Highly fantasised origin stories, especially for differences among animals, and accounts of how various phenomena came about. A forerunner of these stories is Kipling's 'How Fear...

Wilhelm goes through deep self-realisation and decides to escape his empty life of a bourgeois businessman. After a failed romance with the theatre, Wilhelm commits himself to the...

Travelling from Odessa and Sevastopol, the narrator on board the steamboat meets a man called Ivan Shamokhin, who tells him a story of his love for a woman named Ariadna...

Beautiful, clever, rich - and single - Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than...

Richard Larch is a young man with talent and ambition. He moves to London to make his way in life. He takes a clerk's position in a law office and in his spare time makes attempts...

It was the Sunday after Easter, and the last bull-fight of the season in Mexico City. Four special bulls had been brought over from Spain for the occasion, since Spanish bulls are...

The Winter’s Tale, one of Shakespeare’s very late plays, is filled with improbabilities. Before the conclusion, one character comments that what we are about to see,...

The final voyage of a British sailing ship, the Chancellor, told from the perspective of one of its passengers in the form of a diary.

Set in Victorian era Britain, the story follows Jean Muir, the deceitful governess of the wealthy Coventry family. With expert manipulation, Jean Muir obtains the love, respect,...

A villainous dandy who cheats, swindles and philanders his way across Europe and England with little concern for the law or the welfare of others.