Aeschylus

Aesop lived in the early sixth century BC on the island of Samos, which lies off the coast of modern Turkey. He originally came from Thrace which was a separate country in those days, though it now forms part of Greece and Bulgaria. Very little is known about his life except that he worked as a slave on Samos for a master called Iadmon, and that he became a very famous storyteller. He was so famous that almost any fable which could have been told by him became attributed to him.

Aesop

Afsaneh Knight

Afsaneh Moqadam

Afua Hirsch is a writer, filmmaker, and journalist. She is the author of Brit(ish), the Sunday Times bestseller that explores Britishness, identity and belonging, for which she was awarded the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Prize for Non-Fiction. She co-presented Enslaved, a 6-part series about the transatlantic slave trade with Samuel L Jackson. She is the presenter of the Audible podcast series We Need To Talk About the British Empire, and Africa Rising, an ongoing flagship series about art and culture for the BBC, through her production company Born in Me Productions. She is a longtime columnist for the Guardian and is a professor of journalism at the University of Southern California.

Afua Hirsch

AGAPI STASSINOPOULOS is an author, blogger and international speaker who inspires audiences around the world. She has spoken at many corporations and conferences, such as Nike Women, Starbucks,Time Inc., Virgin, Johnson &amp; Johnson and the American Heart Foundation. She was born in Athens and trained in London at RADA before gaining a Master’s in psychology at the University of Santa Monica. She has collaborated with her sister, Arianna Huffington, to develop talks and seminars, and has worked with the Oprah Winfrey network. She is currently hosting a new podcast series in collaboration with The Huffington Post, entitled ‘Sundays with Agapi’, which includes guided meditations and interviews with prominent guests. She lives in Los Angeles.

Agapi Stassinopoulos

Agatha Christie

Aggie MacKenzie

Aghnia Mardiyah is a London-based Illustrator and Character Designer with a passion for children's books and animation. She is drawn to fun, bright and vibrant colours. When she isn't disappearing under piles of work, she loves to travel! Exploring foreign places, exciting new sights and sensations is what inspires her the most!

Aghnia Mardiyah

Agnes Callard is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. Her primary areas of specialization are ancient philosophy and ethics. She has written for The New York Times, New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper’s, Boston Review, and penned a monthly column for the Point. From 2019 to 2020, she held a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for the research that contributes to this book.

Agnes Callard

Agnes Jekyll

Agnes Bertha Marshall (24 August 1855-29 July 1905) was an English culinary entrepreneur who became a leading cookery writer, dubbed the 'Queen of Ices'. Her 1888 cookery book included a recipe for 'cornets with cream', possibly the earliest publication of the edible ice cream cone. Marshall was born in Walthamstow. She wrote four books: Ices Plain and Fancy: The Book of Ices (1885), Mrs A B Marshall's Book of Cookery (1888), Mrs A B Marshall's Larger Cookery Book of Extra Recipes (1891) and Fancy Ices (1894).

Agnes Marshall

Agnes Prus

Agri Ismaïl is a Kurdish author based in Sweden who has worked as a corporate lawyer in London, Dubai, and Iraqi Kurdistan. His work has been published in The White Review, The Rumpus, Litro, 3:AM Magazine, and Asymptote amongst other places. His piece 'Haunted Home' won the 2016 Stack award for best non-fiction for The Outpost, runner-up in the Lifted Brow &amp; RMIT non/fictionLab Prize for Experimental Non-Fiction, and he was longlisted for the 2017/2018 Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize. Hyper is his first novel.

Agri Ismaïl

Aharon Appelfeld authored more than 45 acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction and received many international awards including the MLA Commonwealth Award, the Independent Foreign Fiction prize, the prix Médicis étranger, the Israel prize, and the Nelly Sachs prize. Born in Czernowitz, Bukovina (now part of Ukraine) in 1932, he survived the Holocaust and passed away in Israel in 2018.

Aharon Appelfeld

Ahmadou Kourouma

Ahmed Alnaouq is a Palestinian journalist and human rights activist based in London. He is the co-founder and director of We Are Not Numbers and a journalist with Palestine Deep Dive. Ahmed holds a degree in English Literature from Al-Azhar university in Gaza, and an MA in International Journalism from Leeds University, where he was a Chevening Scholar. 
 
Pam Bailey is a social-justice activist and journalist based in Washington DC. She lived and worked in the Gaza Strip following the 2008/9 Israeli assault, and co-founded We Are Not Numbers. Today, in addition to her ongoing dedication to the Palestinian cause, she dedicates herself to two nonprofits that advocate for people detained in American prisons -- including one she co-founded in 2020, called More Than Our Crimes.

Ahmed Alnaouq

Ahmed Errachidi

Ahmed Rashid

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar

Ahron Bregman is the author of four books about Israel and the Arabs: The Fifty Years War (with Jihan el Tahri), Israel's Wars, A History of Israel and Elusive Peace. He teaches at the Department of War Studies, King's College London.

Ahron Bregman

Ai Qing is regarded as one of the finest modern Chinese poets, whose free verse was influential in the development of new poetry in China.

Ai Qing

Ai Weiwei

Aidan Chambers was born in County Durham in 1934. After national service in the Royal Navy he became a teacher and then, for seven years, a monk. His young adult novels have been widely acclaimed, with POSTCARDS FROM NO-MAN'S LAND winning the prestigious Carnegie Medal and the US Michael L Printz Award. With his wife Nancy he ran Signal magazine and he has served as the president of the School Library Association. His devoted services to children's literature were recognised by his receipt of the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 2002.

Aidan Chambers

Aidan Higgins was born in 1927. Langrishe Go Down, his first novel, won the James Tait Black memorial Prize and the Irish Academy of Letters Award, and was later filmed for television with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. His second novel, Balcony of Europe, was shortlisted for the 1972 Booker Prize. The novel Lions of the Grunewald appeared in 1993 and a collection of shorter fiction, Flotsam and jetsam, in 1996. Donkey's Years and Dog Days were the first two volumes of the Higgins Bestiary which concludes with this volume.

Aidan Higgins

Aidan Mathews

Aidan Potts

Aidan Smith

Aidan Storey

Aidan Trimble is the Chief Instructor to the Federation of Shotokan Karate and a former British, European and World Karate Champion, winning the world title in Tokyo - the home of Karate. Aidan has trained with some of the world's leading teachers of 'traditional' and 'sport' karate and is now an award-winning instructor and teacher who is in demand throughout the world. He can be contacted via www.fsk-karate.com.

Aidan Trimble

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Will Self

A moving, hilarious and scabrous portrayal of egos, appetites and addictions, Liver is an extraordinary examination of lives out of control and beyond saving by the pre-eminent chronicler of our neuroses and our times.

Liver

And Other Stories

'Self at his most nihilistic and funny; you'll laugh and flinch at the same time' Guardian 
 
'Self has turned out a hilarious collection, with the requisite touch of disorientation. "Flytopia", the story about a man who suddenly finds flies more lovable than his girlfriend, follows the Kafkaesque line Self opened with his recent novel Great Apes- man as animal... "Story for Europe", about a two-year-old north Londoner who suddenly starts speaking business German, is comic genius' New Statesman 
 
'When Will Self wants to step outside his cultivated amoral threshold and shock us into rage, the effect can be profound. This is Self's third short-story collection and like all the best books it delivers what its title promises... an awesome London Dungeon of a collection... Self is a massive talent' Time Out

Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys

Ali Smith

Distinguished by Smith's trademark ability to unearth flashes of truth and depth in the everyday, The First Person and Other Stories sparkles with warmth and humanity. In one story, a middle-aged woman conducts a poignant conversation with her fourteen-year-old self. In another, an innocent supermarket shopper finds in her trolley a foul-mouthed, insulting, yet beautiful child. And in a third story that challenges the boundaries between fiction and reality, the narrator, 'Ali', drinks tea, phones a friend, and muses on the surprising similarities between a short story and a nymph... 
 
Fans of Ali Smith will be delighted, amused and moved by these stories from a writer at the very top of her game.

The First Person and Other Stories

Colm Liddy

Couples. 
 
Couples at war. 
Couples apparently at peace - with war simmering beneath the surface. 
Desire frustrated. 
Desire, satisfied - but in surprising ways. 
Revenge at its most creative. 
Reconciliation at its most tender. 
Love. Perhaps. 
 
Here is the story of how couples are forever tripped up by the missteps of love and sex. 
 
This delightfully puckish and highly original work gets under the skin of relationships through the ages - showing the infinity of ways men and women drive each other crazy, yet remain essential to one another.

40 Fights Between Husbands and Wives

John Buchan

In 'The Strange Adventures of Mr Andrew Hawthorn' and the other stories in this collection, peculiar worlds of temptation, adventure or iniquity are perilously close at hand. Mr Hawthorn himself steps outside to allow his porridge to cool and disappears for five years and more, a Glasgow grocer is shipwrecked and ultimately worshipped as a god, a young mathematician discovers an entirely new aspect of reality and becomes terrified by what he finds there, and an ageing sinner clings grimly, weakly to a hard-won life of decency: John Buchan in each demonstrating his abilities as a gripping writer of short stories. 
 
In his introduction, Giles Foden explores Buchan's innate sense of the fascination held by sudden jeopardy and vanished comfort, and the themes of the will and fate in his work.

The Strange Adventures of Mr Andrew Hawthorn & Other Stories

F. Scott Fitzgerald

<a href="https://shop.penguin.co.uk/collections/book-bundles-modern-classics/?&amp;utm_source=Penguin.co.uk&amp;utm_medium=Linked_text&amp;utm_campaign=Penguin_Modern_Classics_Series_26_06">Choose 3 timeless classics for only £21 over on the Penguin Shop</a>

Born an old man, Benjamin Button lived a very curious life, backwards 
 
When Benjamin Button's father arrives at hospital he is surprised and ashamed to find his new baby boy is a weathered, aged man, for all appearances no younger than seventy years old. As time goes by, young Benjamin comes to no longer require a cane, his hair ceases to be grey, his limbs become less frail, his wrinkles less deep, but still the world around him fails to come to terms with his oddness, as he ages towards infancy and beyond ... 
 
This remarkable, imaginative tale is here accompanied by a story of the desperate measures required by limitless wealth, and another about the lengths (and cuts) a girl is willing to go to for popularity. 
 
Includes A Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Bernice Bobs Her Hair.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

And Two Other Stories

Edgar Allan Poe

However you try to escape it, horror is always there 
 
Outside the abbey&rsquo;s armoured walls, the common poor are ravaged by a grisly pestilence known as the &lsquo;Red Death&rsquo;, while within, safe and untroubled, the happy Prince Prospero hosts lavish entertainments. But, in their immodest comfort, the Prince and his guests are not as safe as they hope from the horrors of the outside world &hellip; 
 
In &lsquo;The Masque of the Red Death&rsquo; and other tales of gothic horror, Edgar Allan Poe writes as no one else ever has of creeping, mounting terrors &ndash; of torments of ingenious, malevolent tormentors and of a mind&rsquo;s own sickening madness.

The Masque of the Red Death

Ambrose Bierce

Death awaits them all &hellip; 
 
A man stares into the deep river swirling beneath him &ndash; hands tied, noose around his neck &ndash; and waits for the order to end his life. Another is trapped for eternity in a room full of corpses. A cowering woman is strangled in the dead of night. 
 
These are just some of the countless victims for whom all hope is lost in Ambrose Bierce&rsquo;s chilling stories of death, delusion and the supernatural.

The Spook House

Terrifying Tales of the Macabre

The Book of Other People is just that: a book of other people. Open its covers and you&rsquo;ll make a whole host of new acquaintances. Nick Hornby and Posy Simmonds present the ever-diverging writing life of Jamie Johnson; Hari Kunzru twitches open his net curtains to reveal the irrepressible Magda Mandela (at 4:30a.m., in her lime-green thong); Jonathan Safran Foer's Grandmother offers cookies to sweeten the tale of her heart scan; and Dave Eggers, George Saunders, David Mitchell, Colm T&oacute;ib&iacute;n, A.M. Homes, Chris Ware and many more each have someone to introduce to you, too. 
 
With an introduction by Zadie Smith and brand-new stories from over twenty of the best writers of their generation from both sides of the Atlantic, The Book of Other People is as dazzling and inventive as its authors, and as vivid and wide-ranging as its characters.

The Book of Other People

Zhu Wen

An immediate sensation upon publication in China, I Love Dollars makes high comedy out of modern everyday life in China. In the title story, a young man, acutely aware of his filial duty, sets out to secure a prostitute for his father, only to haggle his old man out of a good time. This and other stories amplify China&rsquo;s identity crisis in post-Mao settings ranging from an old Yangtze River vessel to failing factories, cheap diners, and a for-profit hospital run according to dated socialist norms. Through a cast of brilliantly drawn characters, Zhu Wen&rsquo;s stories create a vivid portrait of contemporary China &mdash; its wealth and poverty, humour and chaos.

I Love Dollars

And Other Stories of China

Henry James

The stories in this collection were written mostly between 1888 and 1897, a time when Henry James&rsquo;s writing was concerned with the art of fiction and the position of the artist in society. The motif and title story, &lsquo;The Figure in the Carpet&rsquo;, is an inspired joke, a masterpiece of double-entendre that demands the reader&rsquo;s undivided love and attention and continues to baffle its critics. Also included are &lsquo;The Author of Beltraffio&rsquo;, an absorbing story of family infighting, authorship and tragedy, and &lsquo;The Private Life&rsquo;, a spirited tale that considers the contrast between the artist alone and at work. While many of these stories appear to be elaborate Jamesian games, all employ irony and humour to allegorize artistic creation.

The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories

Alison MacLeod

Sexy, tender, funny and haunting by turns, the stories in Alison MacLeod's daring new collection are tales of lovers, would-be lovers and lovers gone wrong.  Here we discover ECT patient Gloria, who falls for her anaesthetist, 'Dr Numb'; the cerebral Nick, who chases after the heavily pregnant Katie at an Ikea sale; and the legendary lovers Heloise and Abelard re-imagined for the twenty-first century.  With settings that range from a cheap Paris café to London's Hayward Gallery, and from the Brighton seafront to the Nova Scotia coast, these stories are at times magical, at times grittily real, but always affecting.

Fifteen Modern Tales of Attraction

6 of the Roaring Twenties chronicler&rsquo;s most scintillating short stories, chosen from Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and Tales of the Jazz Age (1922). This inexpensive volume comprises &quot;The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,&quot; &quot;The Ice Palace,&quot; &quot;Bernice Bobs Her Hair,&quot; &quot;May Day,&quot; &quot;The Jelly-Bean,&quot; and &quot;The Offshore Pirate.&quot;

The Diamond As Big As the Ritz And Other Stories

The Diamond As Big As the Ritz; Bernice Bobs Her Hair; the Ice Palace; May Day; the Bowl

Sharon Mehdi

Sometimes, great change starts with the smallest action ... 
 
One day, two grandmothers meet in the park, with a remarkably ambitious goal in mind. More and more women decide to join them and the impact on their community soon makes international news. Together, these women discover that great things are possible, and that by showing a simple act of solidarity they have the power to transform the world.

The Great Silent Grandmother Gathering

A Story for Anyone Who Thinks She Can't Save the World

Kim Edwards

Young, fiery and bright, Eshlaini has her whole future ahead of her &ndash; until her father condemns her to a life of spinsterhood. 
 
Joyce has settled into Malaysian life after thirty years as an ex-pat wife &ndash; or so she thinks, until a newcomer arrives and reveals just how little of her home she knows. 
 
Jade Moon wants the best for her family &ndash; but, surrounded by Americans who reject her Korean traditions, she must first work out what &lsquo;the best&rsquo; means. 
 
Though cultures and distances separate them, their experiences reflect our universal fears and desires. From a breathtaking island off Singapore to upstate New York and France, Kim Edwards takes in the world, compassionately and gracefully exploring the obstacles of time, place and circumstance in all of our quests for love, happiness and acceptance.

The Secrets of a Fire King

G K Chesterton

Immortalized in these famous stories, G. K. Chesterton's endearing amateur sleuth has entertained countless generations of readers. For, as his admirers know, Father Brown's cherubic face and unworldly simplicity, his glasses and his huge umbrella, disguise a quite uncanny understanding of the criminal mind at work. This edition includes seven tales from a number of G. K. Chesterton's 'Father Brown' books.

Father Brown Stories

Micheal O Muircheartaigh

Miche&aacute;l &Oacute; Muircheartaigh is best known as the voice of the GAA. But his interests and enthusiasms &ndash; sporting and non-sporting &ndash; go far beyond the fields of Gaelic games. In his new book, the follow-up to his bestselling memoir From D&uacute;n S&iacute;on to Croke Park, Miche&aacute;l brings us along on his travels around the world, and to the villages, townlands and sporting fields of the four provinces of Ireland. He recalls great days at the races and in sporting stadiums big and small, and great nights in the dance halls. Above all, he tells the stories of these places and the people he has encountered there &ndash; stories told as only Miche&aacute;l can tell them.

From Borroloola to Mangerton Mountain

Travels and Stories from Ireland's Most Beloved Broadcaster

Since their first publication in the 1830s and 1840s, Edgar Allan Poe's extraordinary Gothic tales have established themselves as classics of horror fiction and have also created many of the conventions which still dominate the genre of detective fiction. As well as being highly enjoyable, Poe's tales are works of very real intellectual exploration. Attentive to the historical and political dimensions of these very American tales, this new selection places the most popular -- `The Fall of the House of Usher', `The Masque of the Red Death', `The Murders in the Rue Morgue; and `The Purloined Letter' -- alongside less well-known travel narratives, metaphysical essays and political satires.

Selected Tales

Franz Kafka

Drawing directly on original manuscripts, this collection comprises the major short stories published after Kafka&rsquo;s death. It includes The Great Wall of China, Blumfeld, An Elderly Bachelor, Investigations of a Dog and his great sequences of aphorisms, with fables and parables on subjects ranging from the legend of Prometheus to the Tower of Babel. Allegorical, disturbing and possessing a dream-like clarity, these writings are quintessential Kafka.

The Great Wall of China

Oscar Wilde

These special fairy tales, which Oscar Wilde made up for his own sons, include 'The Happy Prince', who was not as happy as he seemed; 'The Selfish Giant', who learned to love little children; 'The Star Child', who suffered bitter trials when he rejected his parents. . . . Often whimsical and sometimes sad, they all shine with poetry and magic.

The Happy Prince and Other Stories

Philip Ó Ceallaigh

A performance artist opens his chest and displays his beating heart on stage. A young man walks through the hills of south-west Romania, where the locals have peculiar ideas about gold. On the morning of a medical examination, a woman tries to coax her husband off the roof. A smuggler pays off an old debt to his sister and resigns himself to a life of honest toil in the mine-shafts of his home town. A mysterious rodent named Brigitte enters the lives of two old men. And, in the astonishing long story 'In the Neighbourhood', the inhabitants of a crumbling tower-block go about their business, unforgettably. The stories of Philip &Oacute; Ceallaigh create a world that is utterly original and yet immediately recognizable - a world of ordinary people grappling with work and idleness, ambition and frustration, wildness and sobriety, love and lust and decay. Scabrously honest, screamingly funny and beautifully crafted, Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse is a brilliant debut from a writer who cannot be ignored by anyone who cares about the art of fiction.

Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse

Anthology of winning entries in The decibel Penguin Prize.

The Decibel Penguin Prize Anthology: Volume 1

New Voices from a Diverse Culture

Penelope Lively

"Story-telling is an ingrained habit; I wouldn't know what else to do. But the mythology that is intriguing today is that of imagined alternatives. Somehow, choice and contingency have landed you where you are, as the person that you are, and the whole process seems so precarious that you look back at those climatic moments when things might have gone differently, when life might have spun off in some other direction, and wonder at this apparently arbitrary outcome" 
In this fascinating new piece of fiction, Penelope Lively takes moments from her own life and asks "what if" she had made other choices: what if she hadn't escaped from Alexandria at the outbreak of WWII? What would her life have been like if she had become pregnant when she was 18? If she had married someone else? If she taken a different job? If she had lived her life abroad? In this highly original work, Penelope Lively examines alternative destinies, choices and the moments in our lives when we could have chosen a different path....

Making It Up

Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers has championed the cause of the short story so magnificently that through his McSweeney's magazine and its many imitators the form is once again in the ascendancy. Yet while celebrating the work of others, Eggers has also proved time and again that he himself is one of the modern masters of the form. This unmissable collection is Eggers's first, and showcases his talents in a variety of stories that are short-short, short-long and every length in between; and in stories that are dark, funny, inspiring, daring and endlessly inventive (including the acclaimed Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly). In short, these stories will make you appreciate that Dave Eggers and the short story were made for each other - and in turn, for you.

How We Are Hungry

John Updike

Gathering together almost all the short fiction that John Updike published between 1953 and 1975, this collection opens with Updike's autobiographical stories about a young boy growing up during the Depression in a small Pennsylvania town.  There follows tales of life away from home, student days, early marriage and young families, and finally Updike's experimental stories on 'The Single Life'.  Here, then, is a rich and satisfying feast of Updike - his wit, his easy mastery of language, his genius for recalling the subtleties of ordinary life and the excitements, and perils, of the pursuit of happiness.

The Early Stories

1953-1975

Mark Mitchell

David Leavitt

The diversity - and unity - of gay love and experience in the twentieth century is celebrated in this acclaimed anthology, which includes twenty-one stories from the original collection, published in 1994, together with fifteen new stories. The texts range from the tender unarticulated longings of D.H. Lawrence's A Poem of Friendship to the explicit sexual. Writers include both men and women, gay and straight, amongst them: John Updike, Edna O'Brien, E.M. Forster, Annie Proulx, William Trevor and Edmund White.

The New Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories

Individually lucid and luminous, these formally inventive and exquisite tales resonate subtly together.  In examining the distances and connections between ourselves and others, and lightly and expertly inching us closer to the bone, storytelling itself has never seemed so necessary, so moving or so joyous.

The Whole Story and Other Stories

John Mortimer

We last left Rumpole in his hospital bed after his sudden collapse in court. Now our hero finds himself in the Primrose Path nursing home - or a hospice as he persists in describing it. Things aren't looking good for Rumpole - until suddenly he begins to sense there's something wrong with the place, and all his intelligence and formidable insight into human behaviour come to the fore again. And once he has solved the mystery of the Primrose Path nursing home, Rumpole finds the briefs fly thick and fast again. 
This collection of six brand-new Rumpole stories shows the legendary advocate on top form.

Rumpole and the Primrose Path

This new volume of eight short stories offers students of German at all levels the opportunity to enjoy a wide range of contemporary literature in the original, with the aid of parallel translations. 
 
The majority of these stories have been written in the past decade, and reflect a rich diversity of styles and themes. Complete with notes, the stories make excellent reading in either language.

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