Short Stories. Round The Sofa

Set against the backdrop of the Salem witch hunts, Elizabeth Gaskell's somber novella reveals much about the complicity of mankind. Recently orphaned, Lois is forced to leave the English parsonage that had been her home and sail to America. When the girl joins her distant family, she finds jealousy and dissension are rife, and her cousins quick to point the finger at the "imposter." With the whole of Salem gripped by a fear of the supernatural, it seems her new home is where she is in most danger. Lonely and afraid, the words of an old curse return to haunt her

A major new celebration of the French short story across the twentieth century • The short story has a rich tradition in French literature. This feast of an anthology celebrates its most famous practitioners, as well as newly translated writers ready for rediscovery. Here are fables, puzzles, fairy tales, war stories and family histories, testing and expanding the boundaries of the form. They are stories about the self and the other, the centre and the periphery, experimental and existential, real and surreal • The second volume takes the reader through the tumultuous twentieth century in the company of writers including Simone de Beauvoir and Maryse Conde, Patrick Modiano and Virginie Despentes, covering world wars, revolutions, and the horrors of the motorway service station

This exciting collection celebrates the richness and variety of the Spanish short story, from the nineteenth century to the present day • Featuring over fifty stories selected by revered translator Margaret Jull Costa, it blends old favourites and hidden gems - many of which have never before been translated into English - and introduces readers to surprising new voices as well as giants of Spanish literary culture, from Emilia Pardo Bazan and Leopoldo Alas, through Merce Rodoreda and Manuel Rivas, to Ana Maria Matute and Javier Marias • Brimming with romance, horror, history, farce, strangeness and beauty, and showcasing alluring hairdressers, war defectors, vampiric mothers, and talismanic mandrake roots, the daring and entertaining assortment of tales in The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories will be a treasure trove for readers

This eclectic, moving and richly enjoyable collection is the essential introduction to Korean literature • Journeying through Korea's dramatic recent past, from the Japanese occupation and colonial era to the devastating war between north and south and the rapid, disorienting urbanization of later decades, The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories captures a hundred years of vivid storytelling • Here are peddlers and donkeys travelling across moonlit fields; artists drinking and debating in the tea-houses of 1920s Seoul; soldiers fighting for survival; exiles from the war who can never go home again; and lonely men and women searching for connection in the dizzying modern city. The collection features stories by some of Korea's greatest writers, including Pak Wanso, O Chonghui and Cho Chongnae, as well as many brilliant contemporary voices, such as P'yon Hyeyong, Han Yujoo and Kim Aeran

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell was an English novelist, biographer, and short story writer. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of Victorian society, including the very poor, and are of interest to social historians as well as lovers of literature. Some of GaskelPs best known novels are Cranford, North and South and Wives and Daughters. The Short Stories II is a beautiful collection of five stories, including Christmas Storms and Sunshine - beautiful and heart-warming Christmas tale

Jane Austen is one of the most enduring and skilled English novelists. With her wit, social perception and unerring ability to create some of literature's most charismatic and believable heroines, she mesmerizes her readers as much today as she did when her novels were first published. Short Stories II is the collection of Jane Austen's stories, they remained unpublished during her lifetime even though the last one was completed before she was 17

Written by authors from Quebec as well as France, the majority of these stories have been published in the last decade and reflect a rich diversity of styles and themes. From Daniel Boulanger's exploration of revenge and the desire for recognition in "The Hunter's Cafe", to Alain Gerber's brief and poetic "You Never Die", these stories make excellent reading in any language

Jhumpa Lahiri's landmark collection brings together forty writers that reflect over a hundred years of Italy's vibrant and diverse short story tradition, including well known authors such as Italo Calvino, Elsa Morante and Luigi Pirandello, alongside many captivating rediscoveries • Poets, journalists, visual artists, musicians, editors, critics, teachers, scientists, politicians, translators: the writers that inhabit these pages represent a dynamic cross section of Italian society