Meik Wiking founded the world's first Happiness Research Institute in 2013, in Copenhagen, Denmark and is a New York Times and Sunday Times Bestselling author. Meik has been called The Indiana Jones of Smiles and probably the World's Happiest Man by The Times. He is the author of four globally bestselling books which have sold over 2 million copies worldwide: The Little Book of Hygge, The Little Book of Lykke, The Art of Making Memories and My Hygge Home.

Meik Wiking

Sue Meikle has always been obsessed with picture books, and after working as an Early Years Specialist for over 25 years, she has read stories to children from Stockport to South Africa. In schools, in early years centres, while on forest school adventures... Sue has even read stories on a travelling play bus! So, perhaps it was always in the stars for Sue to not just read books, but write them, too! When she's not reading or writing stories, Sue can be found walking her dog or chauffeuring her teenagers around the Greater Manchester area (because that’s where they live… in a home that they made from a derelict barn!)

Sue Meikle

David Meikle is a TV scriptwriter and Sunday Times bestselling author. He has written and co-written seven books, including the autobiographies of Charlie Richardson and Bobby Cummines.

David Meikle

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E.T.A. Hoffmann

The gift of a handsomely decorated, enigmatic nutcracker sets the stage for a Christmas like no other: there will be legends of ancient curses, battles with the dreaded Mouse King, and a visit to the wonderful Kingdom of Dolls. The inspiration for the classic ballet, E. T. A. Hoffmann's irresistible tale of magic and mystery continues to be the perfect encapsulation of a child's wonder at Christmas.

The Nutcracker

Yasunari Kawabata

Tired of the bustling city, a man takes the train through the snow to Japan's mountains, to meet with a geisha he believes he loves. Beautiful and innocent, she is tightly bound by the rules of a rural geisha, and lives a life of servitude and seclusion. Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata's masterpiece, is a delicate, subtle meditation on love and its limits.

Snow Country

Yuko Tsushima

Territory of Light is the radiant story of a young woman, living alone in Tokyo with her two-year-old daughter, in her first year of separation from her husband. At once tender and lacerating, luminous and unsettling, Territory of Light is a novel of abandonment, desire and transformation. It was originally published in twelve parts in the Japanese literary monthly Gunzo, between 1978 and 1979, each chapter marking the months in real time, and remains one of Yuko Tsushima's most beloved works.

Territory of Light

Lafcadio Hearn

In this haunting collection, the phantoms and ghouls of Japanese folklore stalk the page. Lafcadio Hearn, a master storyteller, drew on traditional Japanese folklore, infused with memories of his own haunted childhood in Ireland, to create these chilling tales. They are today regarded in Japan as classics in their own right.

Of Ghosts and Goblins

Dylan Thomas

For a boy growing up in an ordinary town in Wales, summer is 'always radiant, rainless, lazily rowdy and skyblue', and it always snows at Christmas. Weaving through the course of a year, this selection of Dylan Thomas's most evocative and bittersweet stories depicts silent winter mornings by the sea, glorious holidays in the countryside and lovelorn nights in the pub. It ends with 'A Child's Christmas in Wales', perhaps the most beautiful story of the festive season ever written.

A Child's Christmas in Wales

Ryunosuke Akutagawa

Akutagawa was one of the towering figures of modern Japanese literature, and is considered the father of the Japanese short story. This paradigmatic selection, which includes the stories that inspired Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon, showcases the terrible beauty, cynicism, sublime pain and absurd humour of his writing.

Hell Screen

Isak Dinesen

Karen Blixen, author of the acclaimed memoir Out of Africa, was also a master of the short story form: her tales offer luminous meditations on rebirth and redemption, on the mystery and unexpectedness of human behaviour. Alongside 'Babette's Feast', this selection also includes 'Sorrow-Acre', often thought to be one of her finest stories.

Babette's Feast

Shirley Jackson

Step into the unsettling world of Shirley Jackson with a collection of her finest, creepiest short stories, revealing the queen of American gothic at her mesmerising best. This selection includes 'The Lottery', Jackson's masterpiece and one of the most terrifying and iconic stories of the twentieth century.

The Lottery

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges remains one of the most influential short story writers of the twentieth century, whose spellbinding tales of magic, mystery and murder are shot through with deep philosophical paradoxes. This collection brings together many of his greatest stories, including 'The Garden of Forking Paths', 'The Book of Sand' and 'Shakespeare's Memory'.

The Library of Babel

Vladimir Nabokov

Thirteen ingeniously crafted stories make up Vladimir Nabokov's baker's dozen. In some of these stories shadowy people pass through, cooped up by life, with nowhere to escape. In others, elusive glimpses of fleeting happiness, which flutter away before they can be snatched, waylay their victims. Like the shimmer of the sea, the gleam of a glass caught by the sun, these stories sparkle brilliantly only to dissolve again.

Nabokov's Dozen

Clarice Lispector

The small incidents of life become moments of inner revelation in the luminous writing of Clarice Lispector. A woman contemplating a vase of roses after a nervous breakdown; a tangled mother-daughter relationship; a man's abandonment of a dog; an animal in a zoo: each one leads to mystery and self-discovery, delight and devastation.

The Imitation of the Rose

Leo Tolstoy

Dmitry Andreich Olenin, in the hope of escaping the hollowness of his privilege, joins the army and heads to the Caucasus. There among the foothills, he will meet the Cossacks: a people he considers to be at one with the land. In their company he will hunt, he will drink, he will fall in love and, slowly, he will begin to understand that between people, between cultures, there is often a space that cannot be traversed...

The Cossacks

Nella Larsen

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. 
 
Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil. 
 
Clare Kendry, elegant, fair-skinned and ambitious, is married to a white man who is unaware of her African-American heritage. When she reunites with childhood friend Irene, who has not hidden her origins, both women are forced to confront the secret fears they have buried within themselves. A taut exploration of race and gender, Passing is one of the Harlem Renaissance's greatest works. 
 
'A tragic story rooted in inescapable facts of American life' The New York Times

Passing

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F. Scott Fitzgerald

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. 
 
Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil. 
 
F. Scott Fitzgerald was the most celebrated chronicler of the Jazz Age. At the time of his death, he believed he was an alcoholic failure; but he received posthumous acclaim as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century. This collection brings together some of his finest stories, including 'The Curious Tale of Benjamin Button'; 'Winter Dreams', a melancholy thwarted love story that anticipated The Great Gatsby, and 'Babylon Revisited', set the year after the 1929 stock market crash, when the Jazz Age sounded its last. 
 
'His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly's wings' Ernest Hemingway

Babylon Revisited

Edgar Allan Poe

'Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, 
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore— 
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, 
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.' 
 
Uncanny and strange, Poe's writing defied convention, shocked readers, and confounded critics. This selection of his poetry and short stories demonstrates the astonishing power and imagination with which Poe probed the darkest corners of the human mind. The title poem, perhaps Poe's most famous work, follows a man's terrifying descent into madness after the loss of a lover, when he receives an unexpected visitor one bleak December night.

The Raven

Sheridan Le Fanu

Laura leads a secluded life in a castle buried deep in the Austrian forest, far away from the dangers of the outside world. That is until a horse and carriage crashes nearby one night, and she and her father take in a weary, young traveller – Carmilla. As mysterious as she is beguiling, Carmilla weaves her way into Laura’s heart. Life proves less lonely with a friend. But sinister things start happening as the girls become closer, and the forest isn’t the safe haven it once was. 
 
Sheridan Le Fanu’s nineteenth-century gothic tale was the first vampire novella. It paved the way for a literary tradition of female and lesbian vampires, and, before Dracula, explored the boundaries of sex and death. Still as chillingly alluring today as it was when it was written in 1871-2, Carmilla now joins Penguin’s Little Clothbound Classics series.

Carmilla

Virginia Woolf

'The hour should be evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful'. In such conditions, Virginia Woolf takes to London's streets in search of a pencil. The account of her journey - the people, the places, the pleasure - soon becomes one of the great paeans to city life. This collection also includes other wonderful essays, such as 'How Should One Read a Book?' and 'The Sun and the Fish'.

Street Haunting

Jane Austen

Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. 
 
 Celebrating the range and diversity of Penguin Classics, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Beautifully designed and printed, these collectible editions are bound in colourful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil. 
 
Recently widowed, the unscrupulous and beautiful Lady Susan Vernon is determined to scheme her way through high society in the hope of a profitable new match - all while trying to marry off her unfortunate daughter. Told through a series of letters, Jane Austen's magnificent first novella is as subversive as it is charming. 
 
'The wit of Jane Austen has for partner the perfection of her taste' - Virginia Woolf

Lady Susan

Hans Christian Andersen

Step into the enchanting world of Hans Christian Andersen with this collection of timeless Christmas tales, capturing both the magic and melancholy of the season. This selection brings together Andersen’s most beloved works, from the magical journey of ‘The Snow Queen’ to the heart-breaking ‘The Little Match Girl’, and the tender reflections on the passage of time in ‘The Fir Tree’. Together these stories show how Andersen transformed the traditional fairy tale with his unique ability to blend exuberant whimsy and profound insight.

The Snow Queen

Franz Kafka

Michael Hoffman

One morning, ordinary salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant cockroach. Metamorphosis, Kafka's masterpiece of unease and black humour, is one of the twentieth century's most influential works of fiction, and is accompanied here by two more classic stories.

Metamorphosis

Alexander Pushkin

A countess with a card trick; love letters filled with deception; a desperate man with a pistol.'The Queen of Spades', one of Pushkin's most popular and chilling stories, is accompanied here by the thrilling 'Dubrovsky' and unforgettable 'Tales of Belkin'.

The Queen Of Spades

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