A first-person diary of a prisoner’s final day before being executed for an unspecified crime, Victor Hugo’s poignant tale vividly conveys the mental anguish of a man confronted with the intransigent mechanism of justice, as his mind seeks refuge in recollections from his past and philosophical musings on his inevitable fate....

In the 1940s, Picasso wrote two plays in French: the first, Desire Caught by the Tail, was conceived during the German occupation of Paris and features a cast of grotesque allegorical characters such as the Onion, Silence or Fat Anxiety discussing the crucial wartime themes of hunger, cold and love; the second, The Four Little Girls, came about a f...

\\\"In the autumn month of September, eighteen hundred and fifty-seven… two idle apprentices, exhausted by the long, hot summer, and the long, hot work it had brought with it, ran away from their employer....

A secret terrorist group infiltrates the household of a government official’s son, with a view to spying on the father and, ultimately, assassinating him....

In the somnolent Flemish town of Quiquendone disagreements are unheard of, courtships might last a decade and not a ripple of activity can be seen at all....

In A Voyage to the Moon, the narrator, after an attempt to reach the moon using vials of dewdrops, finally finds himself in what appears to be the Garden of Eden, surrounded by Biblical patriarchs. After falling foul of the prophet Elijah, he soon meets a race who walk on all fours and whose nourishment comes in the form of vapour....

Rising from humble beginnings as a foundling, Castruccio Castracani came to prominence as one of the most powerful and shrewd warlords in Italy....

Famed for having killed his cousin Alessandro, the Duke of Florence, in 1537, but also for writing accomplished literary works, including a comedy and several poems, Lorenzino de’ Medici remains one of the most enigmatic figures of Italian literature....

Published in 1880, one year before Verga’s influential novel The Malavoglias, Life in the Country first marked his stylistic shift towards the verismo school of Italian realism....

Frank Aldersley becomes engaged to Clara Burnham on the eve of his departure on a journey to discover the Northwest Passage. Unbeknownst to him, Richard Wardour, his spurned rival, joins the crew of another ship belonging to the same expedition....

When Emily Dickinson died in 1886, having published only a tiny selection of her verse anonymously in journals and newspapers, she left behind a chest containing almost 1,800 poems written on notebooks and loose sheets....

A carriage transporting ten passengers fleeing from Rouen is stopped at a village inn by Prussian soldiers, who decide to detain them until one of their party, the prostitute Boule de Suif, consents to sleep with their officer....

As Paris is shaken by a spate of murderous robberies, the aristocratic Mademoiselle de Scuderi pens a poem to poke fun at the cowardly lovers who now fear to go out at night to see their mistresses....

The lowly, downtrodden Paris civil servant Jean Folantin seeks respite from the boredom and isolation of his life in the small joys of food and the occasional embraces of a prostitute....

Travelling salesman Enrico Gaia decides to play a trick on the conceited ageing litterateur Mario Samigli: he dupes him into thinking that a representative of a prestigious Viennese publishing house wants to commission a German translation of a long-forgotten novel Samigli had written and published at his own expense forty years ago....