Set during the American Civil War, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is the classic short story of Peyton Farquhar, a Confederate sympathizer condemned to death by hanging from Owl Creek Bridge. Flashing between the present and the past—from Peyton's thoughts as he stands on the bridge to his memories as a major Confederate supporter in the South—he creates parallel realities in which truth and fantasy become indistinguishable.A story of war, death, and the power of the mind, "An...

Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol during a period when the British were exploring and re-evaluating past Christmas traditions, including carols and newer customs such as Christmas trees. He was influenced by the experiences of his own youth and by the Christmas stories of other authors including Washington Irving and Douglas Jerrold. Dickens had written three Christmas stories prior to the novella, and was inspired following a visit to the Field Lane Ragged School, one of several establishme...

From haunting ghost stories to classic fairy tales, Going Public … In Shorts! is a collection of forty classic and lesser-known works by history's greatest writers.Among the stories included are "The Death of a Government Clerk," Anton Chekhov's defining vignette; "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," Mark Twain's comedic story that earned him national fame; "The Gift of the Magi," O. Henry's masterful Christmastime tale about love and sacrifice; and "The Stor...

On the same day that the stock market crashes in New York in 1929, the dark underside of Berlin flushes to the surface in the form of a burlap sack spewed by floodwaters from the city sewer system. What it contains calls Jewish Detective Willi Kraus to investigate perhaps the most vicious criminal heretofore known.

A Christmas Carol is a novella by Charles Dickens. A Christmas Carol tells the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, an old miser who is visited by the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. After their visits Scrooge is transformed into a kinder, gentler man.

During the final weeks of the Weimar Republic, a young woman washes up in the Havel River in picture-perfect Old Spandau. Bodies in rivers are hardly news in the chaos of 1932 Berlin, maddened by years of war, defeat, revolution, inflation, depravity, and now the Great Depression. But this one is different. Her dark hair is too short. Her wisdom teeth have been removed, something few German girls could afford. And her legs, dotted with suture marks, are bizarrely deformed, as if someone ha...

1786, Jerusalem College, Cambridge. The ghost of Sylvia Whichcote is rumored to be haunting Jerusalem, since disturbed fellow-commoner, Frank Oldershaw, claims to have seen the dead woman prowling the grounds.Desperate to salvage her son's reputation, Lady Anne Oldershaw employs John Holdsworth, author of The Anatomy of Ghosts, a stinging account of why ghosts are mere delusion to investigate. But his arrival in Cambridge disrupts an uneasy status quo as he glimpses a worl...

Pekkala: He was the Romanovs’ most trusted investigator. Now he’s Stalin’s greatest fear.He operates in the shadows of one of history’s most notorious regimes. He seeks the truth in a nation where finding it can mean death—or worse. His name his Inspector Pekkala, and this time he’s taking on a case with implications far deadlier than anything he can imagine: a shattering revelation that was never meant to be unearthed.Its official name is T-34, and this ma...

Spanning the tumultuous years of 1934 to 1948, John Lawton’s A Lily of the Field is a brilliant historical thriller from a master of the form. The book follows two characters—Méret Voytek, a talented young cellist living in Vienna at the novel’s start, and Dr. Karel Szabo, a Hungarian physicist interned in a camp on the Isle of Man. In his seventh Inspector Troy novel, Lawton moves seamlessly from Vienna and Auschwitz to the deserts of New Mexico and the rubble-strewn streets of p...

Olen Steinhauer's first two novels, The Bridge of Sighs and The Confession, launched an acclaimed literary crime series set in post–World War II Eastern Europe. Now he takes his dynamic cast of characters into the shadowy political climate of the 1960s. State Security Officer Brano Sev's job is to do what his superiors ask, no matter what—even if that means leaving his post to work the assembly line in a factory, fitting electrical wires into gauges. So when he gets a dir...

In 1975, a People’s Militia homicide investigator is on a plane for Istanbul when it is hijacked by Armenian terrorists. Before the Turkish authorities can fulfill the hijackers’ demands, the plane explodes in midair.Two investigators, a secret policeman and a homicide detective, are assigned to the case. Both believe that their superiors are keeping them in the dark, but they can’t figure out why … until they begin to realize that everything is connected to a seven-year-old murder...

The revolutionary politics and chaotic history at the heart of Olen Steinhauer’s literary crime series set in Eastern Europe have made it one of today’s most acclaimed, garnering two Edgar Award nominations and numerous other awards. Upon reaching the tumultuous 1980s, the series comes full circle as one of the People’s Militia’s earliest cases reemerges to torment its inspectors, including militia chief Emil Brod, the original detective on the case. His arrest of a revolutionary leader in...