The third volume of Somerset Maugham's Collected Short Stories" introduced by the author contains the celebrated series about Ashenden a secret service agent in World War I. Based on Maugham's own experiences with the British Intelligence service in Switzerland the stories are vignettes in which he dramatises both the romance & absurdity of espionage as well as its ruthlessness & brutality. Accountable only to 'R' Ashenden travels all over the Continent on assignments which entangle him with such characters as the traitor Grantley Caypor the passionate Guilia Lazzari & the sinister 'hairless Mexican'." ...

This classic collection of stories moves from England France & Spain to the silver sands of the South Pacific. It

Includes::

...

The stories in this collection move from Malaya to America & England & include some of Maughams most famous tales; Flotsam & Jetsam the story of an old woman trapped for years in a loveless marriage in the remote rubber plantations; The Man with the Scar & notably the opening story The Vessel of Wrath a tale of the unexpected love that grows between a devout missionary nurse & a drunken reprobate. In this second volume of his collected stories Maugham illustrates his characteristic wry perception of human foibles & his genius for evoking compelling drama from an acute sense of time & place. ...

All decent people live beyond their incomes nowadays & those who aren't respectable live beyond other peoples'. Saki (H.H. Munro) stands alongside Anton Chekhov & O Henry as a master of the short story. His extraordinary stories are a mixture of humorous satire irony & the macabre in which the stupidities & hypocrisy of conventional society are viciously pilloried. This collection

Includes:: Sredni Vastor & The Unrest Cure. ' We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth but like other married couples they sometimes live apart'

...

These outstanding stories of American award-winning novelist John Cheever show the power & range of one of the finest short story writers of the century. Stories of love & squalor set in a world in which momentary glimpses of brightness contend with time social change & the chaos of history. ...

Kafka was an obsessive writer who produced a huge volume of stories novels diaries & letters in his brief lifetime. The present volume

Includes:: all his available shorter fiction in a new collection edited & introduced by Gabriel Josipovici. The stories which range from tiny fragments to substantial narratives have been arranged both to illuminate one another & to illustrate Kafkas evolution as a writer
- which as Professor Josipovici shows is more complex & radical than often thought. The extensive prefatory essay is an introduction not only to the stories but also to Kafkas work as a whole.


...

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is the complete collection of short fiction from the world-renowned Lydia Davis. It is the winner of the Man Booker international prize 2013. Big rejoicing: Lydia Davis has won the Man Booker International prize. Never did a book award deliver such a true match-winning punch. Best of all a new audience will read her now & find her wit her vigour & rigour her funniness her thoughtfulness & the precision of form which mark Davis out as unique. Daring excitingly intelligent & often wildly comic [she] reminds you in a world that likes to bandy its words about what words such as economy precision & originality really mean. This is a writer as mighty as Kafka as subtle as Flaubert & as epoch-making in her own way as Proust. A two-liner from Davis or a seemingly throwaway paragraph will haunt. What looks like a game will open to deep seriousness; what looks like philosophy will reveal playfulness tragicomedy ordinariness; what looks like ordinariness will ask you to look again at Davis' writing. In its acuteness it always asks attentiveness & it repays this by opening up to its reader like possibility or like a bush covered in flowerheads. She's a joy. There's no writer quite like her". (Ali Smith). " What stories. Precise & piercing extremely funny. Nearly all are unlike anything you've ever read". (Metro). "I loved these stories. They are so well-written with such clarity of thought & precision of language. Excellent". (William Leith Evening Standard). " Remarkable. Some of the most moving fiction
- on death marriage children
- of recent years. To read Collected Stories is to be reminded of the grand echoing mind-chambers created by Sebald or recent Coetzee. A writer of vast intelligence & originality". (Independent on Sunday). "A body of work probably unique in American writing in its combination of lucidity aphoristic brevity formal originality sly comedy metaphysical bleakness philosophical pressure & human wisdom". (New Yorker). " Davis is a high priestess of the startling telling detail. She can make the most ordinary things such as couples talking or someone watching television bizarre almost mythical. I felt I had encountered a most original & daring mind". (Colm Toibin Daily Telegraph). Lydia Davis is the author of one novel & seven story collections the most recent of which was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is the recipient of a Mac Arthur Fellowship & was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts & Letters by the French government for her fiction & her translations of modern writers including Maurice Blanchot Michel Leiris & Marcel Proust."

...

Collected here are Gogols finest tales
- from the demon-haunted St Johns Eve to the strange surrealism of The Nose from the heart-rending
...

Once upon a time there was a huge family of children; & they were terribly terribly naughty." So begins " Nurse Matilda" the first of three books about the no-nonsense nanny who uses magic to rein in the mischievous children in her charge
- & changes their lives for ever."
...

Poet artist & mystic Kahlil Gibran was born in 1883 to a poor Christian family in Lebanon & emigrated to the United States as an adolescent. His masterpiece The Prophet" a book of poetic essays written in his youth has sold over eight million copies in more than twenty languages since its first publication in 1923. But all Gibran's works
- essays stories parables prose poems
- are imbued with equally powerful simplicity & wisdom whether meditating upon love marriage friendship work pleasure time or grief. Perhaps no other twentieth-century writer has touched the hearts & minds of so remarkably varied & widespread a readership. Included in this volume are " The Madman" " The Forerunner" " The Prophet" " Sand & Foam" " Jesus the Son of Man" " Earth Gods" " The Wanderer" " The Garden of the Prophet" " Prose Poems" " Spirits Rebellious" " Nymphs of the Valley" & "A Tear & a Smile"."

...