Recommendations based on "The Berkley Showcase New Writings in Science Fiction and Fantasy"

Titles in this set:The Fifth mountain, The devil & miss prym, Eleven Minutes, By the river piedra, The pilgrimage, The witch of portobello, The Valkyries, The Zahir, Veronika decides to die, The alchemist.

Millions of young readers have loved the Worlds Worst Children tales now they will revel in this delightfully dreadful collection of the most gruesome grown-ups ever: The Worlds Worst Teachers. From the phenomenally bestselling David Walliams and illustrated in glorious colour by the artistic genius, Tony Ross. Think your teachers are bad? Wait till you meet this lot. These ten tales of the worlds most splendidly sinister teachers will have you running for the school gates. Dr Dread teaches science and is half man, half monster Watch out for the ghastly Miss Seethe. She is ALWAYS furious and shes on a detention rampage. And as for Pent, hes a teacher with a real difference. He is bone-shakingly terrified of children!

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)

Brimming with tales of terror, suspense, and the uncanny, this work offers the first collection devoted to the Gothic genre. Each story contains the common elements of the gothic tale--a warped sense of time, a claustrophobic setting, a link to archaic modes of thought, and the impression of a descent into disintegration. Yet taken together, they reveal the progression of the genre from stories of feudal villains amid crumbling ruins to a greater level of sophistication in which writers brought the gothic tale out of its medieval setting, and placed it in the contemporary world. Bringing together the work of such writers as Eudora Welty, Thomas Hardy, Edgar Allan Poe, William Faulkner, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joyce Carol Oates, and Jorge Luis Borges, The Oxford Book of Gothic Tales presents a wide array of the sinister and unsettling for all lovers of ghost stories, fantasy, and horror.

'It was a monstrous constellation of unnatural light, like a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed marsh...'H.P. Lovecraft was perhaps the greatest twentieth century practitioner of the horror story, introducing to the genre a new evil, monstrous, pervasive and unconquerable. At the heart of these three stories are terrors unthinkable and strange: a crash-landing meteorite, the wretched inhabitant of an ancient castle and a grave-robber's curse. This book includes "The Colour Out Of Space", "The Outsider" and "The Hound".

"A twisting, wondrous tale full of magic that only Neil Gaiman could have written."—Chicago Tribune"Beautiful, memorable . . . A book full of marvels."—Milwaukee Journal SentinelAmong the wondrous, beautiful, and strange literary offspring conceived by Sandman creator, multi-award winner, and #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman (Anansi Boys, Neverwhere, American Gods, Coraline, The Graveyard Book), his magical 1997 fantasy novel, Stardust, remains a top favorite. An enchanting adult fairy tale about a young man who travels beyond the boundaries of his small village to find a fallen star and win the heart of the woman he loves—the basis for the hit motion picture starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Sienna Miller, Claire Danes, and Robert DeNiro—Gaiman's glorious fable is now available in a special keepsake edition. Here is a gift of Stardust—beautifully packaged, with a special new introduction by the author—that every Neil Gaiman devotee will want to receive.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe...' wrote Lewis Carroll, author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, in his wonderfully playful poem of nonsense verse, 'Jabberwocky'. This beautiful, clothbound new edition collects together the marvellous range of Carroll's poetry, including nonsense verse, parodies, burlesques, and more. Alongside the title piece are such enduringly wonderful pieces as 'The Walrus and the Carpenter', 'The Mock Turtle's Song', 'Father William' and many more.

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.

NOW A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES A Warning from the Publisher: Would you rather sprain your ankle, bruise your hip, and lose a toe to frostbite on the same day? Or would you rather have these accidents happen on three different days? This electronic collection of volumes seven through nine in A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket is the e-equivalent of having three ghastly accidents right in a row. Contained here are such unpleasantries as kidnapping, disguise, murder, paperwork, another disguise, heart-shaped balloons, false allegations, stiletto heels, a shattered crystal ball, a cryptic map, an irritating song, and quite a few more disguises, all bundled together into a continuous barrage of horror and dismay. The more sensible approach would be to read The Vile Village, The Hostile Hospital, and The Carnivorous Carnival months or even years apart from one another, so you have time to recuperate from the misery each volume offers—or better yet, to turn your eyes away from Mr. Snicket's work and find an electronic experience that would cause you no distress whatsoever.

NOW A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES A Warning from the Publisher: If you have come this far, it is likely too late. Readers who have experienced the first nine volumes in A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket are usually so weakened by their dreadful knowledge of the Baudelaire orphans' story that they spend most of their time moaning and weeping, and have no strength to read The Slippery Slope, The Grim Grotto, The Penultimate Peril, or The End. If, by chance, your moaning and weeping is more or less under control, there is no need to further risk your physical, emotional, and literary health by reading the four remaining volumes in the series. It would be better to regain your strength by spending your time indulging in less alarming activities, such as whistling or making cupcakes for the elderly. After all, this collection contains all of the calamities in the last four volumes of A Series of Unfortunate Events, including abandoned condiments, cigarette smoking, a shocking revelation, a ridiculous laugh, a fearsome storm, a herd of wild sheep, a truly haunting secret about the Baudelaire parents, another shocking revelation, and Phil. There is no need to expose yourself to such atrocities, not after all you've been through already.