Classic Literature Short Stories

A spine-tingling collection of weird and wonderful horror stories, featuring ghosts, curses, strange phenomena, ghouls, black magic, and demonic apparitions. Do you dare to listen?

Spanning four decades in the mid-19th century, the interconnected novellas of Old New York lay out in vivid detail the complex and inscrutable codes, customs, and taboos of New York society in classic Wharton style.

From a variety of masterfully rendered perspectives, these six stories depict people at painful odds with the world around them. A wife can only surrender to a desert night by betraying her husband. An artist struggles to honor his own aspirations as well as society's expectations of him. A missionary brutally converted to the worship of a tribal fetish is left with but an echo of his identity. Whether set in North Africa, Paris, or Brazil, the stories in Exile and the Kingdom are probing portraits of spiritual exile, and man's perpetual search for an inner kingdom.

Riuniti in raccolta dallo stesso Buzzati questi racconti brevi rappresentano una vera "summa" del mondo poetico dello scrittore, uno dei maestri nella narrativa italiana contemporanea.

Just So Stories is a collection of contemporary children's stories by Rudyard Kipling. Many of the stories are fictitious explanations for natural occurrences, including the stories How the Whale Got His Throat and How the Camel Got His Hump. These stories will keep children entertained for hours.

The earth's surface is no longer habitable. All humanity is sequestered beneath the ground, couched in isolation and contentment. The Machine provides the needs of humanity. Mankind becomes subservient drones to the life-supporting Machine. But what happens when the Machine stops?

This is Raymond Carver's third collection of stories, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, including the canonical titular story about blindness and learning to enter the very different world of another. The 12 stories in Cathedral mark a turning point in Carver's work.

Gertrude Stein’s pioneering triptych Three Lives portrays the lives of three working-class women in the fictional American town of Bridgepoint (Baltimore). A progenitor of the "stream of consciousness" technique later adopted by Joyce and Woolf, Stein takes us into the minds of three distinct women, who are each trapped in their societal positions. "The Good Anna" follows a stern but kind German immigrant, "Melanctha" the tragic life of an African-American woman of the same name, and "The Gentle Lena" a dreamy and unopinionated servant whose passiveness becomes her undoing.

Charles Dickens was a master of the macabre. His stories of madness, murder and revenge, often imbued with a sympathetic moral undertone, have continued to thrill and chill fans ever since they were written. Here then are 15 tales that display the full range of Dickens' Gothic talents. "The Signalman," perhaps the most well-known, is a chilling story about a mysterious figure and its deathly omen. "The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain" shows the consequences for those who make deals with the dead. Listen for more.

Satire, Humor and Irony in some cases have been regarded as the most effective source to understand a society, the oldest form of social study. Contents: The Cop and the Anthem by O. Henry; The Ransom of Red Chief by O. Henry; What Stumped the Blue Jays by Mark Twain; The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain; The Toys of Peace by Saki (H. H. Munro); The Artful Hussar by Johann Peter Hebel; From The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen by Rudolf Erich Raspe; The Golden Honeymoon by Ring Lardner; When I Was a Witch by Charlotte Perkins Gilman; Micromegas: A Philosophical History by Voltaire.

The diary is that most intimate of journals, of records. Within its pages the writer records and gives expression to their thoughts, their feelings, their emotional state on all the things that make up and surround them in this world. With authors of the calibre of Bulgakov, Woolf, Tolstoy, Twain and many others this volume explores characters whose lives seem dominated by these diaries, and the events that unfold are both compelling and literary journeys into the very personal and intimate side of their characters’ lives.

Five tales which range from the jungles of India to the frozen emptiness of the North... In all of them, Kipling's extraordinary powers of description and ability to identify with human aspiration and animal survival are vividly shown. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi must battle with Nag, the cobra, in his territory; Toomai has a unique glimpse of the elephant world, Kotick, the White Seal, searches for sanctuary, while Kotuko has to find food for his starving Eskimo village. Above all, Kipling's love of life in all its variety shines through.

"The Crystal Cup" reveals the struggle a young artist faces when he is taken from his family and forced to work for the king. He is promised freedom in return for his hard work making a perfect crystal vase. But the story takes a tragic twist when he dies immediately following his completion of the vase. The king jeopardizes his reign after displaying the artist's remains alongside the vase during a feast at the castle.

A fascinating collection of tales from some of Great Britain's finest classic authors.

A gripping collection of outstanding American classic short stories by some of America's greatest writers: 'A Ghost Story' by Mark Twain; 'Pomegranate Seed' by Edith Wharton; 'Pigeons from Hell' by Robert E. Howard; 'Pickman's Model' by H. P. Lovecraft; 'The Adventure of the German Student' by Nathaniel Hawthorne; 'Absolute Zero' by Morgan Robertson; and many more.

The golden age of the short story was in Victorian and Edwardian times, when authors made a living by contributing to literary magazines and journals. These popular journals threw up such literary greats as Dickens, Conan Doyle, Rider Haggard, and Jerome K. Jerome. Many of the great writers are undeservedly neglected by modern audience...but what a pleasure it is to rediscover the literary treasures that delighted our great grandparents!

Edgar Allan Poe fue un gran escritor romántico y precursor de simbolismos, decadentistas y estilistas, fue, al tiempo que un gran poeta, un verdadero iniciador. Aún hoy géneros literarios tan consagrados como la narrativa fantástica y de ciencia ficción, la narrativa policial o la novela de aventuras llevan su impronta inconfundible. Fascinado por la muerte y por todas las formas del terror, dio lo mejor de su talento en sus cuentos de misterio, manifestando además un vibrante interés por lo ridículo y absurdo.

Depuis l’Antiquité, le mythe de Pygmalion et Galatée n’a de cesse de fasciner et d’inspirer des artistes. Mais ce récit millénaire du sculpteur misanthrope, épris de la statue qu’il vient de réaliser, demeure inachevé : lorsque Galatée est transformée en être vivant par les dieux, elle est réduite au silence par les hommes. Enfin, il est temps pour elle de devenir la narratrice de sa propre histoire et ainsi de choisir elle-même son destin.

A glorious collection of some of the finest British short stories ever written. The Dog – Arnold Bennet, Not On The Passenger List – Barry Pain, The Old Man’s Tale About The Queer Client – Charles Dickens, The Half Brothers – Elizabeth Gaskell, The Veiled Portrait – James McGovan, Markheim – Robert Louis Stevenson, The Bottle Imp – Robert Louis Stevenson, The Adventures Of The Kind Mr. Smith – William J. Locke, The Man Of Mystery – Barry Pain, The Brazilian Cat – Sir. Arthur Conan Doyle.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was a reclusive poet whose only friendships were carried out in correspondence. Despite writing almost 1800 poems in her life, very few were published until after her death. Here, the poems are presented in chronological order in their original form, unaltered by editorial revision, in one volume. It offers a wide-angle view of Dickinson's poetic development, from the clunky rhyme schemes of her youth, through valentines she wrote in the early 1850s, to the gloomy, hell-obsessed writings of her last years.