allusions and their military context is necessary if he is to appreciate them in their full glory. John Whitehead, critic and biographer who himself served with the Indian Army in Burma, has provided this in full measure in his entertaining and scholarly Introduction and comprehensive textual Notes. This Centenary Edition of the ballads is unlikely ever to be superseded.

Among the best loved of all children’s classics, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book is set among a community of animals in the jungles of India, where Kipling was born and grew up. Three of the stories feature the adventures of an abandoned “man cub,” a boy named Mowgli, who is raised by wolves in the jungle. Other well-known stories in the collection include “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” the tale of a heroic mongoose who outwits vicious cobras in order to save his human benefactors, and "Toomai of the Elephants," the story of a ten-year-old elephant-handler.This edition includes black-and-white illustrations by Kurt Wiese and William Henry Drake.