CLASSICS

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...

One of Dickens's finest novels, Great Expectations chronicles the fortunes of its young protagonist Pip as he is unexpectedly endowed by a mysterious benefactor with the life of a gentleman,...

In the Twilight, the third collection of short stories compiled by Anton Chekhov himself, was his first major success and won him the prestigious Pushkin Prize when it was published...

While he is now mostly associated with his Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle was also celebrated for the many masterful tales he wrote outside of that cycle. In this...

The most extensively annotated edition available with almost 1,000 notes by Marc A. Mamigonian and John TurnerThis text is based on the Egoist Press second edition of 1918James Joyce's first...

Begun in 1920 while Bulgakov was employed in a hospital in the remote Caucasian outpost of Vladikavkaz, and continued when he started working for a government literary department in Moscow,...

As Mrs Dalloway works on the preparations for a dinner party, her thoughts throughout the day wander from memories of the past to interrogations about the present and lead her...

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author of one of the most poignant and enduringly popular novels of the twentieth century, left only a few other pieces of fiction when he...

On a boat in the Thames estuary, Marlow tells his travelling companions of his reconnaissance expedition for a Belgian trading company to its most remote outpost in central Africa, which...

One of Twain's most celebrated novellas, 'The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg' is a satirical retelling of the Garden of Eden story in the Bible, in which the author, mocking the...

Stevenson published this collection of his early fiction in 1882, after the pieces had appeared in various magazines. The first half features two popular detective-story cycles, The Suicide Club and...

Inspired by Fitzgerald's own courtship of his future wife Zelda, 'The Last of the Belles' centres on the Southern beauty Ailie Calhoun from Tarleton, Georgia, who finds herself the object...

Although he is best known to the public as the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories and other pioneering works of detective fiction, Arthur Conan Doyle successfully contributed to other...

On a train journey, Pozdnyshev tells his story to a stranger: how his relationship with his wife gradually deteriorated from one of love and passion to jealousy and resentfulness, culminating...

A young Harvard graduate with bright prospects, Bill Frothington is invited on board a steamer hosting a high-school dance, where he meets and falls in love with the seventeen-year-old Mae....

Set in an unspecified island kingdom, A Regicide tells the story of the statistician Boris who, after the electoral victory of the Church party in the country's elections, decides to...

When the descendant of an ancient aristocratic family moves from Massachusetts to Exham Priory, his ancestral home in the south of England, he is plagued by the constant noise of...

Tales of Adventure and Medical Life, one of the collections Arthur Conan Doyle published at the end of his career, anthologizes some of his best short fiction outside of the...

Having moved into an abandoned haunted house, the narrator, undaunted by the warnings of the locals, invites a party of friends over; on Twelfth Night he and his guests gather...

Having been found guilty of adultery, Hester Prynne is forced to wear an embroidered scarlet letter A as a punishment for her sin. While her vengeful husband embarks on a...

Four sailors discover a copper cylinder containing a manuscript written by the adventurer Adam More, who was shipwrecked in the southern hemisphere. They read its contents out to one another,...

As a group of Western tourists travel down the Nile on the steamer Korosko towards the historical sites near Egypt's southern border, they are kidnapped by a marauding band of...

The present selection traces the development of Yeats's verse, encompassing the poet's interest in Irish folklore and national identity, his engagement with the political situation of his day and the...

Trapped in an unhappy marriage with a boorish, inattentive and socially ambitious husband, Julie de Chaverny enjoys a flirtatious dalliance with the elegant Major de Chateaufort. However, the sudden reappearance...

Eichendorff's prose masterpiece - a picaresque account of the wanderings of a young man who leaves home after a row with his father, and who eventually finds love with the...

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 plagued by a swarm of...

Happily engaged to the poet Amandus, Fraulein Anna is horrified to discover that a beautiful ring, mysteriously deposited upon her finger whilst tending her kitchen garden, forces her into marriage...

While on a journey with his wife to Prague for the opening night of Don Giovanni, Mozart is caught picking an orange on the grounds of a stately home. But...

By writing what he called a "secret book" - taking the shape of a conversation between himself and St Augustine - Petrarch aimed to compose a cathartic text which would...

This collection of Pushkin's stories begins with 'The Queen of Spades', perhaps the most celebrated short story in Russian literature. The young Hermann, while watching some friends gambling, hears a...

Hadji Murat, one of the most feared and venerated mountain chiefs in the Caucasian struggle against the Russians, defects from the Muslim rebels after feuding with his ruling imam, Shamil....

Regarded as one of the most influential horror stories of all time and the inspiration for countless literary spin-offs, the tale of the young Englishman Jonathan Harker's journey into the...

Sense and Sensibility is the story of the two Dashwood sisters, who embody the conflict between the oppressive nature of "civilized" society and the human desire for romantic passion. Elinor...

When the publishers of the Pickwick Papers, Chapman & Hall, brought out the anonymous 'Sketches of Young Ladies' in 1837, their resounding success prompted the twenty-six-year old Dickens to write,...

Fathers and Children, arguably the first modern novel in the history of Russian literature, shocked readers when it was first published in 1862 - the controversial character of Bazarov, a...

After an accident, Tess Durbeyfield, the daughter of impoverished peasants, decides to call on the aristocratic d'Urbervilles, as she believes that she is also descended from their ancient Norman lineage...