It’s a tale from the past, with a message for today. A stunningly poignant, devastating, and ultimately beautiful tour-de-force - Simon James GreenAt just nineteen, Stephen has…
The whole town got involved with the hunger-artist; from day to day of his starving, people’s participation grew; everyone wanted to see the hunger-artist at least once a day; on…
Closely Watched Trains tells the story of Miloš Hrma, a young railroad apprentice coming of age in wartime Czechoslovakia. Miloš is overwhelmed with worries – about his virginity,…
‘As for me I have one ambition only: to invent stories, very beautiful stories’ Gothic, expansive and truly spellbinding, Karen Blixen’s short stories offer incisive psychological…
This small group of stories by D. H. Lawrence show him in a number of moods.The hope is that in such a limited number of pages, the reader will come away with a compressed, rich…
Known as Ireland’s Chekhov, Frank O’Connor was a master of the modern short story, with an eye for capturing the spaces between our selves and our surroundings. The Genius brings…
‘And this is fantasy, the flutter, the rapture of fantasy!’ A bashful dragon, a lost wood-sprite, the prophet Elijah and the Devil disguised as a middle-aged woman appear in these…
No author perfected the twist in the tale better than Roald Dahl. His stories – many of which were filmed as Tales of the Unexpected – take us into a world that is shocking,…
Muriel Spark claimed The Driver’s Seat to be her best and creepiest novel. Once you have met her heroine Lise – heading for the holiday of a lifetime in an extraordinarily garish…
In one of the great English war memoirs, we learn what it is to cross the Pyrenees through freezing snow to fight fascism in Spain; to narrowly escape execution by your own side;…
Of course, very few people go through the gate and abandon the beautiful phenomenon of the outside world for the interior reality that they intuit... A visitor to a zoo discovers…
Rabindranath Tagore was one of the greatest authors of his generation. In these two short stories – ‘The Broken Nest’ and ‘Dead or Alive’ – he is at his devastating best, charting…
'What does love fear? Limitation.' Johannes stealthily pursues Cordelia through the streets of Copenhagen, and through an intricate, manipulative courtship contrives to possess…
I am not a man, I am dynamiteWeeks before his final mental breakdown, Nietzsche set out to compose his autobiography, and Ecce Homo is the result. A summary of his life’s work as…
'My dear friend, he said, life is strange and strange things happen in life' It is a hot July Sunday in Lisbon and our narrator has an appointment to meet someone by the quayside.…