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 ...
London has the greatest literary tradition of any city in the world. Its roll-call of story-tellers includes cultural giants who changed the way the world thought about writing, like Shakespeare, D...
Love Stories brings together a captivating assortment of short stories inspired by romantic entanglement in its many forms: first love, infatuation, obsession, unrequited love, marriage, adultery, ...
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...
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...
Tales about ghosts are as old as human culture itself but the ghost story as a distinguished literary form reached its apogee in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As traditional re...
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...
In the eighteenth century, Laurence Sterne explores the temptations of the French capital in a teasing study of foreign mores and Restif de la Bretonne provides an eye-witness account of the Revolu...
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...
In a novella which remains highly controversial to this day, Conrad explores the relations between Africa and Europe. On the surface, this is a horrifying tale of colonial exploitation. The narrato...
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...
Jane Austen seems to have been born with the comic precision and other-worldly insight she everywhere displays in Sense and Sensibility, her first published novel (1811), which, though revised late...
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...
As a literary subject, Christmas has inspired everything from intimate domestic dramas, to fanciful flights of the imagination, and the full range of its expression is represented in this wonderful...
A perfect gift of timeless erotic stories ranging from ancient Greek myth to modern stories of longing and lust. This beautifully jacketed Everyman's Library Pocket Classics hardcover anthology has...
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...