Joseph Delaney used to be an English teacher, before becoming the best-selling author of the Spook's series, which has been published in 30 countries and sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide. The first book, The Spook's Apprentice, was adapted into a major motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Julianne Moore.

Joseph Delaney

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J.M.G. Le Clézio

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In these nine unforgettable and impressionistic 'tales of little madness', the Nobel Prize-winning author Le Clézio explores how the physical sensations we experience every day can be as strong as feelings of love or hate, with their power to bring chaos to our lives. In 'The Day that Beaumont became Acquainted with his Pain', a man with toothache spends the night seeking ways to disown his throbbing jaw; in 'Fever', Roch finds his mind transported by sunstroke; while in 'A Day of Old Age' little Joseph tries to comprehend the physical suffering of a dying old woman. Set in a timeless, spaceless universe, these experimental and haunting works portray the landscape of the human consciousness with dazzling verbal dexterity and power.

Fever

Joseph Conrad

In these four stories, written between 1900 and 1902, Joseph Conrad bid gradual farewell to his adventurous life at sea and began to confront the more daunting complexities of life on land in the twentieth century. In 'Typhoon' Conrad reveals, in the steadfast courage of an undemonstrative captain and the imaginative readiness of his young first mate, the differences between instinct and intelligence in a partnership vital to human survival. 'Falk', the companion sea-story, contrasts, as Conrad once put it, 'common sentimentalism with the frank standpoint of a more or less primitive man', a man with a conscience, however, about the girl he desires. In one of the 'land-stories' Conrad explores the utter isolation of an East European emigrant in England; in the other, the plight of a woman ironically trapped by the unwitting alliance of two retired widowers - each blind in his own way.

Typhoon and Other Stories

Andreas Karkavitsas

Stripped of their ancestral lands and persecuted by other proud dynasties, the once illustrious Eumorphopoulos family have been brought low. But when their rivals begin to falter, two Eumorphopoulos brothers, Aristodemus and Dimitrakis, resolve to restore their line's ancient glory. Yet they disagree about the best path forward: do they look to the ancient past - to long-lost language and culture - or to the ideology and technology of the present. . . 
 
The Archeologist, Andreas Karkavitsas' masterpiece, is at once a powerful allegory for the questions facing Greek nationalism at the turn of the century, as well as a vision of Europe that, conceived on the precipice of the First World War, now resounds with tragedy. 
 
Also included in this edition are a selection of 'sea tales' - folk stories told to Karakvitas by sailors, fishermen and sponge-divers during his travels in the Mediterranean. Staples of Greek literature, these four sea stories are considered some of Karakvitsas' greatest achievements.

The Archeologist and Selected Sea Stories

On sea, on land, at the edges of the colonial experience, Joseph Conrad's short stories offer a glimpse of the violence, the kindness, and the mystery at humanity's heart. 'The Lagoon' tells of love and its shadow, 'The Typhoon' of the gap between man and nature, while 'The Secret Sharer' provides a brilliant exploration of truth and trust.

The Lagoon

Henry James

A wonderful new selection of Henry James's short stories exploring the relationship between art and life, edited by Michael Gorra. 
 
This volume gathers seven of the very best of Henry James's short stories, all focussing the relationship between art and life. In 'The Aspern Papers', a critic is determined to get his hands on a great poet's papers hidden in a faded Venetian house - not matter what the human cost. 'The Author of Beltraffio', 'The Lesson of the Master' and 'The Figure in the Carpet' all focus on naive young men's unsettling encounters with their literary heroes. In 'The Middle Years', a dying novelist begins to glimpse his own potential, while 'The Real Thing' and 'Greville Fane' both explore the tension between artistic and commercial success. These fables of the creative life reveal James at his ironic, provocative best. 
 
Henry James was born in 1843 in New York and died in London in 1916. In addition to many short stories, plays, books of criticism, autobiography and travel, he wrote some twenty novels, the first published being Roderick Hudson (1875). They include The Europeans, Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, The Tragic Muse, The Spoils of Poynton, The Awkward Age, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. 
 
Michael Gorra is Professor of English at Smith College and the author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (2012), a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in biography.

The Aspern Papers and Other Tales

James Joyce

Dubliners, Joyce's first major work and written when he was only twenty-five, brought his city to the world for the first time. His stories are rooted in the rich detail of Dublin life, portraying ordinary, often defeated lives with unflinching realism. From 'The Sisters', a vivid portrait of childhood faith and guilt, to 'Araby', a timeless evocation of the inexplicable yearnings of adolescence, to 'The Dead', in which Gabriel Conroy is gradually brought to a painful epiphany regarding the nature of his existence, Joyce draws a realistic and memorable cast of Dubliners together in an powerful exploration of overarching themes. Writing of social decline, sexual desire and exploitation, corruption and personal failure, he creates a brilliantly compelling, unique vision of the world and of human experience.

Dubliners

Penguin Classics

Frank O'Connor

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 together some of his very best stories, often told from the perspective of young children and forming a revealing portrait of coming of age in postwar Ireland. Humorous and poignant in equal parts, these stories are a lesson in craft from a celebrated, prolific author.

The Genius

A wonderful new collection of tales exploring Henry James's favourite 'international theme': the experiences of Americans in Europe, and the meeting of the old world and new. 
 
Daisy Miller is one of Henry James's great heroines - a young, independent American travelling in Europe, whose flouting of social conventions has the potential to lead to disaster. Her story is here accompanied by six more set among English castles, Swiss hotels and French ports, and all riffing on a classic Jamesian theme: the clash between the old world and new, Europe and America. 
 
The tales included in this volume are 'Travelling Companions', 'Madame de Mauves', 'Four Meetings', 'Daisy Miller', 'An International Episode', 'Europe' and 'Fordham Castle', and the collection has been edited by renowned scholar of Anglo-American literature, Stephen Fender, under the general editorship of Philip Horne. This is one of three new volumes of James's greatest tales in Penguin Classics, and is accompanied by The Aspern Papers and Other Tales and The Turn of the Screw and Other Tales (forthcoming).

Daisy Miller and Other Tales

one of a series of new editions of Henry James's most famous short stories and novels.

The Europeans

M. R. James

The only annotated edition of M. R. James's writings currently available, Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories contains the entire first two volumes of James's ghost stories, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary and More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. These volumes are both the culmination of the nineteenth-century ghost story tradition and the inspiration for much of the best twentieth-century work in this genre. Included in this collection are such landmark tales as "Count Magnus," set in the wilds of Sweden; "Number 13," a distinctive tale about a haunted hotel room; "Casting the Runes," a richly complex tale of sorcery that served as the basis for the classic horror film Curse of the Demon; and "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad," one of the most frightening tales in literature. The appendix includes several rare texts, including "A Night in King's College Chapel," James's first known ghost story.

Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories

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In 'The Turn of the Screw', one of the most famous ghost stories of all time, a governess becomes obsessed with the belief that malevolent forces are stalking the children in her care. But are the children really in danger - and if so, from whom? The novella is accompanied here by several more of the very best of Henry James' short stories, including 'The Jolly Corner' and 'The Third Person', all of which explore human psychology through ghostly visitations and the uncanny.

The Turn of the Screw and Other Ghost Stories

Mario Benedetti

They met when they were teenagers. Quiet, poor, perhaps even a little dull, Miguel fell for languid Alicia during their long walks back from school. Then Lucas arrived and changed everything, entrancing Alicia with his confident bohemian charm. Miguel could not compete. But he stuck around and, against all the odds, was the one Alicia ended up marrying. 
 
Now, eleven years later, their marriage has begun to fray, and Alicia sets out to see Lucas again. Yet gnawing at each member of the ménage a trois is the knowledge that, somewhere along the line, something has gone badly awry. 
 
In a final heady whirl of sex and obsession, treachery and blame, they all struggle to ascertain: who among them is to blame?

Who Among Us?

James Tiptree Jr.

Daring, energetic, and struck through with linguistic inventiveness, Warm Worlds and Otherwise is one of the most influential short story collections in all of science fiction, and one of the principle achievements of James Tiptree Jr - the pen name of Alice Bradley Sheldon. 
 
Demonstrating Tiptree's eye for unnerving future dystopias and her unparalleled depiction of strange worlds and mysterious creatures, Warm Worlds and Otherwise also traces a movement toward ground-breaking explorations of sexuality, gender and race. Included in this collection are the Hugo and Nebula award-winning 'The Girl Who was Plugged In' and 'Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death', as well as the extraordinary 'The Women Men Can't See'.

Warm Worlds and Otherwise

James Tiptree Jr, the pen name of Alice Bradley Sheldon, is widely considered to be one of the most influential American genre writers ever, and a pioneer of feminist science fiction. 
 
10,000 Light Years from Home, her brilliant debut collection, displays all her trademark humour, intensity and originality, with dark dystopian thrills, fast-paced intergalactic satire and hardboiled tales of alien invasion. A startling and unforgettable depiction of humanity's experience among the stars, the collection includes some of Tiptree's most powerful stories: 'And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill's Side', 'The Man Who Walked Home' and 'Beam Us Home'.

Ten Thousand Light-Years From Home

Heinrich Kleist

In The Marquise of O-, a virtuous widow finds herself unaccountably pregnant. And although the baffled Marquise has no idea when this happened, she must prove her innocence to her doubting family and discover whether the perpetrator is an assailant or lover. Michael Kohlhaas depicts an honourable man who feels compelled to violate the law in his search for justice, while other tales explore the singular realm of the uncanny, such as The Beggarwoman of Locarno, in which an old woman's ghost drives a heartless nobleman to madness, and St Cecilia, which portrays four brothers possessed by an uncontrollable religious mania. The stories collected in this volume reflect the preoccupations of Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) with the deceptiveness of human nature and the unpredictability of the physical world.

The Marquise of O -

And Other Stories

Oh Jung-hee

In this emblematic selection of her stories, Oh Jung-hee probes beneath the surface of seemingly quotidian lives to expose nightmarish family configurations warped by desertion, psychosis, and death. In ‘Chinatown’ a young girl living on the edge of the city’s Chinese community comes of age among mundane violences, collisions with adult sexuality and the American occupation; in ‘The Garden Party’ a woman grapples with her conflicting identities of wife, mother and writer at an alcohol-fuelled gathering. Throughout a career spanning six decades, Oh Jung-hee has drawn comparisons to Alice Munro, Virginia Woolf, and Joyce Carol Oates, and is assuredly a trailblazing writer.

Chinatown

Damon Runyon

Slick, upbeat and funny, these stories inspired the popular musical and film Guys and Dolls. 
 
'Of all the high players this country ever sees, there is no doubt but that the guy they call the Sky is the highest.. He will bet all he has, and nobody can bet any more than this'.

Guys and Dolls

and Other Stories

Guy de Maupassant

Set in the Paris of society women, prostitutes and small-minded bourgeousie, and the isolated villages of rural Normandy that de Maupassant knew as a child, the thirty-three tales in this volume are among the most darkly humorous and brilliant short stories in nineteenth-century literature. They focus on the relationships between men and women, as in the poignant fantasy of 'A Parisian Affair', between brothers and sisters, and between masters and servants. Through these relationships, Maupassant explores the dualistic nature of the human character and his stories reveal both nobility, civility and generosity, and, in stories such as 'At Sea' and 'Boule de Suif', vanity, greed and hypocrisy. Maupassant's stories repeatedly lay humanity bare with deft wit and devastating honesty.

A Parisian Affair and Other Stories

Leo Tolstoy

This volume includes Family Happiness; The Kreutzer Sonata; The Devil and Father Sergius. The four stories are all about love, but they take very different attitudes towards it. Tolstoy knows that jis readers have fallen in love and also, often, fallen out of it; they have wanted to kill their loved ones; they have lusted vigorously; or desperately sought the approval and even worship of others - Tolstoy depends on our own memories to entagle us in his tragic stories.

The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories

John Steinbeck

Each of these delightful interconnected tales is devoted to a family living in a fertile valley on the outskirts of Monterey, California, and the effects that one particular family has on them all. Steinbeck tackles two important literary traditions here; American naturalism, with its focus on the conflict between natural instincts and the demand to conform to society's norms, and the short story cycle. Set in the heart of 'Steinbeck land', the lush Californian valleys.

The Pastures of Heaven

Penguin Modern Classics

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Full grown with a long, smoke-coloured beard, requiring the services of a cane and fonder of cigars than warm milk, Benjamin Button is a very curious baby indeed. And, as Benjamin becomes increasingly youthful with the passing years, his family wonders why he persists in the embarrassing folly of living in reverse. In this imaginative fable of ageing and the other stories collected here &ndash; including &lsquo;The Cut-Glass Bowl&rsquo; in which an ill-meant gift haunts a family&rsquo;s misfortunes, &lsquo;The Four Fists&rsquo; where a man&rsquo;s life shaped by a series of punches to his face, and the revelry, mobs and anguish of &lsquo;May Day&rsquo; &ndash; F. Scott Fitzgerald displays his unmatched gift as a writer of short stories.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

And Six Other Stories

The quarter century or so before the outbreak of the First World War saw an extraordinary boom in the popularity and quality of short stories in Britain. Fuelled by a large new magazine readership and vigorous competition to acquire new stories, these years were ones where the normal rule-of-thumb (novels sell, short stories don't) was inverted. 
 
This was the era of Sherlock Holmes, of Kipling's most famous stories, of Katherine Mansfield and Joyce's Dubliners. Some of the greatest writers of the period - particularly Conrad and James - found that the effort that went into their shorter works was more rewarded during their lifetimes than their now famous novels. Writers such as Chesterton, Beerbohm, Lawrence and Saki produced some of their greatest work. 
 
Short stories also provided a brilliant medium for experiment, and this generous and endlessly entertaining anthology includes fascinating examples of writers as varied as Rebecca West, H.G. Wells and Wyndham Lewis experimenting with what it was acceptable to write and how you could write it.

The Golden Age of British Short Stories 1890-1914

Mary Gaitskill

First published in the late 1990s and a bestseller at the time, this incisive collection of short stories explores connection and disconnection in families, between ex-lovers and friends. From a father reflecting on the daughter whose lesbianism he cannot accept, to two people who were once young together stumbling over the foundations of their past, inside are twelve portraits of heart-rending emotional intimacy and the delicacy of relationships. Because They Wanted To is a perfectly formed set of stories about alienation in modern times.

Because They Wanted To

The story of the title deals with a little boy named Larry and his feelings towards his father. When his father returns home from World War II, Larry is resentful and jealous of losing his mother's undivided attention, and finds himself in a constant struggle to win back her affections.

My Oedipus Complex

James Thurber

This collection brings together the best of James Thurber's brilliantly funny, eccentric and anarchic writings. It includes his most famous work, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, in which an ordinary man's fantasies have a more powerful hold on him than reality, as well as essays, poetry and cartoons gathered from all of Thurber's collections. Making fun of his own weaknesses and those of other people (and dogs) - the English teacher who looked only at figures of speech, the Airedale who refused to include him in the family, the botany lecturer who despaired of him totally - James Thurber is a true original, whose off-beat imagination shows us everyday life from a different angle.

The Thurber Carnival

Walter Scott

Set within a framing narrative told by Chrystal Croftangry, these three stories are set in the years following the Jacobite defeat and all feature characters who are leaving Scotland to seek their fortunes elsewhere.  In 'The Highland Widow' and 'The Two Drovers', two young men find themselves torn between traditional Scottish loyalties and the opportunities offered by England.   And 'The Surgeon's Daughter' follows three young Scots to India during the first phase years of the British Empire.

Chronicles of the Canongate

Eudora Welty

First published in 1949, THE GOLDEN APPLES is an acutely observed, richly atmospheric portrayal of small town life in Morgana, Mississippi. There's Snowdie, who has to bring up her twin boys alone after her husband, King Maclain, disappears one day, discarding his hat on the banks of the Big Black. There's Loch Morrison, convalescing with malaria, who watches from his bedroom window as wayward Virgie Rainey meets a sailor in the vacant house opposite. Meanwhile, Miss Eckhart the piano teacher, grieving the loss of her most promising pupil, tries her hand at arson. 
 
Eudora Welty has a fine ear for dialogue and describes each of the characters in incisive, haunting prose. '...in the South,' she says, 'everybody stays busy talking all the time - they're not sorry for you to overhear their tales'. Welty deftly picks up their stories to create an unflinching potrait of everyday life in the American South and offers a deeply moving look at human nature.

The Golden Apples

Philip Pullman

In this stunningly designed book of classic fairy tales, award-winning author Philip Pullman has chosen his fifty favourite stories from the Brothers Grimm and presents them in a 'clear as water' retelling, in his unique and brilliant voice. These new versions show the adventures at their most lucid and engaging yet. Pullman's Grimm Tales of wicked wives, brave children and villainous kings will have you reading, reading aloud and rereading them for many years to come.

Grimm Tales

For Young and Old

O. Henry

Eighty stories that display O. Henry's comic eye and unique, ironic approach to life's realities. These stories about con men and tricksters and 'innocent' deceivers, about fate, luck, and coincidence, have delighted generations of readers. Set in New York and the West, in Central America and the South, they demonstrate O. Henry's mastery of speech and place, and highlight his appreciation of life's quirks.

Selected Stories

Franz Kafka

After Franz Kafka's death, in perhaps the most important of all acts of literary disobedience, his executor refused to agree to Kafka's wish that his great mass of unpublished fiction be destroyed. This fiction included not only The Castle and The Trial but also the amazingly varied, chilling and ingenious short works collected in The Burrow and Other Stories. These tales, some little more than a page, others much more substantial, are among the greatest works of Central European literature. They vary from the tiny and horrifying 'Little Fable' to the elaborate waking nightmares of 'Building the Great Wall of China' and the title story 'The Burrow', in which an unidentified creature describes its creation of an endlessly elaborate burrow to protect itself from unidentified enemies, but with every trap or tunnel only creating further terrors and uncertainty.

The Burrow

Posthumously Published Short Fiction

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