English Classic Short Stories

The Classic Anne of Green Gables Collection: 6 of the 8 Books in the Beloved "Anne Shirley" Series + 2 Avonlea Short Story Collections, contains: Book 1: Anne of Green Gables, Book 2: Anne of Avonlea, Book 3: Anne of the Island, Book 4: Anne's House of Dreams, Book 5: Rainbow Valley, Book 6: Rilla of Ingleside, Book 7: Chronicles of Avonlea, Book 8: In Further Chronicles of Avonlea.

Nominated for both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, this short story introduces the Warlock, who discovers to his horror that the world's mana, the fuel that makes magic work, is rapidly dwindling. The news spells doom for magic-based society. Unfortunately, no secret that powerful can stay hidden for long.

Joyce's first major work, written when he was only 25, brought his city to the world for the first time. His stories are rooted in the rich detail of Dublin life, portraying ordinary, often defeated lives with unflinching realism. He writes of social decline, sexual desire and exploitation, corruption and personal failure, yet creates a brilliantly compelling, unique vision of the world and of human experience.

Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most prolific authors of his time, eventually gaining recognition for his tales of horror and his uncanny ability to paint a macabre picture with words. The Complete Works Collection of Edgar Allan Poe contains over 150 stories and poems, separated into individual chapters, including all of Poe's most notorious works such as The Raven, Annabel Lee, A Dream Within a Dream, Lenore, The Tell-Tale Heart, and many more.

A collection of Kate Chopin’s best-known work, including “The Awakening” and seven additional short stories.

Chesterton's talent as a mystery writer is displayed in this collection of detective stories, The Man Who Knew Too Much. In each story, the star detective, Horne Fisher, deals with another strange mystery: the vanishing of a priceless coin, the framing of an Irish "prince" freedom fighter, an eccentric rich man dies during an obsessive fishing trip, another vanishing during an ice skate, a statue crushing his own uncle, and a few more.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales are rightly ranked among the seminal works of mystery and detective fiction. Included in this collection are all four full-length Holmes novels and more than forty short masterpieces - from the inaugural adventure A Study in Scarlet to timeless favorites like “The Speckled Band” and more. At the center of each stands the iconic figure of Holmes - brilliant, eccentric, and capable of amazing feats of deductive reasoning.

Wolff here returns with fresh revelations - about biding one's time, or experiencing first love, or burying one's mother - that come to a variety of characters in circumstances at once everyday and extraordinary. A retired Marine enrolls in college while her son trains for Iraq. A lawyer takes a difficult deposition. An American in Rome indulges the Gypsy who's picked his pocket.

Can You Forgive Her? is the first of the six Palliser novels. Here Trollope examines parliamentary election and marriage, politics and privacy. As he dissects the Victorian upper class, issues and people shed their pretenses under his patient, ironic probe.

A shape-shifting trickster on a quest for eternal life, Monkey King is one of the most memorable superheroes in world literature. High-spirited and omni-talented, he amasses dazzling weapons and skills on his journey to immortality: a gold-hooped staff that can grow as tall as the sky and shrink to the size of a needle; the ability to travel 108,000 miles in a single somersault. A master of subterfuge, he can transform himself into whomever or whatever he chooses and turn each of his body's 84,000 hairs into an army of clones.

Stalky & Co. is a book published in 1899 (following serialization in the Windsor Magazine) by Rudyard Kipling, about adolescent boys at a British boarding school. It is a collection of linked short stories in format, with some information about the charismatic Stalky character in later life. The character Beetle, one of the main trio, is partly based on Kipling himself. Stalky is based on Lionel Dunsterville, M'Turk is based on George Charles Beresford, and Mr. King is based on William Carr Crofts.

British author Algernon Blackwood was a prolific writer who is usually remembered for his numerous ghost stories; however, he also wrote on many other supernatural themes. This collection of 13 stories includes: "The Wendigo", "The Olive", "The Goblin's Collection", "The Sea Fit", "Ancient Lights", "The Prayer", "The Wood of the Dead", "An Egyptian Hornet", "The Other Wing", "The Singular Death of Morton", "Entrance and Exit", "The Kit Bag", "The Damned".

This collection of 25 Hercule Poirot adventures is compiled from short stories written by Agatha Christie for The Sketch magazine in 1923 from March to December. In these stories, including "The Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim", "The Veiled Lady", and "The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb", the eccentric private detective slowly and surely solves mysteries involving jealousy, revenge, and greed. These stories were well-received at the time and cemented Christie's reputation as the worthy successor to Arthur Conan Doyle.

"Chekhov is probably better known in Britain for his plays than for his prose. For many, however, it is his short stories that mark the high water of his genius. It might at first glance be hard for those not used to his style of narrative to see what the fuss is about - and fuss there is: for most authors and lovers of literature Chekhov is incomparably the greatest short story writer there ever was."

An unplanned murder during a bank robbery has another sheriff on the trail of those on the lam.

Nobody plays accordion like Dick Contino. His skilled fingers can find beauty in even the schmaltziest Borscht Belt favorites, and with his matinee-idol looks he could be a real star. Right now, though, he’s slumming it as the headliner in a Grade Z teenybopper picture called Daddy-O. He’s too good for this movie, and finishing it is going to take him to a very dark place. Daddy-O and Dick Contino are both real, their stories dredged out of the past by James Ellroy, a master of historical crime fiction. In Dick Contino's Blues he takes us to B-List Hollywood in 1957 - a time when movies were cheerful and dirty secrets lurked just off camera.

Carcosa is a fictional land that first appeared in Bierce’s 1886 story “An Inhabitant of Carcosa” (included in this collection), and later is appeared Robert W. Chambers’s The King in Yellow. It has since been used by many other fantasy and horror writers and poets. This collection explores Carcosa and other fictional cities found in nineteenth-century poetry and short stories. The works of these classic and innovative writers are given new life, and a new generation of listeners will have the chance to voyage to Carcosa … and beyond.

In “A Smile of Fortune”, a ship’s captain meets the seemingly genial Mr. Jacobus and his irritable brother while embarking in the tropics. One a respectable businessman with a considerable reputation, the other a confessed rogue and entrepreneur with no reputation left to lose, the captain is at a loss to determine which he should befriend. In this masterly tale of misplaced loyalty, family feuds, and illicit bargaining, the captain finds himself the unwitting partner in a deeply unorthodox transaction.

Robert Hamilton is a young man on a mission to marry Ellen, a beautiful young lady who is unattainable to him due to his lack of resources and means of providing. Robert soon enlists the help of his friend Tom to seek out a long known of buried treasure in hopes that he can attain the means by which to support the woman he loves. Originally published as a serial in 1875, Buried Treasures is a masterpiece of Bram Stoker, who while famous for his macabre tales, is a master craftsman of romance.

Aesop's Fables are stories based on allegories and caricatures featuring mostly animals. These stories got the collective name Aesop’s Fables from the person who collected the stories. Aesop, popularly believed to have been a Phrygian slave, collected his fables sometime around the sixth century BC. Whatever his real story may be, the fables he collected feature valuable lessons.