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...
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...
Scottish Stories is a treasury of great writing from a richly literary land, where the short story has flourished for over two centuries. Here are chilling supernatural stories from Robert Louis St...
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...
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...
Is your ability to focus and pay attention in free fall?You are not alone. The average office worker now focuses on any one task for just three minutes. But it's not your fault. Your at...
Here are libraries modest, mobile, mystical (Borges of course) and magical (Helen Oyeyemi's enchanting 'Books and Roses'); public and private, provincial and prestigious. Little that happen in Eliz...
In this beautifully packaged anthology A. S. Byatt, Alice Munro, Elizabeth Bowen, Sherwood Anderson, Edith Wharton, Anita Desai, Colm Tóibín, Lorrie Moore and many others reflect upon...
Woven through all these tales are the unique histories and mythologies of the regions of Southern Italy, encompassing Sicily, Calabria, Cantania, Basilicata, Apulia and Campania. Theocritus, Virgil...
Poland, 1980. Shy, anxious Ludwik has been sent along with the rest of his university class to an agricultural camp. Here he meets Janusz – and together they spend a dreamlike summer falling ...
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...
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) is celebrated as a novelist and man of action. He is perhaps most famous for WHOM THE BELL TOLLS and A FAREWELL TO ARMS. But he was equally prolific as a writer of shor...
Hana, a Canadian nurse, exhausted by death, and grieving for her own dead father; the maimed thief-turned-Allied-agent, Caravaggio; Kip, the emotionally detached Indian sapper - each is haunted in ...
A friend and contemporary of Richard Wright and James Baldwin - and every bit their equal - Chester Himes was the acclaimed author of literary novels, stories and essays, as well as the classic cri...
An attack on war which broadens into a satire on the ANCIEN REGIME of the Austro-Hungarian empire, THE GOOD SOLDIER SVEJK recreates the age-old figure of the simple soldier whose sheer determinatio...
Scott Fitzgerald was called the laureate of the Jazz Age. The Great Gatsby (1926) is a cynical celebration of the post-Great War Long Island/ New York world of get-rich-quick. The narrator, Nick Ca...
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...
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...
Written during World War II, The Little Prince tells of the friendship between the narrator, an aviator stranded in the Sahara desert, and a mysterious boy whom he encounters there. Ruler of a tiny...
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...