The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was the first collection of Sherlock Holmes short stories Conan Doyle published in book form, following the popular success of the novels A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four, which introduced the characters of Dr. John Watson and the austere analytical detective Sherlock Holmes. The collection contains twelve stories, all originally published in The Strand Magazine between July 1891 and June 1892. Narrated by the first-person voice of Dr. Watson, they involve him and Holmes solving a series of mysterious cases. Some of the more well-known stories in this collection are “A Scandal in Bohemia,” in which Holmes comes up against a worthy opponent in the form of Irene Adler, whom Holmes forever after admiringly refers to as the woman; “The Redheaded League,” involving a bizarre scheme offering a well-paid sinecure to redheaded men; and “The Speckled Band,” in which Holmes and Watson save a young woman from a terrible death.

The Jungle Book is a short collection of stories published by Kipling in various magazines between 1893 and 1894. Kipling spent both his early years and his late teenage years in India, and that upbringing is front and center in these stories—despite them being written while he was living in Vermont, in the United States. The stories are fable-like, with most of them centering on the lives of anthropomorphised jungle animals and a few focused on human characters in India. The stories were popular from the start, and have since been adapted in countless ways in print, screen, and other media.

Arsène Lupin, with his characteristic wit, plots over the course of nine short stories to steal many of France’s best antiques and artworks from under their owners’ noses. Only his classic opponent Detective Ganimard has the brilliance to attempt to foil Arsène’s plans, albeit with mixed results. This first collection of nine Arsène Lupin stories were originally serialised in the magazine Je Sais Tout from 1905 and translated into English in 1910. The final story of the set features Herlock Sholmes. In the original printings, Sholmes was simply an unauthorized Sherlock Holmes, but this appearance annoyed Arthur Conan Doyle; the character’s name was changed to “Herlock Sholmes” for later printings and future stories. Arsène Lupin later went on to feature in over fifty stories by Maurice Leblanc along with many other books, films and plays around the world.

Isaac Asimov’s reputation precedes him; his prolific output of science fiction novels and short stories between the 1940s and the 1990s, along with his many Hugo and Nebula awards, cemented his reputation as the premier science fiction author of his time. His writing, at least in the first half of his career, focused on “hard” science fiction: stories that were broadly founded in realistic science. Indeed, as well as writing fiction, he was a professor of biochemistry, and wrote a wide variety of popular science essays and books. This collection brings together the few Asimov science fiction short stories that are currently known to have passed into the U.S. public domain, arranged in order of publication. It includes one focused on robots and the positronic brain, a subject that he would return to many times over his career.

Jeeves Stories is a collection of humorous short stories by P. G. Wodehouse that feature the adventures of his most famous characters, Jeeves and Wooster. Wooster is a wealthy and idle young English gentleman of the interwar era. Jeeves is his extraordinarily competent valet whose name has since become synonymous with perfect service. The stories follow Wooster in his wanderings about London, around England, and across the Atlantic to New York, with Jeeves following in his wake and striving to keep his employer well-groomed and properly presented. Along the way Jeeves must somehow also manage to extricate Wooster and his friends from the various scrapes and follies they get themselves into. First published as early as 1915, the stories first appeared on both sides of the Atlantic in publications like The Saturday Evening Post and The Strand Magazine. They were later collected into books or reworked into novels. Though only less than 50 of Wodehouse’s over 300 short stories feature Jeeves and Wooster, they remain his most enduring characters. They’ve been copied, imitated, and featured in countless interpretations and adaptations. A century later, these stories still are as amusing and entertaining as they were when they were first published.

During her brief career as a writer, Nella Larsen published two novels and three short stories. The most famous of her short works, the short story “Sanctuary” and the novella “Passing,” focus on the perspectives of African-American and mixed-race people in the United States, and handle themes of solidarity and prejudice based on both race and class. Though Larsen’s literary reputation rests mainly upon her treatment of these issues, her other stories, “The Wrong Man” and “Freedom,” concern infidelity and marriage. Larsen was born in Chicago to a mother and father who had immigrated to the United States from Denmark and the Danish West Indies respectively. She published her first stories in the 1920s, when she was living with her husband in Harlem and working as a librarian. During these years she became active in the literary community of the Harlem Renaissance, but her career was cut short after some accused her of plagiarizing “Sanctuary.” This alienated publishers despite Larsen’s denying any wrongdoing in print. Her short fiction draws on her experiences of not belonging and of the African-American middle class into which she had married. It is noted for the acuity of its psychological insight, its use of suspense and plot twists, and the simplicity and elegance of its prose. Larsen’s novella “Passing” concerns the possibility of moving between the highly race-conscious social groups of 1920s New York, and explicitly mocks the idea that ancestry is straightforwardly deducible from behavior. The concept of “passing” had already been featured in American fiction for several decades before, but “Passing” presented the issue in a new way, alongside questions of social class and morality. The novella was positively received by critics, including W. E. B. Du Bois, and was instrumental in Larsen’s receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1930. “Sanctuary” is set along a desolate strip of the Southern coast. A desperate man named Jim Hammer seeks refuge at Annie Poole’s isolated cottage. When Jim reveals he’s shot a man—possibly white—Annie reluctantly agrees to hide him, not from kindness but because of her son Obadiah’s inexplicable fondness for this man she considers “no ’count trash.”