"In The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Hilary Mantel's trademark gifts of penetrating characterization, unsparing eye, and rascally intelligence are once again fully on display. Her classic wicked humor in each story--which range from a ghost story to a vampire story to near-memoir to mini-sagas of family and social fracture--brilliantly unsettles the reader in that unmistakably Mantel way. Mantel brutally and acutely writes about gender, marriage,...

"We think of Honore Balzac as the author of long and fully upholstered novels, stitched together into the magnificent visionary document called The Human Comedy. Yet along with the full-length fiction within The Human Comedy stand many shorter works, and it's here that we get some of his most daring explorations of crime, sexuality, and artistic creation. As Marcel Proust noted, it is in these tales that we detect, under the surface, the mysterious...

A rich young woman marries an idle playboy against her father's will. Her father holds her captive on his yacht but she escapes and, while on her way to New York, becomes entangled with an unemployed news reporter.

"The timeless collection that introduced Rip Van Winkle, Ichabod Crane, and the Headless Horseman Perhaps the marker of a true mythos is when the stories themselves overshadow their creator. Originally published under a pseudonym as The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Other Stories gave America its own haunted mythology. This collection of larger-than-life tales contains Washington Irving's best-known literary...

Anton Chekhov's Selected Stories contains a wide spectrum of classics and new favorites, including "Ward No. 6," "The Lady with the Little Dog," "Anna on the Neck," "The Name-Day Party," "The Kiss," An Incident at Law," and "Elements Most Often Found in Novels, Short Stories, Etc." This edition features twenty-five brand-new translations, commissioned expressly for this volume from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Peter Constantine, Rosamund...

"Nine short stories featuring Hercule Poirot"--

This collection of eleven stories spans virtually the whole of Tolstoy's creative life. While each is unique in form, as a group they are representative of his style and touch on the central themes that surface in War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Stories as different as “The Snowstorm”, “Lucerne”, “The Diary of a Madman”, and “The Devil” are grounded in autobiographical experience. They deal with journeys of self-discovery and the...

"The masterly novellas that established Ludmilla Petrushevskaya as one of the greatest living Russian writers . After her work was suppressed for many years, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya won wide recognition for capturing the experiences of everyday Russians with profound pathos and mordant wit. Among her most famous and controversial works, these three novellas-The Time Is Night, Chocolates with Liqueur, and Among Friends-are modern classics that breathe...

From the film critics of The New York Times come these uncut, original reviews of the most popular and influential movies ever made -- from the Talkies to blockbusters like Chicago and The Wizard of Oz from timeless classics like Casablanca and Notorious, to beloved foreign films by Truffaut and Kurosawa, Fellini and Almodovar. The reviews reflect Hollywood history at its best. In addition, this volume includes: Full cast and production credits for...

The scariest story ever: For Halloween, Mickey Mouse has tricked out his house like a "tomb, sweet, tomb" and along with his pals, Donald and Goofy, plans to tell hair-raising Halloween stories. Duck the halls: It's touch-and-go for Donald Duck when, instead of heading south for the winter with Daisy and all the other ducks, he insists on staying with Mickey Mouse and the gang to enjoy all that Christmas has to offer.