Tony Tanner Book order (chronological)

To eat in Hong Kong is endlessly fascinating and exciting. A mere dot on the map of China, and home to seven million migrants, Hong Kong boasts a food scene that is breathtakingly rich and varied. Tony Tan explores this vibrant city through 80 exquisite dishes, from the cutting-edge contemporary to the traditional, from both the high and low of Hong Kong cuisine - with recipes from the city's iconic hotels, its hawker stalls, and even a legendary dumpling house on the outskirts of Kowloon. Tony weaves his recipes with stories that trace Hong Kong's Chinese roots, explore its deep colonial connections and tantalise us with glimpses of today's ultra-modern city and most delicious eating spots. Author BiographyBorn in Malaysia and fluent in both Mandarin and Cantonese, Tony Tan trained at La Varenne, France, and Leiths School of Food and Wine in the UK. He has presented master classes and been guest chef at hotels and restaurants throughout Australia, China, Malaysia, Vietnam, New Zealand and Spain, including the Ritz in Madrid and Alambique, one of Spain's top cooking schools. He was an international judge at Hong Kong's premier Chinese cuisine challenge, The Best of the Best Culinary Competition. He writes for magazines and newspapers in Australia and internationally and comments regularly in the media on food and wine. - Hong Kong Food City By Tony Tan (Hardback)

Here is a novel, glamorous, ironical, compassionate – a marvelous fusion into unity of the curious incongruities of the life of the period – which reveals a hero like no other – one who could live at no other time and in no other place. But he will live as a character, we surmise, as long as the memory of any reader lasts. It is the story of this Jay Gatsby who came so mysteriously to West Egg, of his sumptuous entertainments, and of his love for Daisy Buchanan – a story that ranges from pure lyrical beauty to sheer brutal realism, and is infused with a sense of the strangeness of human circumstance in a heedless universe. It is a magical, living book, blended of irony, romance, and mysticism.

In the hope of making a wealthy marriage, Eugenia, the Baroness M©ơnster, and her younger brother, the artist Felix, descend on the Wentworths, in Boston. Installed in a nearby house, they become close friends with the younger Wentworths, Gertrude, Charlotte and Clifford. Eugenia's wit, guile and sophistication, and Felix's debonair vivacity form an uneasy alliance with the Puritan morality and the frugal, domestic virtues of the Americans. A rich and delicately balanced commedy of manners, The Europeans weighs the values of the established order against thos of New England society, but makes no simple judgements, only subtle contrasts and beautifully observed comparisons.

When Elizabeth Bennet first meets eligible bachelor Fitzwilliam Darcy, she thinks him arrogant and conceited; he is indifferent to her good looks and lively mind. When she later discovers that Darcy has involved himself in the troubled relationship between his friend Bingley and her beloved sister Jane, she is determined to dislike him more than ever. In the sparkling comedy of manners that follows, Jane Austen shows the folly of judging by first impressions and superbly evokes the friendships, gossip and snobberies of provincial middle-class life.

Set in the post-Great War Long Island/New York world of the rich. The narrator, Nick Carraway, sympathetically records the pathos of Gatsby's romantic dream which founders on the reality of corruption, the insulated selfishness of Tom and Daisy, and the cutting edge of violence.

Male, female, deft, fraudulent, constantly shifting: which of the masquerade of passengers on the Mississippi steamboat Fidele is the confidence man? The central motif of Melville's last and most modern novel can be seen as a symbol of American cultural history.

When the young Ishmael gets on board Captain Ahab's whaling ship, little does he suspect that the mission on which he is about to embark is the fulfilment of his master's obsessive desire for revenge on Moby Dick, a white whale who has already claimed countless human victims and destroyed many fleets. With some sinister crew members in their midst and the hazardous conditions of the sea to contend with, the expedition becomes increasingly dangerous the closer it gets to its quarry. One of the great American novels, if not the greatest, Moby Dick epically combines rip-roaring adventure, a meticulously realistic portrayal of the whaling trade and a profound philosophical disquisition on the nature of good and evil.

Nietzsche said that he never travelled anywhere without a volume of Emerson's essays in his pocket, while Mathew Arnold described Emerson as 'the greatest prose writer of the century'. It is a remarkable writer who could at once appeal to a man considered a pillar of Victorian society, and to a man dedicated to bringing down such pillars. In his own time Emerson was considered a profoundly radical thinker, but after his death he was increasingly seen as a bland Boston Brahmin, contentedly ripening with the new England melons, benignly meditating on such viperous notions as the Over–soul.He is now appreciated as one of the truly seminal American writers, refusing all orthodoxies, complacencies and fixities—both a truly celebratory and deeply adversarial thinker. A unique paperback edition, with introduction and chronology of Emerson's life and times.

Male, female, deft, fraudulent, constantly shifting: which of the masquerade of passengers on the Mississippi steamboat Fidele is the confidence man? The central motif of Melville's last and most modern novel can be seen as a symbol of American cultural history.

Tanner guides us through Austen's novels from optimistic early works to the darker Persuasion and fragmentary Sanditon--a journey that takes her from acceptance of a society maintained by landed property, family, money, and strict propriety through an insistence on the need for authentication of these values to a final skepticism and even rejection.

Nabokov - Borges - Ellison - Bellow - Heller - Purdy - Hawkes - Barth - Plath - Updike - Roth - Mailer - Kesey.

In 1918 Ernest Hemingway went to war, to the 'war to end all wars'. He volunteered for ambulance service in Italy, was wounded and twice decorated. Out of his experiences came A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway's description of war is unforgettable. He recreates the fear, the comradeship, the courage of his young American volunteer and the men and women he meets in Italy with total conviction. But A Farewell to Arms is not only a novel of war. In it Hemingway has also created a love story of immense drama and uncompromising passion.

The books in the 'Penguin Readers' series are selected from the classics, and film and TV stories, as well as original stories. They are simplified for the benefit of the reluctant reader, foreign language speakers and ESOL/EFL students.

Dr Tanner investigates American literature with regards to wonder and cultivated naivety.