Short Classic Literature

The two strikingly original short novels brought together here - in new translations by award-winning translators - were both literary gambles of a sort for Fyodor Dostoevsky. The first real expression of his genius, The Double is a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare in which a minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelgänger. Written 20 years later under the pressure of crushing debt, The Gambler is a stunning psychological portrait of a young man's exhilarating and destructive addiction.

This complete collection includes all of the published stories of Eudora Welty. There are 41 stories in all, including those in the earlier collections A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The Golden Apples, and The Bride of the Innisfallen, as well as previously uncollected stories.

In his Commonplace Book and and his lengthy essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature", author H.P. Lovecraft carefully assessed weird tales through the ages. He named a great many stories that he admired. The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society has curated a collection of 43 of the best of them and recorded them as audiobooks for your listening enjoyment. Read by the HPLHS' own Andrew Leman and Sean Branney and featuring original music by Troy Sterling Nies, these eerie tales will delight your mind and chill your blood.

This Audiobook contains the following works: "The Builder" [Frank L. Packard], "The Man Who Didn't Count" [Frank L. Packard], "Red Petals" [Frederick Merrick White], "The Other Man's Story" [Frederick Merrick White], "The Shebeeners" [Frederick Merrick White], "The Waterwitch" [Frederick Merrick White], "The Brand of the Wild" [G.B Lancaster], "A Fair Smuggler" [George Newnes], "A Castaway of the South" [Gilbert Parker], "As Deep As the Sea" [Gilbert Parker], "The Gift of the Simple King" [Gilbert Parker], "The Treasure of Sacramento" [Nick Guy Boothby].

The author of outstanding travel books, autobiographical works and novels, including the classic "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", "Mark Twain" (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835–1910) is regarded by many as America's finest humorist and a major writer of short stories. The four selections in this volume span his entire writing career and are among his best-known stories.

Newly re-mastered for digital formats, this is the definitive recording of Hans Christian Andersen's six best-loved stories. Narrator Diane Wolkstein, the artistic director of the Hans Christian Andersen Center in New York City, tells Andersen stories throughout the world. She is the author of 23 award-winning books of folklore and has been honored by the National Storytelling Network as a recipient of its coveted Circle of Excellence Award, a designation reserved for America's best living storytellers.

H.H. Munro (Saki) is one of the undisputed masters of the short story. In this complete compendium, the full gamut of his subjects and themes is experienced. His stories are imbued with humorous satire, biting irony, and often the macabre, all of which have one target: the stupidities and hypocrisies of Edwardian upper-class society.

This is volume two of a two-volume omnibus set comprising the complete fictional works of Howard Phillips Lovcecraft. Every story written for publication under his own name is included in this set, from 1927 through 1935. (Poems, ghostwritten material, and stories written in collaboration with other writers are not included.)

Three years have passed since Sherlock Holmes and his nemesis Moriarty vanished into the abyss of the Reichenbach Falls. In that time the criminals of London have been able to sleep safe in their beds. But the capital has never been in greater need of its protector.

By the time of his early death in 1988, Raymond Carver had established himself as one of the great practitioners of the American short story. Where I'm Calling From, his last collection, encompasses classic stories from Cathedral, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and earlier Carver volumes, along with seven new works previously unpublished in book form.

Though known for his classic novels of adventure and coming of age, Mark Twain is equally esteemed for his short stories, which abound with the colorful characters and often comic antics readers have come to expect from his longer works. Included here is "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," a wild yarn involving a case of mistaken identity, a gambler who'd bet on anything, and an unusual frog named Daniel Webster.

Elizabeth Gaskell's chilling Gothic Tales blends the real and the supernatural to eerie, compelling effect. 'Disappearances', inspired by local legends of mysterious vanishings, mixes gossip and fact; Lois the Witch, a novella based on an account of the Salem witch hunts, shows how sexual desire and jealousy lead to hysteria; while in 'The Old Nurse's Story' a mysterious child roams the freezing Northumberland moors.

The first thing every listener will want to know is whether Anne Shirley appears in these stories of Avonlea and Spencervale. She certainly does. As a matter of fact, page one starts off in this manner: "Anne Shirley was curled up on the window seat of Theodora Dix's sitting room one Saturday evening, looking dreamily afar at some fair starland beyond the hills of sunset. Anne was visiting for a fortnight of her vacation."

Tadeusz Borowski’s concentration camp stories were based on his own experiences surviving Auschwitz and Dachau. In spare, brutal prose he describes a world where where the will to survive overrides compassion, and prisoners eat, work, and sleep a few yards from where others are murdered; where the difference between human beings is reduced to a second bowl of soup, an extra blanket, or the luxury of a pair of shoes with thick soles; and where the line between normality and abnormality vanishes.

N. K. Jemisin is one of the most powerful and acclaimed speculative fiction authors of our time. In the first collection of her evocative short fiction, Jemisin equally challenges and delights listeners with thought-provoking narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption.

The Diary of a Madman and Other Stories is a bizarre and colorful collection containing the finest short stories by the iconic Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. From the witty and Kafkaesque "The Nose", where a civil servant wakes up one day to find his nose missing, to the moving and evocative "The Overcoat", about a reclusive man whose only ambition is to replace his old, threadbare coat, Gogol gives us a unique take on the absurd.

Set 10 years after Little Men, Jo's Boys revisits Plumfield, the New England school still presided over by Jo and her husband, Professor Bhaer. Jo's Boys — including sailor Emil, promising musician Nat, and rebellious Dan — are grown. Jo remains at the center of this tale, holding her boys fast through shipwreck and storm, disappointment...and even murder.

First published in an 1843 edition of the Saturday Evening Post, "The Black Cat" tells the story of a man and his increasingly antagonistic relationship with his cat. Akin to "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Cask of Amontillado", "The Black Cat" investigates the psychological effects of guilt as well as the potentially destructive and violent consequences of alcoholism.

Hoffmann, among the greatest and most popular of the German Romantics, is renowned for his humorous and sometimes horrifying tales of supernatural beings. This selection, while stressing the variety of his work, focuses on those stories in which the real and the supernatural are brought into contact and conflict. This new translation includes The Golden Pot, The Sandman, Princess Brambilla, Master Flea, and My Cousin's Corner Window.

From the celebrated, award-winning translators of Anna Karenina and War and Peace: a lavish, masterfully rendered volume of stories by one of the most influential short fiction writers of all time.