Stories

The first work published by Rudyard Kipling, an outstanding and deceptively light-hearted collection of stories about life in India/Pakistan under British control in the latter part of the 19th century.
(73,000 words)
An e-book is available for downloading below. TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. LISPETH. 2. THREE AND—AN EXTRA. 3. THROWN AWAY. 4. MISS YOUGHAL’S SAIS. 5. YOKED WITH AN UNBELIEVER. 6. FALSE DAWN. 7. THE RESCUE OF PLUFFLES. 8. CUPID’S ARROWS. 9. HIS CHANCE IN LIFE. 10. (...)

The Colonel Chabert had played a heroic role in Napoleon’s victory at the battle of Eylau but had been left for dead on the battlefield under his horse, his body thrown into a collective burial pit, and he’d been declared legally deceased. However, he managed to revive and to survive although a great many months had passed before he’d sufficiently recovered to be able to consider returning to the post-Napoleonic Paris and recover his estate and his belongings. But as he’d been declared (...)

A young painter – who we soon discover to be the future world-famous Nicolas Poussin [1] – pays a visit to the studio of a celebrated master, Porbus, where he is admitted behind a rather strange old man who has also come to visit the master, whose works he proceeds to ruthlessly criticize for their lack of life and truthfulness. This visitor turns out to be an unknown master painter himself, who passionately describes the magnificent masterpiece that he has almost but not quite finished (...)

Two children go over into the neighbouring valley high up in the Austrian Alps to visit their grandmother on the day before Christmas and get lost on their way back when a terrible snowstorm unexpectedly hits the whole region and covers up not only their tracks but all the recognizable landmarks that usually guide them on their way.
A story about life in the mountains, a story about the diverse and ever-changing environment in the mountains, a story about Christmas in the mountains and (...)

This famous story (with its 38,000 words Heart of Darkness is a novella, not a novel) manages in a mysterious way to create an intriguing atmosphere of significance, even if the narrator’s mysticism and his unbounded admiration of the long-sought-after figure of Kurtz, a European trader of ivory in the upper reaches of what is clearly the Congo River who only appears towards the end of the story, is not to everyone’s taste in these more down-to-earth days.
And the rather complacent (...)

The first full account of the adventures of Robin Hood [1], Maid Marian, Friar Tuck and their merry band of outlaw-foresters, their various encounters with the hapless Sheriff of Nottingham and their struggles against the redoubtable King John who’s seeking to usurp the kingdom from his brother Richard Coeur-de-Lion – to whom Robin and his followers have sworn allegiance – while he is absent campaingning in the Holy Lands.
A famous tale elegantly recounted by the distinguished man of (...)

The account of his love affair with the lovely Miesmies by the very gifted tomcat Murr, who had been taught to read and write by his erudite master and who had then proceeded to write his autobiography, including this most delightful episode from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s wonderful masterwork “The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr (1821).”
(2,400 words)
Translated specially for this site. An e-book, with the original text in an annex, is available for downloading below.
The original text (...)

The first book published by the future author of The Scarlet Letter, a collection of stories that had previously appeared in various New England newspapers, all evoking the past epochs of that English colony, all with a tinge of the occult and the mysterious, and just about all with a quite passionate anger at the rigidities and injustices of the rigorous Puritan mentality that was so characteristic of that colony and that was still somewhat present in later times there.
A precious and (...)

Hermann Hesse, the celebrated author of Siddharta and Steppenwolf, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947, was also a masterful writer of short stories, of which this delicate, charming account of a young man returning to his birthplace is an outstanding example.
(14,400 words)
It has been specially translated here for this site. An e-book, with the original text in an annex, is available for downloading below.
The original text can also be seen here. CHAPTER ONE (...)

An account of life and death and nature in the high alps in upper Austria long before modern life changed the ancient ways in those remote parts, recounted with strong poetic overtones by the narrator as he remembers a striking incident from his youth in that magnificent region.
A charming, captivating and finally very moving reading experience.
By the Austrian writer, painter and teacher Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868), one of the leading figures of the Biedermeier literary movement that (...)