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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Sei Shonagon

All moonlight is moving, wherever it may be… 
 
Japanese gentlewoman Sei Shonagon invites us to look behind the painted screens in the Emperor’s palace and discover a lost world, in which games of poetry are the highest form of wit, lovers send each other elegant morning-after letters, and appreciation of the natural world – wild geese in autumn, the pure white frost of winter – is one of life’s most exquisite pleasures.

A Lady in Kyoto

Yasunari Kawabata

Kikuji has been invited to a tea ceremony by a mistress of his dead father, only to find that the mistress’ rival and successor is also present. He falls for her, with devastating consequences. By 1949 Yasunari Kawabata, the first Japanese author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, felt that the tradition of the tea ceremony had been degraded. In this delicate novella he uses the ceremony as a powerful vehicle for loneliness, yearning and loss of history.

Thousand Cranes

Eileen Chang

‘But how sweet a fruit the ‘suppose’ must be, that people will sup and sup on it! A juicy fruit, like a lychee but without the pit, sparkling and light green: a fruit that hides the tart within the sweet.’ 
 
In this haunting collection of stories, a young man’s obsession leads to tragedy and a woman’s bitterness poisons a family’s legacy. In delicate, piercing prose, Chang captures a world of quiet cruelties and calamitous desires in pre-revolutionary China.

Jasmine Tea

Wang Xiaobo

Razor-sharp, pugnacious and blackly funny, Wang Xiaobo’s essays established him as one of China’s most popular – and subversive – writers. From the political power of silence to the irrepressible spirit of a pig he met while working in a commune, these reflections on life and literature in the shadow of the Cultural Revolution provide a rare glimpse of a fearless satirical genius.

The Maverick Pig

Wu Cheng’en

Wu Cheng’en’s 16th-century novel Journey to the West is widely regarded as one of the most important Chinese novels ever written. Here, in Julia Lovell’s witty and charismatic translation, we meet one of its heroes: Sun Wukong, or Monkey King, whose powers include shape-shifting, immortality and being incredibly rude. Though he rises to a position of power in the heavenly bureaucracy, Monkey King’s arrogant exploits attract the attention of the Buddha – with very unfortunate consequences.

Monkey King Makes Havoc in Heaven

Mary Shelley

'He stretched out his two long, lank arms, that looked like spider’s claws, and seemed to embrace with them the expanse before him' 
 
His inheritance squandered and engagement severed, Guido di Cortese stalks the desolate Genoese coast. A monstrous creature, shipwrecked by a ferocious storm, offers him unimaginable wealth to exchange bodies, entwining their fates. Transformation, with two further tales of striking and eerie power here, shows how Mary Shelley haunts us still.

Transformation

Lafcadio Hearn

'The body was cold as ice; the heart had long ceased to beat: yet there were no other signs of death.' 
 
The phantoms and ghouls of Japanese folklore are in this book driven back into the world of the living. Mysterious brides melt into mist, paintings come alive, and man-eating goblins barter for redemption. Traditional Japanese folktales and legends, infused with memories of Lafcadio Hearn’s own haunted childhood, are here masterfully retold.

Some Japanese Ghosts

Søren Kierkegaard

'What does love fear? Limitation.' 
 
Johannes stealthily pursues Cordelia through the streets of Copenhagen, and through an intricate, manipulative courtship contrives to possess her. Motivated not by love or sex but by sensation and experiment, he seeks to make the object of his desire desire him – and then to retreat. At once a captivating story and philosophical exploration of existence’s entanglements, The Seducer's Diary is also an excoriating reconstruction of Kierkegaard’s own romantic failures.

The Seducer’s Diary

Franz Kafka

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 the later days there were season-ticket holders who sat for days on end in front of his little cageReading these stories by the master of the absurd is like entering a dreamworld in which nothing, and yet somehow everything, makes sense.

A Hunger-Artist

Italo Calvino

I went down, I climbed back up into the light of the jaguar sun – into the sea of the green sap of the leaves. The world spun, I plunged down, my throat cut by the knife of the king-priest … The solar energy coursed along dense networks of blood and chlorophyll; I was living and dying in all the fibers of what is chewed and digested and in all the fibers that absorb the sun

Under the Jaguar Sun

Jack Kerouac

Tristessa is a strange fever-dream of morphine sickness and belly-deep sadness. Or, in the words of Allen Ginsberg: ‘a narrative meditation studying a hen, a rooster, a dove, a cat, a chihuahua dog, family meat, and a ravishing, ravished junky lady, first in their crowded bedroom, then out to drunken streets, taco stands, and pads at dawn in Mexico City slums’.

Tristessa

Georges Simenon

‘Maigret moved slowly, edging his bulky frame through the throng in Rue Saint-Antoine, which burst into life every morning, the sunshine streaming down from a clear sky on to the little barrows piled high with fruit and vegetables’ 
 
In these three tales of deception, set in and around Paris, Simenon's celebrated detective uncovers chilling truths about the depths of the human instinct for self-preservation.

Stan the Killer

Charles Dickens

Trotty Veck, an elderly porter, has read so many newspaper reports about crime and immorality that he believes the working classes are irredeemable. But, on New Year’s Eve, summoned to the church tower by a mysterious chiming, Trotty witnesses his own death, and is taken on a ghostly journey that will force him to reassess his conviction. One of Dickens’ ‘Christmas stories’, The Chimes is charming and surprising manifesto for empathy for our fellow man.

The Chimes

Mikhail Bulgakov

What would happen if a doctor implanted the pituitary gland and testicles of a man into the body of a stray dog? In Mikhail Bulgakov’s topsy-turvy world, the dog starts to walk on two legs, drink, smoke, thieve, chase women and recite every swear word in Russian. The perfect candidate for a government official, in other words. This rude, riotous send-up of the Soviet Union, banned immediately on publication, is satire red in tooth and claw.

A Dog's Heart

Hermann Hesse

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 he can understand the animals talking, a young man turns into a mountain and a bird guides a boy to another planet in this selection of dream-like and visionary fairy tales from the great German-Swiss master.

Strange News from Another Planet

Willa Cather

How light and alive she was! Like a bird caught in a net . . . 
 
Marian Forrester enchants everyone around her: her husband, an elderly railroad pioneer; the small town of Sweet Water; and Niel Herbert, her unwavering confidant. Yet, her irresistible charm and dazzling wit conceal a dangerous vulnerability – and her greatest secret. A significant inspiration for The Great Gatsby, this exquisite novella is a poignant elegy for a bygone era, fading into history.

A Lost Lady

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allen Poe’s short stories have lost none of their power to horrify. He remains a destabilizingly terse sketcher out of ideas, a writer who allows the reader to fill in the many ghastly blanks in his narratives of violence, retribution and animalism. It is hard to recommend Hop-Frog wholeheartedly (its original subtitle was: Or, The Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs) as it is such an affront to decency, but you will certainly never forget it.

Hop-Frog

Karen Blixen

‘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 portraits and imaginative visions of war, longing and tender love. Here, an orphan boy creates an elaborate fantasy of a life of grandeur, a feudal lord sets a peasant woman a deadly task, and a young woman resists against her captors, in the midst of conflict.

The Dreaming Child

Katherine Mansfield

She drew a long, soft breath, as though the paper daffodils between them were almost too sweet to bearKatherine Mansfield was a magician of the short story, whose work was described by Virginia Woolf as ‘the only writing I have ever been jealous of’. These eight tales show her gift for transforming fleeting moments – a chance meeting, a letter received, a careless remark – into small miracles of language and feeling.

A Dill Pickle

Virginia Woolf

‘Waking, I cry “Oh, is this your – buried treasure? The light in the heart.”’ 
 
In these exquisite stories from the genius of English modernism, everyday objects acquire profound significance: a lump of buried green glass leads to a lifetime of obsession; a mark on the wall prompts a questioning of reality itself; a pale-yellow silk dress provokes a painful self-reckoning. Beautiful, strange and pioneering, each piece is a small precious stone to be held to the light and savoured.

The New Dress

Sarah Orne Jewett

A young writer leaves the city to complete her manuscript in a small coastal town, but finds herself writing about the lives of its inhabitants instead – their occupation with memory and tradition, their vibrant female friendships, and the idyll of the landscape that informs their sense of togetherness. A classic of American fiction adored by Willa Cather and Henry James, The Country of the Pointed Firs seems woven from the fabric of community itself.

The Country of the Pointed Firs

H. P. Lovecraft

‘Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such as has befallen no man before’ 
 
After five years of 'strange amnesia', Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee remains haunted by madness and memories that cannot be real. Desperate for answers he travels to Western Australia, joining an archaeological excavation into Earth’s deep past. 
 
Journey with Peaslee to discover his fate in the story described by author Lin Carter as ‘Lovecraft’s single greatest achievement in fiction’.

The Shadow out of Time

Dorothy Parker

What can you say, when a man asks you to dance with him? I most certainly will not dance with you. I’ll see you in hell first. Why, thank you, I’d like to awfully, but I’m having labor pains.Acerbic, pithy and vibrant, Dorothy Parker’s writings capture the dizzying decadence of Jazz Age New York. Though Parker refuses to be swept along: she gleefully deconstructs its hypocrisy, prejudice and taboos with style and precision.

Horsie

Alexander Lernet-Holenia

Baron Bagge, a cavalry officer during the First World War, receives orders from his unhinged commander to ride into Russian machine guns. But instead of meeting certain death, he and his brigade pass, unscathed, into a peaceful, otherworldly country where festivities are in full swing… Alexander Lernet-Holenia, championed in his lifetime by Roberto Calasso, Stefan Zweig and Rainer Maria Rilke, triumphs in this dreamlike novel of mystery and yearning.

Baron Bagge

Shirley Jackson

It’s terribly important that I get in touch with a gentleman who may have stopped in here to buy flowers this morning. Terribly important. 
 
Sometimes, the person you think you love isn’t who they seem. And sometimes, you can be your own deception. Spanning Shirley Jackson's entire career, these devilish tales of love, death, and despair show us how all that keeps us safe in suburbia can strike up, leave, and instantly disappear.

The Daemon Lover

Ota Pavel

‘Of all the sleep a man can have, the fisherman’s sleep is the sweetest. It is the greatest of luxuries – sleep and fishing.’ 
 
Through tender, vivid, and often humorous recollections – from magical fishing trips to the rivers and ponds of Bustehrad to his charismatic father’s eccentric business ventures - this bittersweet memoir tells the story of a childhood in Czechoslovakia, against the backdrop of World War II.

How I Came to Know Fish

Rumi

Rumi’s verses have been a balm for readers’ souls for over eight centuries. This exquisite selection brings together some of the Persian mystic’s most profound, evocative and transcendent works. Exploring passion, heartbreak, friendship, faith and the myriad ways in which we move through the world, these strikingly modern poems are perfect for those looking for inspiration, guidance, or endless delight.

Where Everything is Music

Hafez

May I remember always when, 
Your glance in secrecy met mine, 
And in my face your love was like 
A visibly reflected sign. 
 
May I remember always when, 
Your chiding eyes were like my death, 
And your sweet lips restored my life, 
Like Jesus’s reviving breath. 
 
May I remember always when, 
We drank our wine as darkness died, 
My friend and I, alone at dawn, 
Though God was there too, at our side.

I am a Bird from Paradise

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

Andy Warhol

‘People should fall in love with their eyes closed. Just close your eyes. Don’t look.’ 
 
From Warhol’s romantic relationships to his thoughts on interior design, these candid, highly entertaining musings - on love, sex, beauty, work and space – give an intimate glimpse into the mind of one of the most iconic figures in twentieth-century culture.

Beauty

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