When Cyril, Anthea, Robert and Jane accidentally destroy a carpet in their London home with fireworks, their parents replace it with a second-hand one. Upon unfurling it, the children find an egg insi
Shortly before his death at the age of twenty, the young literary sensation Raymond Radiguet compiled a volume of his poetry, composed between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. Presented here, this p
With his birth itself a monumental exploit in itself, it is clear that the giant Pantagruel is destined to great things, and the novel that bears his name chronicles his the remarkable life of the exu
When the young nobleman Des Grieux lays eyes on the beautiful and charming lower-class Manon Lescaut, he immediately falls in love with her and runs away with her to Paris, incurring the wrath of his
First published in French magazines in the 1960s, the essays and interviews collected in this volume tackle two of Sartre’s most enduring concerns as a philosopher: politics and literature. With regar
When Sara Crewe is brought from India to attend Miss Minchin’s boarding school for girls in London, she arrives looking rather like a princess, with trunks full of the finest clothes. Yet, despite hav
Babel, Alan Burns’s fourth critically acclaimed novel, contains all the hallmarks of the aleatoric style he helped to define – shot through with seemingly random newspaper headlines, poems, snatches o
Of unknown date, and surviving in a tenth-century manuscript, Beowulf is the tale of a young Geatish hero and his struggle with three deadly foes, beginning with the dread monster Grendel, who has bee
“There was an Old Derry down Derry,Who loved to see little folks merry;So he made them a Book,And with laughter they shookAt the fun of that Derry down Derry.”First published in 1846 under the pseudon
In 1890, the thirty-year-old Chekhov, already knowing that he was ill with tuberculosis, undertook an arduous eleven-week journey from Moscow across Siberia to the penal colony on the island of Sakhal
When Darwin set sail at the end of 1831, it was only with a vague notion that all life forms, both present and extinct, were more strongly related than the Christian version of the world's creation pu
“In the autumn month of September, eighteen hundred and fifty-seven… two idle apprentices, exhausted by the long, hot summer, and the long, hot work it had brought with it, ran away from their employe
“Be it so if you will; but, alas! it was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown.”Rich in allegory and symbolism, and suffused with darkness and tragedy, satire and touching humour, these tales,
With Sherlock Holmes's reputation as the scourge of the criminal underworld preceding him, the ingenious detective, with the aid of Dr Watson, is confronted in these stories by some of his most fiendi
Having grown up in London and rural southern England, Margaret Hale moves with her father to the northern industrial city of Milton. She is shocked by the poverty she encounters and dismayed by the un
Against the backdrop of growing discontent in Paris, Doctor Manette is released from the Bastille after eighteen years of unjust imprisonment and begins a new life in England with his devoted daughter
In contrast with the epic scope of the Rougon-Macquart novels, Zola's short stories are concerned with the everyday aspects of human existence and the interests of ordinary people.From the cruel irony
First published in 1797, The Italian, with its archetypal villain Schedoni, its intense romance and its sublime depiction of landscape, is the masterpiece of Gothic fiction.Enlisted by the Marchesa di
One of the classics of American children's literature, Daddy-Long-Legs tells the tale of Judy Abbott – an ebullient orphan beginning a college degree with the aim of becoming a writer – through her le
John Dolittle is a highly respected doctor in the village of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh, yet he loves animals so much that his house is soon full of them. With all his patients scared away, and the expense
The Vita Nuova, with its unusual blend of prose and poetry, is universally recognized as Dante's early masterpiece and provides an indispensable prequel to The Divine Comedy. Set in thirteenth-century
In ‘The Waves’, a young man falls dangerously in love with his tenant downstairs who is about to get married; in ‘The Signorina’, a woman, disillusioned with her suitor’s inability to declare his feel
When Cora and Alice Munro’s Native American guide Magua proves to be secretly allied with the French and slips away, the sisters turn to Natty Bumppo and the Mohicans Chingachgook and Uncas to lead th
Already with thee! tender is the night, And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne, Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays; But here there is no light,
When her wealthy family prepares to host a lavish summer party, the young, hitherto sheltered Laura Sheridan suddenly feels a kinship with the staff and the helpers hired to set up the venue for the f
Four women, with very different backgrounds and characters – the artless Lottie Wilkins, the pious Rose Arbuthnot, the cantankerous Mrs Fisher and the haughty Lady Caroline Dester – respond to an adve
Written as a passionate riposte to Talleyrand’s report to the French National Assembly, in which he declared that women needed only a domestic education, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman attacked
Buster was the first, and arguably the most traditional, work of fiction by Alan Burns – dating from before his aleatoric style developed into “cutting up”, but displaying early examples of the tradem
In the 1940s, Picasso wrote two plays in French: the first, Desire Caught by the Tail, was conceived during the German occupation of Paris and features a cast of grotesque allegorical characters such
The mayor and local officials of a small provincial town in Russia have got it made: corruption is rife and they have all the power. Yet, when they learn that an undercover government inspector is abo
Celebrations, Alan Burns’s third novel, brings the inherent violence and oppression so apparent in Europe after the Rain into the setting of a family-owned factory, where social hierarchies, legal str
A masterpiece of the Gothic genre, The Monk tells the story of the Capuchin friar Ambrosio and his fall from grace through desire, greed and lust. Published anonymously and favourably reviewed at firs
At a train station on her way to meet her friends Marie and Leo to recover her pet rock, Madame Charlotte accidentally picks up the Prime Minister’s elephant-hide bag instead of her own. As it contain
A celebrated journalist in his lifetime, Ambrose Bierce’s began circulating his own sardonic, mischievous definitions of words in his various columns for San Francisco newspapers. Over several years t
After the death of his father, the seventeen-year-old orphan David Balfour discovers the existence of an uncle, and sets off in search of him. His uncle Ebenezer is far from welcoming, however, and Da
This selection of plays by Luigi Pirandello contains some of his best-known works, such as Six Characters in Search of an Author – an absurdist piece in which the characters, actors and Pirandello him
"Kimball O’Hara, the orphaned son of an Irish soldier, spends his childhood on the bustling streets of Lahore, begging and running errands in order to survive. One day he meets an old Tibetan lama, an
Presented through an ingeniously overlapping and intertwining series of letters written by six very different characters, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker is the story of Squire Matthew Bramble and h
Jude Fawley, an intelligent and sensitive young Wessex schoolboy, is encouraged in his scholarly pursuits by the local schoolmaster, Mr Phillotson. Jude dreams of studying at the university of Christm
In A Voyage to the Moon, the narrator (called, like the author, Cyrano de Bergerac), after a failed first attempt to reach the moon using vials of dewdrops, finally makes it into space and to his desi
