Showing 145–156 of 236 resultsSorted by latest
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In some of these stories shadowy people pass through, cooped up by life, mangled by it, with nowhere to escape to. Their dreams lie stifled, smothered by routine and repetition, and frustrations lurk in all the corners. In others, elusive glimpses of fleeting happiness, which flutter away before they can be snatched, waylay their victims. Like the shimmer of the sea, the gleam of a glass caught by the sun, they sparkle brilliantly only to dissolve again. Two of the stories, ‘First Love’ and ‘Mademoiselle O’, are autobiographical, and ‘The Assistant Producer’ is based on real events, but the rest are pure flights of fantasy – or the stuff that life is weaved of?
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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.
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Seventeen-year-old Charity Royall feels trapped in the decaying town of North Dormer. One summer afternoon, Lucius Harney walks into the library where she works and sets off a chain of events that changes her life forever.
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Introducing ‘Little Clothbound Classics’, irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world’s greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith. Celebrating the range and diversity of ‘Penguin Classics’, they take us from snowy Japan to springtime Vienna, from haunted New England to a sun-drenched Mediterranean island, and from a game of chess on the ocean to a love story on the moon. Sam Selvon is now widely considered to be one of the greatest chroniclers of the West Indian emigrant experience. His evocation of voice, of place, of longing, defined for many the experience of a generation. Describing life in the Caribbean and day-to-day adventures in London, this collection features many his most acclaimed stories, including ‘The Village Washer’, ‘A Drink of Water’ and ‘The Cricket Match’.
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Filled with rich description and luxurious beauty, these ten tales of loss and longing from one of Japan’s greatest writers show the pull between duty and desire, ecstasy and death: a mother lost in mourning, a moonlit journey to fulfil a wish, a night of infidelity, a young lieutenant who ends his life.
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Thirteen short tales from one of the most blistering and innovative writers of the twentieth century. The small incidents of life become moments of inner revelation in the luminous writing of Clarice Lispector. A woman contemplating a vase of roses after a nervous breakdown; a tangled mother-daughter relationship; a man’s abandonment of a dog; an animal in a zoo; an egg: each one leads to mystery and self-discovery, delight and devastation.
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In ‘Babylon Revisited’ a man goes to Paris to gain custody of his daughter, but his plans go disasterously awry. In ‘The Cut-Glass Bowl’ a wedding present becomes a curse for fading beauty. In ‘The Lost Decade’ a writers’ lunch becomes a meditation on the tragedy of lost time.
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When a small-time crook is murdered on the Mediterranean island of Porquerolles it transpires he had fervently declared his friendship with Maigret beforehand. The famous French detective, with a Scotland Yard observer in tow, must travel there to investigate.
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Published in 1899, ‘The Awakening’ ignited a firestorm of controversy. Reviewers criticized the book for its tacit endorsement of adultery, its frank depiction of a woman’s sexual frustration, and its overt rejection of conventional expectations for women’s roles and behaviour.
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Cecile leads a hedonistic, frivolous life with her father and his young mistresses. On holiday in the South of France, she is seduced by the sun, the sand and her first lover. But when her father decides to remarry, their carefree existence becomes clouded by tragedy.
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Addressing a chance acquaintance in an Amsterdam bar, Jean-Baptiste Clamence remarks that Amsterdam’s concentric circles resemble the circles of hell. Clamence, a successful barrister realises the deep-seated hypocrisy of his existence.
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In a rocky cove in the bay of Hakata, the bodies of a young and beautiful couple are discovered. Stood in the coast’s wind and cold, the police see nothing to investigate: the flush of the couple’s cheeks speaks clearly of cyanide, of a lovers’ suicide. But in the eyes of two men, Torigai Jutaro, an old and shabby detective, and Kiichi Mihara, a young gun from Tokyo, something is not quite right. Together, they will begin to pick at the knot of a unique and calculated crime.
