When Edward J. O'Brien asked me to cooperate with him in choosing each year's best English short stories, to be published as a companion volume to his annual selection of the best American short stories, I had not realized that at the end of my arduous task, which has involved the reading of many hundreds of stories in the English magazines of an entire year, I should find myself asking the simple question: What is a short story?

Table of ContentsHonore de Balzac: An Historical MysteryJohn Buchan: The Thirty-Nine StepsEgerton Castle: The Baron's QuarryEdmund Clerihew Bentley: Trent's Last CaseGilbert Keith Chesterton:The Man Who Knew Too MuchThe Man Who Was ThursdayFather Brown:The Innocence of Father BrownThe Wisdom of Father BrownRobert Erskine Childers: Riddle of the SandsAgatha Christie:The Mysterious Af...

Elliott O'Donnell once claimed he saw a ghost, but regardless of whether he actually did, he certainly wrote about them, and his ghost stories continue to be widely read today.

A chemist's life is transformed by the wonders of selling snake oil in this satire of early–twentieth century capitalism by the author of The Time Machine.As a young assistant chemist, George Ponderevo rode his uncle's coattails to a great fortune. His uncle Edward's meteoric rise was all thanks to a miraculous patent medicine, Tono-Bungay—which George knew to be nothing more than sugar water. Though it provided none of its promised curative effects, Tono-...

Twelve Stories and a Dream -- "A Dream of Armageddon": "That book," he repeated, pointing a lean finger, "is about dreams. Dreams tell you nothing." I did not catch his meaning for a second. "They don't know," he added. I looked a little more attentively at his face. "There are dreams," he said, "and dreams." Also includes "Filmer," "The Magic Shop," "The Valley of Spiders," "The Truth about Pyecraft," "Mr. Skelmersdale in Fairyland," "The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost," "Jimmy Goggles ...

Hector Hugh Munro (18 December 1870 – 14 November 1916), better known by the pen name Saki, and also frequently as H. H. Munro, was a British writer whose witty, mischievous and sometimes macabre stories satirize Edwardian society and culture. He is considered a master of the short story, and often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker. Influenced by Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling, he himself influenced A. A. Milne, Noël ...

This book, newly updated, contains now several HTML tables of contents that will make reading a real pleasure! The first table of contents (at the very beginning of the ebook) lists the titles of all novels included in this volume. By clicking on one of those titles you will be redirected to the beginning of that work, where you'll find a new TOC that lists all the chapters and sub-chapters of that specific work. This book contains the following works arranged alphabetically by authors las...

A brilliant romantic novel that traces the generational pulls of love and fidelityAt seventeen, Ellen Melville's life is filled with passion for the suffrage movement, her mother, and Edinburgh, if not romance. Then Richard Yaverland, a successful older man, enters her life. Haunted by his own illegitimacy, Richard wants to avert the pain that left his mother a bitter woman even as he kindles a passionate romance. As Ellen and Richard tentatively try on the roles o...

David Herbert Lawrence was the son of a coal-miner and a mother from a family with middle-class aspirations. He was a poet, novelist, travel writer, playwright, art critic as well as one of the most consummate short story writers of the twentieth century. For the first time, all of Lawrence’s sixty-seven short stories are collected in a single volume. The settings range from the scenes of his Nottinghamshire boyhood and his teaching years to the world of his travels, but the stories always...

This early work by Anna Katharine Green was originally published at the turn of the 20th century and we are now republishing it with a brand new introduction. 'Room Number 3' is one of Green's novels of crime and mystery. Anna Katharine Green was born in Brooklyn, New York, USA in 1846. She aspired to be a writer from a young age, and corresponded with Ralph Waldo Emerson during her late teens. When her poetry failed to gain recognition, Green produced her first and best-known novel, The L...