Short Classic Literature

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.

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.

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.

Here are 11 short stories and one novella by Anton Chekhov, one of the finest masters of what is acknowledged as a difficult genre. There is the richly comic "Oh! The Public" about a hassled ticket inspector, a wry look at morals and manners in "The Chorus Girl", and the melancholic tale of a cab driver in "Misery".

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.

Dubliners is a collection of 15 short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914. The stories comprise a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle-class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century. The stories were written when Irish nationalism was at its peak, and a search for a national identity and purpose was raging; at a crossroads of history and culture, Ireland was jolted by various converging ideas and influences.

This collection of 11 stories spans virtually the whole of Tolstoy's creative life. While each is unique in form, as a group they are representative of his style, and touch on the central themes that surface in War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Stories as different as "The Snowstorm", "Lucerne", "The Diary of a Madman", and "The Devil" are grounded in autobiographical experience. They deal with journeys of self-discovery and the moral and religious thought that characterizes Tolstoy's works of criticism and philosophy.

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?

Les deux des plus grands textes de la littérature française réunis dans cette compilation pour le plus grand plaisir des admirateurs de Maupassant.

Uno dei capolavori della letteratura italiana, Sillabari raccoglie una serie di racconti brevi sui sentimenti nella loro essenzialità

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

From money-making schemes involving placing wagers on vicars to poor Bingo having to produce the village school Christmas entertainments, every one of Wodehouse’s superb short stories are guarantee to raise a smile from even the most stony-faced listener!

“I was sick, sick unto death with that long agony,” begins one of the most famous tales from the master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe. Through the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition, we follow the straying mind of the unnamed prisoner in his quest for hope in a world of darkness and despair. This episode skyrocketed The Classic Tales Podcast to number 3 on iTunes’ Top 100 Podcasts chart.

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.

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.

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.

Centering on the picaresque realism of Nikolai Gogol’s (1809-1852) mid-19th-century visions of the extraordinary in everyday life, this collection mines the ambiance and mind of pre-Revolutionary Russia. These seven stories take us from the Miracle Mile of St. Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt, and a summer night in a Ukrainian village, to the fantastical psychological geographies of fathers, sons, and madmen. Augmenting Gogol’s visions are two disturbing tales by the foremost storyteller of Russia’s “Silver Age”.

Young, impressionable Aubrey is fascinated by the enigmatic Lord Ruthven, and accompanies him on a tour to Europe. But Aubrey develops a growing distaste for Lord Ruthven’s sinister and grotesque conduct - especially as it concerns human blood. This novella, penned during that tempestuous night in Switzerland amongst such notables as Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley, served as the great inspiration for Bram Stoker to create Dracula.

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.

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.