検索キーワード： ナレーター "Cathy Dobson" すべてのカテゴリー

James Wilbraham Waite is living in a bedsit in Praxton Street, London, and feels trapped. Trapped by his life, his job...and particularly by the depressing room he rents. He sees it as his personal hell. His only escape is through reading books and imagining adventures. When he unexpectedly inherits a substantial sum of money from an uncle in Canada, he resolves to take off and live his dream.... He wants to experience life in the desert.

William Wymark Jacobs (1863 - 1943) was an English author of short stories and novels. Most of his works were either humorous tales or horror stories. Many of his popular tales are written in the cockney vernacular and are based either on the docks at Wapping, or in the bar of the infamous tavern The Cauliflower. 'A Tiger's Skin' is a tale narrated by the oldest regular at The Cauliflower. It is the story of the Claybury tiger... a beast which had apparently escaped from a travelling circus....

Edward Frederic Benson (1867-1940) was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, archaeologist, and short story writer, best known for his masterly and uncanny ghost stories. The Terror by Night describes a strange and uncanny haunting which is simultaneously experienced by multiple different witnesses in entirely separate ways...each of them receiving a part of the whole picture, but none able to understand its import individually. When the various pieces are put together, the meaning is terrifying.

A Patch on the Quilt is a short story about an actor who is pursued by a strange woman at the theatre with a very odd request. She has attended every performance of his play since it started, skipping meals to afford the tickets. She now wants him to come with her to a house in Kensington after his performance...which she says is part of her 'plan'. But who is this person and what could she possibly want from him?

W. W. Jacobs (1863-1941) is well known for humorous stories and for the most grisly of horror stories. His Brother's Keeper belongs firmly in the latter category. It tells the story of a man whose murdered enemy lies secretly buried at the bottom of the garden. It is the perfect crime. Nobody need ever know who has murdered him and where he lies. Nobody need ever have known....

More French Than the French is the risqué story of a British girl who is spending her last night in Paris. She meets a young Englishman who flirts with her. She pretends to be a confident young Frenchwoman and invites the young man back to her apartment. The story follows the mental processes of the two young people as they prepare to lose their virginity.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was an English writer best known for his fictional priest-detective, Father Brown. In "The Blue Cross" however, we are following the famous Parisien sleuth Aristide Valentin in pusuit of a master criminal in London. Valentin's problem is that he has no clue where to start looking... until in a restaurant where he has his breakfast, the salt and sugar are in the wrong containers.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937), who wrote as H. P. Lovecraft, was an American writer who achieved posthumous acclaim for his outstanding and influential works of horror fiction."Pickman's Model" is the story of a bizarre painter who has an uncanny genius for painting terrifying, hellish creatures which are extraordinarily lifelike. Indeed, the rendition is so amazing that it seems inconceivable that they could have been painted from anything but a real-life model. But of course, that could never be...surely....

A breathtaking collection of 80 classic short stories inspired by different locations, people and customs across the globe...

Ludwig Achim von Arnim (1781-1831) was a German poet and novelist from a Prussian noble family, and one of the most notable writers in German Romanticism. The Mad Veteran of Fort Ratonneau, written in 1881, is an engaging story which combines humour, sentiment, the eternal struggle between good and evil, and a rattling good storyline all in one.

Henry Chapman Mercer (1856-1930) was an American archeologist, artifact collector, tile maker and writer of extraordinary supernatural stories. The Wolf Book is the story of a professor who spends the summer travelling in Hungary and Romania in search of rare manuscripts. At the monastery at Jollok, he learns that the library was plundered a hundred years earlier by a sinister nobleman who was rumoured to be a werewolf.

Mary Ann Lamb (1764 – 1847) was an English writer who battled with mental illness all her life. In 1796 during a nervous breakdown, she stabbed her mother to death and was sent to an asylum. Six months afterward, her brother Charles took over her care, and she went to live with him, and the two of them collaborated on many works of literature together.

Fifty short stories by women writers who broke the mould.

Leo Tolstoy is widely recognized as one of the world's greatest novelists and short story writers and a master of realistic fiction. He is equally known for his complex and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, developed following a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became known for his deep moral thinking and social reforms.

Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) was a preeminent Ukrainian-born story writer. He is particularly famous for those stories which veer in the direction of surrealism and the grotesque. The Cloak is one such tale. Akaky Akakiyevich is a reclusive and widely ridiculed lower official whose job is to copy letters. He lives a hand-to-mouth existence with his elderly landlady and has little money. But the harsh weather in St. Petersburg necessitates the purchase of a new cloak.

Edward Frederic Benson (1867-1940) was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, archaeologist, and short story writer, best known for his evocative and beautifully narrated ghost stories. Caterpillars is the story of a strange visit to the mysterious Villa Cascana, where one bedroom is inexplicably always kept empty. The visitor feels uneasy immediately on arriving, although there is no obvious reason why he should. And then the nightmares begin.

The Last Adventure is the bizarre tale of a young rake who regularly suffers from amnesia while out having adventures. He wakes up with no memory of how he got into his current predicament, nor of what went before it. In this story, he discovers himself in the company of an attractive woman and gradually becomes aware that something very terrible has happened...something that shocks him to the very core....

Barry Eric Odell Pain (1864-1928) was an English journalist, poet, and writer best known for his outstanding mystery and horror stories, often with a strange twist at the end. "A Considerable Murder" is the odd tale of a retired gentleman and his daughter who are suddenly imposed upon by an old, sick and highly cantankerous man...a former friend of their father and grandfather, who had helped them out in earlier years.

When Mr. Dillet buys a breathtakingly beautiful antique dolls' house from a dealer, he is delighted with his purchase and has it installed in his bedroom at home. When he goes to bed, however, he hears a clock strike one and then a strange scene unfolds before his eyes, leading him into a vision from the past in which he unravels a mysterious unsolved murder...

The short story is considered to be one of the most challenging genres because of the need for compact plotlines and the ability to conjure up atmosphere and character in a few sentences and to engage the reader instantly. This collection presents 66 of the greatest examples of the genre - many of them well known, some hidden literary treasures, all of them exquisite examples of the short story at its finest.