Item category 1: Classics

'I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.' First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads—driven from th...

Beyond the genre-defining influence of Dracula, Bram Stoker was also a master of the short story form. This new collection of the author's tales represents his diverse interests in the macabre and uncanny.

Trotty Veck, an elderly porter, has read so many newspaper reports about crime and immorality that he believes the working classes are irredeemable. But, on New Year's Eve, summoned to the church tower by a mysterious chiming, Trotty witnesses his own death, and is taken on a ghostly journey that...

It's terribly important that I get in touch with a gentleman who may have stopped in here to buy flowers this morning. Terribly important. Sometimes, the person you think you love isn't who they seem. And sometimes, you can be your own deception. These devilish tales of love, death, and despair s...

After a six-year hiatus, a man and a woman who used to be lovers or close friends meet in a café. An insightful study of relationships and nostalgic ideals, this story also looks at the difference money, or the lack of it, can make, especially if one half of a couple (romantic or otherwise) is f...

I am a ridiculous man. They call me mad now. That would be a promotion in rank. A delusional man whose strange dream changes his life; a self-justifying husband who causes his wife's suicide; a witness to a young girl's ruin; a writer who stretches out on a gravestone and listens to the gossip of...

Gothic, expansive and truly spellbinding, Karen Blixen's short stories offer incisive psychological portraits and imaginative visions of war, longing and tender love. Here, an orphan boy creates an elaborate fantasy of a life of grandeur, a feudal lord sets a peasant woman a deadly task, and a yo...

Lise is driven to distraction by her office job so, leaving everything, she flies south on holiday. But what is she looking for? Infinity and eternity attend Lise's last terrible day in an unnamed southern city.

'I'm not the sort of husband you dream of when you're walking alone along the avenue in the evening, am I? And it would be a disaster, wouldn't it? 'How does love die? This question lies at the heart of Tolstoy's desperately sad novella. It tells the story of seventeen-year-old Masha who, despit...

Told in the form of two intensely personal 'letters', 'The Fire Next Time' is an excoriating condemnation of the terrible legacy of racial injustice, drawn from Baldwin's early life in Harlem and his experience as a prominent cultural figure of the civil rights movement.