Have you read 'A Clean Well-Lighted Place'?... It is masterly. Indeed, it is one of the best short stories ever written..."

    Bromgard has come to a small country town to assume a new practice. No sooner has he arrived than he receives word that a colleague, Dr. Polyakov, has fallen gravely ill. Before Bromgard can go to his friend's aid, Polyakov is brought to his practice in the middle of the night with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and, barely conscious, gives Bromgard his journal before dying. What Bromgard uncovers in the entries is Polyakov's uncontrollable and merciless descent into morphine addiction -- his first injection to ease his back pain, the thrill of the drug as it overtakes him, the looming signs of addiction, and the feverish final entries before his death.

    Lovecraft's 'the Call of Cthulhu' is a harrowing tale of the weakness of the human mind when confronted by powers and intelligences from beyond our world.

    Published individually in magazines throughout 1923 and 1924 and collected into a book in 1931, they deal primarily with a group of Jewish thugs that live in the Moldavanka, a ghetto of Odessa.

    Using his own experiences as a journalist and propagandist with the Red Army during the war against Poland, Babel brings to life an astonishing cast of characters from the exuberant, violent era of early Soviet history: commissars and colonels, Cossacks and peasants, and among them the bespectacled, Jewish writer/intellectual, observing it all and trying to establish his role in the new Russia.Drawn from the acclaimed, award-winning Complete Works of Isaac Babel, this volume includes all of the Red Cavalry cycle; Babel's 1920 diary, from which the material for the fiction was drawn; and his preliminary sketches for the stories—the whole constituting a fascinating picture of a great writer turning life into art.

    P. Lovecraft. Written between March and August 1921, it was first published in Weird Tales, April 1926. In this work, a mysterious man who has been living alone in a castle for as long as he can remember decides to break free in search of human contact. "The Outsider" is one of Lovecraft's most commonly reprinted works and is also one of the most popular stories ever to be published in Weird Tales.

    The psychologically complex and morally ambiguous tales of love and adultery, dream and reality, desire and death in Night Games prove Schnitzler to be fully the equal of his great contemporaries Kafka, Rilke, and Musil, and justify Freud's praise of his knowledge of depth psychology. The collection includes powerful early works such as "The Dead Are Silent" and "Geronimo and His Brother" as well as late masterpieces such as "Night Games" and "Dream Story." Schnitzler creates memorable characters and makes original and masterful use of inner monologue, "stream of consciousness," and unrealiable narrator-techniques that he was among the first, if not the first, to use-to explore the complexities of their inner lives, even as he delineates their social world with elegance and wit. The results are comic, tragic, powerful, and psychologically compelling tales of love, sex, and death, that often surprise. They are as fresh and as relevant to us today, a century later, as when they were first written."

    Maugham, English novelist, short-story writer, and playwright is best remembered for his novel Of Human Bondage. The Casuarina Tree contains six stories by Maugham including: Before the Party; P. and O.; The Outstation; The Force of Circumstance; The Yellow Streak; and The Letter.

    This short story is considered to be one of the first and most influential modern works written in vernacular Chinese. "A Madman's Diary" is an attempt by Lu Xun to describe the effects of feudal values upon the Chinese people. He uses an analogy of cannibalism to describe the way such outdated values eat away at the individual. In addition to "A Madman's Diary", the collection also includes the following: Remembrances of the past Kong yiji Medicine Tomorrow An unimportant affair The story of hair A passing storm Hometown Ah Q: the real story Dragonboat festival The white light Some rabbits and a cat A comedy of ducks Village opera New Year's sacrifice Upstairs in a wineshop A happy family Soap The eternal lamp A warning to the people The venerable schoolmaster Gao The loner Mourning the dead Brothers Divorce

    This duality of vision infuses his work with a powerful energy from the earliest tales including 'Old Shloyme' and 'Childhood', which affirm his Russian-Jewish childhood, to the relatively non-Jewish world of his collection of stories entitled 'Red Cavalry'. Babel's masterpiece, 'Red Cavalry' is the most dramatic expression of his dualism and in his simultaneous acceptance and rejection of his heritage heralds the great American-Jewish writers from Henry Roth to Saul Bellow to Philip Roth.

    

    This edition is based on extensive surviving manuscripts and typescripts. The volume contains a scholarly introduction, historical notes, a textual apparatus, illustrations, and appendices. The complex history of composition for 'The Rich Boy' is untangled, and Fitzgerald's thorough revision of 'Winter Dreams' is described. Important passages of sexual innuendo and tabloid-style scandal in 'Jacob's Ladder', 'The Love Boat', and 'Magnetism' - removed by editors at the Saturday Evening Post - are restored to the Cambridge texts.

    Tales Told in Holland consists chiefly of stories with a few translations from the greatest Dutch poets and a few old Dutch nursery rhymes, naive and nonsensical as our English rhymes, and contrasting interestingly with the far more sophisticated rhymes of the French. There is at least one story from each of the eleven Dutch Provinces, which form the kingdom of the Netherlands. In addition to these folk tales, there are tales of the great Dutch artists, that wonderful group whom even Italy could scarcely excel, and stories with a background introducing all the high spots in Dutch history, from the time when the Netherlands formed a part of the Empire of Charlemagne through her most dramatic days of struggle for independence from Spain and down to the Peace Palace of today. Thus this book comes to reveal in a way most interesting to the child, as much as possible of all sides of Dutch life; its history, art, literature, geography, and customs as well as the Dutchman's sense of humor, his love of cleanliness and thrift, his sturdy independence and the character of his fancies.

    

    Along the way, he falls in love and meets some important literary figures that define and shape his vision towards life. An early piece of bisexual literature that makes use of a pseudo-surrealistic style along with a stream-of-consciousness aftertaste.