Klasika

An American Masterpiece Clyde Griffiths finds his social-climbing aspirations and love for a rich and beautiful debutante threatened when his lower-class pregnant girlfriend gives him an ultimatum

Surely no man would take up my profession if it were not that danger attracts him.' In The Casebook, you can read the final twelve stories that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about his brilliant detective. They are perhaps the most unusual and the darkest that he penned. Treachery, mutilation and the terrible consequences of infidelity are just some of the themes explored in these stories, along with atmospheric touches of the gothic, involving a bloodsucking vampire, crypts at midnight and strange bones in a furnace. The collection His Last Bow features some of Sherlock Holmes' most dramatic cases, including the vicious revenge intrigue connected with 'The Red Circle' and the insidious murders in 'The Devil's Foot'. The title story recounts how Sherlock Holmes is brought out of retireme

The Complete Short Stories of Roald Dahl in the first of two unsettling and sinister volumes. "They are brutal, these stories, and yet you finish reading each one with a smile, or maybe even a hollow laugh, certainly a shiver of gratification, because the conclusion always seems so right". (Charlie Higson, from his introduction). Roald Dahl is one of the most popular writers of the modern age, effortlessly writing for children and adults alike. In this, the first of two volumes chronologically collecting all his published adult short stories, we see how Dahl began by using his experiences in the war to write fiction but quickly turned to his powerful and dark imagination to pen some of the most unsettling and disquieting tales ever written. In 27 stories, written between 1944 and 1953,

'It is the sum of myself, as far as the written word can go' - Kerouac on "The Town and the City". Kerouac's debut novel is a great coming of age story which can be read as the essential prelude to his later classics. Inspired by grief over his father's death and gripped by determination to write the Great American Novel, he draws largely on his own New England childhood.

Castigated for offending against public decency, Madame Bovary has rarely failed to cause a storm. For Flaubert's contemporaries, the fascination came from the novelist's meticulous account of provincial matters. For the writer, subject matter was subordinate to his anguished quest for aesthetic perfection. For his twentieth-century successors the formal experiments that underpin Madame Bovary look forward to the innovations of contemporary fiction. Flaubert's protagonist in particular has never ceased to fascinate. Romantic heroine or middle-class neurotic, flawed wife and mother or passionate protester against the conventions of bourgeois society, simultaneously the subject of Flaubert's admiration and the butt of his irony - Emma Bovary remains one of the most enigmatic of fictional

This is the "Penguin English Library Edition" of "The Woman in White" by Wilkie Collins. 'In one moment, every drop of blood in my body was brought to a stop ...There, as if it had that moment sprung out of the earth ...stood the figure of a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white'. "The Woman in White" famously opens with Walter Hartright's eerie encounter on a moonlit London road. Engaged as a drawing master to the beautiful Laura Fairlie, Walter is drawn into the sinister intrigues of Sir Percival Glyde and his 'charming' friend Count Fosco, who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison. Pursuing questions of identity and insanity along the paths and corridors of English country houses and the madhouse, "The Woman in White" is the first and most influential o

"The Sea is My Brother" is Jack Kerouac's very first novel, begun shortly after his tour as a merchant sailor in 1942. Lost during his lifetime, it is an intense portrait of friendship and brotherhood and a meditation on the desire to escape society, following the fortunes of two men as they impulsively decide to work their passage on the S.S. Westminster: drinking, arguing, playing cards, dodging torpedoes and contemplating the vast, terrible beauty of the sea. Published with fragments of early stories and letters, this visceral work gives a unique insight into the young Kerouac and the formation of his genius.

Finnegans Wake is the book of Here Comes Everybody and Anna Livia Plurabelle and their family - their book, but in a curious way the book of us all as well as all our books. Joyce's last great work, it is not comprised of many borrowed styles, like Ulysses, but, rather, formulated as one dense, tongue-twisting soundscape. This 'language' is based on English vocabulary and syntax but, at the same time, self-consciously designed to function as a pun machine with an astonishing capacity for resisting singularity of meaning. Announcing a 'revolution of the word', this astonishing book amounts to a powerfully resonant cultural critique - a unique kind of miscommunication which, far from stabilizing the world in meaning, constructs a universe radically unfixed by a wild diversity of possibil

Edgar Allan Poe was a writer of uncommon talent; in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" he created the genre of detective fiction while his genius for finding the strangeness lurking within us all has been an influence on everyone from Freud to Hollywood. This complete collection of all his short stories and novellas contains well-known tales 'The Pit and the Pendulum' and 'The Tell-Tale Heart' alongside hidden gems that both unsettle and enthrall the reader.

We are here to find a target who will fulfil our requirements. Someone who is admired and whose ignominious destruction would cause dismay' A beautiful Soviet spy. A brand-new Spektor cipher machine. Smersh has set an irresistible trap that threatens the entire Secret Service. In Fleming's fifth "007" novel Bond finds himself enmeshed in a deadly game of cross and double cross.

War and Peace is a vast epic centred on Napoleon's war with Russia. While it expresses Tolstoy's view that history is an inexorable process which man cannot influence, he peoples his great novel with a cast of over five hundred characters. Three of these, the artless and delightful Natasha Rostov, the world-weary Prince Andrew Bolkonsky and the idealistic Pierre Bezukhov illustrate Tolstoy's philosophy in this novel of unquestioned mastery. This translation is one which received Tolstoy's approval.

"The Complete Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde" is as the titlewould suggest a collection of whimiscal tales by Oscar Wilde. Thiscollections includes the following short stories: The Happy Prince, TheNightingale and the Rose, The Selfish Giant, The Devoted Friend, TheRemarkable Rocket, The Young King, The Birthday of the Infanta, TheFisherman and his Soul, and The Star-child. Readers of all ages will bedelighted by these fanciful tales.