Four sailors discover a copper cylinder containing a manuscript written by the adventurer Adam More, who was shipwrecked in the southern hemisphere. They read its contents out to one another, and the incredible story unfolds of his journey to a lost world which survives at the foot of a volcano....

When the young and sensitive Auguste Saint-Clair notices an Etruscan vase on the mantelpiece of his beloved Mathilde, he becomes gradually consumed by jealousy at the thought that it could be the gift of another man, and the situation escalates dramatically as he demands proof from her that she loves only him....

A Village Romeo and Juliet is a bitter-sweet tragedy telling the tale of two young lovers kept apart by a family feud....

Dual-Language Edition. Foscolo ranks among the most famous and enduringly popular poets in Italian literature, and in this collection, the only available in the English language, his most significant poems are collected in J.G. Nichols\"s lucid verse translation....

While on a journey with his wife to Prague for the opening night of Don Giovanni, Mozart is caught picking an orange on the grounds of a stately home. But when the resident family find out who they are dealing with, they are delighted to be in the presence of the celebrated composer and invite him to their daughter’s wedding....

Eichendorff\"s prose masterpiece - a picaresque account of the wanderings of a young man who leaves home after a row with his father, and who eventually finds love with the girl of his dreams - is one of the best-known classics of German literature....

After one of their own people repeatedly fails to live up to a pact with the Devil, a petty and morally bankrupt village community is plagued by a swarm of deadly black spiders. Using a complex narrative structure, Gotthelf\"s cautionary novella shrewdly dissects the iniquitous social dynamics of rural life....

Paul Scarron’s masterpiece, The Comic Romance, recounts the adventures of a troupe of provincial itinerant actors, skilfully weaving multiple narrative strands – such as the personal histories and love stories of the central couples Destiny and Star and Leandre and Angelique, the farcical misadventures of the buffoonish Ragotin and various tales in...

Trapped in an unhappy marriage with a boorish, inattentive and socially ambitious husband, Julie de Chaverny enjoys a flirtatious dalliance with the elegant Major de Chвteaufort. However, the sudden reappearance of an old admirer, M....

Published posthumously, The Red Notebook is an account of the youth of the author of the seminal Romantic novel Adolphe, relating Constant’s eccentric and peripatetic education, his introduction to European high society and the kindling of his literary ambitions – as well as his often comic and calamitous early experiences with the opposite sex and...

In the title piece of this collection a party of guests wonder at the great comet which has appeared in the sky, and give their predictions of what this ill omen portends for the Earth....

Happily engaged to the poet Amandus, Fraulein Anna is horrified to discover that a beautiful ring, mysteriously deposited upon her finger whilst tending her kitchen garden, forces her into marriage with the gnome Corduanspitz. Can Anna find any way of removing the ring? Will her poet lover shake off his passive demeanour and come to her aid?...

Based on a true story, The Jew\"s Beech centres on two brutal murders in rural Westphalia – the first of a local forester and the second of a Jewish moneylender near a beech tree - and the impact these events have on the life of Friedrich Mergel, a local herdsman with a turbulent family history....

Unsuccessful in his endeavours, the young and naive Peter Schlemihl seals a pact with the Devil in which he exchanges his shadow for the purse of Fortunatus, thereby gaining everlasting riches....

Portraying the characters and events of a small Midwestern town at the end of the nineteenth century, Winesburg, Ohio is a chronological cycle of stories which reads like an episodic novel....