'It's coming - the postponeless Creature' Electrifying poems of isolation, beauty, death and eternity from a reclusive genius and one of America's greatest writers

'Drunk or sober, king or soldier, none will be excluded' - Sensual,profound, delighted, wise, Hafez's poems have enchanted their readers for more than 600 years. One of the greatest figures of world literature, he remains today the most popular poet in modern Iran.

'Strangely enough, I mistook it for a gentleman at first. Fortunately I had my spectacles with me so I could see it was really a nose.'With this pair of absurd, comic stories Gogol indulges his imagination and delights readers.

'But I, while vineyards ring with the cicadas' scream,Retrace your steps, alone, beneath the burning sun.' Virgil's lyrical, wistful and often witty pastoral poems.

'I cried, "Come, tell me how you live!"And thumped him on the head.' Conjuring wily walruses, dancing lobsters, a Jabberwock and a Bandersnatch, Carroll's fantastical verse gave new words to the English language.

'...a good bit of spice to give the critlings a flavour, and plenty of treacle to make the mince-meat look rich' - Radical Victorian reformer Henry Mayhew walked the streets of London interviewing ordinary flower girls, market traders, piemen and costermongers to create the first ever work of mass social observation, and the ultimate account of urban life - including an extraordinary description of the city from a hot air balloon.

'Is it me you love, friend? or the race that made me?' A gothic novella about love, torment and doomed aristocracy, set in the remote mountains of Spain.

'Our passion was so great. Will the Old Man understand and help us once again?'The Old Man of the Moon is Shen Fu's intimate and moving account of his marriage - from early passion to the trials of poverty and separation - and his great, enduring love for his wife in eighteenth-century China.

'Even in the stillness of that dead-cold weather, I had heard no sound of little battering hands upon the window-glass...'A phantom child roams the Northumberland moors, while a host of fairytale characters gone to seed gather in the dark, dark woods in these two surprising tales of the uncanny from the great Victorian novelist.

'People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed - a knife - a purse - and a dark lane...'In this provocative and blackly funny essay, Thomas de Quincey considers murder in a purely aesthetic light and explains how practically every philosopher over the past two hundred years has been murdered - 'insomuch, that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him'.

«Вночі, серед очерету на затоці, Шіко все ще міг чути жіноче голосіння, змішане тепер із кваканням жаб...»
Від одної з найсміливіших письменниць Америки кінця 19 століття, п’ять історій пробудження які варіюються від плантацій Луїзіани та бідних заток до її позолочених міст.

'If marriage was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature.' - Two moving stories of love, loss, desire and divorce, from one of the great chroniclers of nineteenth-century New York life.

'All those excessive, useless regrets...' A collection of nostalgic, erotic poetry from one of the greatest Greek poets to have ever lived.

'I'm not myself - I'm somebody else - that's me yonder - no - that's somebody else got into my shoes...I can't tell what's my name, or who I am!' - Touching and comic short stories from the 19th century American master of the genre.

'Then she began to run, and she ran over the sharp stones and through the thorns, and the wild animals bounded past her ...' - Four weird, dark and enchanting fairy-tales from the Brothers Grimm.

'In two I'll slice the hair-seat / of Helga's kiss-gulper' - In this epic tale from the Viking Age that ranges across Scandinavia and Viking Britain, two poets compete for the love of Helga the Fair - with fatal consequences.

'She decided she would teach him to speak and he was very soon able to say, 'Pretty boy!', 'Your servant, sir!' and 'Hail Mary!''With pathos and humour, Flaubert imagines the unexamined life of a servant girl.

The valley was full of snakes and serpents as big as palm trees, so huge that they could have swallowed any elephant that met them.' A selection of fantastic and perilous adventures at sea from the Thousand and One Nights.

'I can promise to be candid, not, however, to be impartial.' - A selection of the most insightful maxims and reflections from one of Germany's greatest ever thinkers.

'I will go in, out of this dust and heat, out of this dry glitter of vanity, out of these toilsome futilities. I will go and never return.'Three disturbing, mysterious and moving stories from Wells, science-fiction pioneer.

'I'll stop doing it as soon as I understand what I'm doing.' - Somewhere between a historical account and work of philosophy, Socrates' Defence details the final plea of Plato's beloved mentor.

Meditative, deeply personal poems to the god Siva, from four major Hindu saints.

'He gave orders that they were not to get any hot glum pudding in flames, for fear the spirits in their innards might catch fire' The Steel Flea is an uproarious and alcohol-soaked shaggy-dog story from one of Russia's great comic masters.

'Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was a groan of mortal terror ... the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul.'Stories about murder, mystery and madness, portraying the author's feverish imagination at its creative height.

'...dreaming of bears, or fire, or water...' - The greatest of Elizabethan pamphleteers, Nashe had a magical ability with words, never more so than in The Terrors of the Night, where he mulls over ghosts, demons, nightmares and the supernatural.

One of Pushkin's most popular and chilling stories, 'The Queen of Spades' tells of a young man who develops a dangerous obsession in pursuit of the wealth he craves.

The disturbing tale of a young man's obsession with the Sandman, stealer of eyes, which has inspired writers from Sigmund Freud to Neil Gaiman.

A disgusting account of a school of giant squid attacking a seaside resort, and two other examples of Wells' extraordinary imagination at work - 'The Magic Shop' and The Land Ironclads'.

From the father of American literature, four sparkling comic tales of extraordinary animals and parables subverted.

A jealous lover's curse and an ingenious party trick feature in these two suspenseful stories set in Hardy's imaginary Wessex.

An illustrated collection of fables from one of France's most vital writers.

' "She's an adventuress. Yes, an adventuress, but an end-of-the-century one. She doesn't travel for profit, but for pleasure."' - Offering an entertaining introduction to the fin-de-siècle, this selection from the notorious magazine The Yellow Book includesstories and poems by famous writers such as Arnold Bennett and John Buchan, brilliant pieces by lesser-known writers such as Ada Leverson and Ella D'Arcy, and illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley.

'Can I bear to leave these blue hills?'- A generous selection from three of the greatest and most enjoyable of Chinese poets

'There sat the dog with eyes as big as mill wheels' - Though criticised for their anarchic immorality when first published, Hans Christian Andersen's tales made him an international star, taken to the hearts of children and adults for their beauty, sorrow and strangeness.
Included here are 'The Steadfast Tin Soldier' and 'Big Klaus and Little Klaus'.

Three ghostly tales from a master of the form, 'The Signalman', 'The Trial for Murder' and the title story, 'To Be Read at Dusk'.

'It was as if the sea, breaking down the wall protecting all the homes of the town, had sent a wave over her head' One of Conrad's most powerful, gripping stories

You shall have thousands of gold pieces; - thousands of thousands - millions - mountains of gold: where will you keep them?' - Two of Ruskin's most powerful essays: 'Traffic' and 'The Roots of Honour'

'You will hear it for yourselves, and it will surely fill you with wonder...' - In this selection from Marco Polo's famous travel book, theintrepid Venetian describes the customs of India, recounts the story ofthe king who died eighty-four times and explains how to retrieve diamonds from Tsnake-infested caves...

'I blush to say what happened next.' - A satirical portrait of a drunken, orgiastic Roman banquet, hosted by the grossly ostentatious Trimalchio.

'Their fruits be diverse and plentiful, as nutmegs, ginger, long pepper, lemons, cucumbers, cocos, sago, with divers other sorts...' - Scholar, spy, diplomat and supreme propagandist for Elizabethan sea power, Richard Hakluyt's accounts of famed explorers mythologised a nation growing rapidly aware of the size and strangeness of the world - and determined to dominate it.

'...revealing great shining fangs more than three inches long.' - Some of the most macabre and wonderful of all Chinese stories, including 'The Golden Goblet', 'Scorched Moth the Daoist' and 'The Black Beast'

'Ye Ice-Falls! Ye that from the mountain's brow. A down enormous ravines slope a main -...'A selection of Coleridge's poems, including 'This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison' and 'Frost at Midnight'

A poignant tale of love and loneliness from Russia's foremost writer.

'Those husbands that I had,Three of them were good and two were bad.The three that I call "good" were rich and old...' One of the most bawdy, entertaining and popular stories from The Canterbury Tales.

'Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me...'After the death of his wife Emma, a grief-stricken Hardy wrote some of the best verse of his career. Moving and evocative, it ranks among the greatest elegiac poetry in the language.

'The color is hideous enough, and unreliable enough, and infuriating enough, but the pattern is torturing.'Written with barely controlled fury after she was confined to her room for 'nerves' and forbidden to write, Gilman's pioneering feminist horror story scandalized nineteenth-century readers with its portrayal of a woman who loses her mind because she has literally nothing to do.