German Romantic poetry is both fluid and formed, and it is full of song: the poems themselves are often intrinsically lyrical, and many of them inspired some of the best-known musical compositions ...
A biting satire on dictatorship written during the Second World War and published in 1945, ANIMAL FARM is perhaps the most celebrated twentieth-century English satire after the same writer's NINETE...
Saki's dazzling tales manage the remarkable feat of being anarchic and urbane at the same time. Studded with Wildean epigrams and featuring well-contrived plots and surprise endings, his stories gl...
Returning to Turkey from exile in the West, the secular poet Ka is driven by curiosity to investigate a surprising wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden by the government to wear their h...
The doppelgänger, the ghostly double infecting the soul, was a popular fictional subject for late nineteenth-century writers, and it found its most brilliant realization in Robert Louis Steven...
During its three-thousand-year history Rome has been an imperial metropolis, the capital of a nation and the spiritual core of a great world religion. For writers from antiquity to the presen...
The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed . If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repr...
This brilliantly coloured tale of the French Revolution is an historical romance set in Paris and London. Famous for the character of Sidney Carton who sacrifices himself upon the guillotine' it is...
As Scheherazade proved long ago, good stories make the best bedtime entertainment. The tales collected here represent the essence of the storyteller's art, with its ancient roots in fantastical leg...
T. S. Eliot called The Moonstone ‘the first, the longest and the best of detective novels’. Combining a teasing plot with a vivid portrait of Victorian England, Collins makes his charac...
The sublime city of Venice has long offered inspiration to the world's storytellers. This anthology gathers a dazzling variety of stories with Venetian settings, including Daphne du Maurier's haunt...
This most romantic of fairy tales is found in many versions, and the story of the beautiful girl who falls into a long sleep, to be awakened by a lover, has been interpreted by some as an allegory ...
Arthur Rackham (1867-1939) was one of the leading illustrators from the golden age of British book illustration. Fairy-tale and fantasy were his forte and in later life he responded to the dark sti...
The stories collected here--including such gems as Stephen Crane's "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," O. Henry's "The Marry Month of May," F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Bridal P...
The five original fairy tales included in this volume were first published by Davis Nutt in 1888. Although it is said that Wilde wrote them for his two young sons, the author himself claimed they w...
Baron Munchausen’s absurd adventures have entertained adults and children alike for more than two centuries. First published in England in 1785, his traveller’s tales soon became as wel...