Little Clothbound Classics

Late into the night we talked of love and its complications

Bonjour Tristesse is the story of seventeen-year-old Cécile, and one long, hot summer that will change her life.

Cécile leads a golden, carefree existence with her widowed playboy father and his mistresses. On holiday on the French Riviera, she is seduced by the sun, the sand and her first lover. But when her father decides to remarry, their perfect world becomes clouded by tragedy.

Françoise Sagan was born in France. Bonjour Tristesse, published in 1954 when she was just nineteen, became a succès de scandale and even earned its author a papal denunciation. Sagan went on to write many other novels, plays and screenplays, and died in 2004.

Translated by Heather Lloyd

They had senselessly begun to abuse each other’s love, tear it into shreds

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s exquisite, poignant tales of longing, dreams and regret embody all the dazzle and disillusionment of America’s Jazz Age.

Spanning the Roaring Twenties from giddy excitement to the Wall Street Crash, these stories portray, among other things, a young girl’s desire to be popular; the curious case of a man who lives backwards; the lost memories of a southern belle; and an American atoning for his dissolute past in Paris.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night, is regarded as one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers. He was working on his final novel, The Last Tycoon, when he died in Hollywood in 1940.

She had always thought of love as something confused and furtive, and he made it as bright and open as the summer air

A tale of forbidden passion, Summer depicts a young woman who wants to live and love on her own terms.

Seventeen-year-old Charity Royall is desperate to escape her hard-drinking adoptive father in rural Massachusetts. When a young city architect visits for the summer, it offers her hope for a new life. But will their affair bring her the freedom she craves?

Edith Wharton was famous for her novels including The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome and The Age of Innocence, for which she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in 1921.

It was the height of summer, and there was anger in the rays of the sun

Filled with rich description and luxurious beauty, these ten tales of loss and longing from one of Japan’s greatest writers show the pull between duty and desire, ecstasy and death: a mother lost in mourning, a moonlit journey to fulfil a wish, a night of infidelity, a young lieutenant who ends his life.

Yukio Mishima was a novelist, playwright, poet, actor, bodybuilder and Samurai, whose writing broke social boundaries when Japan was in a state of rapid change. In 1970 he performed seppuku, a ritual suicide, upon himself after initiating a failed military coup. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature three times.

Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker, Ivan Morris, Donald Keene and Geoffrey W. Sargent

I somehow acquired the feeling that she was less happy than I, less loved

Thirteen stylishly inventive stories make up Nabokov's baker's dozen. From Russia to the Mediterranean, a German lake to new worlds, these tales of memory and escape show elusive glimpses of fleeting happiness, which, like the shimmer of the sea, sparkle brilliantly only to dissolve again.

Vladimir Nabokov, born in St Petersburg, exiled in Cambridge, Berlin and Paris, became the greatest Russian writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Fleeing to the US with his family in 1940, he then became the greatest writer in English of the second half of the century, famous for his novels, stories, an autobiography, poems, plays, essays and reviews.

You could be lonely as hell in the city, then one day you look around you and you realise everybody else is lonely too

Sam Selvon is one of the greatest chroniclers of West Indian emigration; his evocation of voice, of place, of longing, defining for many the experience of a generation. Describing life in the Caribbean and in London with verve, humour and grace, this collection features many of his most acclaimed stories, including 'The Village Washer', 'The Cricket Match' and ‘My Girl and the City’.

Sam Selvon was born in Trinidad and worked as a wireless operator and reporter. In 1950 he left for the UK, where he established himself as a writer. His best-known novel was The Lonely Londoners.

Neither sand nor this book has a beginning or an end

Magical books, infinite libraries, parallel worlds, mazes, labyrinths and philosophical paradoxes haunt these spellbinding tales by one of the most uniquely inventive short story writers of the twentieth century.

This collection brings together many of Borges’s greatest and most beloved stories, including 'The Garden of Forking Paths', 'The Book of Sand' and 'Shakespeare's Memory'.

Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires in 1899 and educated in Europe. One of the most widely acclaimed writers of our times, he published many collections of poems, essays and short stories, before his death in Geneva in June 1986.

Translated by Andrew Hurley

I was enjoying the return of silence, the sweetness of the evening and Paris empty. I was happy

Told as a series of confessions, The Fall is a brilliant portrayal of a man who has lost his innocence.

Jean-Baptiste Clamence, formerly a successful lawyer, is in turmoil. Over several drunken nights he regales a chance acquaintance with his story: of parties and debauchery, of Parisian nights and the Aegean sea, and, ultimately, of the absurdity of his existence.

Albert Camus grew up in a working-class neighbourhood in Algiers. His most important works include The Outsider, The Plague and The Fall. He was killed in a road accident in 1960, and his last unfinished novel, The First Man, appeared posthumously.

Translated by Robin Buss

The more a man restricts himself the closer he is, conversely, to infinity

Chess is a disturbing, intensely dramatic depiction of the cost of obsession.

It begins as a cruise ship sets sail for Buenos Aires. On board, a group of passengers challenge the world chess champion to a match. At first, they crumble, until they are helped by whispered advice from a stranger in the crowd – a man who will risk everything to win.

Stefan Zweig was born in Vienna to an Austrian-Jewish family and achieved literary fame early with his biographies and novels, most notably Beware of Pity. In 1934 Zweig fled to England, then Brazil, where he wrote this acclaimed novella, shortly before he and his wife killed themselves.

Translated by Anthea Bell

Maigret looked at the Seine, outside, through the curtain of rain, and thought of the Mediterranean sun

Maigret is going about his work in rainy Paris with his usual pipe and quiet determination – followed closely by Inspector Pyke from Scotland Yard, who has come to study the famous detective’s methods. Then a call from a Mediterranean island sends the two men off to the Côte d’Azur, where they must investigate a strange death amid the eccentric inhabitants of an isolated community.

Georges Simenon was born in Liège, Belgium, in 1903. He is best known in Britain as the author of the Maigret novels, and his prolific output of over 400 novels and short stories has made him a household name in Europe.

Translated by Shaun Whiteside

She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before

This candid portrayal of a woman who refuses to accept her allotted role as wife and mother caused an outcry when it was published in 1899.

It is the story of Edna Pontellier, who spends the summer on the Gulf of Mexico with her businessman husband and her two sons. When an illicit romance awakens unfamiliar ideas and longings in Edna, she discovers a new identity for herself, but cannot hope for understanding in the stifling attitudes of Louisiana society.

Katherine O'Flaherty, known by her married name Kate Chopin, is renowned for her novels and short stories depicting the inner lives of unconventional women, mostly set in the American South.

I kissed her for the last time, pressed her hand and we parted for ever

Six poignant tales of lost love, unlucky love and love that can never be, from one of the greatest of short story writers.

This selection brings together Chekhov’s very best tales: ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’, ‘The House with the Mezzanine’, ‘The Black Monk’ and his ‘little trilogy’ of stories, ‘Man in a Case’, ‘Gooseberries’ and ‘About Love’.

Anton Chekhov, the grandson of a former serf, was born in Southern Russia. While he was at university, his domineering father went bankrupt; Chekhov supported the family by selling stories to magazines. Although a doctor by profession, he became world renowned for his plays and short fiction.

A feeling of bliss – absolute bliss! – as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun

Blazing with colour and emotion, these are some of the most brilliant short stories ever written.

Katherine Mansfield's perceptive and resonant writing captures apparently fleeting incidents – a momentary glance, a shift in the atmosphere – to create quietly devastating revelations of inner lives. This collection contains some of her most celebrated stories, including ‘Bliss’, ‘The Garden Party’ and ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’.

Born in New Zealand, Katherine Mansfield died from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-four, but revolutionised the short story form and profoundly influenced the Modernist movement.

However much they might belong to one another heart and soul, they knew last night was not the first time they had been stirred by a whiff of freedom, danger and adventure

In Arthur Schnitzler’s scandalous novella, a husband and wife explore their darkest fantasies.

Through Vienna’s underworld of cafes, red-light district and decadent villas, through reverie, sexual adventures and what-might-have-beens, Dream Story uncovers the wild, often violent impulses that lie beneath the surface of civilised society.

Like his Viennese contemporary Sigmund Freud, the doctor and writer Arthur Schnitzler was a bold pioneer in exploring the deep, tangled roots of human consciousness. His 1926 work Dream Story was the inspiration for the film Eyes Wide Shut.

What matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now

The poet Rilke's life-changing advice to an aspiring young writer is among the most inspiring expressions of youthful creativity there has ever been.

At the start of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, responding to his questions on art, love, suffering and the nature of advice itself. These profound and lyrical letters have since become hugely influential for writers and artists of all kinds.

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in Prague. He studied literature, art history and philosophy in both Munich and Prague, and is often considered one of the greatest poets in the German language.

At long last, I am actually going to put down in black and white what happened to me!

Often described as the father of the modern short story, Guy de Maupassant conjured an entire world of emotion in his brief tales.

Taking us from Parisian society to rural Normandy and the wilds of Corsica, this selection includes his most famous short work, the heart-breaking ‘Boule de Suif’, as well as the love story ‘Moonlight’, and the supernatural ‘The Horla’.

In addition to his six novels, which included Bel-Ami, Maupassant wrote hundreds of short stories. After developing signs of syphilis and trying to end his life, he was committed to an asylum in 1891. He died there two years later.

Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don't belong no place

A moving portrayal of friendship, loneliness and the dispossessed, Of Mice and Men is Steinbeck's most universally popular work.

It tells the story of George and his friend Lennie, drifters searching for work in America’s Great Depression, who have nothing except for the clothes on their back – and a dream that one day they’ll have land of their own.

John Steinbeck is one of the best-loved American writers, who portrayed ordinary lives with sympathy and humanity. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing

Wise, entertaining and always bracingly honest, George Orwell’s essays are some of the greatest ever written.

This selection brings together many of the best of them, ranging over the evils of imperialism in ‘Shooting an Elephant’, the perils of school in ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, and his peerless advice on the art of writing in ‘Why I Write’ and ‘Politics and the English Language.’

Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name, George Orwell, was born in India and became one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century literature, famous worldwide for his novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

I was puzzled by how I had changed. But I could no longer go back

Territory of Light is the radiant story of a young woman, living alone in Tokyo with her two-year-old daughter, in the first year of separation from her husband. As the seasons turn, she must confront what she has lost and what she will become.

At once luminous and unsettling, Territory of Light was originally published in twelve parts in the Japanese literary monthly Gunzo, each chapter marking the months in real time. Its author, Yuko Tsushima, was awarded the inaugural Noma Literary Prize for this work, and went on to win many awards over the course of her career. She died in 2016.

Now she had taken off her goodness and left it behind her like a heap of rain-sodden clothes, and she only felt joy

The Enchanted April is an uplifting, sun-drenched depiction of what it is like to rediscover happiness.

It tells the tale of four very different women who, on answering an advertisement in The Times, find themselves far away from the drizzle of London and transformed forever by the warmth of the Italian Riviera.

Elizabeth von Arnim was born in Australia but grew up in England. Cousin of Katherine Mansfield and lover of H.G. Wells, she was at the hub of the literary society of her day, making her name with this 1922 novella, and the semi-autobiographical Elizabeth and Her German Garden.

He stood lonely in the searching sunshine; and he looked beyond the great light of a cloudless day into the darkness of a world of illusions

On sea, on land, at the edges of the colonial experience, Joseph Conrad's short stories penetrate the mysterious depths of the soul.

‘The Lagoon’ is an enigmatic tale of love and its shadow, ‘The Typhoon'’ shows men battling the unforgiving immensity of nature, while ‘The Secret Sharer’ is a disturbing exploration of truth, trust and duality.

The Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad went to sea at the age of sixteen and worked for the French and British merchant navies for many years before becoming a writer. He is most famous for his novel Heart of Darkness.

She was looking me right in the eyes, and the revolver was already by my temple

By turns unnerving and acerbic, tragic and tender, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s psychologically acute short stories are the perfect introduction to this great Russian writer.

‘White Nights’ is a poignant tale of unrequited love and loneliness in St Petersburg; the satirical ‘A Nasty Business’ concerns a general who drunkenly embarrasses himself at a wedding; and ‘The Meek One’ portrays a suffocating marriage.

During his eventful life Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky became a literary sensation aged twenty-four, was nearly shot by a firing squad, spent four years in a Siberian prison and developed a gambling addiction, before producing such world-renowned novels as Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.

On the contrary, Watson, you can see everything. You fail, however, to reason from what you see

Discover some of the most famous and devilishly difficult cases to face Sherlock Holmes, the world’s greatest fictional detective.

They range from the first short story to feature Holmes and his sidekick Dr Watson, ‘A Scandal in Bohemia’, where they are foiled by the quick-thinking of  ‘the woman’, Irene Adler, to ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’, involving the theft of a precious gemstone, and ‘The Final Problem’, featuring Professor Moriarty, ‘the Napoleon of crime.’

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle qualified as a doctor in Edinburgh, and achieved worldwide fame with his creation Sherlock Holmes, the first scientific detective.

You silly girl! How can you truly believe that this wooden Nuremberg doll can have life and motion?

The story of a wooden toy soldier who comes to life to defeat the dreaded Mouse King, Hoffmann’s fairy tale ‘The Nutcracker’ perfectly evokes the frantic joy and feverishness of a young girl’s Christmas.

This collection also includes two of Hoffmann’s most well-known stories, the haunting ‘The Mines at Falun’ and the sinister ‘The Sandman’.

Born in Germany in 1776, E. T. A. Hoffmann was a major figure of the Romantic movement and a pioneer of fantasy writing, renowned for his gothic stories of the fantastical and the uncanny.

Translated by Joachim Neugroschel, R.J. Hollingdale and Sally Hayward

I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany’s

Breakfast at Tiffany's, featuring one of fiction’s most endearing heroines, is the ultimate ode to dreamers.

Holly Golightly is a free spirit. With her dark glasses and chic black dresses, she parties all night and plays host to millionaires and gangsters alike in her New York brownstone apartment. Yet Holly never loses sight of her ultimate dream - to find a real-life place like Tiffany's that makes her feel at home.

Truman Capote was born in New Orleans in 1925. He wrote stories in his teens and became one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated literary icons.

As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead

Set in a frozen world that is gradually being devastated by ever-encroaching ice, Anna Kavan's haunting novel follows one man's pursuit of a mysterious silver-haired girl to the ends of the earth.

With its vision of a bleached, post-apocalyptic world laid waste by climate change, and its depiction of a woman whom men seek to control, Kavan’s award-winning 1967 novel is prophetic and disturbing.

Its author, born Helen Woods and adopting her pen name Anna Kavan from a character in one of her early novels, was renowned for her experimental works, which blurred the boundaries of identity, gender, narrative and the science fiction genre.

She sat silent in the oak-tree, and thought about the mystery of Love

In this collection of moving fairy tales, a nightingale gives up her song for a young musician, a fisherman cuts out his soul to join a mermaid under the sea, and a beautiful boy learns the brutal cost of cruelty. Though written for children, their lessons about compassion, openness and, above all, love, resonate for any generation.

Oscar Wilde was, in his own lifetime, a celebrated novelist, poet and playwright, until he abruptly fell from grace in 1895 following his incarceration for homosexuality. He spent the last three years of his life in exile and poverty.

There are liqueur glasses, and crystallized fruits, and tapestry curtains, and heaps of other necessaries of life that make really sensible presents

The deliciously funny, barbed short stories of Saki are by turns festive, satirical and macabre, exploding the buttoned-up world of the British upper classes.

These tales deal with, among other things, hellish family gatherings, disappointing Christmas gifts, gambling aunts, malicious children, a sardonic talking cat, vengeful pagan gods and many twists of fate.

H. H. Munro was better known by his pen name Saki. Born in 1870 in Burma and educated in England, he began his career as a journalist but later turned to writing fiction, before joining the army. He was killed during the First World War.

Long after midnight the windows of the house shone like gold, and golden song flowed out into the winter air

Babette’s Feast is a sublime celebration of eating, drinking and sensual pleasure.

In Isak Dinesen's life-affirming short story, two elderly sisters in a remote, god-fearing Norwegian community take in a mysterious refugee from Paris and are rewarded with the feast of a lifetime, while the other tales collected here consider rebirth, redemption and the mystery of human behaviour.

Isak Dinesen was the pen name of the Danish writer Karen Blixen. After marrying her cousin Baron Bror Blixen-Finecke in 1914, they travelled to Kenya to manage a coffee plantation, an experience recounted in her acclaimed memoir Out of Africa.

The hour should be evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful

Virginia Woolf’s account of wandering London’s streets during a winter’s evening – the lit windows, the people glimpsed, the pleasure – is one of the great paeans to city life.

In the other essays collected here, we see the finest writer of her age range over subjects including female novelists, watching a solar eclipse and visiting the houses of  ‘great men’, each brought to life with a playful, easy wit and unfailing wisdom.

Although famous for her pioneering novels and being at the centre of the ‘Bloomsbury Group’, Virginia Woolf also made her living through an astonishing output of literary criticism, journalism and biography.

I’m not afraid of them, I have a rifle, and strength, and youth; and the mountains...

This tale of freedom and fighting in the majestic mountains of the Caucasus was inspired by Tolstoy’s years as a soldier living amid the Cossack people.

Its hero Olenin, a rich young Russian, is disenchanted with his life of privilege, so decides to join the army. Among the foothills of the Caucasus, he will meet the wild Cossack warriors, drink, fight, fall in love, and gradually understand what civilization really means.

Tolstoy’s short autobiographical novel, reflecting the military adventures of his twenties, was begun in 1852 and is considered his first great masterpiece.

Translated by David McDuff

The thread was spun in the snow, and the cloth woven in the snow, washed in the snow, and bleached in the snow

Snow Country is a delicate, crystalline story of love and its limits, from one of Japan’s finest writers.

It begins as a man takes the train through the snow, on his way to meet the geisha he believes he loves. But she is tightly bound by rules of servitude and seclusion that are alien to him, and their affair can offer no freedom to either.

Filled with beauty and sadness, Snow Country is widely considered to be the masterpiece of Yasunari Kawabata, who was renowned as his country’s leading twentieth-century novelist and awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968.

Translated by Edward G. Seidensticker

Her old days were a blurred and flickering sequence, an imperfect film, dealing with the actions of strangers

Ten tales of glamour and heartbreak from the greatest wit of America’s decadent Jazz Age.

This selection of Dorothy Parker’s best short stories features young women dreaming big, a housewife meeting the actress she idolizes, an alcohol-fuelled date, a husband’s casual cruelty and, in the prize-winning masterpiece ‘Big Blonde’, a dissipated party girl putting on a brave face – all told with a dashing, debonair humour that dances on the edge of despair.

Poet, critic and Oscar-nominated screenwriter, Dorothy Parker was famed in her lifetime for her razor-sharp prose and her endlessly quotable one-liners.