Carmen, the archetype of the amoral femme fatale, is Prosper Merimee's highest creation, and a model for many subsequent literary heroines. First published in 1846, this story of crime and desire has been adapted into a number of dramatic works, including the famous 1875 opera of the same name by Georges Bizet.

An enormous commercial and critical success on its first publication in 1920, Main Street - regarded by many as Sinclair Lewis's best novel - delivers a scathing satire on the American dream, and is invaluable as a document of pre-Prohibition Middle America."

Presented in a new translation by Stephen Pimenoff, The Looking Glass is accompanied in this volume by other stories by Chekhov, some of them never translated before into English.

By turns comic and melancholy, Orwell's fourth novel - published in 1939 to critical and commercial acclaim by Victor Gollancz - is Wellsian in its exploration of the frustrations and helplessness of a lower-middle-class protagonist faced with the indifference of a rapidly changing world, and a vital record of a society on the verge of war.

In The Chinese Conundrum, Vince Cable provides an answer to these and many other topical questions of global politics and economy, examining the long history of relationships between China and the West, as well as the change in attitudes on both sides of the divide.

Published posthumously in 1869, Paris Spleen was a landmark publication in the development of the genre of prose poetry - a form which Baudelaire saw as particularly suited for expressing the feelings of uncertainty, flux and freedom of his age - and one of the founding texts of literary Modernism.

First translation into English of an extraordinary document that lays bare the jealousies felt but rarely expressed by writers, and an eternal monument to literary paranoia.