When Edward J. O'Brien asked me to cooperate with him in choosing each year's best English short stories, to be published as a companion volume to his annual selection of the best American short stories, I had not realized that at the end of my arduous task, which has involved the reading of many hundreds of stories in the English magazines of an entire year, I should find myself asking the simple question: What is a short story?

Thirteen Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories that send chills up the spine and create an atmosphere sure to make the reader turn on an extra light and push up the back of their armchair against the wall.Set amidst crumbling, ill-maintained churches and imposing cathedrals, on desolate coastland, moors and marshes, even along unlit roads extending into the new suburbs of London, the stories have been chosen for their quality of writing, imaginative range and diversity of character...

'Excellent, entertaining and ingenious ... from Oscar Wilde to Arthur Conan Doyle, this fine anthology celebrates one of the richest moments in Britain's literary history' Sunday TimesThe quarter century between 1890 and the outbreak of the First World War saw an extraordinary boom in the popularity and quality of short stories in Britain, fuelled by a large, eager new magazine readership. The great writers of the age produced some of their finest work, an...

Ghost stories date back centuries, but those written in the Victorian era have a unique atmosphere and dark beauty. Michael Sims, whose previous Victorian collections Dracula's Guest (vampires) and The Dead Witness (detectives) have been widely praised, has gathered twelve of the best stories about humanity's oldest supernatural obsession. The Phantom Coach includes tales by a surprising, often legendary cast, from Charles Dickens and Margaret Oliphant to Henry J...

The Wheels of Chance is a comic novel by H. G. Wells.This novel was written at the peak of what has been called the Golden Age of the bicycle the years of 1890-1905 when practical, comfortable bicycles first became widely and cheaply available, and before the rise of the automobile (see History of the bicycle). The advent of the bicycle stirred sudden and profound changes in the social life of England. It was unprecedented that a person of modest means could travel substantial distances, q...

The concept of body switching has been used as fodder for Hollywood blockbusters for decades. Humor writer F. Anstey's take on this time-honored trope, Vice Versa, recounts the hilarious hijinks that ensue when a boy and his father suddenly and mysteriously wind up inhabiting each other's skin. Adapted for the silver screen four times, this knee-slapping romp is sure to please.

Classic ghost stories to send a chill down your spine!There are few pleasures more enduring than a ghost story read as the light fails. In this carefully gathered anthology, the great nineteenth and early twentieth-century masters turn parlours, railway cuttings, lonely rooms and old houses sinister.A signalman hears a warning that may come too late. A scholar finds that curiosity can carry a terrible price. Travellers, servants, widows and solitary witness...

As the nights draw in and Halloween is just around the corner, what better to read than this collection of seriously spooky stories about ghosts, ghouls and things that go bump in the night.Ghost stories became hugely popular during the nineteenth century and the Victorians became the masters of the genre. This deliciously chilling collection of Classic Hallowe'en Stories includes authors such as Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, Edgar Allen...

The Short Stories Of Edith Nesbit. The short story is often viewed as an inferior relation to the Novel. But it is an art in itself. To take a story and distil its essence into fewer pages while keeping character and plot rounded and driven is not an easy task. Many try and many fail. In this series we look at short stories from many of our most accomplished writers. Miniature masterpieces with a lot to say. In this volume we examine some of the short stories of Edith Nesbit. Edith Nesb...

The short story is often viewed as an inferior relation to the Novel. But it is an art in itself. To take a story and distil its essence into fewer pages while keeping character and plot rounded and driven is not an easy task. Many try and many fail. In this series we look at short stories from many of our most accomplished writers. Miniature masterpieces with a lot to say. In this volume we examine some of the short stories of Arnold Bennett. Arnold Bennett was born in 1867 in Hanley, one...

Alfred McLelland Burrage was born in 1889. His father and uncle were both writers, primarily of boys fiction, and by age 16 AM Burrage had joined them and quickly became a master of the market publishing his stories regularly across a number of publications. By the start of the Great War Burrage was well established but in 1916 he was conscripted to fight on the Western Front, his experiences becoming the classic book War is War by Ex-Private X. For the remainder of his life Burrage was rarel...

Edward Frederic Benson (24 July 1867 – 29 February 1940) was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, archaeologist and short story writer.First Published in 1934 to 1937 :How Fear Departed from the Long GalleryAt Abdul Ali's GraveMrs. AmworthBetween the LightsThe House with the Brick-KilnThe Man Who Went Too FarThe Bus-ConductorCaterpillarsAnd the Dead SpakeThe Dust-Cloud