The Night Before Christmas

William Shakespeare

Ladybird

With a foreword by Lev Rosen, author of the Evander Mills series and You've Goth My Heart. 'All that glisters is not gold.' Rediscover Shakespeare's tale of bitterness and retribution. Bitterness begets blood. Bassiano is in love with the gorgeous heiress Portia! Alas, he's too poor to pass the suitors' test set by her father. Fortunately, Bassiano's best friend, Antonio, s...

Virgil

Penguin

Crafted during the reign of Augustus Caesar at the outset of the Roman Empire, Virgil's Aeneid is a tale of thrilling adventure, extreme adversity, doomed romance, fateful battles, and profound loss. Through its stirring account of human struggle, meddling gods, and conflicting destinies, the poem brings to life the triumphs and trials that led to one of the most powerful socie...

Mary Shelley / Siv Jansson / Keith C / Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Wordsworth Classics

Frankenstein is the classic gothic horror novel which has thrilled and engrossed readers for two centuries. Written by Mary Shelley, it is a story which she intended would 'curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart.' The tale is a superb blend of science fiction, mystery and thriller. Victor Frankenstein driven by the mad dream of creating his own creature, experim...

Robert Plunket

Penguin

A Madame Bovary for the heyday of gay New York, Love Junkie is a riotously funny, razor-sharp tale about wanting it all 'He was a charismatic porn star who sold his dirty underwear. I was an upper-middle-class housewife from Bronxville' Mimi Smithers, bored aesthete manquée, lives with her husband Boyce in the New York suburbs, where dreams of dazzling social success elude he...

Caroline Blackwood

Abacus

Caroline Blackwood's masterpiece, shortlisted for the 1977 Booker Prize - a gothic family drama in miniature In her gloomy mausoleum of a home, the terrifying matriarch Great Granny Webster spends her days sitting bolt upright in a Victorian chair, entirely alone except for her one-eyed maid - and her orphaned great-granddaughter, sent to stay for the sea air. She presides ove...

A. A. Milne

Phoenix

Winnie the Pooh is a classic children's book by A.A. Milne that follows the adventures of a honey-loving bear named Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends, including Piglet, Eeyore, Rabbit, Owl, and Christopher Robin, in the fictional Hundred Acre Wood. The stories often center around Pooh's playful attempts to find honey, his simple nature, and the heart-warming friendships between t...

Nikolai Gogol

Penguin

'Strangely enough, I mistook it for a gentleman at first. Fortunately I had my spectacles with me so I could see it was really a nose.' With this pair of absurd, comic stories Gogol indulges his imagination and delights readers. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classi...

Nikolai Gogol

Alma Classics

A mysterious stranger named Chichikov arrives in a small provincial Russian town andproceeds to visit a succession of landowners, making each of them an unusual andsomewhat macabre proposition. He offers to buy the rights to the dead serfs who arestill registered on the landowner's estate, thus reducing their liability for taxes. It is notclear what Chichikov's intentions are w...

Nikolai Gogol

Alma Classics

Written in the 1830s and early 1840s, these comic stories tackle life behind the cold and elegant façade of the Imperial capital from the viewpoints of various characters, such as a collegiate assessor who one day finds that his nose has detached itself from his face and risen the ranks to become a state councillor (‘The Nose'), a painter and a lieutenant whose romantic pursuit...

Nikolai Gogol

Penguin

Author, dramatist and satirist, Nikolai Gogol deeply influenced later Russian literature with his powerful depictions of a society dominated by petty bureaucracy and base corruption. This volume includes both his most admired short fiction and his most famous drama. A biting and frequently hilarious political satire, "The Government Inspector" has been popular since its first p...