William Roberts

Melville’s Bartleby is a classic American short story, a strange tale of an assiduous copyist whose catch-phrase is ‘I would prefer not to’. It is joined here by two other stories from The Piazza Tales, Melville’s idiosyncratic collection: The...

A maritime classic from the master pen of Herman Melville. Written some forty years after Moby Dick, Melville’s Billy Budd is a moving tale of good versus evil. Set aboard a British navy ship at the end of the eighteenth century, a young, innocent...

Represented here are 16 short stories by seven great American writers, dating from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Different in atmosphere and writing style, they nevertheless caught the mood and concerns of the day in a way that was...

Five great American short story writers, dating from the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth centuries are represented here. Different in atmosphere and writing style, they nevertheless caught the mood and concerns of the day in a way that was distinctly...

Famous Heroes of the American West is a lively account of the ‘Wild West’ and its renowned figures, narrated with vigour by Adam Sims. The lives of Davy Crockett, Christopher ‘Kit’ Carson, Calamity Jane and Sitting Bull, amongst others, are explored...

The Portrait of a Lady focuses first and foremost on the character and experiences of its heroine Isabel Archer. She is, in Henry James' words, the ‘lighted’ character; all the other people in the novel remain relatively obscure. Their dealings with...

At the heart of these stories, as with all the best of Lovecraft’s work, is the belief that the Earth was once inhabited by powerful and evil gods, just waiting for the chance to recolonise their planet. Cthulhu is one such god, lurking deep beneath...

Buck is living the good life in the soft South, when he is snatched and transported to the savagery of the Northland. There, the Klondike gold rush has brought out rough basic instincts of survival in men – and dogs. He adjusts to the gruelling regime...

The horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, with its dungeon of death, and the overhanging gloom on the House of Usher demonstrate unforgettably the unique imagination of Edgar Allan Poe. Unerringly, he touches upon some of our greatest nightmares –...

When The Great Gatsby was published, commercially it was a failure but critically it was a success. It is still the most admired and well read of all Scott Fitzgerald’s novels and it is considered a handbook of the 'Jazz Age'. Scott Fitzgerald put...

Hanson died quickly—with a knife in his back. Carole was next—tortured to death. Now Judd Stevens, a successful Manhattan psychoanalyst, must face a horrific prospect: someone is trying to kill him and he is being treated as the prime suspect. As two...

The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Whisperer in Darkness are counted amongst H.P. Lovecraft’s most popular stories. In the first we are transported to the decrepit coastal town of Innsmouth, whose amphibian-like citizens betray a dark and sinister...

H.P. Lovecraft never found fame during his lifetime and died in 1937 in relative obscurity. But in the decades that followed his death, his importance as a unique and original visionary in the genre of science fantasy and ‘weird fiction’ has grown...