The master of the short story has themes ranging from the brutality of war and the hypocrisy it spawns, the petty limitations, dissimulations and vanities inherent at different levels of society and all the stories are linked by a trenchant irony and preoccupation with the frailty of human nature and futility of so many lives. From tragedy and satire to comedy and farce. 197 page Wordsworth paperback.

'The Turn of the Screw' is the classic ghost story for which Henry James is best remembered. Set in an English country house, it is a chilling tale of the supernatural told by a master of the genre. 'The Aspern Papers' is a tale of Americans in Europe, a theme in which Henry James is at his most assured and accomplished. The author cleverly evokes the drama of the comédie humaine against the majestic setting of a Venetian palace. 192pp. Paperback.

One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'. Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley on Lake Geneva. The story of Victor Frankenstein who, obsessed with creating life itself, plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, but whose botched creature sets out to destroy his maker, would become the world's most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity. Begun when the author was only eighteen and conceived from a nightmare, Frankenstein, is the deeply disturbing story of a monstrous creation which has terrified and chilled readers since its first publication in 1818. 192pp. Paperback.

Notes from Underground and Other Stories is a comprehensive collection of Dostoevsky's short fiction. Many of these stories, like his great novels, reveal his special sympathy for the solitary and dispossessed, explore the same complex psychological issues and subtly combine rich characterization and philosophical meditations on the (often) dark areas of the human psyche, all conveyed in an idiosyncratic blend of deadly seriousness and wild humour. In Notes from Underground, the Underground Man casually dismantles utilitarianism and celebrates in its stead a perverse but vibrant masochism. A Christmas Tree and a Wedding recounts the successful pursuit of a young girl by a lecherous old man. In Bobok, one Ivan Ivanovitch listens in on corpses gossiping in a cemetery and ends up deploring their depravity. In A Gentle Spirit, the narrator describes his dawning recognition that he is responsible for his wife's suicide. In short, as a commentator on spiritual stagnation, Dostoevsky has no equal. Paperback, 686pp.

Saki (H.H. Munro) stands alongside Anton Chekhov and O Henry as a master of the short story. His extraordinary stories are a mixture of humorous satire, irony and the macabre, in which the stupidities and hypocrisy of conventional society are viciously pilloried. This collection includes 'Sredni Vastor' and 'The Unrest Cure'. 494pp. Paperback.

The proverbial phrase ‘life’s little ironies’ was coined by Hardy for his third volume of short stories. These tales and sketches possess all the power of his novels: the wealth of description, the realistic portrayal of the quaint lore of Wessex, the ‘Chaucerian’ humour and characterisation, the shrewd and critical psychology, the poignant estimate of human nature and the brooding sense of wonder at the essential mystery of life. Ranging widely in length and complexity, they are unified by Hardy's quintessential irony, which embraces both the farcical and the tragic aspects of human existence. 192pp. Paperback.

The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41), with its combination of the sentimental, the grotesque and the socially concerned, and its story of pursuit and courage, which sets the downtrodden and the plucky against the malevolent and the villainous, was an immediate popular success. Little Nell quickly became one of Dickens' most celebrated characters, who so captured the imagination of his readers that while the novel was being serialised, many of them wrote to him about her fate. With an Introduction and Notes by Peter Preston, University of Nottingham. Illustrations by Hablot K. Browne (Phiz) and George Cruickshank. 570pp. Paperback.

Dickens' last complete novel of Victorian society is a vision of a culture stifled by materialistic values. The chief of its several plots centres on John Harmon who returns to England as his father's heir. He is believed drowned under suspicious circumstances - a situation convenient to his wish for anonymity until he can evaluate Bella Wilfer whom he must marry to secure his inheritance. Colourful characters and incidents the faded aristocrats and parvenus gathered at the Veneering's dinner table, Betty Higden and her terror of the workhouse and the greedy plottings of Silas Wegg. Includes illus, 794pp. Paperback.

Living overseas but writing, always, about his native city, Joyce made Dublin unforgettable. The stories in Dubliners show us truants, seducers, gossips, rally-drivers, generous hostesses, corrupt politicians, failing priests, amateur theologians, struggling musicians, moony adolescents, victims of domestic brutishness, sentimental aunts and poets, patriots earnest or cynical, and people striving to get by. In every sense an international figure, Joyce was faithful to his own country by seeing it unflinchingly and challenging every precedent and piety in Irish literature. Introduction and notes. 176pp. Paperback.

Jules Verne's third great science fiction novel describes the discovery and exploration of a secret tunnel which leads through a volcano to the centre of the Earth. The leader of the expedition is an archetypal comic and eccentric boffin, and together with his ward, his nephew Axel (who is in love with the ward), and an estimable Icelandic guide, the journey is made. 'Journey to the Centre of the Earth' achieved instant and enduring popularity on publication in 1874. Together with 'Around the World in Eighty Days', 'Five Weeks in a Balloon' and 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea', it established Verne as an author of high adventure who filled his stories with a wealth of technical detail, and the energy and freshness of an extraordinary inventive imagination. 192pp. Paperback.