British literary tradition is very rich. It unites the heritage of its own classics, such as medieval and Shakespeare productions, as well as the cultural influences of the various colonies and peoples who, throughout history, have mixed into British imagination. The critic August Nemo brings an excerpt of this rich cultural heritage through seven specially selected short stories: - The Blue Cross by G.K. Chesterton - The Red-Headed League by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Quality by John Galsworthy - A Love-Knot by W. W. Jacobs - The Shades of Spring by D. H. Lawrence - Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf - The Three Strangers by Thomas Hardy For more books with interesting themes, be sure to check the other books in this collection!

This anthology is in many was a ‘best of the best’, containing gems from thirty-four of Britain's outstanding contemporary writers. It is a book to dip into, to read from cover to cover, to lend to friends and read again. It includes stories of love and crime, stories touched with comedy and the supernatural, stories set in London, Los Angeles, Bucharest and Tokyo. Above all, as you will discover, it satisfies Samuel Butler's anarchic pleasure principle: 'I should like to like Schumann's music better than I do; I daresay I could make myself like it better if I tried; but I do not like having to try to make myself like things; I like things that make me like them at once and no trying at all ...'

London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, London is considered to be one of the world's most important global cities. Such a historically important city has certainly left its legacy in the imagination of writers. Check out the tales full of London's atmosphere selected by critic August Nemo: - Lost in a London Fog by Louisa May Alcott - London Impressions by Stephen Crane - A London Life by Henry James - The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle - The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad - Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street by Virginia Woolf - The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson For more books with interesting themes, be sure to check the other books in this collection!

DIVFirst-rate selections include Hardy's "The Fiddler of the Reels," James' "Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad," Dickens' "The Haunted Hotel," and tales by Saki, Kipling, Lawrence, Trollope, Stevenson, and others. /div

TELEGRAPH, INDEPENDENT, FINANCIAL TIMES AND OBSERVER BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2015 Hilarious, exuberant, subtle, tender, brutal, spectacular, and above all unexpected: these two extraordinary volumes contain the limitless possibilities of the British short story. This is the first anthology capacious enough to celebrate the full diversity and energy of its writers, subjects and tones. The most famous authors are here, and many others, including some magnificent stories never republished since their first appearance in magazines and periodicals. The Penguin Book of the British Short Story has a permanent authority, and will be reached for year in and year out. This volume takes the story from the 1920s to the present day. Edited and with an introduction by Philip Hensher, the award-winning novelist, critic and journalist.

Since its first printing in 1954, this outstanding anthology has been the book of choice by teachers, students, and lovers of short fiction. Surveying stories by British and American writers in the first half of the twentieth century, editors Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine selected stories that broke new ground and challenged the imagination with their style, subject matter, or tone: the unforgettable, enduring works that shaped the literature of our time. A truly exceptional collection of great stories, including: The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky by Stephen Crane The Horse Dealer’s Daughter by D. H. Lawrence Barn Burning by William Faulkner The Sojourner by Carson McCullers The Open Window by Saki Flowering Judas by Katherine Anne Porter The Boarding House by James Joyce Soldier’s Home by Ernest Hemingway The Tree of Knowledge by Henry James Why I Live at the P.O. by Eudora Welty . . . and twenty-five more of the century’s best stories!

This book contains 350 short stories from 50 classic, prize-winning and noteworthy authors. Wisely chosen by the literary critic August Nemo for the book series 7 Best Short Stories, this omnibus contains the stories of the following writers: - H.P. Lovecraft, - Edgar Allan Poe, - Arthur Conan Doyle, - Katherine Mansfield, - Jack London, - Guy de Maupassant, - Virginia Woolf, F. - Scott Fitzgerald, - Edith Wharton, - Stephen Crane, - Susan Glaspell, - Kate Chopin, - Laura E. Richards, - Alice Dunbar-Nelson, - Louisa May Alcott, - Hans Christian Andersen, - Charles Dickens, - Nathaniel Hawthorne, - Henry James, - Mark Twain, - Charlotte Perkins, - Elizabeth Gaskell, - Herman Melville, - James Joyce, - Leo Tolstoy, - Nikolai Gogol, - Anton Chekhov, - Fyodor Dostoevsky, - Maxim Gorky, - Leonid Andreyev, - Ivan Turgenev, - Joseph Conrad, - Aleksander Pushkin, - Robert Louis Stevenson, - Robert E. Howard, - G. K. Chesterton, - Edgar Wallace, - Arthur Machen, - Ambrose Bierce, - Talbot Mundy, - Abraham Merritt, - Zane Grey, - Edgar Rice Burroughs, - Oscar Wilde, - Rudyard Kipling, - E.T.A. Hoffman, - Bram Stoker, - H.G. Wells, - Franz Kafta - Washington Irving.

TELEGRAPH, INDEPENDENT, FINANCIAL TIMES AND OBSERVER BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2015 Hilarious, exuberant, subtle, tender, brutal, spectacular, and above all unexpected: these two extraordinary volumes contain the limitless possibilities of the British short story. This is the first anthology capacious enough to celebrate the full diversity and energy of its writers, subjects and tones. The most famous authors are here, and many others, including some magnificent stories never republished since their first appearance in magazines and periodicals. The Penguin Book of the British Short Story has a permanent authority, and will be reached for year in and year out. This volume takes the story from its origins with Defoe, Swift and Fielding to the 'golden age' of the fin de siècle and Edwardian period. Edited and with an introduction by Philip Hensher, the award-winning novelist, critic and journalist.

'Sometimes - not often - a book comes along that feels like Christmas. Philip Hensher's timely, but timeless, selection of the best short stories from the past 20 years is that kind of book. His introduction is as enriching as anything that has been published this year' Sunday Times A spectacular treasury of the best British short stories published in the last twenty years We are living in a particularly rich period for British short stories. Despite the relative lack of places in which they can be published, the challenge the medium represents has attracted a host of remarkable, subversive, entertaining and innovative writers. Philip Hensher, following the success of his definitive Penguin Book of British Short Stories, has scoured a vast trove of material and chosen thirty great stories for this new volume of works written between 1997 and the present day. Includes short stories by A.L. Kennedy, Tessa Hadley, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jackie Kay, Graham Swift, Jane Gardam, Ali Smith, Neil Gaiman, Martin Amis, China Miéville, Peter Hobbs, Thomas Morris, David Rose, David Szalay, Irvine Welsh, Lucy Caldwell, Rose Tremain, Helen Oyeyemi, Leone Ross, Helen Simpson, Zadie Smith, Will Self, Gerard Woodward, James Kelman, Lucy Wood, Hilary Mantel, Eley Williams, Sarah Hall, Mark Haddon and Helen Dunmore.