His dissections of science, spiritual faith, legal systems, vanity, and love make him the undisputed master of social commentary.

    There are seven in all, with subjects ranging from social revolt to insanity, disease and unrequited love. They are considered some of the finest works of German literary Expressionism and have been compared to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and the prose pieces of Baudelaire.

    

    The mâquis is the domain of the Corsican shepherds and of those who are at variance with justice. It must be known that, in order to save himself the trouble of manuring his field, the Corsican husbandman sets fire to a piece of woodland. If the flame spread farther than is necessary, so much the worse! In any case he is certain of a good crop from the land fertilized by the ashes of the trees which grow upon it. He gathers only the heads of his grain, leaving the straw, which it would be unnecessary labor to cut. In the following spring the roots that have remained in the earth without being destroyed send up their tufts of sprouts, which in a few years reach a height of seven or eight feet. It is this kind of tangled thicket that is called a mâquis. They are made up of different kinds of trees and shrubs, so crowded and mingled together at the caprice of nature that only with an axe in hand can a man open a passage through them, and mâquis are frequently seen so thick and bushy that the wild sheep themselves cannot penetrate them.

    His wife found it too gruesome, so he promptly burned the manuscript. In another three days, he wrote it again. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was published as a "shilling shocker" in 1886, and became an instant classic. In the first six months, 40,000 copies were sold. Queen Victoria read it. Sermons and editorials were written about it. When Stevenson and his family visited America a year later, they were mobbed by reporters at the dock in New York City. Compulsively readable from its opening pages, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is still one of the best tales ever written about the divided self.

    'The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.'Written with barely controlled fury after she was confined to her room for 'nerves' and forbidden to write, Gilman's pioneering feminist horror story scandalized nineteenth-century readers with its portrayal of a woman who loses her mind because she has literally nothing to do.Also contains The Rocking-Chair and Old Water.

    It tells the story of Cécile, who leads a carefree life with her widowed father and his young mistresses until, one hot summer on the Riviera, he decides to remarry - with devastating consequences. In A Certain Smile Dominique, a young woman bored with her lover, begins an encounter with an older man that unfolds in unexpected and troubling ways. These two acerbically witty and delightfully amoral tales about the nature of love are shimmering masterpieces of cool-headed, brilliant observation.

    Having squandered his wealth, the feckless Guido returns home to claim the hand of the celestial Juliet, but finds himself censured by her father. Petulant at his chastisement, his Byronic temperament gets the better of him, and he is punished with banishment. Plotting his revenge, he witnesses a mighty tempest, and from the raging sea emerges a strange figure. Although he is initially repelled by the dwarfish form before him, the stranger soon makes him an offer he can't refuse, but by surrendering his identity and selling his soul to this mysterious creature, Guido makes yet another fatal error. A macabre, sinister and supernatural tale, Mary Shelley's Transformation is a masterpiece of Gothic writing. It is accompanied by The Mortal Immortal and The Evil Eye, two further stories of the supernatural, both of which display the perfection of Shelley's literary craft.

    In a satanic bargain, Melmoth exchanges his soul for immortality. The story of his tortured wanderings through the centuries is pieced together through those who have been implored by Melmoth to take over his pact with the devil. Influenced by the Gothic romances of the late 18th century, Maturin's diabolic tale raised the genre to a new and macabre pitch. Its many admirers include Poe, Balzac, Oscar Wilde and Baudelaire.

    Sheridan LeFanu -- Irish author of such classics as the short vampire novel Carmella (reputed to be the inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula) and A Chapter in the History of the Tyrone Family (said to be the tale that gave rise to Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights -- lived from 1814 until 1873. He wrote all sorts of tales, but he's best remembered as a writer of mysteries and horror.

    as one of this century's most innovative writers. Now Godine is pleased to issue two of his most powerful novels in one volume: Things, in an authoritative new translation, and A Man Asleep, making its first English appearance. Both provoked strong reactions when they first appeared in the 1960s; both which speak with disquieting immediacy to the conscience of today's readers. In each tale Perec subtly probes our compulsive obsession with society's trappings the seductive mass of things that crams our lives, masquerading as stability and meaning.Jerome and Sylvie, the young, upwardly mobile couple in Things, lust for the good life. "They wanted life's enjoyment, but all around them enjoyment was equated with ownership." Surrounded by Paris's tantalizing exclusive boutiques, they exist in a paralyzing vacuum of frustration, caught between the fantasy of "the film they would have liked to live" and the reality of life's daily mundanities.In direct contrast with Jerome and Sylvie's cravings, the nameless student in A Man Asleep attempts to purify himself entirely of material desires and ambition. He longs "to want nothing. Just to wait, until there is nothing left to wait for. Just to wander, and to sleep." Yearning to exist on neutral ground as "a blessed parenthesis," he discovers that this wish is by its very nature a defeat.Accessible, sobering, and deeply involving, each novel distills Perec's unerring grasp of the human condition as well as displaying his rare comic talent. His generosity of observation is both detached and compassionate.

    In the case of Thomas Ligotti, the response has invariably been to the effect that he never has any idea what he is going to produce in the future, if anything. Since he began publishing in the early 1980s, this answer has perhaps seemed somewhat disingenuous. Some may have thought that it was an affectation or diversionary tactic. After all, books under his name have since appeared on a somewhat regular, if not exactly prolific, schedule. But as the years went by, it became more and more apparent that Ligotti’s output was at best haphazard. A chapbook here, a slim or full-fledged story collection there, a book of poetry or unclassifiable prose out of nowhere, and then at some point a quasi-academic statement of his philosophical ideas and attitudes. Such a scattered crop of writings is not unheard-of, but for one who toils in the genre of horror, whose practitioners are commonly hard at work on a daily basis, it does seem as paltry as it is directionless. Accordingly, the present volume is another unexpected contribution to Ligotti’s desultory offerings. And no one could be as surprised by its appearance as he was. As anyone knows who has followed his interviews and obsessions as they appear in his fiction, Ligotti must take his literary cues from a lifetime of, let us say, whimsical pathologies. Other authors may suffer writer’s block. In the present case, the reason may be dubbed “existence block,” one that persisted for some ten years. This is less than an ideal development for anyone, but for a word-monger it can spell the end. And yet the end did not arrive. During 2012, it seemed that it might in the form of a sudden collapse and subsequent hospitalization prefigured—one might speculate—by the abdominal crisis suffered by the character Grossvogel in Ligotti’s story “The Shadow, The Darkness.” Yet like the agony endured by the aforementioned figure, the one in question led only to a revitalization of creativity. This revitalization may not be exactly spectacular, but all the same here it is. Throughout Ligotti’s “career” as a horror writer, many of his stories have evolved from physical or emotional crises. And so it was with the surgical trauma that led to the stories in The Spectral Link, an event that is marginally mentioned in the first of these stories, “Metaphysica Morum.” In the second story, “The Small People,” Ligotti returns, although not precisely in the usual fashion, to his fixation with uncanny representations of the so-called human being. Having nearly ceased to exist as he lay on the surgeon’s table, the imposing strangeness of the nature and vicissitudes of this life form once again arose in his imagination. So what project and publications are forthcoming from Thomas Ligotti? As ever, not even he knows.

    His cousin is a reclusive alchemist obsessed with making himself immortal. Stephen is repeatedly troubled by visions of a young gypsy girl and a traveling Italian boy with their hearts missing.

    A stunning collection of the kind of fiction that has only one source--the unparalleled Ray Bradbury.

    When you are a gypsy, an antique dealer, and you've been entrusted with a very old highboy in which a dead body is discovered, you have a major problem.Sorcery and the dark sciences lie at the heart of a terrible murder that threatens to force the police into a confrontation with New York's gypsy community. However, Roman Grey decides to unearth the truth about the killing, whatever the cost.