CLASSICS

When the ambitious but inept clerk Frans Laarmans is offered a job managing an Edam distribution company in Antwerp, he jumps at the chance, despite his professed dislike for cheese...

First imagined in the 1960s but never published, this collection of Robert Louis Stevenson's essays, fables and short stories was imagined by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares -...

Described by Gore Vidal as 'a novel written at the top of her form and so unique', Reality and Dreams concerns the delirious, egocentric film director Tom Richards, who is...

Hildegard Wolf is a German psychiatrist who lives a comfortable life in Paris. When she encounters a client who claims to be Lord Lucan, shecan't help but be intrigued. After...

Dubliners is a wonderfully engaging and accessible collection of stories by James Joyce, an author famed for being difficult to read. It contains fifteen stories, among them The Dead, made...

The unique Dublin Illustrated Edition, endorsed by The James Joyce Centre, meticulously recreates the 1922 text, and has been published to celebrate the Global Bloomsday Gathering, a live online reading...

Written in 1796, "The Italian", with its archetypal villain Schedoni, intense romance between Vincentio di Vivaldi and Elena di Rosalba, and immaculate poetics of the sublime is the masterpiece of...

On arriving at a rural monastery, the monk Ambrosius meets a young girl, Benedicta. She is shunned by the local community for being the daughter of the local hangman, but...

Unsuccessful in his ambitions, the young and naive Peter Schlemihl seals a pact with the Devil in which he exchanges his shadow for the purse of Fortunatus, thereby gaining everlasting...

This collection of lesser-known of short stories - ranging from absurd humorous sketches to psychological pieces and tragic stories - demonstrates Anton Chekhov's mastery of the genre. Although varying in...

After one of their own people repeatedly fails to live up to a pact with the Devil, a petty and morally bankrupt village community is terrorized by a succession of...

During the German advance through Belgium into France in 1940, Captain de Reixach is shot dead by a sniper. Three witnesses, involved with him during his lifetime in different capacities...

When the young and sensitive Auguste Saint-Clair notices an Etruscan vase on the mantelpiece of his beloved Mathilde, he becomes gradually consumed by jealousy at the thought that it could...

When Mrs Ramsay tells her son at their summer house on the Isle of Skye that they will be able to visit the nearby lighthouse the following day, little does...

Portraying the characters and events of a small Midwestern town at the end of the nineteenth century, Winesburg, Ohio is a cycle of stories which reads like an episodic novel....

Dmitry Rudin, a high-minded gentleman of reduced means, arrives at the estate of Darya Mikhailovna, where his intelligence, eloquence and conviction immediately make a powerful impression. As he stys on...

Charles Dickens wrote a number of supernatural and horror stories, some of which were included in his longer works, while others were published in magazines. This collection provides an invaluable...

Set in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev during the chaotic winter of 1918-19, The White Guard, Bulgakov's first fulllength novel, tells the story of a Russian-speaking family trapped in circumstances...

Invited to an extravagantly lavish party in a Long Island mansion, Nick Carraway, a young bachelor who has just settled in the neighbouring cottage, is intrigued by the mysterious host,...

While holidaying at a villa on the French Riviera, Dick and Nicole Diver, a wealthy American couple, meet the young film star Rosemary Hoyt. Her arrival causes a stir in...

'Atala', published in 1801, tells the tragic tale of the eponymous heroine, the mixed-race Christian daughter of a Native American chief, who saves the captured Chactas and tragically falls in...

First published in 1861, Humiliated and Insulted plunges the reader into a world of moral degradation, childhood trauma, unrequited love and irreconcilable relationships. At the centre of the story are...

Based, like the earlier Impressions of Africa, on uniquely eccentric principles of composition, this book invites the reader to enter a world which in its innocence and extravagance is unlike...

Arriving at a rural monastery, the monk Ambrosius meets a young girl called Benedicta, shunned by the local community for being the daughter of the local hangman. Ambrosius is drawn...

When the immoral libertine Monsieur de Franval marries and fathers a daughter, he decides to inculcate in her a sense of absolute freedom, an unconventional education that involves the two...

Constantly rebuffed from the social circles he aspires to frequent, the timid clerk Golyadkin is confronted by the sudden appearance of his double, a more brazen, confident and socially successful...

Published a year after The Great Gatsby, this short-story collection showcases many of the celebrated novel's themes, as well as its unique writing style. Two of the most famous tales,...

A collection of early short stories which helped make Fitzgerald's name, Tales of the Jazz Age combines period pieces - the most notable of which is the novella-length 'May Day'...

On his way back to Russia after some years spent in the West, Grigory Mikhailovich Litvinov, the son of a retired official of merchant stock, stops over in Baden-Baden to...

Set in Paris during the years of the Reign of Terror, 'The Gods Want Blood' centres on the rise to power of Jacobin sympathizer Evariste Gamelin, a young painter who...

Monroe Stahr is a film producer at the height of his career, revered by the industry and in control of every aspect of his business empire. In his ruthless rise...

The tale of Heathcliff and Cathy's ungovernable love and suffering, and the havoc that their passion wreaks on the families of the Earnshaws and the Lintons, shocked the book's first...

The young student Nathanael remains haunted by his childhood fears: he is convinced that Coppelius, a strange night-time visitor who used to come to his house to conduct alchemical experiments...

A master of many literary genres, Arthur Conan Doyle excelled particularly in the short-story form, and was acclaimed in his day as much for his detective stories as for his...

The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism, and FascismAs a lifelong socialist, Shaw believed that economic inequality was a poison destroying every aspect of human life, perverting family affections...

Jane Tressider has never been afraid of speaking her mind, even if she admits that she may have occasionally given offence by doing so. But as a busy mother of...

Basil and Josephine charts the coming of age of two privileged youths from quiet Midwestern towns, Basil Duke Lee and Josephine Perry - based on Fitzgerald himself and a combination...

Published soon after Fitzgerald's debut novel This Side of Paradise, Flappers and Philosophers was the author's first collection of short fiction, a form through which he had gained notoriety in...

Originally hand-printed at her Hogarth Press in Richmond, Monday or Tuesday is the only collection of short stories that Virginia Woolf published during her lifetime, providing a fascinating insight into...

The Mudfog Papers, a collection of sketches by Dickens published in Bentley's Miscellany between 1837 and 1838, describes the local politics of the fictional town of Mudfog - such as...

First published in 1831, Belkin's Stories was the first completed work of fiction by the founding father of Russian literature. Through a series of interlinked stories purporting to have been...

When the young salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning transformed into a monstrous insect, his shock and incomprehension are coupled with the panic of being late for work and...

Based on a true story, The Jew's Beech centres on two brutal murders in rural Westphalia - the first of a local forester and the second of a Jewish moneylender...

Dorian Gray is having his picture painted by Basil Hallward, who is charmed by his looks. But when Sir Henry Wotton visits and seduces Dorian into the worship of youthful...

A novel of high romance and great intensity, Jane Eyre has enjoyed popular success and critical acclaim ever since its first publication in 1847. Jane's journey from a troubled childhood...

When an ageing, impoverished nobleman decides to style himself "Don Quixote" and embarks upon a series of daring endeavours, it is clear that his ability to distinguish between reality and...

Micromegas is a six-hundred-and-fifty-year-old, thirty-nine-kilometre-high giant from the planet Sirius who can speak a thousand languages and has been expelled from his homeland for writing a heretical tract. On Saturn...

Set in the year after the 1929 crash and incorporating many autobiographical elements, 'Babylon Revisited' tells the story of the widower Charlie Wales, a reformed alcoholic and successful businessman returning...