This comprehensive collection of Twain’s short stories showcases his immense talent, humor, and wit. Considered to be the greatest American humorist of all time, Mark Twain was born in 1835 and was raised in Hannibal, Missouri, where many of his most well-known stories take place. Twain led an adventurous life: working as a type setter for his brother’s newspaper as a young man, then as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi river, followed by a s ...
Nikolai Gogol, an early 19th century Ukrainian-born Russian novelist, humorist, and dramatist, considered the father of modern Russian realism, created some of the most important works of Russian literature. Gogol satirized the corrupt bureaucracy of the Russian Empire through the scrupulous and scathing realism of his writing, which would ultimately lead to his exile. Among some of his finest works are his short stories. A representative select ...
First published in 1895, “The King in Yellow” is a collection of short stories by Robert W. Chambers for which the author is best known. The title of the collection refers to a fictional forbidden play referenced in the first four of the stories of the collection which induces its readers to madness. The remainder of the stories of this volume have a less eerie tone and are written in the romantic fiction style common to Chambers’ later work. “T ...
Anton Chekhov, who is often credited with inventing the modern short story, wrote many volumes worth of stories during his lifetime. Considered by many as one of the greatest short story writers of all time, Chekhov’s extraordinary storytelling gift is exemplified in this volume of twenty-three of his most popular stories. “Ward No. 6 and Other Stories” includes the following stories: “The Cook’s Wedding”, “The Witch”, “A Dead Body”, “Easter Eve ...
“Billy Budd” is the final work of American author Herman Melville which was discovered amongst his papers three decades after his death and first published in Raymond Weaver’s 1924 edition of “The Collected Works of Melville.” The emergence of that collection as well as Weaver’s 1921 biography, “Herman Melville: Man, Mariner and Mystic”, sparked a revival of interest in the forgotten writer. Despite the complex and incomplete nature of the manus ...
First published in 1902, “Just So Stories” is Rudyard Kipling’s classic collection of animal fables and poetry. This collection grew out of nighttime story-telling between Rudyard and his daughter Josephine. The peculiar name is drawn from her insistence that these tales, which were origin stories describing how animals got their most distinctive features, be told “just so”. This volume reproduces the complete edition of “Just So Stories” which ...
Anton Chekhov was a master of the short story. The son of a former serf in southern Russia, he attended Moscow University to study medicine, writing short stories for periodicals in order to support his family. What began as a necessity became a legitimate career in 1886 when he was asked to write in St. Petersburg for the Novoye Vremya (New Times), owned by publishing magnate Alexey Suvorin. Chekhov began paying more attention to his writing, r ...
What would the genre of detective fiction be without the inimitable Sherlock Holmes? One can only speculate as to its state given the absence of its most famous character. Based on Doyle’s own list of best stories and expanded to include several other reader favorites, this collection includes his very best tales. This edition includes a preface by the author, a biographical afterword, and includes the following stories: “A Scandal in Bohemia,” ...
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle, and Other Stories” is a volume of essays and short stories by Washington Irving that were first published serially between 1819 and 1820 and was originally collected as “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.” It includes some of the works for which would establish Irving as one of the preeminent American authors of his day and cement his literary legacy. The most famous of the works in this volum ...
