This collection features a brilliant new translation of the Japanese master's stories, from the source for the movie Rashōmon to his later, more autobiographical writings. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) is one of Japan's foremost stylists - a modernist master whose short stories are marked by highly original imagery...
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is a short story by Edgar Allan Poe published in Graham's Magazine in 1841. It has been recognized as the first modern detective story; Poe referred to it as one of his "tales of ratiocination". C. Auguste Dupin is a man in Paris who solves the mystery of the brutal murder of two women...
Born in 1907, Nakahara Chuya was one of the most gifted and colourful of Japan's early modern poets. A bohemian romantic, his death at the early age of thirty, coupled with the delicacy of his imagery, have led to him being compared to the greatest of French symbolist poets. Since the Second World War Nakahara's statu...
Notes from Underground, also translated as Notes from the Underground or Letters from the Underworld, is an 1864 novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Notes is considered by many to be one of the first existentialist novels. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (g...
The Brothers Karamazov, also translated as The Karamazov Brothers, is the final novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky spent nearly two years writing The Brothers Karamazov, which was published as a serial in The Russian Messenger from January 1879 to November 1880. The Brothers Karamazov is a pass...
Crime and Punishment is a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. It was first published in the literary journal 'The Russian Messenger' in twelve monthly installments during 1866. Later, it was published in a single volume. It is the second of Dostoevsky's full-length novels following his return from 5 years o...