Some of them have appeared in magazines but the majority have not been published before. The characters and backgrounds are widely varied. "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place" is about an old Spanish Beggar. "Homage to Switzerland" concerns various conversations at a Swiss railway-station restaurant. "The Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio" is laid in the accident ward of a hospital in Western United States, and so on. Ernest Hemingway made his literary start as a short-story writer. He has always excelled in that medium, and this volume reveals him at his best.

    This collection brings together some of the most well known stories of M T Vasudevan Nair, fairly representative of his literary works. Written over a broad span of time from 1962 to 2000, the stories collected here reflect the built-in variety of his fictional concerns and the changing tones of his narration.

    In acclaimed stories such as 'Rain', 'The Letter', 'The Vessel of Wrath' and 'The Alien Corn', Maugham illustrates his wry perception of human weakness and his genius for evoking compelling drama and an acute sense of time and place.

    While the tales and sketches reflect many of the strengths and themes of the great novels, they are powerful works in their own right. Unified by his quintessential irony, strong visual sense, and engaging characters, they deal with the tragic and the humorous, the metaphysical and the magical. The collection displays the whole range of Hardy's art as a writer of fiction, from fantasy to uncompromising realism, and from the loving re-creation of a vanished rural world to the repressions of fin-de-siecle bourgeois life.

    She always worked Fridays, but if things had gone according to plan on that particular Friday, she would have had the night off. One rainy Tokyo night, a waitress’s uneventful twentieth birthday takes a strange and fateful turn when she’s asked to deliver dinner to the restaurant’s reclusive owner. Birthday Girl is a beguiling, exquisitely satisfying taste of master storytelling, published to celebrate Murakami’s 70th birthday.

    She herself acknowledged, 'you know I can tell stories better than any other way of expressing myself'. Her work shows her compulsion to express herself on the many subjects relevant to her experience as a Victorian, and Mancunian, a Unitarian, a social observer, and a woman. Above all, however, she writes about love.Love is the common thread which runs through the stories collected here. Gaskell recognizes that it can give rise to selfishness as well as self-sacrifice, unhappiness as well as joy. Writing with passion and shrewdness, irony and sympathy, she explores these paradoxes through humour, pathos, tragedy, the extraordinary, and the everyday.This selection of one short novel and eight stories shows Mrs. Gaskell working in different genres and with a wide range of material. As in her novels she explores different kinds of love, and her observations about human nature are as acute here as in her longer works.In addition to the title tale, this edition includes The Sexton's Hero, Christmas Storms and Sunshine, The Well of Pen-Morfa, The Heart of John Middleton, Morton Hall, My French Master, The Manchester Marriage, and Crowley Castle.

    In struggling to escape from their thwarted lives and to achieve human 'tenderness', the characters embody and continue the major preoccupations of Lawrence's work as a whole.Love Among the Haystacks provides an early illustration of the intensity and innovation which made Lawrence one of the most distinctive and important of twentieth-century writers.

    What happens when a man lives his life backwards, or a family owns a diamond as big as the Ritz Hotel?How can a boring girl become more popular, a careless young woman become more sensible, or a cut-glass bowl destroy a married woman's life?What does a young man do to save the girl that he likes from an evil ghost, or to forget old feelings for a woman when she marries another man?Read this collection of short stories by one of America's finest storytellers to find out.

    

    This series features classic tales retold with color illustrations to introduce literature to struggling readers. Each 64-page eBook retains key phrases and quotations from the original classics. You'll be kept in suspense with these four Edgar Allan Poe short stories! The Pit and the Pendulum, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Cask of Amontillado, The Murders in the Rue Morgue.

    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.

    Short story, published in The Atlantic

    A delightful volume of 16 songs, rhymes and poems from the acclaimed The Hobbit. Illustrated.

    In this, the first of two volumes chronologically collecting all his published adult short stories, we see how Dahl began by using his experiences in the war to write fiction but quickly turned to his powerful and dark imagination to pen some of the most unsettling and disquieting tales ever written.In 27 stories, written between 1944 and 1953, we encounter such classic tales as 'Man from the South', featuring a wager with appalling consequences; 'Lamb to the Slaughter', in which a wife murders her husband yet has a novel idea for throwing the police off the scent; and in 'The Sound Machine', the horrific truth about plants is revealed.Enter the sinister, twisted world of Roald Dahl: whether you're young or old, you'll never want to leave.'Roald Dahl is one of the few writers I know whose work can accurately be described as addictive' Irish Times'The great magician' SpectatorLook out for Volume Two, introduced by Anthony Horowitz Roald Dahl, the brilliant and worldwide acclaimed author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, and many more classics for children, also wrote scores of short stories for adults. These delightfully disturbing tales have often been filmed and were most recently the inspiration for the West End play, Roald Dahl's Twisted Tales by Jeremy Dyson. Roald Dahl's stories continue to make readers shiver today.

    In her works of fiction, Gilman sought to illustrate her ideas about the way American society squandered the talents and economic contributions of women. Based on the nervous breakdown she suffered during her own disastrous first marriage, The Yellow Wall-Paper is her classic story about a woman who goes mad when the rest-cure treatment she undergoes forbids her any kind of work.Herland, Gilman's most famous novel, is a feminist utopian comedy in which three men stumble upon a society of women that has banished men. Also included in this Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition is a selection of Gilman's poetry and other short fiction. Gilman scholar Denise D. Knight has written an enlightening Introduction that explores Gilman's use of the utopian form, satire, and fantasy to provide a critique of women's place in society and to propose creative solutions.