W. W. Jacobs

This book combines biography, literature, and cultural and feminist theory to examine the radical critiques of patriarchy performed by Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf in Jane Eyre, Villette, The Mill on the Floss, The Voyage Out, and Orlando. The book's focus is how these novels revise the romance plot, abandoning this ancient and very political story line and creating in its place a much larger imaginary field in which female heroines as well as their readers can consider and experiment with other possibilities. Strikingly different from the swooning beauties of traditional romance, Jane Eyre, Lucy Snowe, Maggie Tulliver, Rachel Vinrace, and Orlando share a love of language and desire for intellectual expression that takes precedence over marriage and motherhood.

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas / Ursula K. Le Guin I Love My Love / Helen Adam I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream / Harlan Ellison The Tattooer / Junichiro Tanizaki A Selection from Steps / Jerzy Kosinski Axolotl / Julio Cortazar [Wish]( / Roald Dahl The Lottery / Shirley Jackson It's a Good Life / Jerome Bixby They Bite / Anthony Boucher The Last Night of the World / Ray Bradbury Born of Man and Woman / Richard Matheson Piazza Piece / John Crowe Ransom The South / Jorge Luis Borges The Fly / George Langelaan The Doll / Algernon Blackwood The Ghost / Richard Hughes The Hunted Beast / T. F. Powys End / Langston Hughes The Rival Dummy / Ben Hecht Caterpillars / E. F. Benson Lukundoo / Edward Lucas White Sredni Vashtar / Saki (H. H. Munro) The Picture un the House / H. P. Lovecraft Pollock and the Porroh Man / H. G. Wells The Spider / Hans Heinz Ewers The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains / Frederick Marryat Tcheriapin / Sax Rohmer My Doll Janie / Lola Ridge The Monkey's Paw / W. W. Jacobs The Mark of the Beast / Rudyard Kipling Manacled / Stephen Crane Yuki-Onna / Lafcadio Hearn Mujina / Lafcadio Hearn The Squaw / Bram Stoker The Yellow Wallpaper / Chalotte Perkins Gilman The Black Mass, Episode from La-bas (Down There) / J. K. Huysmans The Magic Shirt / Anonymous Carmilla / Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu Not to Be Taken at Bed-time / Rosa Mulholland The Very Sad Tale of the Matches / Heinrich Hoffmann The Man-Tiger / Anonymous The Hours in the Life of a Lousy-Haired Man, Episode from Maldoror Varney, the Vampyre / James Malcolm Rymer The Horla / Guy de Maupassant A Carrion / Charles Baudelaire [Pit and the Pendulum]( / Edgar Allan Poe [Black Cat]( / Edgar Allan Poe [Birthmark]( / Nathaniel Hawthorne La Belle Helene / Prosper Merimee Nuckelavee / Anonymous La Bella Dame Sans Merci / John Keats Isabella, or The Pot Basil The Erl-King / Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Count de Gernande, Episode from Justine / The Marquis de Sade Lord Randal / Anonymous The Painted Skin / P'u Sung-ling Satan at the Gates of Hell, from Paradise Lost, Book II / John Milton The Milk-White Doo / Anonymous The Wife of Usher's Well / Anonymous Bluebeard / Charles Perrault The Vampire, Episode from The Golden Ass / Lucius Apuleius Jael / Book of Judges

W. W. Jacobs was a prolific writer of short stories. His topics were typically humorous and nautical in nature, but they weren’t exclusively so. This anthology includes some of his most famous short stories, including “The Monkey’s Paw,” a story of the supernatural in which a monkey’s hand grants three wishes to its owner, but at huge cost.

Eighth edition in Methuen's Shilling Novel series, illustrated with four sketches

The ghoulish, disturbing and macabre tales contained in this anthology of fear draw the reader into a world inhabited by the dark and threatening monsters of nightmare. Legendary creators of horror and suspense such as the father of vampire literature Bram Stoker and Ambrose 'Bitter' Bierce combine within these pages with modern mastercraftsmen like Psycho author Robert Bloch and phenomenal bestseller writer Stephen King. Their stories range from grisly supernatural revenge ("The Squaw") to black humour of a fantastic nature ("Edifice Complex") and the mystery and menace of fiendish possession ("The Night of the Tiger"). The collection encompasses recognised masterpieces of the genre such as H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror" - a sustained evocation of monstrous violence in a sleepy mid-Western town - as well as stories by famous authors not usually associated with this type of fiction - H. G. Wells and Robert Silverberg for example. Within this Chamber of Horrors also lurk haunted houses such as H. Russell Wakefield's "The Red Lodge", psychological tortures of a peculiarly unpleasant kind, as in "The Cloth of Madness" by Seabury Quinn, and the masterful use of understatement and surprise endings in stories by M. R. James, Rudyard Kipling and Robert Aickman. From underwater monsters to bloodthirsty ghouls, from the evil that lies just beneath the surface of domestic comfort and security to cannibalism twenty-first- century style, this chilling compendium of terror is calculated to send a shiver down the spine of the most hardened devotee of horror fiction.

Introduction: Wishing Will Make It So - essay by Isaac Asimov The Monkey's Paw - short story by W. W. Jacobs Behind the News - short story by Jack Finney The Flight of the Umbrella - novella by Marvin Kaye Tween - novelette by J. F. Bone The Boy Who Brought Love - short story by Edward D. Hoch The Vacation - short story by Ray Bradbury The Anything Box - short story by Zenna Henderson A Born Charmer - short story by Edward P. Hughes What If ... - short story by Isaac Asimov Millennium - short story by Fredric Brown Dreams Are Sacred - novelette by Peter Phillips The Same to You Doubled - short story by Robert Sheckley Gifts - short story by Gordon R. Dickson I Wish I May, I Wish I Might - short story by Bill Pronzini Three Day Magic - novella by Charlotte Armstrong The Bottle Imp - novelette by Robert Louis Stevenson

Poe: The Murders in the Rue Morgue [Black Cat]( [Fall of the House of Usher]( [Pit and the Pendulum]( [Premature Burial]( [Tell-tale Heart]( [Berenice]( Ligeia [Raven]( Lenore To Helen Ulalume [Annabel Lee]( The Haunted Palace The Conqueror Worm Spirits of the Dead Others: Afterward / Edith Wharton -- Sredni Vashtar / Saki -- The Signalman / Charles Dickens -- The Furnished Room / O. Henry -- A Terrible Strange Bed / Wilkie Collins -- The Boarded Window / Ambrose Bierce -- The Monkey's Paw / W.W. Jacobs.