Seven short stories from one of the most celebrated authors of the early twentieth century have been updated with an eye toward readability for modern readers. The bones of the stories are just as she told them with no changes to plot or settings. Best of all the book includes the original unedited versions in appendices. The Hermit and the Wild Woman: One escapes from war, the other from a convent, only to find themselves together in their solitude. The...

The Descent of Man and Other Stories offers the author's well-known depictions of upper class life in New York, but also exhibits her remarkable talent in tales of humorous irony, history and the supernatural. Originally published in 1904 The Descent of Man and Other Stories features the author's nuanced prose and sharply observed characters in a chain of unforgettable tales. In several Wharton examines marriage, which was frequently arranged in...

Edith Wharton was an American novelist, poet and short story writer whose works display her mastery over the realistic fiction genre. Although she grew up in a world of refined manners and fashionable people, she was also aware of its superficiality, a theme that frequently appeared in her works. Her stories range widely from powerful social commentary to titillating ghost stories that made Wharton extremely popular beyond her living years. This collection...

What begins as an ordinary event quickly shifts into the bizarre after the narrator, a wealthy bachelor, meets their friend, Lanvivain, at an old mansion. Thinking about purchasing the property, the narrator and Lanvivain explore the mansion at Kerfol, attracted to the vast and ordinate property. Lanvivain enthusiastically urges the bachelor to buy the property, declaring that it matches his personality exactly. The narrator, however, is unconvinced,...

The Pulitzer Prize—winning author of The Age of Innocence explores the supernatural and other unknowns in six short stories. The acclaimed Gilded Age author travels around the world and into the unknown with these six tales. After recovering from a bad fever in a Swiss sanitorium, an American pays a social call to a friend's lonely sister on the coast of Brittany, but his journey takes a terrifying turn in "Miss Mary Pask." A wealthy resident of...

Bunner Sisters, written in 1892 but not published until 1916 in Xingu and Other Stories, takes place in a shabby neighborhood in New York City. The two Bunner sisters, Ann Eliza the elder, and Evelina the younger, keep a small shop selling artificial flowers and small handsewn articles to Stuyvesant Square's "female population." Ann Eliza gives Evelina a clock for her birthday. The clock leads the sisters to become involved with Herbert Ramy, owner...

This selection of horror stories has been published for Halloween 2014. It includes the very first publication of "Night Should Be Black," by classic WEIRD TALES author Everil Worrell - an unpublished story found among her papers after her death. Good stuff! Included are: "The Eyes," by Edith Wharton "Mysterious Maisie," by Wirt Gerrare "The Open Door," by Margaret Oliphant "The Moonlit Road," by Ambrose Bierce "Night Should Be Black," by Everil...

In this comic novel by a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, a bachelor on a transatlantic cruise meets a group of runaway children who change his life forever. Martin Boyne is a cautious man of forty-six. The bachelor has been nursing a relationship with a widow for five years, and now he is crossing the Atlantic to be with her. He laments that he never meets interesting people in his travels, but that is about to change . . . The seven precocious...