One little piggy builds a house of straw. The second makes a house of sticks. But the third and smartest pig constructs his of bricks. Will the big, bad wolf be able to blow it down? Not by the hair of his chinny-chin-chin! Lavishly illustrated and l...

The characters in David Constantine's fourth collection are often delicately caught in moments of defiance. Disregarding their age, their family, or the prevailing political winds, they show us a way of marking out a space for resistance and taking a...

Not for sale in Estonia! First published in French in 1948, "To Hell with the Ugly" saw Boris Vian's noir-novelist pseudonym Vernon Sullivan take on Vian's own burlesque pop sensibilities. An erotic crime novel with science fiction tendencies, Sull...

In "The Tale of the Talking Face", eminent Indian artist K. G. Subramanyan offers a stinging parable of democracy gone wrong by narrating and illustrating the story of a princess whose autocratic rule brought nothing but suffering to her people, desp...

"Alphabets and names make games and everybody has a name and all the same they have in a way to have a birthday" muses Gertrude Stein in "To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays". Written in 1940 and intended as a follow-up to her children's book "T...

Not for sale in Estonia! Honore de Balzac's 1830 Treatise on Elegant Living was a keystone text on dandyism, preceding Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly's "Anatomy of Dandyism" (1845) and Charles Baudelaire's "The Dandy" (in "The Painter of Modern Life", 18...

To judge by the worldwide success of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie's Poirot, it is not only the Anglo-Saxons who have an appetite for mystery and mayhem. Talking about the craft of detective writing and sharing her personal...

Told is about the art of story, not the science. It defines the twenty great principles of storytelling and then shows how they work by weaving them into 30 illustrated short stories that vary in format from poetry to screenplay. From genre to premi...

In this collection of essays, Ashis Nandy uses the metaphor of the future – imagined utopias, conceptions of cultural possibilities, social critiques of things to come – to redefine the present. Nandy's effort is to demonstrate that, in a world incre...

"Twelfth Night" is one of Shakespeare's funniest plays and also one of his most romantic. A young noblewoman, Viola, shipwrecked in a foreign land and separated from her twin brother, dresses as a man in order to enter the service of Orsino, duke of...