Classic Literature Anthology

Can You Forgive Her? is the first of the six Palliser novels. Here Trollope examines parliamentary election and marriage, politics and privacy. As he dissects the Victorian upper class, issues and people shed their pretenses under his patient, ironic probe.

Kurt Vonnegut made his mark as one of America’s most influential writers with novels such as Slaughterhouse Five, named one of the 100 best English-language novels by Time. Published posthumously, While Mortals Sleep is a collection of 16 short stories, written early in Vonnegut’s career, that further cements his status as an American literary icon.

In this original collection from Skyboat Media and Blackstone Publishing, Elizabeth Gaskell showcases the height of gothic fiction's ability to delight in the otherworldly and to dig deep into what truly haunts us. Set against the backdrop of the Salem witch trials, "Lois the Witch" reveals much about the complicity of mankind. Recently orphaned, Lois is forced to leave the English parsonage that had been her home and sail to America.

The inaugural title from Roxane Gay Books, And Then He Sang a Lullaby is a searingly honest and resonant debut from a 23-year-old Nigerian writer and queer liberation activist, exploring what love and freedom cost in a society steeped in homophobia. August is a God-fearing track star who...

From one of the world's most beloved and outspoken public intellectuals comes an illuminating book on the nature of criticism "Readers will be surprised, stimulated, instructed, impressed."―The New Yorker “What is a beginning? What must one do in order to begin? What is special about...

William Shakespeare is arguably the most pivotal and widely read figure in the history of English literature. This comprehensive collection highlights some of the bard’s best works, adapted to be more easily digestible for children. Featured within are some of the bard’s most famous and compelling works, including: The Comedy of Errors, Hamlet, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, and many more.

From a variety of masterfully rendered perspectives, these six stories depict people at painful odds with the world around them. A wife can only surrender to a desert night by betraying her husband. An artist struggles to honor his own aspirations as well as society's expectations of him. A missionary brutally converted to the worship of a tribal fetish is left with but an echo of his identity. Whether set in North Africa, Paris, or Brazil, the stories in Exile and the Kingdom are probing portraits of spiritual exile, and man's perpetual search for an inner kingdom.

In A Few Quick Ones, P. G. Wodehouse brings together some of his oldest friends for a party. Jeeves and Wooster are there, so is Mr Mulliner and the Oldest Member.

Stalky & Co. is a book published in 1899 (following serialization in the Windsor Magazine) by Rudyard Kipling, about adolescent boys at a British boarding school. It is a collection of linked short stories in format, with some information about the charismatic Stalky character in later life. The character Beetle, one of the main trio, is partly based on Kipling himself. Stalky is based on Lionel Dunsterville, M'Turk is based on George Charles Beresford, and Mr. King is based on William Carr Crofts.

Bachelor John Marcher is haunted by the premonition that something terrible lies in store for him, like a "beast in the jungle" lying in wait. So he spends his life in idleness, unable to carry out his dreams or desires, while his friend May Bartram, curious to see how this spectacular fate will manifest, helps watch out for the arrival of the beast.

The inevitable is understood by each and every one of us who faces the final calling. So too are the effects on those left behind. The memories are there but the empty space, the void can never be refilled. It remains a dark, unreliable pit of loneliness. The sadness and often depression, the lack of will to continue may swamp us all. Unquenchable, undeniable. But loss can, after mourning, give the opportunity to reappraise the lost and how we can each move forward. In the literary world an accessible balance can be given.

Once, Hope Payne was a mermaid, performing at the local theme park and captivating audiences young and old. Today, she's married to a pragmatic marine biologist who has filled the pool in their backyard with flounder for a special study. Before he begins, the fish vanish - echoing a loss Hope alone can understand. She senses there's something underwater, something alive and hungry for more, but is she in too deep to ever resurface?

The Star Rover is a 1914 collection of science fiction short stories with the theme of reincarnation. It tells the story of Darrell Standing, an inmate of San Quentin’s death row. The narrator escapes the horror of prison life by withdrawing into altered states and the memory of past lives. Forming the body of the work, the accounts of these past lives are vivid but disconnected. They include a desert island survival story, one which involves a Roman perspective on Christ, a tale of medieval Korea, and one which takes place in a prehistoric era.

Fifty of the world's greatest classic short stories: 1.The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant 2.The One Million Pound Banknote by Mark Twain 3.The Phantom Rickshaw by Rudyard Kipling 4.The Fly by Katherine Mansfield 5.The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe 6.My Favorite Murder by Ambrose Bierce 7.The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe 8.One Thousand Dollars by O. Henry 9.Regret by Kate Chopin 10.The Nose by Nikolai Gogol 11.The Mezzotint by M. R. James 12.The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry

Flamboyant, theatrical and ambitious, Margaret Cavendish was one of the 17th century's most striking figures: a woman who ventured into the male spheres of politics, science, philosophy and literature. The Blazing World is a highly original work: part Utopian fiction, part feminist text, it tells of a lady shipwrecked on the Blazing World where she is made empress and uses her power to ensure that it is free of war, religious division and unfair sexual discrimination. This volume also includes 'The Contract' and 'Assaulted and Pursued Chastity'.

Instructed to abandon her intellectual life and avoid stimulating company, she sinks into a still-deeper depression invisible to her husband, who believes he knows what is best for her. Alone in the yellow-wallpapered nursery of a rented house, she descends into madness.

Fairytales are a universal part of childhood. No matter what time or what place you grew up, you have at one point or another heard that classic phrase “once upon a time.” They are usually the first stories we ever hear or read. These types of tales set us up to understand the art of stories and storytelling, and they are certainly worth revisiting. Here in The Blue Fairy Book, the first of Andrew Lang’s beloved collections of classic fairy stories, you will return to the tales you already know.

Grimms' Fairy Tales, originally known as the Children's and Household Tales, is a German collection of fairy tales as told by the Grimm Brothers (also known as Brothers Grimm), Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, first published on 20 December 1812. In this collection of 62 fairy tales, you will find Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, the Frog-Prince and Snow White and Rose Red, among other timeless works.

Few ghost stories are as chilling as the ones written by Victorian writers. Featuring work by H.G. Wells, Edith Wharton, F.G. Loring and Florence Marryat, this second volume of eight enduring stories, some well-known, others less familiar, transport you to a cosy fireside to hear tales of disembodied voices, haunted objects and unknown entities lurking in the shadows cast by candlelight.

Enjoy the great detectives of the Golden Age of classic mysteries in this unique collection of audio whodunits. Newly recorded for this original anthology, the crimes, criminals, and sleuths depicted here set the standard for decades to come, and remain as entertaining today as they were when first published. Fantastic narrators including Simon Prebble, Kate Fenton, Bill Wallace, and Robert Fass breathe new life into these stories.