Twenty-seven short stories. Authors Hemingway, Kipling, Masefield, E.M. Forster, Jack London and Herman Melville.

An anthology of writings illustrating humans' changing vision of the sea features passages from the work of Melville, Conrad, Darwin, Dickens, E.B. White, Dickinson, and Woolf.

'So you won't sell me your soul?' said the Devil. 'Thank you,' replied the student, 'I had rather keep it myself, if it's all the same to you.' So begins this rich and intriguing collection of fantasy stories. Figures such as the devil, trolls and werewolves, sorcerers and dragons have long been part of the human psyche, and the authors of these marvellous tales draw upon this deep well of images, characters, and landscapes with great imagination and subtlety. With thirty-one tales by writers as diverse as John Buchan and Mervyn Peake, Angela Carter and Terry Pratchett, this is an anthology for the newcomer and dedicated fan alike.

The Caribbean is the source of one of the richest, most accessible, and yet technically adventurous traditions of contemporary world literature. This collection extends beyond the realm of English-speaking writers, to include stories published in Spanish, French, and Dutch. It brings together contributions from major figures such as V. S. Naipaul, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and work from the exciting new generation of Caribbean writers represented by Edwidge Danticat, and Jamaica Kincaid.

Travel, associated as it is with strangeness, marvels, and excitement, has always proved an irresistible subject for writers. The Oxford Book of Travel Stories brings together some of the best short fiction on this most exhilarating of subjects from writers as diverse as Anthony Trollope,Edith Wharton, Ring Lardner, William Trevor, Sylvia Townsend Warner, John Cheever, Beryl Bainbridge and V.S. Pritchett. Readers of this anthology will be able to revel in the atmosphere of 19th-century Palestine, the Riviera of the 1920s, or a cruise down the Nile. There are stories set in far distant locations - China, Australia - and others closer to home, such as Benedict Kiely's entrancing 'A Journey to theSeven Streams'. Most are high-spirited, in keeping with the theme, some are wonderfully funny and one or two productively unsettling, such as Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man is Hard to Find'. Some deal with the journey itself, and encounters on train or boat; others see travel as a literal rite ofpassage, an escape or a sudden growing-up. All of them illustrate, in various ways, how travel has to do with stimulus, enrichment and a sense of achievement - 'Not fare well,' as T.S. Elliot has it, 'But fare forward, voyagers'.

This collection of French short stories in translation expands our idea of French writing by including new stories by women writers and by authors of Francophone origin. Spanning the centuries from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth, the collection opens with a rumbustious tale from the Marquis de Sade, takes in the masters of the nineteenth century, from Stendhal and Balzac to Maupassant, and reaches to Quebec, Africa, and the French Caribbean in the twentieth century. Women writers include relatively well known figures such as Renee Vivien, Colette, and Beauvoir, and newer writers such as Assia Djebar, Christiane Baroche, and Annie Saumont. The French short story is a rich and diverse medium, but all the stories selected share a common characteristic: they make exciting reading.

The field of detective fiction is vast, and The Oxford Book of Detective Stories brings together the best short fiction from around the world to show how different nationalities have imposed their own stamp on the genre. As well as English and American stories from acknowledged masters such as Ellery Queen, Dashiell Hammett, and Agatha Christie, the anthology includes stories by Simenon, Conan Doyle, Sarah Paretsky, and Ian Rankin, and roams across Europe and further afield to embrace Japan, Denmark, Holland, Italy, Argentina, Czechoslovakia, and other countries. Women detectives, police procedurals, the amateur sleuth, locked-room mysteries are all here, and in her introduction Patricia Craig examines the figure of the detective in international literature.