The master of the novella, Prosper Mérimée, created some of the most vivid characters in world literature, combining captivating plots with historically and ethnographically accurate descriptions of Corsican and Spanish life. This edition includes his best novellas, among them ‘Mateo Falcone,’ ‘The Game of Backgammon,’ ‘Colomba,’ and, of course, the famous ‘Carmen.’

The place is the Greek island of Cephallonia, where gods once dabbled in the affairs of men and the local saint periodically rises from his sarcophagus to cure the mad. Then the tide of World War II rolls onto the island's shores in the form of the conquering Italian army. Caught in the occupation are Pelagia, a willful, beautiful young woman, and the two suitors vying for her love: Mandras,...

The collection includes Kafka's most famous ‘short’ works from different years. Here you will find the so-called Kafkaesque nightmares – ‘The Metamorphosis,’ ‘In the Penal Colony,’ elegant parables, satirical stories and miniatures, as well as diary entries.

Five years after On the Road, the book that made him an overnight celebrity, Kerouac examines with wrenching clarity his unwished for fame, escalating alcoholism, and troubling alienation from nature. In a thinly veiled autobiographical account of his time in Big Sur at the cabin of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and with friends in San Francisco—among them fellow iconoclasts Neal Cassady, Gary...

Ben Richards has no job, no money, and a young daughter who urgently needs medical attention. Desperate, out of options, he signs up for The Running Man, ‘the biggest show in the country.’ It’s an ultraviolent competition where the stakes could not be higher. Ben must stay alive for thirty days while an elite strike force, trained to kill, hunts for him. If he can survive for a month, he...

When Johnny Smith was six years old, head trauma caused by a bad ice-skating accident left him with a nasty bruise on his forehead and, from time to time, those hunches…infrequent but accurate snippets of things to come. But it isn’t until Johnny’s a grown man—now having survived a horrifying auto injury that plunged him into a coma lasting four-and-a-half years—that his special abilities...

Cujo used to be a big friendly dog, lovable and loyal to his trinity (THE MAN, THE WOMAN, and THE BOY) and everyone around him, and always did his best to not be a BAD DOG. But that all ends on the day this nearly two-hundred-pound Saint Bernard makes the mistake of chasing a rabbit into a hidden underground cave, setting off a tragic chain of events. Now Cujo is no longer himself as he is...

When Vera Donovan, one of the wealthiest and most ill-natured residents of Maine’s Little Tall Island, dies suddenly in her home, suspicion is immediately cast on her housekeeper and caretaker, Dolores Claiborne. Dolores herself is no stranger to such mistrust, thanks to the local chatter and mysterious circumstances surrounding her abusive husband’s death twenty-nine years earlier.

The short novel ‘Heart of Darkness’ was first published in 1902 and caused a major upheaval in English-language literature, of which it is still considered a classic, and Francis Ford Coppola's film ‘Apocalypse Now,’ based on it, was and remains one of the most powerful works in the history of world cinema. Young Captain Marlow sails up the Congo River, through the wild African jungle, full...

The British author Edmund Crispin belongs to the Golden Age of detective fiction, and his works are considered classics of British crime literature. The protagonist of all nine of Crispin's novels is Gervase Fen, an eccentric Oxford professor of English language and literature with a penchant for solving crimes. ‘The Moving Toyshop’ is the third novel featuring Gervase Fen's investigations....

‘A Room of One's Own’ is a famous essay based on lectures Woolf gave at Newnham College and Girton College – two women's colleges at Cambridge University – in October 1928. In it, she addresses all women engaged in literature and recalls her great predecessors – Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot – who were forced to write in the common living room, hide their manuscripts from...

Travel to 1920s China, a time when the last emperor still ruled and the sweeping changes of the twentieth century were distant rumblings, with this timeless, evocative classic tale of the honest farmer Wang Lung and his family as they struggle to survive in the midst of vast political and social upheavals.