Steve Roud was Local Studies Librarian for the London Borough of Croydon and served as Honorary Librarian of the Folklore Society for over fifteen years. He has been researching British folklore for over thirty years and is the joint author of the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore, plus other books on traditional drama and folk song, and the Penguin Guide to the Superstitions of Britain and Ireland, which won the Katharine Briggs Folklore Award in 2004. His publications include London Lore (2008) and The Lore of the Playground (2010). He also compiles the Folk Song Index and the Broadside Index, two internationally acclaimed computer databases of traditional folk and popular song. He lives in Sussex.

Steve Roud

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Bernard Malamud

A matchmaker finds love for a would-be rabbi; a shopkeeper dies because he cannot afford a doctor; a little girl steals candy; an angel visits a grieving tailor. Through Malamud's great gifts as a writer - humour and profound concern for the matter of human life - he transmutes the particular struggles of everyday sufferers into a strange poetry.

The Magic Barrel

Stella Gibbons

A festive treat from a treasured comic writer. It's Christmas-time at Cold Comfort Farm and it's the worst sort of family gathering... 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH 
 
The title story tells of a typical Christmas at the farm before the coming of Flora Poste. It is a parody of the worst sort of family Christmas: Adam Lambsbreath dresses up as Father Christmas in two of Judith's red shawls. There are unsuitable presents, unpleasant insertions into the pudding and Aunt Ada Doom orders Amos to carve the turkey, adding: 'Ay, would it were a vulture, 'twere more fitting!' 
 
'Stella Gibbons is the Jane Austen of the 20th century' Lynne Truss, author of the Constable Twitten series.

Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm

The perfect Christmas treat

Angela Carter

‘I started to write short pieces when I was living in a room too small to write a novel in.’ So says Angela Carter of this collection, written during a period living in Toyko. These exotic, sensuous stories represent Carter’s first major achievement in the short story form. Lush imaginary forests, a murderous puppet show and an expressionistic vision of Japan: each one instantly conjures an atmosphere, dark and luminous in turn, and from the recognisably daring imagination of one of the great twentieth-century stylists.

Fireworks

Various

A collection of stories from some of our best-loved writers, inspired by ideas found in Henry James's notebooks. 
 
When Henry James died he left behind a series of notebooks filled with ideas for novels and stories that he never wrote. Now ten of our best contemporary authors and James enthusiasts have written new short stories based on these 'germs' of ideas. Differing dramatically in setting and style, these stories are modern interpretations of the richly suggestive and enticing notes that Henry James left behind, offering a fresh and original approach to a canonical literary author. 
 
Professor Philip Horne, a renowned authority on Henry James, has edited and introduced this collection, which also includes transcripts of James’s original jottings allowing readers to trace the raw ideas through to their modern-day interpretations. 
 
Contains stories by Colm Toibin, Rose Tremain, Jonathan Coe, Paul Theroux, Amit Chaudhuri, Giles Foden, Joseph O'Neill, Lynne Truss, Susie Boyt and Tessa Hadley. 
 
WITH A FOREWORD BY MICHAEL WOOD

Tales from a Master's Notebook

Stories Henry James Never Wrote

E F Benson

Sherlock star Mark Gatiss selects and introduces chilling tales by the unsung master of the classic ghost story - E.F. Benson. 
 
There's nothing sinister about a London bus. Nothing supernatural could occur on a busy Tube platform. There's nothing terrifying about a little caterpillar. And a telephone, what could be scary about that? Don't be frightened of the dark corners of your room. Don't be alarmed by a sudden, inexplicable chill. There's no need for a ticking clock, a limping footstep, or a knock at the door to start you trembling. There's nothing to be scared of. Nothing at all.

Ghost Stories

Selected and Introduced by Mark Gatiss

William Maxwell

In settings that range from small town Illinois to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, these stories are distinguished by Maxwell's inimitable wisdom and kindness, his sense of the small details that make up a life, the nuances of joy and sadness that change its direction. Whether describing the reunion of two brothers who will never agree, the furniture of the apartment that becomes everything to a childless couple, the search for the perfect French meal or the life of a ne'er-do-well uncle, Maxwell's stories capture responses that are recognisable in us all.

All the Days and Nights

Kurt Vonnegut

A diabolical government asserts control by eliminating orgasms from sex in the title story of Welcome to the Monkey House – setting the tone for a collection shot through with Vonnegut's acrid wit, and his bewilderment at the corruption of humanity. 
 
From riffs on country music, George Bush, and his mother’s midnight mania, to a bittersweet tribute to a dead friend, Palm Sunday demonstrates why Kurt Vonnegut is equally well known as an essayist and commentator as he is a novelist. 
 
This caustic, funny and poignant collection resonates with Vonnegut’s singular voice.

Welcome To The Monkey House and Palm Sunday

An Autobiographical Collage

Thomas Mann

Mann’s short stories explore his abiding interest in the split nature of humanity and the discordance of the world it inhabits. In ‘A Man and his Dog’, domestic tempests are symbols of the muddle of humanity. In ‘The Black Swan’, the demands of intellect clash with physical desires. And in ‘Mario and the Magician’ a young family on holiday in Italy encounters a creepy entertainer: Cipolla, a hypnotist with a fascist-like will to control his audience. 
 
Written between 1918 and 1953, this collection shows the literary development of one of Germany’s most important writers.

Mario and the Magician

& other stories

Roberto Bolaño

Three fiercely original tales. An unexpected treasure from the vault of a revolutionary talent. 
 
Roberto Bolaño's boundless gift for shaping the chaos of reality into fiction is unmistakable across these three novellas. In &lsquo;Cowboy Graves,&rsquo; Arturo Belano &ndash; Bolaño's alter ego &ndash; returns to Chile after the coup to fight with his comrades for socialism. &lsquo;French Comedy of Horrors&rsquo; finds a seventeen-year-old recruited into a secret society of artists in the sewers of Paris. And in &lsquo;Fatherland,&rsquo; a young poet reckons with the fascist overthrow of his country, as the woman he is obsessed with disappears in the ensuing violence. 
 
TRANSLATED BY NATASHA WIMMER 
 
&lsquo;His work is as vital, thrilling and life-enhancing as anything in modern fiction&rsquo; Sunday Times 
 
&lsquo;Fascinating... A rare opportunity for the reader to witness the creation of a seemingly inexhaustible body of work&rsquo; El Pais

Cowboy Graves

Raymond Carver

With this, his first collection, Carver breathed new life into the short story. In the pared-down style that has since become his hallmark, Carver showed how humour and tragedy dwell in the hearts of ordinary people, and won a readership that grew with every subsequent brilliant collection of stories, poems and essays that appeared in the last eleven years of his life.

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?

A MASTERFUL COLLECTION OF TWENTY-FIVE SHORT STORIES FROM THE INIMITABLE AUTHOR OF SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5, KURT VONNEGUT 
 
'Vonnegut is George Orwell, Dr Caligari and Flash Gordon compounded into one writer...a zany but moral mad scientist' Time 
 
A diabolical government asserts control by eliminating orgasms. A scientist discovers the secret to unlocking instant happiness, with unexpected consequences. In an America where everyone is equal every which way, a teenage boy plans to overthrow the system. 
 
Welcome to the Monkey House gathers together twenty-five of Kurt Vonnegut's short stories from the 1950s and 1960s. Shot through with Vonnegut's singular humour, wit and bewilderment at humanity, this is a collection that celebrates a true master of short-form fiction.

Welcome to the Monkey House

While Mortals Sleep is a smart, clear-eyed collection of stories from one of the most original writers in American fiction. Set in trailers, bars and factories, Vonnegut conjures up a world where men and machines, art and artifice, fame and fortune become curiously twisted and characters pit their dreams and fears against a cruel and comically indifferent world. 
 
Written early in his career, and never published before, these tightly plotted stories are infused with Vonnegut's distinctive blend of observation, imagination and scabrous humour. 
 
This collection features an introduction by Dave Eggers.

While Mortals Sleep

New York, 1950. A young PR man working at General Electric sold his first magazine piece. By the time he'd sold his third, he decided to quit his job and join the likes of Salinger, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner, and make a living as a full-time writer. That young man was Kurt Vonnegut. 
 
Bagombo Snuff Box collects Vonnegut’s favourite stories from the postwar years that sharpened his dark, vaudevillian and quietly subversive voice. Here we see the mind-bending wit and central themes of his masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five. A must-read for Vonnegut aficionados new and old.

Bagombo Snuff Box

Uncollected Short Fiction

W. Somerset Maugham

The stories in this collection move from Malaya to America and England, and include some of Maugham's most famous tales; 'Flotsam and Jetsam', the story of an old woman trapped for years in a loveless marriage in the remote rubber plantations; 'The Man with the Scar', and notably the opening story 'The Vessel of Wrath', a tale of the unexpected love that grows between a devout missionary nurse and a drunken reprobate. In this second volume of his collected stories, Maugham illustrates his characteristic wry perception of human foibles and his genius for evoking compelling drama from an acute sense of time and place.

Collected Short Stories Volume 2

Nikolay Leskov

Leskov’s stories of Russian life are explosions of imagination. Peopled by outsized characters including serfs, princes, Gypsy girls, horse dealers, nomadic Tartars and garrulous storytellers, Leskov’s writing exuberantly fables the national character of his age. For the first time, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation brings Leskov’s original storytelling and irresistible voice to life.

The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

Elizabeth Bowen

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY A. N. WILSON 
 
Throughout these seventy-nine stories - love stories, ghost stories, stories of childhood, of English middle-class life in the twenties and thirties, of London during the Blitz - Elizabeth Bowen combines social comedy and reportage, perception and vision in an oeuvre which reveals, as Angus Wilson affirms in his introduction, that 'the instinctive artist is there at the very heart of her work'.

Collected Stories

This powerful collection of stories, set in the mid-West among the lonely men and women who drink, fish and play cards to ease the passing of time, was the first by Raymond Carver to be published in the UK. With its spare, colloquial narration and razor-sharp sense of how people really communicate, the collection was to become one of the most influential literary works of the 1980s.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Margaret Atwood

This miniature array of perfect stories by the legendary Margaret Atwood flash before us the joys and despairs of mothers good and bad, evoking laughter, compassion and recognition in us all. 
 
BRIEF ENCOUNTERS: classic novellas and captivating stories, to be read in a single sitting or savoured over days.

Significant Moments

Discover Angela Carter's classic feminist retelling of favourite fairy tales woven in seductive, luminous storytelling. 
 
Beauty is turned into a Beast, Little Red Riding’s grandmother is stoned to death as a witch and, in the title story, a beautiful young pianist is swept into the world of a rich and sinister aristocrat, a man whose previous three wives have all died in mysterious circumstances. 
 
From familiar fairy tales and legends – Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, vampires and werewolves – Angela Carter has created an absorbing collection of dark, sensual, fantastic stories. 
 
'Magnificent set pieces of fastidious sensuality' Ian McEwan 
 
'A quirky, original, and baroque stylist' Margaret Atwood 
 
With an introduction from award-winning short story writer Helen Simpson

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

A special edition of the feminist cult classic

Italo Calvino

A group of travellers chance to meet, first in a castle, then a tavern. Their powers of speech are magically taken from them and instead they have only tarot cards with which to tell their stories. What follows is an exquisite interlinking of narratives, and a fantastic, surreal and chaotic history of all human consciousness.

The Castle of Crossed Destinies

First published on the anniversary of Kurt Vonnegut's death, Armageddon in Retrospect is a collection of twelve new writings - a fitting tribute to the author, and an essential contribution to the discussion of war, peace and humanity's tendency towards violence. Imbued with Vonnegut's trademark rueful humour, the pieces range from a visceral non-fiction recollection of the destruction of Dresden - to a painfully funny short story about three soldiers and their fantasies of the perfect meal.

Armageddon in Retrospect

Richard Wright

'All eight men and all eight stories stand as beautifully, pitifully, terribly true... This is fine, sound, good, honorable writing rich with insight and understanding, even when occasionally twisted by sorrow' New York Times 
 
Hunted by the police for a crime he didn't commit, a man turns to the sewers and a life underground. Struggling to get work, another turns to wearing his wife's clothes in a desperate last attempt. Finding himself the object of derision, yet another man buys a gun only to discover its true power. 
 
Here are Richard Wright's stories of eight men - black men, living at violent odds with the white world around them. As suspenseful as they are excoriating, they stand alongside Wright's novels as some of the most powerful depictions of black America in the twentieth century.

Eight Men

Richard Yates

The stories in Liars in Love are concerned with troubled relations and the elusive nature of truth. Whether it be in the depiction of the complications of divorced families, grown-up daughters, estranged sisters, office friendships or fleeting love affairs, the pieces in this collection showcase Richard Yates's extraordinary gift for observation and his understanding of human frailty.

Liars in Love

George Saunders

THE 2017 MAN BOOKER-SHORTLISTED AUTHOR OF LINCOLN IN THE BARDO 
 
In his first collection, George Saunders' vision of our near future is as black and funny as you can get. He takes us on a trip to the shopping malls and theme parks and enviromental hazards that lie just around the chronological corner, introducing us to a gang of misfits and losers struggling to survive in an increasingly haywire world. Bizarre but familiar, fierce but always humane, these are stunningly original stories by a master of the form. 
 
'Saunders is a morally passionate, serious writer, who perfectly expresses the madness of the times we live in. He will be read long after these times have passed' Zadie Smith 
 
'He makes the all-but-impossible look effortless. We're lucky to have him' Jonathan Franzen 
 
'There is no-one better, no-one more essential' Dave Eggers

Civilwarland In Bad Decline

Marcovaldo is an enchanting collection of twenty stories that are both melancholy and funny, farce and fantasy. Calvino charts the struggles of an Italian peasant to reconcile country habits with urban life, combining comical disasters with a surrealistic view of city life through the eyes of an outsider. As always with Calvino, nothing is quite as it seems. 
 
'Delightful and rewarding as always' Observer 
 
'The most magically ingenious of the contemporary Italian novelists' The Times

Marcovaldo

Mary Lavin

Mary Lavin is the great unsung voice of Irish fiction. Here are her very best, most electric stories: illuminating, moving, arrows in flight. 
 
‘This is a wonderful collection, and a reminder that Mary Lavin was – is – one of Ireland’s greatest writers’ Roddy Doyle 
 
Mary Lavin’s stories feature ordinary people in the tight confines of ordinary life. From rural Ireland and the streets of Dublin they charm, irritate and intrigue in complicated brilliance, appearing to us with unique freshness. Good friendships, bad deeds, frustrations, missteps, hope and laughter are all found in captivating stories where real and astonishing things happen. 
 
Few women were so consistently published in the New Yorker and yet today Lavin’s work is largely unpublished and overlooked. This collection re-establishes her as one of the most genius, irresistible and memorable voices of the last century. 
 
SELECTED AND INTRODUCED BY COLM TÓIBÍN 
 
‘She is, to come right out with it, magnificent’ New York Times 
 
‘A feast of quiet humour and heartbreak’ Emma Donoghue 
 
‘Mary Lavin's stories conjure sadness, profundity, hilarity and wildness out of thin air. They are simply masterful’ Colin Barrett 
 
‘Mary Lavin’s stories are a delight. They are delicate, but not too delicate to carry tragedy on one shoulder and comedy on the other’ Sunday Times

An Arrow in Flight

Somerset Maugham is the acknowledged master of the short story, and his full range is represented in this collection. In acclaimed stories such as 'Rain', 'The Letter', 'The Vessel of Wrath' and 'The Alien Corn', Maugham illustrates his wry perception of human weakness and his genius for evoking compelling drama and an acute sense of time and place.

Short Stories

&lsquo;In this neighbourhood, only the dead go out for a walk&rsquo;... 
 
A young party animal collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor, only to watch his soul departing his body. Two embittered police detectives debate their favourite weapons. A violent man looks back on his childhood and seeks out the now-aged male porn actor his mother shot movies with. 
 
Here is the eagerly anticipated second volume of stories by Roberto Bolaño. Tender or etched in acid; hazily suggestive or chillingly definitive: The Return is a trove of strangely arresting short master works. 
 
TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS 
 
'Dark, intimate and sneakily touching... There is gold to be found in this collection' New York Review of Books 
 
&lsquo;Each tale turns the reader into a voyeur, grasping at snapshots of troubled lives and ghosts&rsquo; Observer 
 
 &lsquo;A compelling encapsulation of Bolaño's work... You won't be bored&rsquo; Los Angeles Times

The Return

Edgar Allan Poe

A beautiful deluxe gift edition of Poe's most macabre and irresistible stories with foiled covers, marbled endpapers, sprayed edges, beautiful paper and finished with a silk ribbon. 
 
Edgar Allan Poe's stories uncover the deeply unnerving strangeness lurking within us all. His genius for horror and suspense went on to influence the world, from Freud to Hollywood. This complete collection of his best short stories contains the well-known works 'The Pit and the Pendulum' and 'The Tell-Tale Heart' alongside a wide range of delightfully terrifying tales to unsettle and enthrall. 
 
This hardback is part of VINTAGE COLLECTOR’S CLASSICS, a series of luxurious books especially crafted for collectors and fans of beautiful special editions. Sumptuous design meets the highest quality production. Discover timeless classics beautifully bound for every bookshelf.

The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Stories

These early short stories brim with the beauty of the Italian countryside and seaside, telling tales both sumptuous and unnerving. 
 
Calvino's war-torn Italy is vivid, intense, almost hyper-real. A trio of greedy burglars rob a pastry shop, a boy offers a girl presents of toads and insects from the garden, a wealthy family invites a rustic goatherd to lunch, only to mock him. In every story he reveals the hidden meaning beneath the surface of everyday life, and the ludicrousness of war. 
 
Some stories from Last Comes the Raven have been previously available in the collection Adam, One Afternoon. This new expanded collection includes several stories newly translated by Ann Goldstein and is an important addition to Calvino's legacy. 
 
'In Last Comes the Raven, a collection of early stories, we find the man behind the magician' New Yorker

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