Outstanding Short Stories
Discover a curated collection of outstanding short stories from top authors. Explore timeless classics and hidden gems perfect for any reader. Dive in now!
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Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
In Kublai Khan's garden, at sunset, the young Marco Polo diverts the aged emperor from his obsession with the impending end of his empire with tales of countless cities past, present, and future.
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The Tales of Hoffmann
by Ernst Theodor Hoffman
A lawyer by day and a creator of a world of fantasy by night, Hoffman (1776-1822) lived a Jekyll and Hyde existence. Many of the characters in his stories are subject to a similar split personality. The duality of his nature is frequently reflected in some of his charactersâCardillac the goldsmith in Mademoiselle de ScudĂ©ry and Nathaniel in The Sandman, for example. Cardillac is a virtuous, industrious man by day but a violent criminal at night, while Nathaniel, obsessed by a childhood fantasy, is driven to madness and cruelty. These tales can be read on several levels: as an expression of the concerns of the Romantic era, as impressive examples of German Romantic literature and as exciting works of fiction made all the more extraordinary by their concern with the supernatural and the bizarre.
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Anton Chekhov's Short Stories
by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
The thirty-four stories in this volume span Chekhov s creative career."
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The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol
by Nikolai Gogol
When Pushkin first read some of the stories in this collection, he declared himself "amazed." "Here is real gaiety," he wrote, "honest, unconstrained, without mincing, without primness. And in places what poetry! . . . I still haven't recovered." More than a century and a half later, Nikolai Gogol's stories continue to delight readers the world over. Now a stunning new translation--from an award-winning team of translators--presents these stories in all their inventive, exuberant glory to English-speaking readers. For the first time, the best of Gogol's short fiction is brought together in a single volume: from the colorful Ukrainian tales that led some critics to call him "the Russian Dickens" to the Petersburg stories, with their black humor and wonderfully demented attitude toward the powers that be. 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. These fantastic, comic, utterly Russian characters have dazzled generations of readers and had a profound influence on writers such as Dostoevsky and Nabokov. Now they are brilliantly rendered in the first new translation in twenty-five years--one that is destined to become the definitive edition of Gogol's most important stories.
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Selected Tales and Sketches
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The short stories, reflecting Hawthorne's Puritan background and his use of symbolism and allegory, are presented with biographical notes
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Great Short Works of Herman Melville
by Herman Melville
Billy Budd, Sailor and Bartleby, the Scrivener are two of the most revered shorter works of fiction in history. Here, they are collected along with 19 other stories in a beautifully redesigned collection that represents the best short work of an American master.As Warner Berthoff writes in his introduction to this volume, "It is hard to think of a major novelist or storyteller who is not also a first-rate entertainer . . . a master, according to choice, of high comedy, of one or another robust species of expressive humour, or of some special variety of the preposterous, the grotesque, the absurd. And Melville, certainly, is no exception. A kind of vigorous supervisory humour is his natural idiom as a writer, and one particular attraction of his shorter work is the fresh further display it offers of this prime element in his literary character."
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Edgar Allan Poe Complete Tales and Poems
by Edgar Allan Poe
The life of American writer Edgar Allan Poe was characterized by a dramatic series of successes and failures, breakdowns and recoveries, personal gains and hopes dashed through, despite which he created some of the finest literature the world has ever known. Over time his works have influenced such major creative forces as the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Andre Gide, filmmaker D.W. Griffith and modern literary legend Allen Ginsberg. Best known for his poems and short fiction, Poe perfected the psychological thriller, invented the detective story, and rarely missed transporting the reader to his own supernatural realm. He has also been hailed posthumously as one of the finest literary critics of the nineteenth century. In Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales and Poems fans may indulge in all of Poe's most imaginative short-stories, including The Fall of the House of Usher, The Murders in Rue Morgue, The Tell-Tale Heart, Ligeia and Ms. In a Bottle. His complete early and miscellaneous poetic masterpieces are here also, including The Raven, Ulalume, Annabel Lee, Tamerlane, as well as select reviews and narratives.
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ID: 0393977102
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The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain
by Mark Twain
For deft plotting, riotous inventiveness, unforgettable characters, and language that brilliantly captures the lively rhythms of American speech, no American writer comes close to Mark Twain. This sparkling anthology covers the entire span of Twainâs inimitable yarn-spinning, from his early broad comedy to the biting satire of his later years. Every one of his sixty stories is here: ranging from the frontier humor of âThe Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,â to the bitter vision of humankind in âThe Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,â to the delightful hilarity of âIs He Living or Is He Dead?â Surging with Twainâs ebullient wit and penetrating insight into the follies of human nature, this volume is a vibrant summation of the career ofâin the words of H. L. Menckenââthe father of our national literature.â
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Collected Stories of Rudyard Kipling
by Rudyard Kipling
As a young writer living in Lahore during the time of the British Raj, Rudyard Kipling (1865Ââ1936) was possessed by an enormous subjectâIndiaâand his genius for rendering its beauty and strangeness was even then so fully formed that we have to look to the likes of Shakespeare and Dickens to find writers equally precocious. What is even more astonishing, and what this selection of stories from across his entire career reveals, is the way that his talent grew and developed over time. The work he did toward the end of his long writing life is even better than that which marked its splendid beginnings. The forty stories collected here range across a surprising variety of subjects and techniques. Here are his superb war stories, âMary Postgate,â âThe Gardener,â and âThe Drums of the Fore and Aft,â as well as his famous forays into horror in âThe Mark of the Beast,â science fiction in âWith the Night Mail,â and the ghost story in âThe House Surgeon.â âThe Man Who Would Be Kingâ is an unforgettable adventure tale, ââLove-oâ-Womenââ and âWithout Benefit of Clergyâ reveal his insight into love and passion, and âBaa Baa, Black Sheepâ is a searing revisiting of Kiplingâs childhood trauma. From the nightmarish allegory of âThe Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukesâ and the mystical visions in âThe Bridge-Buildersâ to the brilliant portrait of obsession and sacrifice in his masterpiece, âThe Wish House,â these stories showcase Kiplingâs remarkable narrative gifts.