Unsuccessful in his endeavours, the young and naive Peter Schlemihl seals a pact with the Devil in which he exchanges his shadow for the purse of Fortunatus, thereby gaining everlasting riches. But when he is ridiculed, persecuted and hated for being different from other men, he realizes that poverty is easier to bear than the loss of his peace of mind. Originally written as a cautionary tale for the children of Chamisso's patron, Peter Schlemihl was hailed by contemporaries as a masterpiece with a wide adult appeal, and continues to capture imaginations today.
Set against the beautiful backdrop of the Vosges mountains, Lenz tells the tale of the real-life writer J.M.R. Lenz's nineteen-day stay in Waldersbach in 1778, describing his wanderings around the mountainous surroundings and his worsening fits of madness, eventually culminating in his removal, under guard, to Strasbourg. Valued both as a chilling exploration of paranoid schizophrenia and an influential forerunner of literary modernism, this existential drama boasts a prose style startlingly ahead of its time.
The first story in this volume, How the Two Ivans Quarrelled, is an amusing portrayal of two exceptionally close friends, the mortal insult that drives them apart, and the ensuing chaos that occurs. This is Gogol's humour at its best, where the most irrelevant-seeming details and turns of phrase take on a bizarre life of their own. Ivan Krylov's Panegyric in Memory of My Grandfather has an ingenuous narrator praise the nobility and modesty of a landowner whose actions prove him to be otherwise.The two tales by Mikhail Saltykov are satirical attacks on civil servants and Russia's autocracy. The final piece, Tolstoy's Ivan the Fool, is a playful and allegorical critique of contemporary Russian society. Together, they represent some of Russia's finest comic writing before the twentieth century.
Simplicius Simplicissimus - the towering achievement of H.J.C. von Grimmelshausen, one of the earliest novelists in the German language - charts the adventures of its hero, Simplicius, through the horrors of battle, murder, fire and famine, offering an invaluable eyewitness account of the Thirty Years' War and showing how humanity can, in the end, triumph over brutality A work of great poetical beauty and satirical strength, and a lasting historical document of timeless value, Simplicius Simplicissimus is one of the greatest picaresque novels in the Western canon.
In 1864, Lewis Carroll sent Alice's Adventures Under Ground, a handwritten and illustrated manuscript, as a gift to Alice Liddell, the daughter of his Oxford dean. This formed the basis for Carroll's Alice in Wonderland - introducing timeless characters such as Alice, the White Rabbit, the Queen of Hearts and the Gryphon - although it differs considerably from the later work, with the author himself approving its publication in 1886. Alice's Adventures Under Ground provides an enchanting glimpse into Carroll's imaginative process, and deserves to be ranked as a classic for all ages in its own right.
Mademoiselle Charlotte, the new teacher, is not like the others: she wears a large hat and a crumpled dress that make her look like a scarecrow, and she talks to a rock. The children think she is craz
Having travelled from her native New York to London to meet her relatives, Isabel Archer, a young, independently minded young woman, rejects the marriage proposals of two suitors in her determination
Widely considered one of the greatest American novels, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn tells the story of Huck Finn and his companion, the slave Jim, as they journey down the Mississippi river after ru
Constantly rebuffed from the social circles he aspires to frequent, the timid clerk Golyadkin is confronted by the sudden appearance of his double, a more brazen, confident and socially successful ver
Anne is an orphan with a penchant for daydreaming and distinctive flaming-red hair that catches the eye of everyone she meets. She is overjoyed to be sent to Green Gables, the Cuthberts' farm, which s
When Conrad, son of Prince Manfred of Otranto, is killed in mysterious circumstances on his wedding day, his father, fearing his line is at an end, declares that he will divorce his wife and marry his
First published in 1855 and extended by the author over the course of more than three decades, Leaves of Grass embodies Walt Whitman's lifetime ambition to create a new voice that could capture the sp
Gilbert's libretti of the comic operas composed by Arthur Sullivan are hugely well known, and lines such as “let the punishment fit the crime” have entered the English lexicon – but his short stories
“Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.” Described by his friend Charles Lamb as “an archangel slightly damaged”, Coleridge was
“I have often been asked how I first came to be a regular opium-eater…”“I sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night – nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium p
“Pronounce quickly, monarch. If you die and make no sign on the subject, woe to Angria… The sword of war is unsheathed and the blade will rankle in many a bosom ere Adrian be cold in his grave.”Inspir
Ichabod Crane is a young schoolmaster from Connecticut now living in Sleepy Hollow, a settlement in New York State notorious for rumours of ghostly visitations, especially from the infamous Headless H
