Five Great Short Stories

Masterfully written tales by one of the greatest practitioners of the form. Stories include "The Black Monk," "The House with the Mezzanine," "The Peasants," "Gooseberries," and "The Lady with the Toy Dog."

Five exciting tales that epitomize Jack London's mastery of the adventure story: "The White Silence," "In a Far Country," "An Odyssey of the North," "The Seed of McCoy," and "The Mexican." Publisher's Note.

Five outstanding selections from noble tradition: Heinrich von Kleist's "The Earthquake in Chile," E. T. A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman," Arthur Schnitzler's "Lieutenant Gustl," Thomas Mann's "Tristan," and Franz Kafka's "The Judgment."

A wide-ranging fictional portrait of life in postwar America by an acclaimed New Yorker short story writer and #1 New York Times–bestselling novelist. Irwin Shaw was a star of the New Yorker’s fiction pages in the 1930s and ’40s. His prose helped shape the landscape of post-war fiction, and his work drew from a remarkable life that spanned from American football fields to European battlefields, Broadway to Hollywood, Depression-era saloons to the McCarthy hearings. Among these sixty-three stories are iconic works such as “The Eighty-Yard Run,” a tale of an American dream crippled on Black Monday, and “Main Currents in American Thought,” in which a hack radio copywriter is tormented by the glitz of show business. Through the decades, Shaw’s writing —as demonstrated in these pages—maintains the clear-eyed moral purpose, rich in wit and startling insight, of a tough kid with a philosopher’s soul. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Irwin Shaw including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.

Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timmy the dog find excitement and adventure wherever they go in Enid Blyton's most popular series. A mysterious light on Kirrin Island, a stolen safe, a bag hidden in the woods, a runaway horse, dog thieves, a Christmas Eve robbery - they all mean a whole lot of fun for The Famous Five! Read all about their exciting adventures in this delightful collection of short stories. The text in this edition has been sensitively edited for today's reader and is unillustrated. Short stories included: Five have a puzzling time; George's hair is too long; Good old Timmy!; A lazy afternoon; Well done, Famous Five!; Five and a half-term adventure; Happy Christmas, Five!; When Timmy chased the cat!

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) Aanton Chekhov, widely hailed as the supreme master of the short story, also wrote five works long enough to be called short novels–here brought together in one volume for the first time, in a masterly new translation by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The Steppe–the most lyrical of the five–is an account of a nine-year-old boy’s frightening journey by wagon train across the steppe of southern Russia. The Duel sets two decadent figures–a fanatical rationalist and a man of literary sensibility–on a collision course that ends in a series of surprising reversals. In The Story of an Unknown Man, a political radical spying on an important official by serving as valet to his son gradually discovers that his own terminal illness has changed his long-held priorities in startling ways. Three Years recounts a complex series of ironies in the personal life of a rich but passive Moscow merchant. In My Life, a man renounces wealth and social position for a life of manual labor. The resulting conflict between the moral simplicity of his ideals and the complex realities of human nature culminates in a brief apocalyptic vision that is unique in Chekhov’s work.

Including one new story and an Index by author of every story that has ever appeared in the series, this new volume offers a "spectacular tapestry of fictional achievement" ("Entertainment Weekly").

177 short stories.