Classic Literature Anthology

An old man recounts the story of a death he witnessed as a young boy working in the theater: His boss, Mr. Haliday, had married a pretty young lady from the theater, much to the chagrin of the other women working in the company. It was a marriage of convenience, but in the beginning they got along well enough. After a handsome younger man, Henry Mortimer, joins the theater company, Mrs. Haliday and Mortimer start up a romance that everyone but Mr. Haliday seem to notice.

About Love is the musings of several friends about love and the great mystery surrounding it. After trying to figure out the love existing between an abusive, ugly cook and the lovely girl that doted on him, one of the men, Alehin, begins sharing his story of love and heartbreak. He recounts the tale of his love for the beautiful Anna Alexyevna, a young woman married to his friend. Alehin describes the way in which their relationship developed, returning again and again to the strange mysteries of love.

Young Claribel was a girl taught goodness by her parents and lived a happy life, especially when she went to school. Claribel loved her teacher, a kindly woman who taught her students the importance of honesty above all else. Her teacher taught them of the Beautiful City where the Good and Honest children would go one day, and Claribel wanted nothing more. One day in class, whilst working on her math, she became bored and distracted and began to draw a lily that she saw out the classroom window.

The Gombeen Man is an evil moneylender who several peasants owe money to. When the peasants find themselves unable to repay the wicked man on time, he is quick with his desire to take their land from them, refusing to take the payment from them in the future if they should be able to come up with it. The poor peasants are then forced to come up with a plan to keep their land from the evil Gombeen Man. This short story is actually a chapter from Stoker’s novel The Snake’s Pass, about a romance between an English tourist and an Irish peasant.

When several employees of the bank are arrested for corruption, the merchant Avdeyev doesn't give the ordeal much thought, figuring the men going to jail deserve it. His opinion changes however when he returns home to find his wife and son very upset - his house had just been searched by officials in connection to the bank corruption. Avdeyev had signed papers for the bankers without knowing what they were and so had essentially signed his life away by his carelessness.

Three men, Mihailo the porter, Nikandr the fish merchant, and Stepan the coachman, sit around a table in the coach-house playing a game of "kings" with Stepan's eight-year old grandson, Alyoshka. While each card player competitively tries to win the coveted position of "king" in the game, a more serious atmosphere casts a sad shadow over the estate in which the coach-house is situated. The man of the house, for whom the porter and coachman work, has attempted suicide, and he lies in the estate house struggling somewhere between life and death.

From best-selling authors Ilona Andrews, Yasmine Galenorn, Allyson James, and Jeanne C. Stein comes an anthology of four all-new novellas featuring powerful women who know how to handle a hex or two. In "Double Hexed" from Allyson James, a novella of the Stormwalker series, Janet and her friends find themselves locked in her hotel, victims of a hex cast by a very powerful sorcerer.

This recording contains four of Katherine Mansfield's best stories. In The Daughters of the Late Colonel, two sisters are recently bereaved; while in Her First Ball a young girl attends her first dance. The Singing Lesson features Miss Meadows, a music teacher in turmoil; and in The Stranger, a middle-aged couple are reunited.

Here is Old Man's War author John Scalzi's sendup of the heroic fantasy genre, now a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story.

The profoundly original and wildly entertaining short stories of a legendary Twilight Zone writer. It is only natural that Charles Beaumont would make a name for himself crafting scripts for The Twilight Zone - for his was an imagination so limitless it must have emerged from some other dimension. Perchance to Dream contains a selection of Beaumont's finest stories, including five that he later adapted for Twilight Zone episodes.

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.

"Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" is a short story by the American writer Herman Melville, first serialized anonymously in two parts in the November and December 1853 issues of Putnam's Magazine, and reprinted with minor textual alterations in his The Piazza Tales in 1856.

Audible is proud to present the first-ever audiobook recording of Tillie Olsen's legendary short stories, included "Tell Me a Riddle", and "I Stand Here Ironing"—works that transformed women's self-reflection and literature forever. Tillie Olsen's work, since the 1930s, spoke to the hard truths of motherhood and marriage, domestic life, and labor. Her political conviction and poetic intensity brought a depth to an influence that continues to be felt today.

Hoffmann, among the greatest and most popular of the German Romantics, is renowned for his humorous and sometimes horrifying tales of supernatural beings. This selection, while stressing the variety of his work, focuses on those stories in which the real and the supernatural are brought into contact and conflict. This new translation includes The Golden Pot, The Sandman, Princess Brambilla, Master Flea, and My Cousin's Corner Window.

Leo Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists for such works as War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He also wrote a number of outstanding short stories. This is one of his best.

How long would you walk, if the Devil sauntered up to you of an evening, and journeyed alongside of you? Young Goodman Brown is led by the Devil to a midnight ritual, where fire, blood, and water change his opinions of the nature of humanity.

Welcome to Bald's farm. Well, perhaps it's not Bald's farm anymore. The old man has kicked the bucket, setting off a wave of conflict from the flooded farmhouse kitchen to the muddy pig pen to the tall wheat fields. In this darkly funny, slightly supernatural chain of tales, no creature is safe. Not Leonard Grey, a spider with sophisticated tastes. Not Esmeralda, a resentful one-legged pig. Not Tulip, a plant with a mean streak.

Wolff here returns with fresh revelations - about biding one's time, or experiencing first love, or burying one's mother - that come to a variety of characters in circumstances at once everyday and extraordinary. A retired Marine enrolls in college while her son trains for Iraq. A lawyer takes a difficult deposition. An American in Rome indulges the Gypsy who's picked his pocket.

Catch the holiday spirit with this magical collection of beloved Christmas tales. Christmas favorites from L.M. Montgomery, O. Henry, Willa Cather, Hans Christian Anderson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bret Harte and Anthony Trollope are lovingly recorded and presented here in one enchanting volume.

With this, his first collection of stories, Raymond Carver breathed new life into the American short story and instantly became both the recognized master of the form and one of our best-loved fiction writers. Carver shows us the humor and tragedy that dwell in the hearts of ordinary people; his stories are the classics of our time.