“By the Waters of Babylon” is a post-apocalyptic short story by Stephen Vincent Benét first published July 31, 1937, in The Saturday Evening Post as “The Place of the Gods”. It was republished in 1943 in The...
A HANDFUL OF DUST is Evelyn Waugh's scathing commentary on the well-mannered death struggles of the upper classes — an irrepressibly amusing picture of society politely blowing its own brains out, with a defiant smile.
It tells of Brenda,...
Three Kingdoms is a classic historical novel. It was also the first Chinese novel with each chapter headed by a couplet giving the gist of the content. It describes the power struggles among the kingdoms of Wei, Shu and Wu, headed by Cao Cao, Liu...
Enter the sublime, upside-down / inside-out world of William H. Gass. . in this case where the Eyes have it every which way, including up. . in a dazzling new collection of novellas and stories (six in all) from one of the most revered writers of...
The Prix Goncourt winning author of the scandalous The Kindly Ones returns with four new novellas that offer startlingly fresh depictions of age-old obsessions: sex and love, desiring and gazing, and the memories that take a lifetime to process....
Oreo is raised by her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. Her black mother tours with a theatrical troupe, and her Jewish deadbeat dad disappeared when she was an infant, leaving behind a mysterious note that triggers her quest to find him. What...
One of Dickens’ most enduringly popular stories is Oliver Twist, an early work published 1837-8. Like many of his later novels, its central theme is the hardship faced by the dispossessed and those of the outside of ‘polite’ society. Oliver...
There was an old story about a king who asked his favourite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn't show you your reflection. Instead, it showed you your soul — it showed you who you really were. But the king couldn't look into the...