Flaubert's most famous short work meditates on the unexamined, futile life of a servant and her beloved parrot.
This horrifying, semi-autobiographical feminist story of imprisonment and madness scandalized nineteenth-century society.
Two devastating stories of faith and sacrifice from Balzac's panorama of nineteenth-century French life.
A ghostly child roams the Northumberland moors, while fairytale characters gather at a strange party, in these two Victorian gothic tales.
Austen's riotous early stories of drunks, poisoners and prison-break, written for her family entertainment when she was a teenager.
Glittering essays by the Renaissance master of the form, exploring contradictions in human thoughts and actions.
Bawdy tales of pimps, cuckolds, lovers and clever women from the fourteenth-century Florentine masterpiece The Decameron
Enduring myths of vengeful gods and tragically flawed mortals from ancient Rome's great poet.
Ranging across Scandinavia, England and Ireland, a Viking-age epic of two poets in doomed pursuit of Helga the Fair
Swift's ferocious, landmark eighteenth-century political satire on how to solve a famine in Ireland