"Sparkling new translations highlight the humor and poignancy of Mann's best stories-including his masterpiece, in its first English translation in nearly a century. A towering figure in the pantheon of twentieth-century literature, Thomas Mann has often been perceived as a dry and forbidding writer-"the starched collar," as Bertolt Brecht once called him. But in fact, his fiction is lively, humane, sometimes hilarious. In these fresh renderings of...

An illustrated collection of fourteen short stories featuring dragons and wizards, councilors and mayors, an adventurous tortoise and a monster in a lake, along with plenty of pointy hats and a few magic spells, written when the author was a teenaged newspaper reporter.

A collection of blistering, darkly humorous stories that upend the idyllic image of the Greek holiday island.
Seeking to escape the paralyzing effects of the Greek economic crisis, a group of Athenian friends move to an Aegean island in the hopes of starting over. Viewed with suspicion and disdain by the locals, they soon find themselves enmeshed in the same vicious cycle of money, power, and violence they thought they had left behind.

From one of modern Russia's finest writers, a spellbinding collection of eighteen stories, her first to be translated into English in more than twenty years. Ordinary realities and yearnings to transcend them lead to miraculous other worlds in this dazzling collection of stories. A woman's deceased father appears in her dreams with clues about the afterlife; a Russian professor in a small American town constructs elaborate fantasies during her cigarette...

As Ivan Ilyich lies dying he begins to re-evaluate his life, searching for meaning that will make sense of his sufferings. In "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" and the other works in this volume, Tolstoy conjures characters who, tested to the limit, reveal glorious and unexpected reserves of courage, or baseness of a near inhuman kind. Two vivid parables and "The Forged Coupon", a tale of criminality, explore class relations after the emancipation of the...

"Mark Haddon, author of the international bestselling novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and A Spot of Bother, returns with a collection of unsparing short stories In the prize-winning story "The Gun," a man's life is marked by a single afternoon and a rusty.45; in "The Island," a mythical princess is abandoned on an island in the midst of war; in "The Boys Who Left Home to Learn Fear," a cadre of sheltered aristocrats sets out...

Presents a collection of short stories dealing with the complexities and contradictions of everyday life in Germany prior to World War II.

Thirteen early stories of the Russian emigre master reveal the often lonely, forboding world of the exile.