Classic Literature Short Stories

The extraordinarily evocative stories depict the generation born in a small-town America during the Depression and growing up in a world where the old sexual morality was turned around and material comforts were easily had. Yet, as these stories reflect so accurately, life was still unsettling, and Updike chronicles telling moments both joyful and painful. The texts are taken from his recent omnibus, The Early Stories, 1953-1975.

O. Henry's short stories are well known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization and clever twist endings. Includes: "By Courier", "Jimmie Hayes and Muriel", "School and Schools", "Roads of Destiny", "A Blackjack Bargainer"," A Cosmopolite in a Café", "Christmas by Injunction", "Mammon and the Archer", "A Bird of Bagdad", "After 20 Years", "From The Cabby’s Seat", "Lost on Dress Parade", "Memoirs of a Yellow Dog", "Tobin’s Palm", "Transients in Arcadia", "The Trimmed Lamp", and more.

The life of a Scrivener can be a dull one. After all, your entire occupation has to do with the handwritten copying of law documents. But when Bartleby arrives, he turns the office upside down with the enigmatic phrase: “I prefer not to.”

The Call of Cthulhu", written in 1926, is probably Lovecraft's best-known work. Discovering notes left by a deceased relative, the narrator pieces together the whole truth and disturbing significance of the Cthulhu cult. This release also contains the shorter tales "The Festival" and "The Hound", in which gravediggers bring home more than they bargained for!

La ironía, la honda melancolía y la inconfundible mirada desencantada de Oscar Wilde impregnan cada una de estas páginas, erigiéndose como un monumento paródico y duramente crítico hacia la sociedad victoriana de finales del siglo XIX. Todo ello esbozado con un estilo único, patente desde las sátiras de «El crimen de lord Arthur Savile» y «El fantasma de Canterville» hasta los cuentos de hadas como «El Príncipe Feliz», «El ruiseñor y la rosa» y «El gigante egoísta».

A prolific writer of Christian romances, Grace Livingston Hill also excelled in creating novels of suspense. These tales highlight three women who, through pluck and cleverness, strive to escape the menace that envelops them. (Of course, being GLH stories, there are always romantic possibilities!)

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota into an upper-middle class family. His classic "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" carefully pulls apart the relationship between two cousins one hot summer. Something has to give and with Fitzgerald its an absolute certainty that the brittle lives of young women finally snap in unique ways.

It takes a lot of effort for Jimmy Crocker to become Piccadilly Jim – nights on the town roistering, headlines in the gossip columns, a string of broken hearts and breaches of promise. Eventually he becomes rather good at it and manages to go to pieces with his eyes open. But no sooner has Jimmy cut a wild swathe through fashionable London than his terrifying Aunt Nesta decides he must mend his ways. He then falls in love with the girl he has hurt most of all, and after that things get complicated. In a dizzying plot, impersonations pile on impersonations....

Joseph Smith Fletcher (1863-1935) was a British journalist and author. He wrote more than 230 books on a wide variety of subjects, both fiction and nonfiction. He was one of the leading writers of detective fiction in the Victorian golden age of the short story. This collection brings together some of the finest and most diverse examples of Fletcher's genius.

Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) was a prolific English writer, now best remembered for his science fiction novels and often credited as being the father of science fiction. 'The Country of the Blind' is the strange story of a mountain guide who accidently falls off a cliff ledge in the Andes. He survives the fall unhurt, and finds himself in a remote valley where a tribe lives completely cut off from the rest of the world.

This collection of Irish tales includes "Eveline", "After the Race", "Two Gallants", "The Boarding House", "Counterparts", "Clay", "A Painful Case", "Ivy Day in the Committee Room", "A Mother", "Grace", and "The Dead".

So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a white rabbit with pink eyes ran close to her. Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland books have delighted readers and listeners across the globe for more than 100 years. The Wonderland Collection presents three of Carroll's most famous works.

In Agatha Christie’s short story, “The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb,” the widow of a famous Egyptologist consults Poirot on the suspicious death of her husband and an American financier, Bleibner. The mystery takes Poirot and Hastings to Egypt to investigate the site of an archaeological dig. But who could want the two men dead? This short story originally appeared in the September 26, 1923 issue of The Sketch magazine.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on 29th January 1860 in Taganrog, on the south coast of Russia. His family life was difficult; his father was strict and overbearing, but his mother was a passionate story-teller, a subject Chekhov warmed to. As he later said; ‘our talents we got from our father, but our soul from our mother’. Chekhov wrote over 500 short stories which included many, many classics including ‘The Kiss’ and ‘The Lady with a Dog’. His collection ‘At Dusk’ won him the coveted Pushkin Prize when was only 26.

Leonidas W. Smiley would bet on anything. Horse races, dog fights, cat fights, chicken fights - all were fair game to the gambling nature of Smiley. But he meets his match when a stranger comes into town, and puts his champion jumping frog to the test.

A fabulous collection of some of the most intriguing British short stories ever written. Includes "The Pipe" by Anonymous, "The Puzzle" by Anonymous, "The Man with the Cough by Mrs Molesworth, "The Pavillion on the Links" by Robert Louis Stevenson, "The Horror of the Heights" by Sir. Arthur Conan Doyle, and "The Rocking Horse Winner" by D. H. Lawrence.

A collection of 11 classic short stories by authors including Kate Chopin, Saki, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce, and Thomas Hardy.

This selection of stories relates the many experiences and complexities of womanhood; sometimes joyful, sometimes sad but always enriching. With stories by Edith Wharton, Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Gaskell - it includes 'Ladies in Lavender' by William J. Locke, the inspiration for the film of the same name starring Judi Dench and Maggie Smith.

Tolstoy brings to these brief tales the same psychological depth and spiritual insight found in his larger works. In fact, his short stories are an excellent place to begin reading this great author. In them, you will find the same challenging themes of morality, forgiveness, redemption and more.

Willa Cather was perhaps most famous for her great novels such as My Antonia and Death Comes to the Archbishop. However, her short stories were enchanting and practical, local and cosmopolitan. Of the great American writers of the early part of the twentieth century she stood alone in her vision. No American writer ever had her breadth of experience and knowledge of people and places, relating to farmers in Nebraska, to barons in New York, and artists in Paris.