Service Alert
Website maintenance April 24 10pm ET
On Wednesday April 24 at 10pm ET the CELA website will be unavailable for about 15 minutes for planned maintenance.
On Wednesday April 24 at 10pm ET the CELA website will be unavailable for about 15 minutes for planned maintenance.
Showing 121 - 140 of 13497 items
By Marguerite De Navarre. 2004
In the early 1500s five men and five women find themselves trapped by floods and compelled to take refuge in…
an abbey high in the Pyrenees. When told they must wait days for a bridge to be repaired, they are inspired - by recalling Boccaccio's Decameron - to pass the time in a cultured manner by each telling a story every day. The stories, however, soon degenerate into a verbal battle between the sexes, as the characters weave tales of corrupt friars, adulterous noblemen and deceitful wives. From the cynical Saffredent to the young idealist Dagoucin or the moderate Parlamente - believed to express De Navarre's own views - The Heptameron provides a fascinating insight into the minds and passions of the nobility of sixteenth century France.By Ben Kane. 2013
An exclusive straight to digital short story which also includes the first chapter of Ben Kane's Hannibal: Fields of Blood.…
WINTER 218 BCIn Cisalpine Gaul, a Carthaginian patrol is moving stealthily through thick woodland.It’s led by Hanno, one of Hannibal’s young officers, and his second-in-command Mutt. Famished and cold, they are making for a town full of the grain that they desperately need.But the local Gauls cannot be trusted; and although defeated, the Romans still have patrols in the area. With peril on every side and a deadly ambush ahead, there is no certainty that either Hanno or Mutt will survive ...By Su Tong. 2008
It was rare for the people from Wangbao to come down from their mountain village, but one spring, they arrive…
in town with sensational news - a virgin birth. What's more, there is something very odd about the baby - he is as big as a child of three, black all over and missing a finger. The villagers whisper that he is the thunder god's son, but back in town, the local doctor knows something he is too afraid to tell.Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection Madwoman on the Bridge.Sherlock star Mark Gatiss selects and introduces chilling tales by the unsung master of the classic ghost story - E.F.…
Benson. There's nothing sinister about a London bus. Nothing supernatural could occur on a busy Tube platform. There's nothing terrifying about a little caterpillar. And a telephone, what could be scary about that? Don't be frightened of the dark corners of your room. Don't be alarmed by a sudden, inexplicable chill. There's no need for a ticking clock, a limping footstep, or a knock at the door to start you trembling. There's nothing to be scared of. Nothing at all.By M. R. James. 2011
Malignant forces and supernatural visitors haunt this selection of superbly spooky tales selected and introduced by Ruth Rendell. M. R.…
James wrote his ghost stories to entertain friends on Christmas Eve, and they went on to both transform and modernise a genre. James harnesses the power of suggestion to move from a recognisable world to one that is indefinably strange, and then unforgettably terrifying. Sheets, pictures, carvings, a dolls house, a lonely beach, a branch tapping on a window - ordinary things take on more than a tinge of dread in the hands of the original master of suspense.By David Richards, Ivan Bunin, Sophie Lund. 1987
A much neglected literary figure, Ivan Bunin is one of Russia's major writers and ranks with Tolstoy and Chekhov at…
the forefront of the Russian Realists. Drawing artistic inspiration from his personal experience, these powerful, evocative stories are set in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russia of his youth, in the countries that he visited and in France, where he spent the last thirty years of his life. In the title story, for example, a family's tour of fashionable European resorts comes to an unexpected end; 'Late Hour' describes an old man's return to the little Russian town in the steppes that he has not seen since his early youth; while 'Mitya's Love' explores the darker emotional reverberations of sexual experience. Throughout his stories there is a sense of the precariousness of existence, an omnipresent awareness of the impermanence of human aspirations and achievements.By M C Scott. 2011
In 'Grave Gold', when a hole is uncovered after a mudslide Cassie, a university student, and Anna, her archaeology professor…
and lover, begin exploring what appears to be an ancient man-made cave. However, they quickly begin to suspect that this may actually be the grave of the famous Boudica. As their exploration continues Cassie begins having vivid dreams about Boudica and cannot escape the feeling that what Anna hails as academic research is actually the desecration of a sacred burial site.In 'Dream Walker', in order for summer to arrive and the darkness of winter to depart, a village performs an annual ritual under the guidance of the grandmother who is the dreamer. The villagers know that if the ritual is performed incorrectly, or the sacrifice is not willing, then the buds of spring will never grow into the summer.In 'Pantera II', set in Hyrcania AD 57 this short story gives an insight into the culture and society of an ancient city and provides a glimpse of Pantera's past through the eyes of the narrator Demalion of Macedon. This exclusive short stories bundle is part of the Storycuts series.By Elizabeth Gaskell. 2000
Elizabeth Gaskell's chilling Gothic tales blend the real and the supernatural to eerie, compelling effect. 'Disappearances', inspired by local legends…
of mysterious vanishings, mixes gossip and fact; 'Lois the Witch', a novella based on an account of the Salem witch hunts, shows how sexual desire and jealousy lead to hysteria; while in 'The Old Nurse's Story' a mysterious child roams the freezing Northumberland moors. Whether darkly surreal, such as 'The Poor Clare', where an evil doppelgänger is formed by a woman's bitter curse, or mischievous like 'Curious, if True', a playful reworking of fairy tales, all the stories in this volume form a stark contrast to the social realism of Gaskell's novels, revealing a darker and more unsettling style of writing.By William Palmer. 1996
"Do you know what the last four things are? In the Christian catechism they are Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell.…
But in our secular age they should perhaps be changed. I suggest - First Love, Friendship, Betrayal and Death . . . These also happen to be the staples of the novelist. Is that the sort of thing you want?"' Thus Cornelius Marten asks the researcher who turns up one night at his house. Cornelius has forgotten his invitation to the young man. But the young woman who accompanies him seems strangely familiar. Cornelius is flattered by their attention. He had thought himself almost forgotten; his great works neglected. And Cornelius, monstrously selfish, whisky glass constantly in hand, his mind shifting between past and present, finds that his mysterious guests release memories and truths he had preferred to forget. The stories which follow Four Last Things complement and explore some of the same themes: the poet who has published only onepoem; a bizarre stag night; a child who is haunted by his encounter with the adult world of a religious maniac; a dreamed murder; an academic who stirs the ghost of Byron in modern Venice; the shifts and deceptions of language and memory; and in a great jazzman's last wordless hurrah, a final flowering of beauty. This irresistibly powerful volume by the author of The Good Republic, Leporello and The Contract confirms William Palmer as one of our finest writers.By Katherine Mansfield. 1997
Fifteen exquisite tales from one of the world'd greatest writers of the short storyInnovative, startlingly perceptive and aglow with colour,…
these stories were written towards the end of Katherine Mansfield's tragically short life. Many are set in the author's native New Zealand, others in England and the French Riviera. All are revelations of the unspoken, half-understood emotions that make up everyday experience - from the blackly comic 'The Daughters of the Late Colonel', and the short, sharp sketch 'Miss Brill', in which a lonely woman's precarious sense of self is brutally destroyed, to the vivid impressionistic evocation of family life in 'At the Bay'. 'All that I write,' Mansfield said, 'all that I am - is on the borders of the sea. It is a kind of playing.'By Su Tong. 2008
In 'Goddess Peak', Miaoyue and Li Yong were almost the last two passengers aboard the steamboat to Goddess Peak -…
them and Li Yong's friend Mr Cui. Miaoyue found Mr Cui taller and better built than she'd imagined, and also a little younger and more handsome. For some reason, this irritated her.In 'The Q of Hearts', when the boy found the Queen of Hearts missing from his deck of cards, he immediately assumed that someone had stolen it. It was 1969, and those cards were his only toy. He searched everywhere for a new one - but only found things to frighten him.Part of the Storycuts series, these two short stories were previously published in the collection Madwoman on the Bridge.By Pat Thomson. 1994
There's something for everyone in this collection of funny short stories. It's packed full of talking pigs, UFOs, gorillas, witches,…
mischievous house elves, flying postmen and lots more! Find out how Bozo the gorilla helps Jimmy deal with his lazy big brother, what Dinah Price does when she finds the three bears tucked up in her bed and what fate Agnethia Toadfax, trainee witch, has in store for Mr Smike the rude librarian . . .'Three weeks later the world was advised of the coming of a new breakfast food, heralded under the resounding name…
of 'Filboid Studge''H.H. Munro, better known by his pen name, Saki, wrote wickedly comic satires of upper-class Edwardian life. These seven short stories are macabre and extremely funny: they include a cat that is regrettably taught to speak, a vicious pet ferret worshipped as a god, a businessman triumphantly selling an unpalatable breakfast mush, and many dark twists and barbs.This book includes Filboid Studge, a Story of a Mouse That Helped, Todermory, Mrs. Packletide's Tiger, Sredni Vashtar, The Music on the Hill, The Recessional and The Cobweb.By Henry James. 1986
The stories in this collection were written mostly between 1888 and 1897, a time when Henry James’s writing was concerned…
with the art of fiction and the position of the artist in society. The motif and title story, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, is an inspired joke, a masterpiece of double-entendre that demands the reader’s undivided love and attention and continues to baffle its critics. Also included are ‘The Author of Beltraffio’, an absorbing story of family infighting, authorship and tragedy, and ‘The Private Life’, a spirited tale that considers the contrast between the artist alone and at work. While many of these stories appear to be elaborate Jamesian games, all employ irony and humour to allegorize artistic creation.By Thomas Hardy. 2003
The Melancholy Hussar/ A Tragedy of Two Ambitions/ The First Countess of Wessex/ Barbara of the House of Grebe/ For…
Conscience' Sake/ The Son's Veto/ On the Western Circuit/ An Imaginative Woman/ A Changed Man/ Enter a Dragoon The 11 short storiesin this collection range from those with the Wessex setting familiar from Hardy's novels, to aristocratic historical fantasies set in the 17th and 18th centuries, and tragic or ironic contemporary dramas. Enormously readable in their own right, thestories can also be seen as a rich testing ground for ideas and themes that receive more sustained treatment in Hardy's most innovative and controversial novels.By Henry James. 2008
By G K Chesterton. 2007
Immortalized in these famous stories, G. K. Chesterton's endearing amateur sleuth has entertained countless generations of readers. For, as his…
admirers know, Father Brown's cherubic face and unworldly simplicity, his glasses and his huge umbrella, disguise a quite uncanny understanding of the criminal mind at work. This edition includes seven tales from a number of G. K. Chesterton's 'Father Brown' books.By H. P. Lovecraft. 2008
Deadly forces are about to be awakened …In the degenerate, unliked backwater of Dunwich, Wilbur Whately, a most unusual child,…
is born. Of unnatural parentage, he grows at an uncanny pace to an unsettling height, but the boy’s arrival simply precedes that of a true horror: one of the Old Ones, that forces the people of the town to hole up by night, fearful for their lives, by day able only to trace the wreckage wrought by the gigantic, unseen monster.In this and other tales of the macabre, H. P. Lovecraft weaves unearthly fantasies of creatures beyond conception – existing between the spaces of the dimensions we know.By Bram Stoker. 2006
Although Bram Stoker is best known for his world-famous novel Dracula, he also wrote many shorter works on the strange…
and the macabre. This collection, comprising Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories, a volume of spine-chilling short stories collected and published by Stoker's widow after his death, and The Lair of the White Worm, an intensely intriguing novel of myths, legends and unspeakable evil, demonstrate the full range of his horror writing. From the petrifying open tomb in 'Dracula's Guest' to the mental breakdown depicted in 'The Judge's House' and 'Crooken Sands', these terrifying tales of the uncanny explore the boundaries between life and death, known and unknown, animal and human, dream and reality.By Edgar Allan Poe. 2003
The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings is a collection that displays the full force of Edgar…
Allen Poe's mastery of both Gothic horror and the short story form. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction and notes by David Galloway.This selection of Poe's critical writings, short fiction and poetry demonstrates his intense interest in aesthetic issues, and the astonishing power and imagination with which he probed the darkest corners of the human mind. 'The Fall of the House of Usher' is a slow-burning Gothic horror, describing the final hours of a family tormented by tragedy and the legacy of the past. In 'The Tell-Tale Heart', a murderer's insane delusions threaten to betray him, while stories such as 'The Pit and the Pendulum', 'The Raven' and 'The Cask of Amontillado' explore extreme states of decadence, fear and hate. In his introduction David Galloway re-examines the myths surrounding Poe's life and reputation. This edition includes a new chronology and suggestions for further reading.Although dissipated in his youth and plagued by mental instability towards the end of his life, Boston-born Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) had a variety of occupations, including service in the US army and magazine editor, as well as his remarkable literary output.If you enjoyed The Fall of the House of Usher, you might like Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, also available in Penguin Classics.'The most original genius that America has produced'Alfred, Lord Tennyson'Poe has entered our popular consciousness as no other American writer'The New York Times Book Review