By Various

A stunning collection of all 80 exquisite Little Black Classics from PenguinThis spectacular box set of the 80 books in the Little Black Classics series showcases the many wonderful and varied writers in Penguin Black Classics. From India to Greece, Denmark to Iran, the United States to Britain, this assortment of books will transport readers back in time to the furthest corners of the globe. With a choice of fiction, poetry, essays and maxims, by the likes of Chekhov, Balzac, Ovid, Austen, Sappho and Dante, it won't be difficult to find a book to suit your mood. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of the Penguin Classics list - from drama to poetry, from fiction to history, with books taken from around the world and across numerous centuries.The Little Black Classics Box Set includes:· The Atheist's Mass (Honoré de Balzac)· The Beautifull Cassandra (Jane Austen)· The Communist Manifesto (Fredrich Engels and Karl Marx)· Cruel Alexis (Virgil)· The Dhammapada (Anon)· The Dolphins, the Whales and the Gudgeon (Aesop)· The Eve of St Agnes (John Keats)· The Fall of Icarus (Ovid)· The Figure in the Carpet (Henry James)· The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows (Rudyard Kipling)· Gooseberries (Anton Chekhov)· The Great Fire of London (Samuel Pepys)· The Great Winglebury Duel (Charles Dickens)· How a Ghastly Story Was Brought to Light by a Common or Garden Butcher's Dog (Johann Peter Hebel)· How Much Land Does A Man Need? (Leo Tolstoy)· How To Use Your Enemies (Baltasar Gracián)· How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing (Michel de Montaigne)· I Hate and I Love (Catullus)· Il Duro (D. H. Lawrence)· It was snowing butterflies (Charles Darwin)· Jason and Medea (Apollonius of Rhodes)· Kasyan from the Beautiful Mountains (Ivan Turgenev)· Leonardo da Vinci (Giorgio Vasari)· The Life of a Stupid Man (Ryunosuke Akutagawa)· Lips Too Chilled (Matsuo Basho)· Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime (Oscar Wilde)· The Madness of Cambyses (Herodotus· The Maldive Shark (Herman Melville)· The Meek One (Fyodor Dostoyevsky· Mrs Rosie and the Priest (Giovanni Boccaccio)· My Dearest Father (Wolfgang Mozart)· The Night is Darkening Round Me (Emily Brontë)· The nightingales are drunk (Hafez)· The Nose (Nikolay Gogol)· Olalla (Robert Louis Stevenson)· The Old Man in the Moon (Shen Fu), Miss Brill (Katherine Mansfield)· The Old Nure's Story (Elizabeth Gaskell)· On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (Thomas De Quincey)· On the Beach at Night Alone (Walt Whitman)· The Reckoning (Edith Wharton)· Remember, Body… (C. P. Cavafy)· The Robber Bridegroom (Brothers Grimm)· The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue (Anon)· Sindbad the Sailor· Sketchy, Doubtful, Incomplete Jottings (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)· Socrates' Defence (Plato)· Speaking of Siva (Anon)· The Steel Flea (Nikolai Leskov)· The Tell-Tale Heart (Edgar Allan Poe)· The Terrors of the Night (Thomas Nashe)· The Tinder Box (Hans Christian Andersen)· Three Tang Dynasty Poets (Wang Wei)· Trimalchio's Feast (Petronius)· To-morrow (Joseph Conrad), Of Street Piemen (Henry Mayhew)· Traffic (John Ruskin)· Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls (Marco Polo)· The Voyage of Sir Francis Drake Around the Whole Globe (Richard Hakluyt)· The Wife of Bath (Geoffrey Chaucer)· The Woman Much Missed (Thomas Hardy)· The Yellow Wall-paper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman)· Wailing Ghosts (Pu Songling)· Well, they are gone, and here must I remain (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

By L. Frank Baum

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) is a children's book written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by W.W. Denslow. It was originally published by the George M. Hill Company in Chicago in 1900,[1] and has since been reprinted countless times, sometimes under the name The Wizard of Oz. The story chronicles the adventures of a girl named Dorothy in the Land of Oz. It is one of the best-known stories in American popular culture and has been widely translated. Its initial success led to Baum's writing and having published thirteen more Oz books.

By Nathaniel Hawthorne

The short fiction of a writer who helped to shape the course of American literature. With a determined commitment to the history of his native land, Nathaniel Hawthorne revealed, more incisively than any writer of his generation, the nature of a distinctly American consciousness. The pieces collected here deal with essentially American matters: the Puritan past, the Indians, the Revolution. But Hawthorne was highly - often wickedly - unorthodox in his account of life in early America, and his precisely constructed plots quickly engage the reader's imagination. Written in the 1820s, 30s, and 40s, these works are informed by themes that reappear in Hawthorne's longer works: The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance. And, as Michael J. Colacurcio points out in his excellent introduction, they are themes that are now deeply embedded in the American literary tradition.

By Howard Phillips Lovecraft

A definitive collection of stories from the unrivaled master of twentieth-century horror"I think it is beyond doubt that H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale." -Stephen KingFrequently imitated and widely influential, Howard Philips Lovecraft reinvented the horror genre in the 1920s, discarding ghosts and witches and instead envisioning mankind as a tiny outpost of dwindling sanity in a chaotic and malevolent universe. S. T. Joshi, Lovecraft's preeminent interpreter, presents a selection of the master's fiction, from the early tales of nightmares and madness such as "The Outsider" to the overpowering cosmic terror of "The Call of Cthulhu." More than just a collection of terrifying tales, this volume reveals the development of Lovecraft's mesmerizing narrative style and establishes him as a canonical- and visionary-American writer.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

By Terry Pratchett

Better watch out ...It's that time of year again. Hogswatchnight. ‘Tis the season to be jolly, to hang mistletoe and holly, and other stuff ending in olly.‘Tis the season when the Hogfather himself dons his red suit and climbs in his sleigh pulled by -- of course! -- eight hogs and brings gifts to all the boys and girls of Discworld.But this year, there's a problem. A stranger has taken the place of the Hogfather. Well, not exactly a stranger. He's actually pretty well known. He carries a scythe along with his bag of toys, and he's going to SLEIGH everyone he sees tonight.Ho ho ho.Even the laugh is wrong. The switch has been arranged by the Auditors, mysterious superbeings who want our universe to be a collection of rocks swinging in curves through space. Life is messy. Why not get rid of it? And who better than -- you know who?Somebody has to rescue the real Hogfather before this morbid impostor tracks soot on the world's carpets. It's up to Ankh-Morpork's intellectual elite, the assembled wizards of Unseen University -- with the help of a monster-bashing nanny, the world's worst inventor, plus a bona-fide, honest-to-god god (the oh god of hangovers, to be precise) -- to come up with a plan to save the universe.And they'd better hurry. The bogus Hogfather is asking the wrong questions. Like: How come rich kids get all the nice toys? How come the poor kids are left with the cheap stuff?"That's life," he is told.Which cuts no ice with Death.

By Ray Bradbury

Bradbury's first story collection is a must-read for any fan of the genre, spinning stardust and cobwebs in its wondrous wake.It contains twenty-seven stories, from science fiction’s master storyteller.

By BURTON TIM

Jack Skellington is the most important figure in Halloweenland and for years he has delighted in organising macabre tricks and frights for Halloween. But this year he doesn't feel right - there must be more to life than scaring people? Then Jack stumbles upon a cheerful, colourful place called Christmas Town and he knows what he must do - he will bring Christmas to Halloween!This beautifully designed commemorative edition celebrates the twentieth anniversary of this classic book, written and illustrated by the incomparable visionary Tim Burton.

By George MacDonald, U. C. Knoepflmacher

George MacDonald occupied a major position in the intellectual life of his Victorian contemporaries. This volume brings together all eleven of his shorter fairy stories as well as his essay "The Fantastic Imagination". The subjects are those of traditional fantasy: good and wicked fairies, children embarking on elaborate quests, and journeys into unsettling dreamworlds. Within this familiar imaginative landscape, his children's stories were profoundly experimental, questioning the association of childhood with purity and innocence, and the need to separate fairy tale wonder from adult scepticism and disbelief.

By Ray Bradbury

For more than sixty years, the imagination of Ray Bradbury has opened doors into remarkable places, ushering us across unexplored territories of the heart and mind while leading us inexorably toward a profound understanding of ourselves and the universe we inhabit. In this landmark volume, America's preeminent storyteller offers us one hundred treasures from a lifetime of words and ideas. The stories within these pages were chosen by Bradbury himself, and span a career that blossomed in the pulp magazines of the early 1940s and continues to flourish in the new millennium. Here are representatives of the legendary author's finest works of short fiction, including many that have not been republished for decades, all forever fresh and vital, evocative and immensely entertaining.

By Roald Dahl

Twenty wickedly anarchic tales from the master of the unpredictable, chosen from his bestsellers Over to You, Someone Like You, Kiss Kiss and Switch Bitch.Stylish, outrageous and haunting, they explore the sinister side of the human psyche with unexpected outcomes. There's the wife who serves up a murderous new dish to her husband, the gambler who collects little fingers from losers, the sound machine that can hear grass scream, and the night-time seduction that has macabre consequences, to name a few.