The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Six Other Stories


F. Scott Fitzgerald - 1921
    Scott Fitzgerald displays his unmatched gift as a writer of short stories.This collection includes 7 stories: * The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: Full grown with a long, smoke-coloured beard, requiring the services of a cane and fonder of cigars than warm milk, Benjamin Button is a very curious baby indeed. And, as Benjamin becomes increasingly youthful with the passing years, his family wonders why he persists in the embarrassing folly of living in reverse. * Head and Shoulders* The Cut-Glass Bowl: An ill-meant gift haunts a family's misfortunes.* The Four Fists: A man's life shaped by a series of punches to his face.* May Day* 'O Russet Witch'* Crazy Sunday

To Be Read at Dusk


Charles Dickens - 1852
    Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories


Robert Louis Stevenson - 1886
    Testing chemicals in his lab, he drinks a mixture he hopes will isolate - and eliminate - human evil. Instead it unleashes the dark forces within him, transforming him into the hideous and murderous Mr. Hyde.The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde dramatically brings to life a science-fiction case study of the nature of good and evil and the duality that can exist within one person. Resonant with psychological perception and ethical insight, the work has literary roots in Dostoevsky's "The Double" and Crime and Punishment. Today Stevenson's novella is recognized as an incisive study of Victorian morality and sexual repression, as well as a great thriller.This collection also includes some of the author's grimmest short fiction: "Lodging for the Night," "The Suicide Club," "Thrawn Janet," "The Body Snatcher," and "Markheim."

The Collected Stories


Colette - 1958
    of the one hundred stories gathered here, thirty-one appear for the first time in English and another twenty-nine have been newly translated for this volume.

The Best Short Stories of All Time - Volume 1


Jack LondonEdgar Allan Poe - 2011
    Ranging from the 19th to the 20th centuries, writers include James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, Richard Edward Connell, Henri Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Jack London, Henri Ringgold Wilmer Lardner, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant and Edgar Allan Poe.

The Dark Tower: And Other Stories


C.S. Lewis - 1977
    S. Lewis’s adult religious books, a repackaged edition of the revered author’s definitive collection of short fiction, which explores enduring spiritual and science fiction themes such as space, time, reality, fantasy, God, and the fate of humankind.From C.S. Lewis—the great British writer, scholar, lay theologian, broadcaster, Christian apologist, and author of Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Chronicles of Narnia, and many other beloved classics—comes a collection of his dazzling short fiction.This collection of futuristic fiction includes a breathtaking science fiction story written early in his career in which Cambridge intellectuals witness the breach of space-time through a chronoscope—a telescope that looks not just into another world, but into another time. As powerful, inventive, and profound as his theological and philosophical works, The Dark Tower reveals another side of Lewis’s creative mind and his longtime fascination with reality and spirituality. It is ideal reading for fans of J. R. R. Tolkien, Lewis’s longtime friend and colleague.

Agatha Christie Crime Collection: Murder Is Easy / Dead Man's Folly / The Man In The Brown Suit


Agatha Christie
    

Orlando


Virginia Woolf - 1928
    Spanning three centuries, the novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth's England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Constantinople, awakes to find that he is now a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women.

The Birds and Other Stories


Daphne du Maurier - 1952
    The five other chilling stories in this collection echo a sense of dislocation and mock man's dominance over the natural world. The mountain paradise of 'Monte Verità' promises immortality, but at a terrible price; a neglected wife haunts her husband in the form of an apple tree; a professional photographer steps out from behind the camera and into his subject's life; a date with a cinema usherette leads to a walk in the cemetery; and a jealous father finds a remedy when three's a crowd . . .

Mrs Death Misses Death


Salena Godden - 2021
    She is exhausted from spending eternity doing her job and now she seeks someone to unburden her conscience to. Wolf Willeford, a troubled young writer, is well acquainted with death, but until now hadn’t met Death in person – a black, working-class woman who shape-shifts and does her work unseen.Enthralled by her stories, Wolf becomes Mrs Death’s scribe, and begins to write her memoirs. Using their desk as a vessel and conduit, Wolf travels across time and place with Mrs Death to witness deaths of past and present and discuss what the future holds for humanity. As the two reflect on the losses they have experienced – or, in the case of Mrs Death, facilitated – their friendship grows into a surprising affirmation of hope, resilience and love. All the while, despite her world-weariness, Death must continue to hold humans’ fates in her hands, appearing in our lives when we least expect her . . .

Luckenbooth


Jenni Fagan - 2021
    But the real reason she's there is to bear him and his barren wife a child, the consequences of which curse the tenement building that is their home for a hundred years. As we travel through the nine floors of the building and the next eight decades, the resident's lives entwine over the ages and in unpredictable ways. Along the way we encounter the city's most infamous Madam, a seance, a civil rights lawyer, a bone mermaid, a famous Beat poet, a notorious Edinburgh gang, a spy, the literati, artists, thinkers, strippers, the spirit world - until a cosmic agent finally exposes the true horror of the building's longest kept secret. No. 10 Luckenbooth Close hurtles the reader through personal and global history - eerily reflecting modern life today.

Carmilla


J. Sheridan Le Fanu - 1872
    Until one moonlit night, a horse-drawn carriage crashes into view, carrying an unexpected guest – the beautiful Carmilla. So begins a feverish friendship between Laura and her mysterious, entrancing companion. But as Carmilla becomes increasingly strange and volatile, prone to eerie nocturnal wanderings, Laura finds herself tormented by nightmares and growing weaker by the day… Pre-dating Dracula by twenty-six years, Carmilla is the original vampire story, steeped in sexual tension and gothic romance.

Lady Susan


Jane Austen - 1871
    A magnificently crafted novel of Regency manners and mores that will delight Austen enthusiasts with its wit and elegant expression.

Three Early Stories


J.D. Salinger - 1940
    He almost desperately wished to publish his early stories in The New Yorker magazine, the pinnacle, he felt, of America’s literary world. But such was not to be for several long years and the length of one long world war. The New Yorker, whose tastes in literary matters were and remain notoriously prim and fickle, was not quite ready for this brash and over-confident newcomer with the cynical worldview and his habit of slangy dialogue. But other magazines were quick to recognize a new talent, a fresh voice at a time when the world verged on madness. Story magazine, an esteemed and influential small circulation journal devoted exclusively to the art of the short story and still active and respected today, was the first publication to publish the name J.D. Salinger and the story “The Young Folks” in 1940, an impressive view of New York’s cocktail society and two young people talking past one another, their conversation almost completely meaningless and empty. His next short story was published in a college journal, The University of Kansas City Review. “Go See Eddie” is a tale of quiet menace as an unsavory male character gradually turns up the pressure on a young lady to see a man named Eddie. Also published in 1940, the story is notable for the backstory that is omitted — a technique that Hemingway used to great effect. Four years later toward the end of Salinger’s war experience saw the publication of “Once A Week Won’t Kill You,” again in Story magazine. Ostensibly about a newly minted soldier trying to tell an aging aunt he is going off to war, some may see the story as a metaphor for preparing one’s family for the possibility of wartime death. Devault-Graves Digital Editions, a publisher that specializes in reprinting the finest in American period literature, is proud to bring you this anthology by one of America’s most innovative and inspiring authors.

Quicksand


Jun'ichirō Tanizaki - 1928
    The voice--cultured, ingenuous, and with a touch of coquetterie--is that of Sonoko Kakiuchi, an Osaka lady of good family married to a dully respectable lawyer.