Cuentos crueles reune una cuidada seleccion de los relatos mas brillantes e inquietantes de Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, maestro del simbolismo y uno de los grandes renovadores del cuento fantastico.
Paris, 1794: the Pimpernel goes back into the city to bring out the Dauphin from the Temple prison, and Chauvelin has learned enough to bait a trap with the one thing Blakeney cannot refuse.
Stories about the thing a life is spent looking for: a knight who follows a legend, a Persian magus who follows a star, a man who finds the blue flower and does not recognize it.
Am einen Anfang, noch wahrend Rauchschwaden uber den chilenischen Prasidentenpalast ziehen und die Nachricht vom Tod Salvador Allendes die Runde macht, ertont der erste Schrei eines Kindes.
A minor poet joins a farming commune of high-minded reformers and finds himself watching, rather than living - a magnetic agitator, a woman who worships him, and a girl with a secret nobody will discuss.
In a Dorset hamlet where everyone lives by the trees, a timber merchant educates his daughter above her station and marries her to a doctor who despises the place.
A painter, his friend, and a girl at Baden-Baden - one man asks the other to inspect her and report whether she will do as a wife, and the report changes both their lives.
Lupin announces a theft, is arrested, escapes, and conducts his next case from a cell - and then a certain English detective arrives and has his name changed by the lawyers.
A bear cub and a pup, orphaned the same week, take up together in the northern forest - and a man and a woman are running from the Mounted Police through the same country.
A self-made paint millionaire from Vermont builds a house on the water side of Beacon Street and discovers that Boston's old families will accept his money and not his daughters.
The life of a novelist as his friend saw it: years of rejection, a father who despises the work, a girl who waits, and the slow arrival of a reputation.
A man attends a seance in a Hampstead drawing room and by the next chapter is on a planet under a double sun, where every landscape strips away another consolation.
A house built on stolen ground, cursed by the man hanged for witchcraft to make the theft legal, and inhabited two centuries later by an impoverished spinster who must open a cent-shop in the front room.
Baree is born in a hollow log, half wolf and half dog, and grows up between the two - a trapper's daughter on one side, the pack on the other, and a wilderness that does not care which he chooses.
A great bridge-builder, a Boston marriage, a first love found again in London, and a cantilever span over the St Lawrence that his firm has been asked to build cheaper than it can safely be built.
A cipher message, a murder at a moated manor house in Sussex with the victim's face destroyed by a shotgun, and then - halfway through - the book stops and goes to a Pennsylvania coal valley, where a secret society runs the mines by terror.
A man who has spent his life in one office arrives at a railway junction with no plans, and stays - and the station tells him its stories, including the signalman on the line below the tunnel mouth who has seen something on the track.
A man vanishes from a Norfolk inn between the fish and the entree, leaving a hundred thousand pounds and a mission from an American millionaire undelivered - and the guests who watched him go have their own reasons for it.
Somerset, 1685: a gentleman wins a wife in a quarrel over a toast, Monmouth lands at Lyme with a rabble, and a letter that could hang everyone is in the wrong hands.
Five early stories of men posted where the empire runs out: a Dutch trader married into a Malay family and despised by both sides, a colonial agent alone at a river station, a Breton farm where the peasants deal with a fool.
A woman is married, in Scottish law, by a form of words she did not know were binding - and the man who spoke them is a brutal athlete who wants her only because she is now his property.
Frank Softly, disinherited, tries caricature, portrait painting, forging Old Masters, and finally coining - and narrates his own downfall with unbroken good humor, from the colony he has been transported to.
Exmoor in the 1680s: the Doones, a clan of outlawed gentry, ride down from their valley to rob and murder as they please, and a yeoman's son who saw them kill his father falls in love with the girl they are raising as their own.
A head waiter finds a guest's abandoned luggage stuffed with manuscripts and, after seven years, sells them to a publisher - which is Dickens's excuse for a set of stories, including His Boots, one of the best things he wrote about a child.
Child Christopher, a king's son raised in ignorance of it, and Goldilind, a queen kept prisoner in her own castle by the man who governs for her - they meet in a wood, as outlaws.
A man is stabbed at a New York ball, in an alcove, and the woman found beside him is engaged to the man everyone suspects - who will not defend himself.
Two elderly bachelors and a household of young women in a Norwood suburb, and a widow next door who bicycles, boxes and holds opinions - after which the neighborhood is never the same.
Colette's irresistible depiction of a childhood in rural France, in a lush new translation I will never be able to help anyone imagine the splendour, bound up in my memories Claudine lives in a large house with a rose-filled garden and a vegetable patch smelling of tomato leaves and apricots.
No other voice has borne truer witness to the dark of our times George SteinerAfter an embarrassing sexual misadventure with a servant girl, sixteen-year-old Karl Rossman is banished to America by his parents.
