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Ivan Turgenev

The finest editions available of the world's greatest classics from Homer to Achebe, Tolstoy to Ishiguro, Proust to Pullman, printed on a fine acid-free, cream-wove paper that will not discolour with age, with sewn, full cloth bindings and silk ribbon markers, and at remarkably low prices. All books include substantial introductions by major scholars and contemporary writers, and comparative chronologies of literary and historical context.

This is the classic book that put Turgenev on the literary map--both in his own time and for all of history. The strength of this, his first book, was such that, even if Turgenev had never written another book, he would still be recognized as the father of the modern short story. Indeed, A Sportsman's Notebook was Hemmingway's favorite book, and it is not hard to see traces of Turgenevs influence in the work of Hemmingway and other later-day masters of the short story. 
 
Notebook contains twenty-five stories in which Turgenev shares shares memories from the hunting expeditions that lead him throughout the Russian countryside. His writing is strong because there is real life in his people and real beauty in his landscapes.

A Sportsman's Notebook

Nella Larsen

Throughout her short but brilliant literary career, Nell Larsen wrote piercing dramas about the black middle class that featured sensitive, spirited heroines struggling to find a place where they belong. Passing is a disturbing story about the unravelling lives of two childhood friends, one of whom turns her back on her past and marries a white racist. Just as disquieting is the portrait in Quicksand of biracial Helga Crane, who is unable to escape her loneliness no matter where and with whom she lives. Race and marriage offer few securities here or in the other stories in this compulsively readable collection, rich in psychological complexities and imbued with a vibrant sense of place - be it 1920s Harlem, Chicago, or Copenhagen.

The Complete Fiction

Passing. Quicksand. And the Stories

Everyman's Pocket Classics complements highly successful Pocket Poets series, offering the best prose writing in a handy pocket-sized format. Like all Everyman Library books, each title is printed on a cream-wove, acid-free paper with full cloth sewn binding, headbands and silk ribbon marker. Eminently collectable and great gifts.

In this beautifully packaged anthology A. S. Byatt, Alice Munro, Elizabeth Bowen, Sherwood Anderson, Edith Wharton, Anita Desai, Colm Tóibín, Lorrie Moore and many others reflect upon all aspects of motherhood in stories lyrical and satirical, realistic and fantastic, hilarious and heart-breaking. Here at last is a gift-book that is neither sentimental nor 'inspirational', offering instead high-quality literary fiction which will continue to entertain long after the chocolates have been eaten and the flowers thrown away.

Stories of Motherhood

Doris Lessing Trust

Included are seminal stories like 'To Room Nineteen'; in which a woman reacts against the oppression of her banal marriage with dreadful results; 'One off the Short List', which traces the surprising conclusion to a seduction gone awry, and 'The Habit of Loving' in which a lonely older man who takes a vivacious young wife witnesses an unexpected reversal of intimacy. 
Here also are two classic novellas, The Temptation of Jack Orkney and The Other Woman, exemplifying Lessing's impressive understanding of human psychology. Rich and various in mood and background - the settings range across England and France - these stories powerfully convey the uncompromising insight, intelligence and vision of one of the most ardently admired writers of our time.

Doris Lessing Stories

Julian Barnes

Flaubert’s Parrot, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1984, concerns the attempts of an increasingly bemused researcher to establish certain facts about a famous French novelist and the stuffed bird which used to sit on his desk.A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters blends fact and fiction in a virtuoso kaleidoscope of vignettes from Noah’s time to the present. One of the author’s most inventive works, it was praised by Salman Rushdie as ‘frequently brilliant, funny, thoughtful, iconoclastic and a delight to read’.

Flaubert's Parrot/History of the World

Alice Munro

Set in her native southwest Ontario, they include 'Royal Beatings', in which a young girl, her father and her stepmother release the tension of their circumstances in a ritual of punishment and reconciliation; 'Friend of My Youth', in which a woman comes to understand that her difficult mother is not so very different from herself; and 'The Love of a Good Woman', in which, when an old crime resurfaces, a woman has to choose whether to believe in the man she intends to marry. 
Like the World War I soldier of the title story, whose letters from the front to a small-town librarian he doesn't know change her life for ever, Munro's unassuming characters take permanent hold of our imaginations. Her incomparable empathy for the people she writes about, the depth of her understanding of human nature, and the grace and surprise of her narrative add up to a richly layered and capacious fiction.

Carried Away

Marguerite Duras

Marguerite Duras was one of the leading intellectuals and novelist of post-war France, but her wartime writings were not published in full until after her death. The Wartime Notebooks trace Duras's formative experiences - including her difficult childhood in Indochina and her harrowing wait for her husband's return from Nazi internment - revealing the personal history behind her bestselling novels. The Lover is the best known of these; set in pre-war Indochina, its haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her wealthy Chinese lover is based on her own life. In spare and luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins in the waning days of France's colonial empire, and the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts. Practicalities is a collection of small and intensely personal pieces Duras dictated near the end of her life. These deceptively simple meditations on motherhood, domesticity, sex, love, alcohol, writing, and more are witty, earthy, outspoken and surprisingly fresh and relevant to the same issues today.

The Lover, Wartime Notebooks, Practicalities

Leo Tolstoy

Written over a period of more than half a century, Tolstoy’s enchanting short stories and novellas reflect every aspect of his developing art and outlook. Volume 1 of the Everyman Collected Shorter Fiction is dominated by the characteristic experiences of his early life as soldier, land-owner, husband and father, the life which shaped Anna Karenina and War and Peace. It also includes several short fables which point to his later preoccupation with the religious life.

Collected Shorter Fiction Volume 1

This unique collection of medical stories approaches its theme from many eras and perspectives. Some of the authors included were themselves physicians, notably Chekhov, Conan Doyle, Somerset Maugham and William Carlos Williams. Bulgakov, too, draws on his own experience as a doctor in rural Russia a century ago, while Anna Kavan's story from Asylum Piece, takes a surreal look inside a Swiss psychiatric clinic, and Lorrie Moore's witty, grief-stricken Mother in 'People Like Us Are the Only People Here' examines the feelings of a parent with a child in the Paediatric Oncology war - 'Peed Onk'. Maupassant, Stevenson, Kipling, Conrad, Graham Greene, O. Henry, J. G. Ballard, Robert Heinlein, Dorothy Parker, Jhumpa Lahiri and Alice Munro all feature. Doctors observe patients; patients observe doctors. Nurses go about their important business, not always appreciated. Not quite everyone is healed. The meaning of illness - does it have any? - and of life itself, is called into question - and all in the most entertaining way imaginable.

The Best Medicine

Stories of Healing

Woven through all these tales are the unique histories and mythologies of the regions of Southern Italy, encompassing Sicily, Calabria, Cantania, Basilicata, Apulia and Campania. Theocritus, Virgil and Ovid evoke a Sicily populated by Cyclopes and sea monsters, while in an excerpt from The Smile of the Unknown Mariner Vincenzo Consolo depicts the island in 1860, on the frontline in Italy's war of independence. The South's legendary legacy of brigandage and organized crime enlivens the stories of Leonardo Sciascia, Carlo Levi and Joseph Conrad. Curzio Malaparte and Norman Lewis immortalize the wreckage of Naples and the indomitable spirit of its people during World War II, and Elena Ferrante paints a spectacular portrait of a poor but vibrant Neapolitan neighbourhood in an excerpt from the bestselling My Brilliant Friend. Collectively, these entertaining tales plunge readers into the sometimes harsh and troubled, but always seductive and vital world of Italy's Mezzogiorno

Stories of Southern Italy

Herman Melville

Herman Melville (1819-91) brought as much genius to the smaller-scale literary forms as he did to the full-blown novel: his poems and the short stories and novellas collected in this volume reveal a deftness and a delicacy of touch that is in some ways even more impressive than the massive, tectonic passions of Moby-Dick. In a story like “Bartleby, the Scrivener” — one of the very few perfect representatives of the form in the English language — he displayed an unflinching precision and insight and empathy in his depiction of the drastically alienated inner life of the title character. In “Benito Cereno,” he addressed the great racial dilemmas of the nineteenth century with a profound, almost surreal imaginative clarity. And in Billy, Budd, Sailor, the masterpiece of his last years, he fused the knowledge and craft gained from a lifetime’s magnificent work into a pure, stark, flawlessly composed tale of innocence betrayed and destroyed. Melville is justly honored for the epic sweep of his mind, but his lyricism, his skill in rendering the minute, the particular, the local, was equally sublime. 
SEE LESS

Complete Shorter Fiction

During its three-thousand-year history Rome has been an imperial metropolis, the capital of a nation and the spiritual core of a great world religion. For writers from antiquity to the present, however, the place holds an alternative significance as a realm of fantasy, aspiration and desire. Captivating and lethal at one and the same moment, its fatal gift of beauty both transfigures and betrays those in thrall to it. Rome Stories explores the city's fateful impact through the writing of classical historians, a Renaissance sculptor, 18th-century tourists, American, British and French novelists and the authors of modern Rome, each testing and unravelling the city's ageless paradoxes. Gibbon admires the Last of the Tribunes, Goethe decodes the mysteries of the Carnival and Stendhal's subversive aristocrats mingle revolution with a little cross-dressing amid their gilt mirrors and frescoed ceilings From Plutarch to Pasolini, from Hawthorne to Wharton, the city of Caesars and popes, of dreamers, chancers and hustlers confronts the questing imagination with its eternally unflinching gaze.

Rome Stories

Saki

Saki's dazzling tales manage the remarkable feat of being anarchic and urbane at the same time. Studded with Wildean epigrams and featuring well-contrived plots and surprise endings, his stories gleefully skewer the pompous hypocrisies of upper-class Edwardian society. But they go beyond mere satire, raising dark humour to extremes of entertaining outrageousness that have rarely since been matched. Saki's elegantly mischievous young heroes sow chaos in their wake without breaking a sweat, occasionally assisted by werewolves, tigers, eavesdropping house pets and casually murderous children. This selection of over fifty stories includes such favourites as 'Tobermory', 'The Open Window', 'Sredni Vashtar', 'Mrs Packletide's Tiger', 'The Schartz-Metterklume Method', and many more.

Selected Stories

Each story captures a slice of life, and together they create a picture of Indian reality in all its fascinating variety. A number of themes predominate: the poverty aggravated by the dominance of landlords and the caste system; the position of women within the family and their desire for shape their own destiny; the lure of the city in a country that was and remains predominantly rural and agricultural. The inspiration and subject matter are Indian, but in their artistry and humanity these powerful and poignant tales are truly universal. 
 
India has a long history of storytelling. To use Salman Rushdie’s phrase, it is ‘an ocean of stories’. So, when British rule brought the Western forms of the novel and the short story to India, they were grafted onto more ancient and varied oral traditions to create something quite unique. Rabindranath Tagore’s short story collections of the 1890s paved the way, but the form swiftly captured the imagination of writers across the subcontinent.

Indian Stories

River gods and nymphs frolic in Ovid's mythic telling. The trickster Coyote reroutes a river in a Native American tale. A set of stone steps at the shore of the Ganges bears witness to heartbreak in Rabindranath Tagore's ‘River Stairs,’ and Mark Twain floats his rebellious heroes on a raft to freedom. Kenneth Grahame's Rat and Mole explore their local waterway in a rowboat, and Ernest Hemingway's war-weary veteran finds peace while catching trout. 
From The Wind in the Willows to Huckleberry Finn, from Hemingway's ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ to Alice Munro's ‘The Found Boat’ and Zadie Smith's ‘The Lazy River,’ the tales collected here—by such luminaries as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Guy de Maupassant, E.M. Forster, Hermann Hesse, Zora Neale Hurston, Cormac McCarthy, Elif Shafak, and many more—set moving scenes against the backdrop of moving waters, in testament to the enduring power of rivers in the human imagination.

River Stories

Nikolai Gogol

Collected here are Gogol's finest tales - stories which combine the wide-eyed, credulous imagination of the peasant with the sardonic social criticism of the city dweller - allowing readers to experience anew the unmistakable genius of a writer who paved the way of Dostoevsky and Kakfa. All of Gogol's most memorable creations are here: the minor official who misplaces his nose, the downtrodden clerk whose life is changed by the acquisition of a splendid new overcoat, the wily madman who becomes convinced that a dog can tell him everything he needs to know. The wholly unique blend of satire and realism that Gogol crafted established his reputation as one of the most daring and inventive writers of his time.

Gogol Collected Tales

Stories from the Kitchen is a mouth-watering smorgasbord of stories with food in the starring role, by a rich variety of authors from Dickens, Chekhov and Saki to Isak Dinesen, Jim Crace and Amy Tan. The menu includes choice titbits from famous novels: the triumphant boeuf en daube served in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Proust's rhapsodic memories of watching the family cook prepare asparagus in Remembrance of Things Past, Zola's extravagant 'cheese symphony' scene from The Belly of Paris. 
 
Here are over-the-top amuse-bouches by Gerald Durrell, Nora Ephron and T. C. Boyle; a short story by famous food writer M. F. K. Fisher; and a delightful account of the perfect meal by eighteenth-century epicure Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who famously said 'Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.'

Stories from the Kitchen

Here are literary classics by such golf-loving writers as P. G. Wodehouse, Ring Lardner, and John Updike, mixed with surprises like an appearance by Ian Fleming's James Bond and a little crime on the links from mystery master Ian Rankin. Humorists and sportswriters ranging from E. C. Bentley to Dan Jenkins and Rick Reilly weigh in as well, alongside a tale of romance on the greens from F. Scott Fitzgerald, a little-known gem by famous golf architect A. W. Tillinghast, and a story by Rex Lardner (Ring's nephew) that just may be the single funniest thing ever written about golf. The resulting anthology is as enticing, provocative, and entertaining as the game of golf itself.

Golf Stories

Writers have always been uniquely inspired by New York City, and the classic stories collected here provide a kaleidoscopic vision of the metropolis in all its grittiness and glamour.  Acclaimed writers past and present, ranging from Truman Capote, Bernard Malamud, John Cheever and Shirley Jackson to Jay McInerney, Edwidge Danticat and Junot Diaz, introduce us to starry-eyed tourists and ambitious immigrants, starving artists and hedonistic yuppies, Jewish matchmakers in the Bronx and Haitian nannies in Central Park. Colourful characters of all kinds come alive in these pages, nursing their dreams in the tiny apartments, the lonely cafés, and the bustling streets of the city that never sleeps.

New York Stories

As Scheherazade proved long ago, good stories make the best bedtime entertainment. The tales collected here represent the essence of the storyteller's art, with its ancient roots in fantastical legends and tales told around a fire.  From the surreal night visions of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown' to the unspeakable horror that haunts two little girls in A. S. Byatt's 'The Thing in the Forest', from Washington Irving's comical 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' to Ursula K. LeGuin's sly perspective on Sleeping Beauty in 'The Poacher', these spellbinding stories transform the stuff of fables and fairy tales into high art. Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Isak Dinesen, Vladimir Nabokov, Angela Carter, Haruki Murakami and many more mingle their voices in this one-volume gateway to dreams - the perfect bedside companion for fiction lovers everywhere

Bedtime Stories

The sublime city of Venice has long offered inspiration to the world's storytellers. This anthology gathers a dazzling variety of stories with Venetian settings, including Daphne du Maurier's haunting "Don't Look Now," Anthony Trollope's wartime romance "The Last Austrian Who Left Venice," Vernon Lee's spine-chilling "A Wicked Voice," and a scene from The Wings of the Dove, Henry James's tale of passion and betrayal in a Gothic palazzo on the Grand Canal. The famed Venetian adventurer Giacomo Casanova weighs in with escapades from his notorious Memoirs, alongside enthralling selections by Baron Corvo, Marcel Proust, Camillo Boito, and Jeanette Winterson. In its multifaceted portrait of La Serenissima, Venice Stories showcases a lineup of literary classics worthy of the magnificent city they celebrate.

Venice Stories

The  stories collected here--including such gems as Stephen Crane's "The  Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," O. Henry's "The Marry Month of May," F.  Scott Fitzgerald's "The Bridal Party," Joy Williams's "The Wedding," and  Lorrie Moore's "Thank You For Having Me", encompass comic wedding  mishaps, engagements broken and mended, honeymoon adventures, and scenes  both heartwarming and heartbreaking. There are glamorous weddings in  Paris and New York, and more eccentric ones in the Wild West and on a  remote island beach. There are nervous brides, forgetful grooms,  meddling guests, interrupted nuptials, second thoughts, and second  chances. Above all, there are all kinds of people - young and old, rich  and poor, divorced and widowed, with or without children - joining  together in the age-old quest for matrimonial happiness.

Wedding Stories

The act of walking inspires a dizzying variety of stories, from Bill Bryson's comic A Walk in the Woods to M. R. James's tale of a ghost cursed to wander forever, and from the thrilling true account of a woman who escaped from an Auschwitz death march to a dreamy tale by Anais Nin about wandering in the labyrinth of memory. Here are comic stories and love stories, moments of adventure and of observation, of sleepwalking and of mental travelling, of strolling and of hiking, all set into glorious motion by a diverse array of great writers past and present.

Walking Stories

Evelyn Waugh

The greatest English comic novelist of the twentieth century produced a considerable body of shorter fiction, including several master-pieces, notably Mr Loveday's Little Outing and Scott-King's Modern Europe. These stories have all Waugh's characteristically brilliant, savage wit and reproduce his unmistakeable world in miniature. They also constitute a vital supplement to the major novels, while standing up as significant works in their own right. Two chapters of Waugh's tantalizingly unfinished novel Work Suspended are also included. This edition brings back into print 17 stories that have long been unavailable in England and America.

The Complete Short Stories

Guy de Maupassant

During his most productive decade, the 1880s, Maupassant wrote more than 300 stories, including 'Boule de Suif', 'The Necklace', 'The House of Madame Tellier', 'The Hand', 'The Horla' and 'Mademoiselle Fifi'. Marked by the psychological realism that he famously pioneered, the tales in this selection lead us on a tour of the human experience-lust and love, revenge and ridicule, terror and madness. Many take place in the author's native Normandy, but the settings range farther abroad as well, from Brittany and Paris to Corsica and the Mediterranean coast, and even to North Africa and India. Maupassant's remarkable range and ability to evoke an entire world in a few pages have ensured that his fiction has retained its power to entertain through generations of readers. Marjorie Laurie's accomplished translations from the 1920s have similarly stood the test of time.

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