Nathaniel Hawthorne

An abridged version of the misfortunes that plague a prominent New England family because of greed and a two-hundred-year-old curse.

A century-and-more ago, while some people pondered the pinnacle that civilization had attained, others worried how it would come crashing down. Many of the era's best writers gave shape to those fears in wildly speculative stories that envisioned unthinkable fates and spectacular dooms for our planet and its people. The End of the World collects twenty-one classic stories and poems from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in which the Earth's...

While her lover's identity remains a secret, a young woman in 18th-century New England is condemned to wear a scarlet A in atonement for her sin of passion and birth of a child out of wedlock.

This is science fiction at its literate best with every story a little gem.

A clock that reverses the order of history, a potion that prolongs youth, a machine that disintegrates matter, the prospect of the earth burning to a crisp from the heat of the sun and the effects of the absence of gravity; all this and more can be found in this superb collection of unabridged classic science fiction stories. Read by Nicky Henson

Stories...

Mankind has always loved to tell stories and to listen to them. The most primitive and unlettered peoples and tribes have always shown and still show this universal characteristic. As far back as written records go we find stories; even before that time, they were handed down from remote generations by oral tradition. The wandering minstrel followed a very ancient profession. Before him was his prototype-the man with the gift of telling stories over...

In a time when adultery is punishable by death, Hester Prynne becomes involved in a risky and scandalous affair with her town's handsome minister.

If you were looking for the definitive Christmas anthology, consider yourself lucky, because you just found it! This book is everything you want Christmas to be — loving, warm and celebratory. Timeless and adorable, beautifully designed, "The Big Book of Christmas" is a great big stocky book — stuffed with novels, novellas, short stories, poems, carols and songs. Inside you'll find: · Novels, novellas and short stories from Charles Dickens,...