LitMundi
Authors represented by the works currently available to read. Each work links to its published editions and sources.
The Captain’s Daughter, Alexander Pushkin’s only completed novel, was first published in 1836 in the journal Sovremennik. Narrated by Pyotr Grinyov, a 17-year-old sent to serve at Fort Belogorsky near Orenburg, it is a romanticized account of Pugachev’s Rebellion of 1773–1774. Pyotr falls in love with Masha, the commandant’s daughter, and is caught between his rival Shvabrin, the rebel leader Pugachev and the Empress’s justice.
First published: 1836
All editions →Lázaro writes a letter to an unnamed “Vuestra Merced” to explain how he came to be who he is, starting with a poor childhood and a blind man who takes him on as guide. From there he passes from master to master, among them a stingy priest and a squire with nothing but his pride. Printed anonymously in 1554, it is the book that started the picaresque.
First published: 1554
All editions →Dmitri Gurov, a Moscow bank worker nearing forty, meets a young woman who has come to Yalta alone with her small dog. Both are married, and both assume the affair will end with the holiday. Chekhov follows what happens afterward in a few quiet pages.
First published: 1899
All editions →Ward No. 6 (1892) is a novella by Anton Chekhov set in a run-down provincial hospital. Dr. Andrey Ragin, its chief doctor, has long ignored the filth and abuse in the locked annex for mental patients, until he starts visiting it to talk with Ivan Gromov, an educated and tormented patient. Their arguments about suffering and resignation draw the doctor, and his town, into consequences he did not foresee.
First published: 1892
All editions →The Cherry Orchard (Вишнёвый сад) is Anton Chekhov’s last play, written in 1903 and first staged by the Moscow Art Theatre on 17 January 1904, under Konstantin Stanislavski. In four acts it follows Lyubov Ranevskaya, a landowner back from Paris, and her family and neighbours as the estate and its famous orchard are put up for sale to pay debts. Chekhov called it a comedy, but Stanislavski’s production treated it as a tragedy, and directors have been working with that split ever since.
First published: 1904
All editions →Three Sisters (Три сестры) is a play in four acts by Anton Chekhov, written in 1900 and first performed by the Moscow Art Theatre on 31 January 1901. Olga, Masha and Irina Prozorov have lived in a provincial town since leaving Moscow eleven years earlier, and they still talk about going back. Around them, army officers, a new member of the household and money troubles keep life moving without taking the sisters anywhere.
First published: 1901
All editions →On Christmas Eve, Ebenezer Scrooge, a London moneylender who hates the holiday, is visited by the ghost of his dead partner, Jacob Marley. What the ghost brings is a warning and three visitors who will show Scrooge his own life.
First published: 1843
All editions →Great Expectations is a novel by Charles Dickens, published as a weekly serial in All the Year Round from December 1860 to August 1861 and in book form by Chapman & Hall in 1861. It follows Pip, a boy from the Kent marshes who is given the chance to become a gentleman in London, and Pip tells the story as an adult looking back. The text on this site is Project Gutenberg #1400, the 1867 edition of the complete novel in 59 chapters.
First published: 1861
All editions →Jane Eyre is a novel by Charlotte Brontë, published under the pen name “Currer Bell” on 19 October 1847 by Smith, Elder & Co. of London. Jane narrates it in the first person, from her unhappy childhood at Gateshead Hall and her schooling at Lowood, through her work as governess at Thornfield Hall. The text on this site is Project Gutenberg #1260, the complete novel in 38 chapters, printed from an 1897 Service & Paton edition with illustrations by F. H. Townsend.
First published: 1847
All editions →A physician rents a summer house and confines his wife to a nursery on the upper floor, forbidding her to work or write. She keeps a secret journal, and her attention settles on the room’s yellow wallpaper. Gilman’s story is brief, domestic and increasingly unsettling.
First published: 1892
All editions →Vandyck Jennings, a sociology student, and two friends fly by biplane to a hidden land said to be inhabited only by women. There they meet a society with no men, no war and no domination, and are asked to explain their own world. Charlotte Perkins Gilman serialised it in her magazine The Forerunner in 1915; it was first issued as a book in 1979 by Pantheon.
First published: 1915
All editions →“Goblin Market” is a narrative poem by Christina Rossetti, published in 1862 in her first commercial volume. Two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, hear goblin merchants crying their fruit at the glen, and Laura buys some with a lock of her hair. What follows is a story of craving, decline and a sister’s rescue. Readers have taken it as a fable of temptation, a study of Victorian women and the marketplace, or a plain tale of sisterly devotion.
First published: 1862
All editions →Nathanael writes to his friend Lothar that a barometer peddler named Coppola is the very man he once knew as the frightening Coppelius, a figure bound up with the nursery tale of the Sandman. His fiancée Clara answers him with calm reason; then a narrator takes over and follows him to university, where a professor’s daughter, Olimpia, catches his eye. Hoffmann’s story appeared in 1816 in Nachtstücke and is one of the founding texts of the uncanny.
First published: 1816
All editions →The narrator insists he is calm, and perfectly sane, and he proves it by describing a murder in exact detail. The old man’s pale blue eye is the cause; a sound that will not stop is the consequence. Poe packs it into a few pages that read aloud like a confession.
First published: 1843
All editions →An unnamed narrator visits his boyhood friend Roderick Usher, who is ill in mind and body and lives in a decaying ancestral house with his sister Madeline. First published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in September 1839, it is Poe’s best-known Gothic tale, and one of the shortest routes into his way of building fear.
First published: 1839
All editions →Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920) is set in the 1870s among the upper class of Gilded Age New York. Newland Archer, a young lawyer, looks forward to marrying May Welland, until the arrival of her cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska, who has scandalously left a disastrous marriage in Europe, makes him doubt the match. It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win it.
First published: 1920
All editions →A narrator is invited to the lavish wedding of Micaelita Aránguiz, and what happens at the altar sets the whole city talking. Years later, at a spa, the bride tells her side. Pardo Bazán turns a scandal into a quiet study of what a woman is expected to swallow.
First published: 1897
All editions →A tenant at Thrushcross Grange visits his landlord at Wuthering Heights, a farmhouse on the Yorkshire moors, and a housekeeper tells him how the place came to be so bitter. Her story reaches back about thirty years, to a boy taken in off the streets and the girl he grew up beside. Emily Brontë’s only novel is a love story with almost no softness in it.
First published: 1847
All editions →Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner, rents a small house on Long Island next to the mansion of Jay Gatsby, whose parties fill the summer nights with music and strangers. As Nick is drawn into Gatsby’s world and the circle of his cousin Daisy across the bay, he comes to see what the glitter is for. Charles Scribner’s Sons published it in New York on 10 April 1925.
First published: 1925
All editions →Gregor Samsa wakes in his bed in Prague, unable to rise, and his first worry is that he will miss his train to work. In under a hundred pages Kafka follows what happens to a household when its breadwinner stops being useful.
First published: 1915
All editions →Frederick Douglass, born into slavery in Talbot County, Maryland, tells his own story in eleven short chapters: separated from his mother, passed between masters, taught the alphabet by a mistress and then forbidden more. Published in Boston in 1845, seven years after he reached the North, it set out what slavery did to enslaved people and to the people who held them, in plain, controlled prose. Douglass signed it with his own name, at a time when that was not safe.
First published: 1845
All editions →The Robbers (Die Räuber) is Friedrich Schiller’s first published play, a five-act drama about two brothers from a noble family, the open-hearted Karl and the scheming Franz. Franz’s lies drive Karl out of his father’s house and into a band of outlaws, and the play follows the consequences of that choice. Schiller wrote it towards the end of the Sturm und Drang movement, and its premiere in Mannheim in January 1782 made him famous almost overnight.
First published: 1781
All editions →Notes from Underground (1864) is a novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky, written as the confession of a bitter, unnamed former civil servant living in St. Petersburg. In the first part he argues against the rational, utopian ideas of his day; in the second he recalls humiliating episodes from his younger years, including a dinner with old schoolmates and a meeting with a young prostitute, Liza. The book tests his theories against how he actually behaves.
First published: 1864
All editions →Dantons Tod (Danton’s Death) is a four-act drama by Georg Büchner, written in about five weeks in early 1835 and first staged in Berlin in 1902. It follows Georges Danton and his circle in the last days of March and early April 1794, when Robespierre and his allies turn against them. Büchner builds the scenes from historical sources and long passages of real political speeches, so the characters talk as much as they act.
First published: 1835
All editions →Silas Marner, a linen weaver falsely accused in his northern chapel, settles in the village of Raveloe and shuts out everyone but his loom and his coins. George Eliot’s short novel of 1861 follows what a village, a landowner’s family with a secret, and one winter night do to that solitude.
First published: 1861
All editions →Middlemarch is a novel by George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, first published in eight parts from December 1871 to December 1872. It follows intersecting stories in a fictional Midlands town from 1829 to 1832, including Dorothea Brooke’s marriage, Tertius Lydgate’s medical ambitions and the lives of their neighbours. The text on this site is Project Gutenberg #145, the complete novel with its Prelude, eight books and Finale.
First published: 1872
All editions →George Sand’s La Mare au Diable (The Devil’s Pool, 1846) is the first of her four pastoral novels. Germain, a twenty-eight-year-old widower with three children, is urged by his father-in-law to remarry and sets off to meet a well-off widow, taking a sixteen-year-old girl, Marie, who is going to a new job. A night by the pond of the title changes what he wants. Sand says it grew from a Holbein engraving of a ploughman and a scene she watched at sowing time.
First published: 1846
All editions →Félicité works in the house of Madame Aubain in Pont-l’Évêque, loving what she is given to love: a family, a nephew, a parrot. Flaubert follows her whole life without once raising his voice.
First published: 1877
All editions →Mathilde Loisel, married to a minor clerk, resents every plain thing in her life. An invitation to a grand evening gives her one chance to shine. Maupassant follows the consequences with a cool, exact eye, and later writers, from Henry James to Somerset Maugham, have answered its ending.
First published: 1884
All editions →In the winter of 1870, with Prussian troops occupying Rouen, ten people leave in a stagecoach for Le Havre: wine merchants, manufacturers, a count, two nuns, a democrat, and a young prostitute nicknamed Boule de Suif. Stopped at an inn in Tôtes by a Prussian officer, the respectable passengers must decide what they are willing to ask of her. Maupassant’s story appeared in April 1880 in Les Soirées de Médan and made his name.
First published: 1880
All editions →A man known only as the Time Traveller tells his dinner guests that time is a fourth dimension, and later comes back with a story to prove it. He has ridden a machine of his own making into the far future, where he meets two very different peoples and has to decide what they are. H. G. Wells’s 1895 novella gave the world its phrase “time machine”.
First published: 1895
All editions →A girl who has sold no matches on a freezing New Year’s Eve dares not go home, because her father would beat her. She strikes the matches one by one for warmth. Hans Christian Andersen’s few pages are among the best-known fairy tales ever printed.
First published: 1845
All editions →The Little Mermaid (Den lille Havfrue, 1837) is a literary fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. A sea king’s youngest daughter, fascinated by the human world above the waves, saves a prince from a shipwreck and bargains with the sea witch for legs at the cost of her voice. She must win his love to gain an immortal soul, and the price of failing is that she will not live past dawn.
First published: 1837
All editions →Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (January 1861) is Harriet Jacobs’s autobiography, published under the pseudonym Linda Brent. It follows a girl enslaved in North Carolina who is harassed by her master, Dr. Flint, and who hides for seven years in a tiny garret above her grandmother’s house when he threatens to sell her children. It ends with her escape to the North and her effort to free her family.
First published: 1861
All editions →Michael Kohlhaas, a novella by Heinrich von Kleist (fragment in Phöbus 1808, complete in 1810), follows a horse dealer wronged by a minor nobleman. When the courts fail him, he turns to a violent private campaign against Saxony. Kleist based it on the 16th-century story of the merchant Hans Kohlhase.
First published: 1810
All editions →A Doll’s House (Et dukkehjem, 1879) is a three-act play by Henrik Ibsen about Nora Helmer, a wife and mother who has secretly borrowed money by forging her father’s signature. When a bank clerk threatens to expose her, the marriage she has treated as safe is put to the test. Written in Dano-Norwegian, it caused what Wikipedia calls a storm of outraged controversy and became one of the most-performed plays in the world.
First published: 1879
All editions →On Christmas Eve, a group by a fire hears a manuscript read aloud: the account of a governess sent to Bly, a country house in Essex, to look after Miles and Flora, whose uncle wants nothing to do with them. Soon she sees a man and a woman who should not be there, and the housekeeper’s answers make her fear for the children. James serialised it in Collier’s Weekly in 1898, and readers have argued ever since over whether the ghosts are real.
First published: 1898
All editions →An elderly Wall Street lawyer, who narrates, takes on a new scrivener named Bartleby. At first Bartleby copies documents tirelessly; then he begins to answer requests with “I would prefer not to”. Published anonymously in two instalments in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in 1853, it is a comedy of office manners that turns into something harder to name.
First published: 1853
All editions →Takekurabe follows four young people in Daionjimae, a fictional neighbourhood just outside Tokyo’s Yoshiwara district, over about four months framed by two festivals. Higuchi Ichiyō serialized it in the magazine Bungakkai from January 1895 to January 1896,.
First published: 1895
All editions →Oriki is the most popular courtesan at the Kikunoi, a brothel in a red-light district; Genshichi, a former customer who has ruined himself for her, now struggles to get by. Higuchi Ichiyō wrote it in June and July 1895, when she was 23, and it appeared in Bungei kurabu that September.
First published: 1895
All editions →Alicia marries Jordán and moves into a white, silent house where his severity leaves little room for tenderness. Then she falls ill, with ordinary symptoms and no cause the doctors can name. In a few pages, Horacio Quiroga lets domestic realism and horror share one scene.
First published: 1907
All editions →Oseki, married seven years to a government official, leaves his house one night and returns to her parents. What she says there, and what her family answers, makes up most of this short story. Higuchi Ichiyō writes it in a few quiet scenes, with the moon as the only witness.
First published: 1895
All editions →Buck lives a sunlit life on a judge’s estate in California until a gardener, deep in gambling debts, sells him. Shipped to Seattle and then north, he is bought by Canadian mail dispatchers and put into harness as a sled dog in the Yukon. London’s short novel ran in The Saturday Evening Post in the summer of 1903 and appeared as a Macmillan book the same year.
First published: 1903
All editions →James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914) gathers fifteen stories of middle-class Dublin life, arranged from childhood through adolescence and maturity to public life. It opens with a boy and a dead priest in “The Sisters”, passes through the bazaar of “Araby”, and ends with a Christmastime party and a wife’s memory in “The Dead”. Joyce wrote the stories between 1904 and 1907, and the book took until 1914 to find a publisher.
First published: 1914
All editions →When a wealthy bachelor rents a house near the Bennets, their neighbours begin planning marriages, and Elizabeth Bennet forms a quick opinion of his proud friend Mr Darcy. Jane Austen’s comedy of manners is also a study of how people are wrong about each other, and how long it takes to find out.
First published: 1813
All editions →Jane Austen’s Persuasion (published December 1817, title page 1818) follows Anne Elliot, a baronet’s daughter who was persuaded years ago to break her engagement to Frederick Wentworth, a naval officer without fortune. When he returns wealthy from the navy and the Elliots let their house and move to Bath, she meets him again among younger women who admire him. Wikipedia calls it Austen’s last completed novel.
First published: 1817
All editions →The Sorrows of Young Werther (Die Leiden des jungen Werthers) is an epistolary novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, published in Leipzig on 29 September 1774. Werther writes to his friend Wilhelm about nature, his own moods and his feelings for Charlotte, who is already engaged to a man named Albert. The text this site uses is the first book only, a run of dated letters from May to September 1771.
First published: 1774
All editions →On the night before he leaves for Paris, five-year-old Bebé lies in bed thinking about the visit of his mother’s rich uncle, Don Pomposo, who made a fuss of him and ignored his motherless cousin Raúl. José Martí wrote it for children and trusts them to notice what is unfair.
First published: 1889
All editions →Charles Marlow, waiting for the tide on the Thames, tells his companions how he took a job captaining a river steamer for a Belgian ivory company in Africa. His task is to find Kurtz, a celebrated trader who has gone silent. Conrad drew on his own 1890 service on the Congo, and the story has been argued over ever since.
First published: 1899
All editions →In the prologue, a man loses his seven masks, runs through the market with his own face uncovered, and is declared mad. He takes the word as a gift and speaks on from there, in a prologue and thirty-four short parables and prose poems about gods, kings, a scarecrow, a wise dog, war and the self. Kahlil Gibran’s first book in English was published by Alfred A. Knopf in New York in 1918.
First published: 1918
All editions →Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (1923) is a book of 26 prose poetry fables written in English. After twelve years in the city of Orphalese, the prophet Almustafa sees the ship that will take him home, and at the request of the seeress Almitra he speaks to the gathered crowd on love, marriage, children, work, joy and sorrow, death and other subjects before he sails. Knopf published it in New York in 1923.
First published: 1923
All editions →Hōjōki, written in 1212, opens with a river that never stays the same and then asks what a person can really keep. Kamo no Chōmei describes the disasters he saw in the capital and the ten-foot-square hut where he settled as a recluse. It is short, calm and unexpectedly personal.
First published: 1212
All editions →Mrs. Mallard is given the news of her husband’s death as gently as possible. What she feels when she is left alone surprises her more than anyone. Kate Chopin packs it into a few pages, and it still unsettles readers.
First published: 1894
All editions →Edna Pontellier, the wife of a New Orleans businessman, spends a summer with her family at a Gulf Coast resort on Grand Isle. There a friendship, a piece of piano music and the sea set her questioning the roles of wife and mother that everyone around her takes for granted. Herbert S. Stone & Company published it in Chicago and New York in 1899.
First published: 1899
All editions →Katherine Mansfield’s 1920 collection gathers fourteen stories, from “Prelude”, a Wellington family’s move to a new house, to “Bliss”, in which a woman’s radiant mood at her own dinner party meets an unwelcome discovery. Other stories include a Parisian writer’s account of a failed love affair and a portrait of an ill wife and her husband. Mansfield, born in New Zealand, was already ill with tuberculosis when she assembled it.
First published: 1920
All editions →Katherine Mansfield’s 1922 collection gathers fifteen stories, opening with “At the Bay”, a summer day at a New Zealand seaside, and “The Garden Party”, in which a family’s party goes ahead after a neighbour’s death. Others follow two sisters sorting out their dead father’s belongings, “The Daughters of the Late Colonel”, and a solitary teacher in a park on a Sunday, “Miss Brill”. Mansfield wrote several of them in Switzerland while ill with tuberculosis, and died the following January.
First published: 1922
All editions →Pahom, a peasant, believes that with enough land he would fear nothing, not even the devil. He buys, moves and buys again, until a deal with the Bashkirs on the steppe puts one day’s walk between him and everything he wants. Tolstoy tells it in a few thousand words, plainly, like a fable.
First published: 1886
All editions →Ivan Ilyich is a high-court judge who has built a comfortable, correct life by doing what is expected. When an illness he cannot name begins to change how he sees that life, the novella follows him closely. Tolstoy published it in 1886, soon after his religious conversion, and it is often counted among the finest examples of the novella form.
First published: 1886
All editions →Hadji Murat (Хаджи-Мурат), a novella by Leo Tolstoy written 1896–1904 and published posthumously in 1912, follows an Avar rebel commander who, to avenge himself and save his captive family, forges an uneasy alliance with the Russians he has been fighting in the Caucasus. The narrator opens with a crushed thistle that still lives. Tolstoy drew on Russian archives, including Hadji Murat’s own account of his life.
First published: 1912
All editions →Alice, sitting bored beside her sister, follows a White Rabbit with a pocket watch down a rabbit hole and finds herself among creatures who change her size, question her name and argue in circles. Lewis Carroll, the pen name of the Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson, published it with John Tenniel’s illustrations in 1865.
First published: 1865
All editions →At Xianheng Inn, customers in long gowns sit to drink and those in short coats stand outside the counter. Kong Yiji wears the long gown but drinks standing. Told by the boy who warms the wine, Lu Xun’s few pages show how a small town amuses itself with a man it has no use for.
First published: 1919
All editions →A short story from 1918 presented as the diary of a man who becomes convinced that his neighbours, and then his own family, mean him harm. It opens with a note in classical Chinese; the rest is written in the plain spoken language that Lu Xun and his circle were pushing into literature.
First published: 1918
All editions →Ah Q is a hired hand with no family, no land and no certain name, living in the village of Weizhuang around the time of the 1911 revolution. Lu Xun’s narrator plays the dutiful biographer while the story laughs, then stops laughing. It is short, quick to read, and sharper than its reputation as a school text suggests.
First published: 1921
All editions →In a seamstress’s workroom, a needle scolds the thread for putting on airs, and the thread answers in kind. Machado de Assis stages their quarrel as a fable, a few pages long, and leaves the reader to decide what it is really about.
First published: 1885
All editions →In Rio de Janeiro in 1869, Rita consults a fortune-teller about her lover Camilo, who is also her husband Vilela’s boyhood friend. Machado de Assis turns a small piece of superstition into a story about skepticism, desire and the irony of fate.
First published: 1884
All editions →Machado de Assis’s Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881; Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, also translated as Epitaph of a Small Winner) is presented as the memoirs of a dead man. Brás Cubas begins with his own funeral and the pneumonia that killed him, then goes back to a spoiled childhood, a law degree, an adulterous affair and a string of failed ambitions. Wikipedia calls it one of the greatest works of Brazilian literature.
First published: 1881
All editions →La Princesse de Clèves is a French novel published anonymously in March 1678 and generally attributed to Madame de La Fayette. Its action runs from October 1558 to November 1559 at the court of Henri II, where a sixteen-year-old heiress marries the Prince de Clèves and then meets the Duke de Nemours. The text on this site is Project Gutenberg #18797, which includes the publisher’s preface and all four parts of the novel.
First published: 1678
All editions →Victor Frankenstein, a young student of natural philosophy, creates a thinking creature and runs from it. The novel passes the story through three voices, the last of them the creature’s own. It is far stranger, and more humane, than the film monster most people expect.
First published: 1818
All editions →In spring 1689 Matsuo Bashō left Edo with his companion Sora for the far north of Honshū, and later turned the trip into a short book of prose and haiku. It is a travel record that reads like a meditation on time, places and the people who passed through them before him.
First published: 1702
All editions →Two hunters in Western-style dress lose their guide in the mountains and, cold and hungry, come upon a Western-style restaurant. Behind each door hangs a sign, welcoming at first and stranger with every room. Miyazawa Kenji’s story turns on the double meaning of its title word chūmon: an order as a request, and an order as a meal.
First published: 1924
All editions →Tartuffe, or The Impostor, is a verse comedy by Molière, first performed in 1664 and printed in its final form in 1669. Orgon and his mother are won over by Tartuffe, a vagrant who apes devotion; he is promised Orgon’s daughter Mariane, courts his wife Elmire and is made heir to the house. The family, led by the maid Dorine, works to expose him before the household is lost.
First published: 1669
All editions →The Miser (L’Avare) is a five-act prose comedy by Molière, first performed in 1668. Harpagon, a rich widower, plans to marry the young Mariane, who loves his son Cléante, and to marry his daughter Élise to an old man who asks no dowry. When the cash box he has buried in his garden disappears, he suspects everyone. The play ends in a flurry of revelations about long-lost relatives.
First published: 1669
All editions →Goodman Brown, three months married to a wife named Faith, leaves her at dusk for an errand in the forest, though she asks him to stay. On the dark path he meets a traveler who seems to know his family and to know the town better than he does. Hawthorne’s story appeared anonymously in 1835 and became one of the most discussed short stories in American literature.
First published: 1835
All editions →A man tells ten dreams in ten short chapters. A vigil by a grave, a blind child on his back, a sculptor carving guardian gods in a temple, a steamship with no destination: each is complete in a few pages and none explains itself.
First published: 1908
All editions →A young Tokyo graduate, rash and proud of it, takes a mathematics post at a middle school in Shikoku and finds a staff room of nicknames, gossip and flattery, and pupils who test him at once. Natsume Sōseki wrote it in about ten days, drawing on his own time teaching in Matsuyama; it is one of the most popular Japanese novels.
First published: 1906
All editions →Kusamakura (“grass pillow”), a novel by Natsume Sōseki first published in the magazine Shinshōsetsu in September 1906, follows an artist who retreats to a remote mountain hotel. He sketches little and writes poetry instead, intrigued by the hostess, O-Nami. The text mixes scenes with essay-like meditations on art.
First published: 1906
All editions →Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin spends his days copying documents in a government office and is mocked by his colleagues. When his old coat falls apart in the Petersburg winter, a tailor’s bill becomes the biggest event of his life.
First published: 1842
All editions →An artist wants to make an image of “the Pleasure that abideth for a Moment.” Oscar Wilde needed only a handful of lines to turn that errand into a parable about what art costs. It is one of six prose poems he published in 1894.
First published: 1894
All editions →Jack Worthing is respectable in the country and “Ernest” in town; his friend Algernon keeps an invalid called Bunbury for the same purpose. When both men fall in love, the two double lives collide in a country house, with a formidable aunt supervising. Oscar Wilde called it “a trivial comedy for serious people”; it opened in London in February 1895.
First published: 1895
All editions →The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s only novel, first appeared as a shorter version in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in July 1890; the novel-length version followed in April 1891. In Victorian London, the painter Basil Hallward portrays the beautiful Dorian Gray, and Lord Henry Wotton’s hedonistic talk leads Dorian to wish that the portrait would age instead of him. The wish comes true, and the picture records every sin.
First published: 1890
All editions →A postmaster from Calcutta is sent to the small village of Ulapur, where he is lonely and ill at ease. An orphan girl, Ratan, cooks and cleans for him, and a quiet bond grows. In a few pages, Tagore asks what we owe the people who briefly make a place bearable.
First published: 1891
All editions →Rahmat, a Pashtun dry-fruit seller from Kabul, befriends Mini, the five-year-old daughter of a Calcutta writer who tells the story. Their friendship runs through years, and through a good deal that the narrator misjudges. Tagore keeps it small and exact, and the feeling arrives without being announced.
First published: 1892
All editions →The Post Office (Dakghar, 1912) is a short play by Rabindranath Tagore about Amal, a child confined to his adoptive uncle’s house by an incurable illness. Sitting at the courtyard, he talks to passers-by and, when a new post office goes up nearby, imagines receiving a letter from the King. The play was written in Bengali in four days and was soon staged in English translation at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.
First published: 1912
All editions →Gabriel Utterson, a sober London lawyer, grows uneasy about a friend’s will that leaves everything to a brutal stranger called Edward Hyde. Stevenson wrote the novella while largely bedridden in Bournemouth; it came out in January 1886 as a one-shilling paperback and sold close to 40,000 copies in six months. Its title has since become shorthand for a person with two faces.
First published: 1886
All editions →In a dream, a woman is led through Ladyland, a country where women govern, science runs on solar power and weather control, and men live in seclusion. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain turns the custom of purdah upside down and argues with every stereotype by following its logic to the end. It is short, playful and sharper than its gentle tone suggests.
First published: 1905
All editions →From the edge of a lotus pond in Paradise, the Buddha looks down into Hell and notices a man who, once, did one small kind thing. Akutagawa Ryūnosuke built this brief story for a children’s magazine in 1918, from a Buddhist tale in a book by the American writer Paul Carus.
First published: 1918
All editions →A servant who has just been dismissed shelters from the rain under the Rashōmon gate, in a Kyoto that has fallen into ruin. Up in the gate’s loft he finds something that tests whatever he still believes. Akutagawa retells a medieval tale in barely a dozen pages.
First published: 1915
All editions →A woodcutter finds a body in a grove near Kyoto. Seven testimonies follow, from witnesses to the people involved, each sure of itself and each different. It is also the reason a word like ‘Rashomon’ now means something in courtrooms and newsrooms.
First published: 1922
All editions →Yoshihide, a proud and disliked master painter, serves the Lord of Horikawa, who commands a screen of hell. A servant in the household tells what followed, in a narration that is courteous, admiring and not to be trusted.
First published: 1918
All editions →Framton Nuttel, a nervous man, pays a call at a country house. While he waits for his hostess, her young niece explains the open window to him. The story takes minutes to read and is built to the last line.
First published: 1911
All editions →Henry Fleming, called “the youth,” is a Union private who has dreamed of glory and now waits for his regiment’s first battle, unsure how he will behave when it comes. Crane follows him in close third person through noise, smoke, rumour and the talk of the men around him. Stephen Crane wrote it in 1893–94, before he had ever been in combat, and Appleton published it in New York in 1895.
First published: 1895
All editions →Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912) is a novella by Thomas Mann. Gustav von Aschenbach, an esteemed and recently ennobled writer, travels to Venice and takes rooms at a hotel on the Lido, where he becomes obsessed with a Polish boy of about fourteen. As the obsession deepens he abandons his lifelong discipline, and he stays on even after he learns that a cholera epidemic is spreading through the city.
First published: 1912
All editions →Invited to speak on “Women and Fiction,” Virginia Woolf answers with a story instead of a thesis: an unnamed narrator is turned off a college lawn and refused entry to a library, and draws her conclusions from what she sees. Her claim is plain: a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. Hogarth Press published the book in 1929, a year after the two Cambridge talks it grew from.
First published: 1929
All editions →Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) follows a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a wealthy woman in post-First World War London, from her morning errands to the party she gives that evening. Alongside her, the novel follows Septimus Warren Smith, a veteran suffering from shell shock, and moves freely between the characters’ present thoughts and their memories. Woolf began it as a short story, “Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street”, and its working title was The Hours.
First published: 1925
All editions →Candide grows up in a Westphalian castle, taught by Dr Pangloss that everything is for the best; then he is thrown out, and the world begins to correct his education. Voltaire’s fast, deadpan satire of 1759 sends him from war to Lisbon to the Americas and back, and asks what is left of hope when the evidence runs the other way.
First published: 1759
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