Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere.In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?The theme ...

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere.In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?The theme ...

In these more welcome days of equality between the sexes we usually forget that the often cited ‘Gentler Sex’ can have dark and disturbing trains of thought that are more than the equal of their male brethren. Indeed, they can manipulate words in a matter of lines from comforting and loving to dark, foreboding and utterly terrifying. These femme fatales really do create stories that leech vile characters into dark and disturbing quite horrific narratives.

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere.In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?The theme ...

*** Original and Unabridged Content. Made available by CLASSIC COLLECTION 600.***Synopsis:“THE BOOK THAT DORIAN GRAY LOVED AND THAT INSPIRED OSCAR WILDE”. Such is the enticing epigraph of one early translation of Huysmans’ cult novel of 1884, which is also routinely called the Bible of Decadence. Accurate descriptions, both, of this bizarre masterpiece which has reverberated ever since through high and popular culture.“Against Nature” (or in this version “Against Th...

It was on one of the last days in July, at ten o'clock in the evening, when the participants in that banquet assembled together. Date and year I have forgotten; indeed this would be interesting only to one's memory of details: and not to one's recollection of the contents of what experience. The spirit of the occasion and whatever impressions are recorded in one's mind under that heading, concerns only one's recollections; and just as generous wine gains in flavor by passing the Equator, b...

The Defendant by Gilbert Keith Chesterton is a compelling and provocative collection of essays that showcases Chesterton's unmatched ability to defend the overlooked, the misunderstood, and the unfashionable aspects of everyday life. In this work, Chesterton turns his sharp wit and philosophical insight toward a wide range of subjects—ordinary people, neglected virtues, and unpopular ideas—arguing that many things taken for granted or dismissed by society are, in fact, deeply valuable. Wit...

AN NYRB CLASSICS ORIGINALVirginia Woolf called Max Beerbohm “the prince” of essayists, F. W. Dupee praised his “whim of iron” and “cleverness amounting to genius,” while Beerbohm himself noted that “only the insane take themselves quite seriously.” From his precocious debut as a dandy in 1890s Oxford until he put his pen aside in the aftermath of World War II, Beerbohm was recognized as an incomparable observer of modern life and an essayist whose voice was always and only his own....

In "Shelley," Sydney Waterlow offers a profound exploration of the life and works of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, meticulously examining the intertwining threads of his personal experiences and poetic expressions. Waterlow'Äôs prose is both lyrical and analytical, reflecting Shelley'Äôs own stylistic flourishes while situating his contributions within the broader context of Romantic literature. The book navigates Shelley's tumultuous relationships, philosophical musings, and rad...