Death in Venice

Five fairy tales about sacrifice, vanity and love, including the story of a gilded statue and the swallow who stays with him. Wilde wrote them to work for children and adults at once.

Oscar Wilde

A travelling salesman wakes up transformed into an insect and has to face what his family does next. Kafka's best known story runs under 40 pages and reads in one sitting.

Franz Kafka

A judge faces his own dying and starts asking whether his respectable life meant anything. Tolstoy's shortest major work, in the Louise and Aylmer Maude translation.

Leo Tolstoy

A respected doctor and a violent stranger turn out to share one body. Stevenson set the template for every split personality story that followed, in barely forty pages.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Three spirits visit a miser on Christmas Eve and show him what his life has cost. Dickens wrote it to be read aloud in a single evening.

Charles Dickens