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  Maggie: A Girl of the Streets...

  Stephen Crane

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  First published in 1893, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is the first published fiction work of American author Stephen Crane. A harrowing depiction of a pretty young girl's life in the slums of turn-of-the-century New York City and her eventual decline into prostitution, Crane's novel is a starkly realistic examination of poverty and the challenges brought about by the rapid industrialization the United States underwent in the late 1800s. An enduring classic, Maggie is often regarded as the first example of naturalism in American fiction, a literary movement that included such authors as Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair. This edition also includes three of Crane's short stories: "The Monster," "The Blue Hotel," and "His New Mittens."

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  Don't Think

  Richard Burgin

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  Nine short stories from the acclaimed author of Man Without Memory exploring themes of love, family, and time. 
   
  Five-time Pushcart Prize–winner Richard Burgin’s stories have been praised by the New York Times Book Review as “eerily funny, dexterous, and too haunting to be easily forgotten,” with “characters of such variety that no generalizations about them can apply.” In Don’t Think, his ninth collection of short fiction, Burgin offers us his most daring and imaginatively varied work to date. The stories explore universal themes of love, family, and time, examining relationships and memory—both often troubled, fragmented, and pieced back together only when shared between characters. 
   
  In the title story, written in propulsive, musical prose, a divorced father struggles to cling to reality through his searing love for his highly imaginative son, who has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. In “Of Course He Wanted to Be Remembered,” two young women meet to commemorate the death of a former college professor with whom they were both unusually close—though in very different ways. In “V.I.N.,” a charismatic drug dealer tries to gain control of a bizarre cult devoted to rethinking life’s meaning in relation to infinite time, while in “The Intruder,” an elderly art dealer befriends a homeless young woman who has been sleeping in his basement. 
   
  Together, the nine stories in Don’t Think illuminate the astonishing fact of existence itself while justifying the Philadelphia Inquirer’s assessment that Burgin is one of America’s most distinctive storytellers. 
   
  “The author’s straightforward and suspense-driven storytelling voice is as compelling as ever, the stories somewhat spooky and darkly comic.” —Cleaver Magazine

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  Top 10 Short Stories The - The...

  Franz Kafka

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  Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart.  A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere. 
   
  In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?  
   
  The theme itself will form the boundaries for our stories which range from well-known classics, newly told, to stories that modern times have overlooked but perfectly exemplify the theme.  Throughout the volume our authors whether of instant recognition or new to you are all leviathans of literature. 
   
  Some you may disagree with but they will get you thinking; about our choices and about those you would have made.  If this volume takes you on a path to discover more of these miniature masterpieces then we have all gained something. 
   
  Whether Central Europe is part of East or West or both it is undeniable that it is also unto itself.  Its stories and literature are amongst the boldest narratives anywhere.  These authors have helped established the incredible literary heritage of all our ages. 
   
  01 - The Top 10 - The Central Europeans - An Introduction 
  2 - The New Paris by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 
  3 - A Hunger Artist by Franz Kafka 
  4 - A Legend of Old Egypt by Boleslaw Prus 
  5 - Gods in Exile by Heinrich Heine 
  6 - The Chamomile Drops by Jaroslav Hasek 
  7 - The Criminal from Lost Honour by Friedrich Schiller 
  8 - The Bundle of Letters by Moritz Jokai 
  9 - Vampirismus or Aurelia by E T A Hoffman 
  10 - The Vampire by Jan Neruda 
  11 - Wake Not the Dead by Johann Ludwig Tieck

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  Invisible Links

  Selma Lagerlöf

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  Selma Lagerlöf was born in Vaermland, Sweden, in 1858 and enjoyed a long and very successful career as a writer, receiving the Nobel-Price in Literature in 1909. She died in Vaermland in 1940. Invisible Links (Osynliga länkar) is a collection of short stories with an underlying theme about the links that influence and guide people’s actions and lives. It was first published in 1894 and the English translation in 1895. The stories are often set in Lagerloef’s Vaermland, but they also depict legends and history of Sweden, and some have connections to other works by Lagerloef. Invisible Links is a good introduction to the writings of Selma Lagerloef. (Summary by Lars Rolander)

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  The Moabite Cypher

  R. Austin Freeman

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  Coming to the aid of a man kicked by a rearing police horse, R. Austin Freeman's famous forsensic investigator, Dr. John Thorndyke, stumbles upon an anarchist plot to assassinate a visiting Russian grand duke. The key appears to be a cryptogram written in ancient Moabite found on the man's body.

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  The Shunned House

  H. P. Lovecraft

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  The narrator and his uncle delve into the history and secrets of the titular shunned house in Providence, where an astonishing number of people have died over generations.The Shunned House, as the first in Lovecraft's oeuvre, extensively utilizes the topography and family history of the author's native Providence. In the first part of the text, it resembles an extensive chronicle of the family residing in the titular 'shunned house.' The work also represents the author's first step into the realm of science fiction – the narrator attempts to explain the events unfolding in the context of the science of the early 20th century.

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