Dog Stories

As a literary subject, Christmas has inspired everything from intimate domestic dramas, to fanciful flights of the imagination, and the full range of its expression is represented in this wonderfully engaging collection. Goblins frolic in the graveyard of an early Dickens tale; a love-struck ghost disrupts a country estate in Elizabeth Bowen's "Green Holly"; devils, witches, Cossacks and peas...

Playful kittens and ruthless predators, beloved pets and witches' familiars - cats of all kinds come alive in these stories. Maeve Brennan and Alice Adams movingly explore what cats can mean to their humans, while writers as varied as Patricia Highsmith and Fritz Leiber imagine the intriguingly alien feline point of view. Cats flaunt their undeniable superiority in Angela Carter's bawdy ...

These eighteen classic stories from across John Updike’s career form a luminous chronicle of the life and times of one marriage in all its rich emotional complexity. In 1956, Updike published a story, ‘Snowing in Greenwich Village’, about a young couple, Joan and Richard Maple, at the beginning of their marriage. Over the next two decades, he returned to these characters again and again, tracing t...

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 ...

'Listen, Svejk, are you really God's prize oaf?' 'Humbly report, sir,' Svejk answered solemnly. 'I am!' Drunkard, malingerer, oaf and possible genius - the story of Czech soldier Svejk and his misadventures in the First World War is one of the most hilarious and subversive satires on war ever written.

If every fiction is at heart a mystery, then the detective story is fiction distilled to its purest essence, combining the intellectual appeal of puzzles with the psychological fascination of human motivation. These sixteen classic tales of crimes and those who unravel them, collected from across the past two centuries, offer ample evidence of the form’s enduring allure. Beginning with modern mast...