Collected Stories of Guy de Maupassant is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: • New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars • Biographies of the authors • Chronologies...

A simple peasant has his life destroyed by the lie of an enemy who accuses him of a theft.

It is one of the most memorable first lines in all of literature: "When Gregor Samsa woke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into some kind of monstrous vermin." So begins Kafka's famous short story, The Metamorphosis . Kafka considered publishing it with two of the stories included here in a volume to be called Punishments. The Judgment explores an enigmatic power struggle between a father and son, while In the Penal Colony...

Reginald on house parties / Saki - The Sphinx without a secret / Oscar Wilde -- Tobermory / Saki -- On being idle / Jerome K. Jerome -- For better or worse / W. W. Jacobs -- The model millionaire / Oscar Wilde -- The garden of truth / E. Nesbit -- The cat that walked by himself / Rudyard Kipling -- The girl from Arles / Alphonse Daudet -- Mr. & Mrs. Dove / Katherine Mansfield -- Georgie Porgie / Rudyard Kipling -- Caterpillars / E. F. Benson -- Lost...