OW Classics

Ivan Bunin’s first published work, The Village is a bleak and uncompromising portrayal of rural life in south-west Russia. Set at the time of the 1905 Revolution and centering on episodes in the lives of two peasant brothers – “characters sunk so...
By: Ivan Bunin

Published for the first time in 1972, this verse collection reveals lesser-known facets of the novelist Alexander Trocchi’s writing. The poems included span a long period of time, and range from the lyricism of his early love poetry and reflections...
By: Alexander Trocchi

Happily engaged to the poet Amandus, Fräulein Anna is horrified to discover that a beautiful ring, mysteriously deposited upon her finger whilst tending her kitchen garden, forces her into marriage with the gnome Corduanspitz. Can Anna find any way...
By: E.T.A. Hoffman

Having moved into an abandoned haunted house, the narrator, undaunted by the warnings of the locals, invites a party of friends over, setting them the task of driving out the ghosts from the various rooms and reporting back on Twelfth Night. The...
By: Charles Dickens

In late nineteenth-century Paris, the writer Hubert is shocked to discover that Icarus, the protagonist of the new novel he’s working on, has vanished. Looking for him among the manuscripts of his rivals does not solve the mystery, so a detective is...
By: Raymond Queneau

Baron Eduard and his second wife Charlotte enjoy a quiet, humdrum existence in their opulent castle, but when he invites his friend the Captain and she invites her niece Ottilie to stay with them, their lives are turned inside out as both hosts...
By: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Canterbury Tales have enthralled readers since the fourteenth century, inspiring countless films, plays and television adaptations. Unfinished at the time of Chaucer’s death, this inimitable collection of fables, romances and sermons has...
By: Geoffrey Chaucer

Following in the footsteps of Horace’s Ars Poetica , Boileau’s Art of Poetry lays down, in four entertaining books dealing with all forms and genres of poetry, the codes and rules for good versification. This beautiful translation proved to have a...
By: Nicolas Boileau

Cecco Angiolieri, the enfant terrible of Italian literature, loved women, gambling, food and wine. It is said that he found comfort for his bad luck at the dice and with Becchina, his unreciprocating lover, only by pouring venomous scorn upon his...
By: Cecco Angiolieri