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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Italo Calvino

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Pin is a bawdy, adolescent cobbler's assistant, both arrogant and insecure who - while the Second World War rages - sings songs and tells jokes to endear himself to the grown-ups of his town - particularly jokes about his sister, who they all know as the town's 'mattress'. Among those his sister sleeps with is a German sailor, and Pin dares to steal his pistol, hiding it among the spiders' nests in an act of rebellion that entangles him in the adults' war.

The Path to the Spiders' Nests

John Mortimer

Horace Rumpole, the irrepressible barrister fuelled by cigars, Tennyson, steak-and-kidney pud and the cooking claret from Pommeroy's wine bar, is back for further misadventures. Amid an unfortunate and temporary downturn in London crime, the Old Bailey hack sits in Chambers (he never writes at home for fear of She Who Must Be Obeyed) and picks up his pen to recount six classic tales of his recent trials. Here he deals with, among others, a clergyman on a shoplifting rampage, a backstage theatrical murder, a villain with unfortunate sartorial taste and, worst of all, the possibility that he may have to hang up his wig and retire.

The Trials of Rumpole

Frank O'Connor

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

and Other Stories

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

Robert Coover

In his carnivalesque and riotously inventive Pricksongs &amp; Descants Robert Coover remakes old stories: of Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, and Beauty (who married her Beast and spends a lifetime suffering his doggy stink). And he reshapes his own: a man makes repeating, re-imagined journeys in an office elevator (while his fellow riders taunt and tempt him), and in the seminal, fractal 'The Babysitter' every moment in a single night is played and replayed, every hope and threat of sex and violence done and undone. Coover's dark, wilfil, comic imagination revels brilliantly in contradictions, a master of chaos.

Pricksongs & Descants

A collection of the stories of Damon Runyon who presents the 1950s world of guys and dolls on Broadway.

On Broadway

More Than Somewhat;Furthermore;take IT Easy

William S. Burroughs

The diabolical Nova Criminals now include the nightmarish characters of Sammy the Butcher, Iron Claws, Izzy the Push and the Brown Artist, and are poised to wreak untold destruction on the world with their new-found control. Only Inspector Lee of the Nova Police has any chance of stopping them, by dismantling the word and image machine before it's too late. 
 
The third book of Burroughs's linguistically prophetic 'cut-up' trilogy - following The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded - Nova Express is a hilarious and Swiftian parody of bureaucracy and the frailty of the human animal.

Nova Express

The Restored Text

This surreal fable, set in America's Old West, features a cast of notorious characters: The Crying Gun, who breaks into tears at the sight of his opponent; The Priest, who goes into gunfights giving his adversaries the last rites; and The Nihilistic Kid himself, Kim Carson, a homosexual gunslinger who, with a succession of beautiful sidekicks, sets out to challenge the morality of small-town America and fight for intergalactic freedom. 
 
Fantastical and humorous, The Place of Dead Roads continues William Burroughs' exploration of society's controlling forces - the State, the Church, women, literature, drugs - with a style that is utterly unique in twentieth-century literature.

The Place of Dead Roads

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?

Enchanting stories about the evolution of the universe, with characters that are fashioned from mathematical formulae and cellular structures. They disport themselves among galaxies, experience the solidification of planets, move from aquatic to terrestrial existence, play games with hydrogen atoms - and have time for a love life. 
 
'Naturally, we were all there, - old Qfwfq said, - where else could we have been? Nobody knew then that there could be space. Or time either: what use did we have for time, packed in there like sardines?'

The Complete Cosmicomics

Hubert Selby Jr.

Fat Phil can't lose at dice, even when his friends turn nasty and he's trying his hardest; a salesman finds success comes from fortune cookie mottoes, but panics when these mottoes turn against him; a date goes so perfectly a man talks himself out of ever seeing the woman again; a commuter finds himself obsessed with a plain young woman on his train, at the expense of his marriage. In this collection of short stories, Hubert Selby Jr. plunges the reader into the violent, passionate worlds of his protagonists and captures perfectly the delicate balance between joy and despair.

Song of the Silent Snow

Slawomir Mrozek

The Elephant (1957) is Slawomir Mrozek's award-winning collection of hilarious and unnerving short stories, satirising life in Poland under a totalitarian regime. The family of a wealthy lawyer keep a 'tamed progressive' as a pet; a zoo saves money for the workers by fashioning their elephant from rubber; a swan is dismissed from the municipal park for public drunkenness; and under the Writers' Association, literary critics are banished to the salt mines. In these tales of bureaucrats, officials and artists, Mrozek conjures perfectly a life of imagined crimes and absurd authority.

The Elephant

Evelyn Waugh

These pieces show the range of Waugh's skills: Mr Loveday's Little Outing; Cruise; Period Piece; On Guard; An Englishman's Home; Excursion in Reality; Bella Fleace Gave a Party; Winner Takes All; Work Suspended; Scott-King's Modern Europe; Basil Seal Rides Again; and Charles Ryder's Schooldays.

Work Suspended and Other Stories

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

Primo Levi

Primo Levi was one of the most astonishing voices to emerge from the twentieth century. This landmark selection of his short stories opens up a world of wonder, love, cruelty and curious twists of fate, where nothing is as it seems. In 'The Fugitive' an office worker composes the most beautiful poem ever with unforeseen consequences, while 'Magic Paint' sees a group of researchers develop a paint that mysteriously protects them from misfortune. 'Gladiators' and 'The Knall' are chilling explorations of mass violence, and in 'The Tranquil Star' a simple story of stargazing becomes a meditation on language, imagination and infinity.

A Tranquil Star

Unpublished Stories

Stanislaw Lem

"This Room Guaranteed BOMB-FREE. From the Management". 
 
Both gruesome and very funny, The Futurological Congress is the story of an ill-fated gathering of scientists who meet in a vast luxury hotel in the smog-bound, chronically over-populated Costa Rica of the future. Caught up in a revolution, the congress ends in a shambles as the authorities try to quell discontent by pouring hallucinogenic drugs into the water-supply. The beleaguered hero, Ijon Tichy (well-known to readers of Lem's The Star Diaries) is shot, frozen and thawed out years later, to find the Earth he had known changed in entirely unexpected ways.

The Futurological Congress

Shirley Jackson

There's something nasty in suburbia. In these deliciously dark tales, the daily commute turns into a nightmarish game of hide and seek, the loving wife hides homicidal thoughts and the concerned citizen might just be an infamous serial killer. In the haunting world of Shirley Jackson, nothing is as it seems and nowhere is safe, from the city streets to the crumbling country pile, and from the small-town apartment to the dark, dark woods...

Dark Tales

A man, dispirited by ageing, endeavours to steal a younger man&rsquo;s face; a doctor yearns for a virus that might eliminate his discomfort by turning everyone else into doubles of himself; a Colonel lays out the precepts of the life of DE (Do Easy); conspirators posthumously succeed in blowing up a train full of nerve gas; a mandrill known as the Purple Better One runs for the presidency with brutal results; and the world drifts towards apocalypses of violence, climate and plague. The hallucinatory landscape of William Burroughs&rsquo; compellingly bizarre, fragmented novel is constantly shifting, something sinister always just beneath the surface.

Exterminator!

Truman Capote

'Breathtaking ... The stories are special. They stand in their own right as lovely vignettes of the lives of the lonely, broken and troubled' Andrew Johnson, Independent 
 
Written when Truman Capote was in his teens and twenties, these recently-discovered short stories give a rare insight into an American icon. Tales of disappointed lovers, ageing spinsters, hoboes and murderous housewives, of yearning, poverty, despair, compassion, wit and wonder, they show us the boy from Alabama who became one of the twentieth century's most celebrated literary voices. 
 
'An intriguing glimpse of Capote as a boy: precocious, provocative, spirited and strange, a "pocket Merlin" spinning tall tales' Olivia Laing, New Statesman

The Early Stories of Truman Capote

James Thurber

Walter Mitty is an ordinary man living an ordinary life. But he has dreams - vivid, extraordinary day dreams - in which the life he leads is one of excitement and even adventure, in which he - a weary, put upon middle-aged man - is the hero of his own story. 
 
 A man can dream, can't he? 
 
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is just one of the brilliant humorous and witty stories written by James Thurber and collected here.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Inspector Lee and the Nova Police have been forced to engage the Nova Mob in one final battle for the planet. This is Burroughs's nightmare vision of scientists and combat troops, of Johnny Yen's chicken-hypnotizing and green Venusian-boy-girls, of ad men and conmen whose destructive language has spread like an incurable disease; a virus and parasite that takes over every human body. 
 
One of Burroughs's most approachable works, The Ticket That Exploded is the climax of his innovative 'cut-up' Nova trilogy - following The Soft Machine and Nova Express - and is an enthralling and frightening image of the future.

The Ticket That Exploded

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

At the centre of Music for Chameleons is Handcarved Coffins, a &lsquo;nonfiction novel&rsquo; based on the brutal crimes of a real-life murderer.Taking place in a small Midwestern town in America, it offers chilling insights into the mind of a killer and the obsession of the man bringing him to justice. Also in this volume are six short stories and seven &lsquo;conversational portraits&rsquo; including a touching one of Marilyn Monroe, the &lsquo;beautiful child&rsquo; and a hilarious one of a dope-smoking cleaning lady doing her rounds in New York.

Music for Chameleons

New Writing

Gyula Krúdy

Life is a Dream (1931) is Gyula Krudy's magical collection of ten short stories. Creating a world where editors shoot themselves after a hard day's brunching, men attend duels incognito and lovers fall out over salad dressing, Life is a Dream is a comic, nostalgic, romantic and erotic glimpse into the Hungary of the early twentieth century. Focussing on the poor and dispossessed, these tales of love, food, death and sex are ironic and wise about the human condition and the futility of life, and display fully Krudy's wit and mastery of the form.

Life Is A Dream

Kingsley Amis

The short stories of Kingsley Amis - the great master of post-war comic prose - are dark, playful, moving, surprising and extremely funny. This definitive collection gathers all Amis's short fiction in a single volume for the first time and encompasses five decades of storytelling. In 'The 2003 Claret', written in 1958, a time machine is invented for the weighty task of sending a man to 2010 to discover what the booze will taste like. In 'Boris and the Colonel' a Cambridge spy is unearthed in the sleepy English countryside with the help of a plucky horse, while In 'Mason's Life' two men meet inside their respective dreams. The collection spans many genres, offering ingenious alternative histories, mystery and horror, satirical reflections and a devilishly funny attacks. Amis's stories reveal the scope of his imagination and the warmth beneath his acerbic humour, and they all share the unmistakable style and wit of one of Britain's best loved writers. 
 
Kingsley Amis' (1922-1995) works take a humorous yet highly critical look at British society, especially of the period following the end of World War II. Born in London, Amis explored his disillusionment with British society in novels such as THAT UNCERTAIN FEELING (1955). His other works include THE GREEN MAN (1970); STANLEY AND THE WOMEN (1984); and THE OLD DEVILS (1986) which won the Booker Prize. Amis also wrote poetry, criticism, and short stories. 
 
Rachel Cusk was born in 1967. She has won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Somerset Maugham Award, and is the author of two works of non-fiction and seven novels, including In The Fold, longlisted for the 2005 Man Booker Prize, and Arlington Park, shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize 2007. Her non-fiction book, A Life's Work, was published to huge acclaim in 2001, and her account of a summer spent in Italy with her family, The Last Supper, was published in 2009. Her most recent novel, The Bradshaw Variations was published in 2009. In 2003 she was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young Novelists. She lives in Brighton.

Complete Stories

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

Hans Fallada

Darkly funny, searingly honest short stories from Hans Fallada, author of bestselling Alone in Berlin 
 
In these stories, criminals lament how hard it is to scrape a living by breaking and entering; families measure their daily struggles in marks and pfennigs; a convict makes a desperate leap from a moving train; a ring - and with it a marriage - is lost in a basket of potatoes. 
 
Here, as in his novels, Fallada is by turns tough, darkly funny, streetwise and effortlessly engaging, writing with acute feeling about ordinary lives shaped by forces larger than themselves: addiction, love, money.

Tales from the Underworld

Selected Shorter Fiction

Kjell Askildsen

Spare, taut and told with flashes of pitch-black humour, the short stories of Norwegian master Kjell Askildsen capture all the strangeness of modern existence. In this selection of tales, spanning the whole of his brilliant career, unnerving encounters occur, lonely individuals try to connect, families and relationships are fractured, and we are confronted by the fragility and absurdity of life.

Everything Like Before

Stories

Ludmilla Petrushevskaya

A woman finds herself filling a pit in the forest in the middle of the night; a family lock each other in their bedrooms to battle a strange plague; a wizard punishes two beautiful ballerinas by turning them into one hugely fat circus performer; a colonel is warned not to lift the veil from his dead wife's face; and a distraught father brings his daughter back to life by eating human hearts in his dreams. 
 
In these blackly comic tales of revenge, disturbing deaths and haunting melancholy, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya blends miracles and madness in the darkest of modern fairy tales.

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales

Saki

Saki is perhaps the most graceful spokesman for England's 'Golden Afternoon' - the slow and peaceful years before the First World War.  Although, like so many of his generation, he died tragically young, in action on the Western Front, his reputation as a writer continued to grow long after his death.  The stories are humorous, satiric, supernatural, and macabre, highly individual, full of eccentric wit and unconventional situations.  With his great gift as a social satirist of his contemporaryupper-class Edwardian world, Saki is one of the few undisputed English masters of the short story.

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