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There are many great English ghost stories, but they appear flimsy and emotionally spectral compared to the works of M. R. James. This selection gives the reader a flavour of his strange gifts. Often, the ghost is barely glimpsed and yet somehow sticks with the reader for years, making ordinary rooms or gardens or churches uncanny and threatening. Is that the kitchen cat? And what is it that terrible thing stalking about in the dolls’ house?
A Boston native travels to a small Maine town called Dunnet Landing. She finds room and board with an older woman named Almira Todd, a widow and local herbalist. During her stay, the visitor develops a close friendship with Mrs. Todd. She also lends an ear to the many residents she encounters throughout the village.
In ‘Lamb to the Slaughter,’ Roald Dahl, one of the world’s favourite authors, tells a twisted story about the darker side of human nature. Here, a wife serves up a dish that utterly baffles the police.
Best known for his existentialist novel ‘The Outsider’, set in French-occupied Algeria, Albert Camus was profoundly influenced by the landscapes, towns and traditions of his youth. Selected here are some of his finest personal essays about Algeria and its environs, including the luminous ‘Nuptials at Tipasa’, one of his earliest works where he developed the themes that would inform his later philosophy – to thrive now, without hope for paradise, as mortal life alone can be worthwhile.
On a cruise ship bound for Buenos Aires, a wealthy passenger challenges the world chess champion to a match. He agrees, but only on one condition – that the stakes are suitably high. Soon, the chessboard is surrounded with onlookers – and one voice in the crowd will play a key role in the outcome of the match.
Many years ago there lived an Emperor who was so terribly fond of beautiful new clothes that he spent all his money on dressing elegantly. Jewels in storytelling, these magical fairytales by Hans Christian Andersen were inspired by his own life as an outsider. From ‘The Little Mermaid’ to ‘The Red Shoes’, his fables show the ugliest of humanity – its power, greed, vanity – but also how suffering can lead to beauty.
I am a ridiculous man. They call me mad now. That would be a promotion in rank. A delusional man whose strange dream changes his life; a self-justifying husband who causes his wife’s suicide; a witness to a young girl’s ruin; a writer who stretches out on a gravestone and listens to the gossip of the dead – the narrators of these four confessional tales show how little we understand ourselves.
After a six-year hiatus, a man and a woman who used to be lovers or close friends meet in a café. An insightful study of relationships and nostalgic ideals, this story also looks at the difference money, or the lack of it, can make, especially if one half of a couple (romantic or otherwise) is financially better off than the other.
A dwarf is taken from his homeland and becomes the jester of a king particularly fond of practical jokes. Taking revenge on the king and his cabinet for striking his friend and fellow dwarf Trippetta, he dresses them as orangutans for a masquerade. In front of the king’s guests, Hop-Frog murders them all before escaping with Trippetta.
In these three witty and fantastical stories, Italo Calvino explores the sensory aptitudes of the body in taste, hearing and smell.
Guido has lost it all. At rock bottom and wandering the shore, Guido spies a misshapen creature floating toward him in the water, riding on a huge chest. The creature offers Guido a path of revenge – switching bodies for three days in exchange for the untold riches in the chest. Guido unfortunately fails to see a potential downside.
Following the death of his sister, middle-aged Dr Graesler leaves his winter home in Lanzarote for a health resort in Germany, where he practised medicine for many years. There he meets the Schleheim family, and is particularly drawn to their daughter Sabine. But a simple, stilted courtship soon unravels a web of hushed-up suicide and illicit sexual liaisons. Arthur Schnitzler’s tumultuous psychodrama remains as startling now as it did on first publication.
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