A practising doctor, Chekhov was an acute observer of Russian society's moral, as well as physical sickness. Joining The Russian Master, Ward Number Six, and A Woman's Kingdom in the World's Classics series, this collection, including `The Party', `After the Theatre', and `A Case History', again poses his recurrent literary quandary of whether to moralize, hoping to reform these ailments, or simply to entertain. The solution is to be found in the stories themselves, which, like his plays,offer no easy answers, but pinpoint the anguish, tedium, or downright evil of his characters with an irony that makes them both poignant and truthful.

On the magical island of the Three Kingdoms, disparaged teenagers quest to save their people from dragons, duplicity and dictatorship. This is a book of fairy tales, but not of happy endings. Don’t expect to fall asleep to sweet dreams when you’re done. Content warnings: violence, abuse, kidnapping, blood, homophobia. Please consume responsibly.

This is one volume in the four-volume collection of the complete fantasy stories of George MacDonald, the great nineteenth-century innovator of modern fantasy, whose works influenced C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.