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London Stories (Everyman's Library Pocket Classics Series) Hardcover – May 6, 2014

Purchase options and add-ons.

• Print length 432 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Everyman's Library
• Publication date May 6, 2014
• Dimensions 4.86 x 1.17 x 7.44 inches
• ISBN-10 0375712461
• ISBN-13 978-0375712463
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Everyman's Library; First Edition (May 6, 2014)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 432 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0375712461
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0375712463
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.6 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.86 x 1.17 x 7.44 inches
• #8,669 in Short Stories Anthologies
• #15,420 in Short Stories (Books)
• #38,316 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Jerry white.

Jerry White has been writing London history for nearly fifty years. He began with two small-scale oral histories of neighbourhoods in Spitalfields and Finsbury Park and moved on to an acclaimed trilogy of London histories spanning the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has won a number of awards, including the prestigious Wolfson History Prize (2002). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

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LONDON STORIES

edited by Jerry White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 6, 2014

Some interesting selections with a few real gems tipped in, but overall this collection reads as if it were assembled out of...

An award-winning historian curates this collection of 26 bits of fiction, essay and journalism about the denizens, grifters and debutantes of London Town.

White (History/Univ. of London; A Great and Monstrous Thing: London in the Eighteenth Century , 2012, etc.), who spent the last two decades chronicling the history of London through the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries over three volumes, has now produced a literary companion to the city. Unfortunately for casual readers, he's selected a curious, somewhat dispassionate, and largely homogenous collection of little-known essays, most of which are long past their copyright dates. The collection spans four decades, starting with dire depictions of London gripped in the black heart of the Great Plague, only to rise from the ashes of the Great Fire barely half a century later. Some stories show that London always has been and always will be a hard place, as Thomas De Quincey relates his relationship with a teenage prostitute in “Ann of Oxford Street” and Henry Mayhew relates his exchange with an 8-year-old sex worker in “Watercress Girl,” both unnerving images for any Londoner who has been hit with that awful query, “Business?” The classics are duly incorporated as well, with entries from Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Graham Greene. Physician Frederick Treves makes for an interesting anomaly with his moving first-person remembrance of Joseph Merrick, “The Elephant Man.” Oddly, the second world war gets little coverage, mostly a nod from combat firefighter William Sansom in “The Wall.” Also, considering what a multicultural city London has become, the editor has selected few portraits of the city's current population. Dominican writer Jean Rhys deservedly earns an entry, as does Scottish novelist Muriel Spark and celebrated British screenwriter Hanif Kureishi. But anyone expecting to find the likes of Monica Ali, Mohsin Hamid, or Zoe Heller will have to keep trudging down the high street.

Pub Date: May 6, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-375-71246-3

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Everyman’s Library

Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016

LITERARY FICTION | SHORT STORIES

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

LITERARY FICTION

More by Mark Z. Danielewski

BOOK REVIEW

by Mark Z. Danielewski

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2019

New York Times Bestseller

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NORMAL PEOPLE

by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2019

Absolutely enthralling. Read it.

A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!

Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends , in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.

Pub Date: April 16, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Hogarth

Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019

More by Sally Rooney

by Sally Rooney

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Look Inside

London Stories

Edited by jerry white, part of everyman's library pocket classics series, category: classic fiction | literary fiction | short stories.

May 06, 2014 | ISBN 9780375712463 | 4-1/2 x 7-1/4 --> | ISBN 9780375712463 --> Buy

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May 06, 2014 | ISBN 9780375712463

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About London Stories

London has the greatest literary tradition of any city in the world. Its roll call of storytellers includes cultural giants like Shakespeare, Defoe, and Dickens, and an innumerable host of writers of all sorts who sought to capture the essence of the place. Acclaimed historian Jerry White has collected some twenty-six stories to illustrate the extraordinary diversity of both London life and writing over the past four centuries, from Shakespeare’s day to the present. These are stories of fact and fiction and occasionally something in between, some from well-known voices and others practically unknown. Here are dramatic views of such iconic events as the plague, the Great Fire of London, and the Blitz, but also William Thackeray’s account of going to see a man hanged, Thomas De Quincey’s friendship with a teenaged prostitute, and Doris Lessing’s defense of the Underground. This literary London encompasses the famous Baker Street residence of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and the bombed-out moonscape of Elizabeth Bowen’s wartime streets, Charles Dicken’s treacherous River Thames and Frederick Treves’s tragic Elephant Man. Graham Greene, Jean Rhys, Muriel Spark, and Hanif Kureishi are among the many great writers who give us their varied Londons here, revealing a city of boundless wealth and ragged squalor, of moving tragedy and riotous joy.

Also in Everyman’s Library Pocket Classics Series

About Jerry White

Professor Jerry White teaches London history at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of an acclaimed trilogy of London from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. His more recent books include Mansions of Misery: A Biography of the… More about Jerry White

Product Details

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“In London Stories , the city’s sprawling historical and literary landscape is served up in a tidy collection of 26 short works that span four centuries. . . . Jerry White doesn’t stint on delivering the goods on London’s dark side, which, of course, will delight true London devotees. . . . For the literary-minded traveler, the book is a gold mine.” — The New York Times “The latest of the covetable Everyman Pocket Classics. . . . London Stories boasts 432 rewarding pages. . . . [White] has mixed up these London stories very inventively.” — Evening Standard (London)

Table Of Contents

Preface   Thomas Dekker “London, lying sicke of the Plague” (1603)   John Evelyn “The Great Fire of London” (1666)   Daniel Defoe “A Ragged Boyhood” (1722)   Samuel Whyte “A Visit to Charlotte Cibber” (1795)     James Lackington “Love Among the Methodists” (1792)   Thomas de Quincey “Ann of Oxford Street” (1822)   William Makepeace Thackeray “Going to see a Man Hanged” (1840)   Henry Mayhew “Watercress Girl” (1851)   Charles Dickens “Down with the Tide” (1853)   C. Maurice Davies “The Walworth Jumpers” (1876)   Eliza Lynn Linton “My First Soiree” (1891)   Arthur Conan Doyle “The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle (1892)   George Gissing “Christopherson” (1906)   R. Andom “The Fetching of Susan” (1912)   Frederick Treves “The Elephant Man” (1923)   John Galsworthy “A Forsyte Encounters the People” (1917)   Graham Greene “A Little Place off the Edgware Road” (1939)   Mollie Panter-Downes “Good Evening, Mrs Craven” (1942)   William Sansom “The Wall” (1944)   Elizabeth Bowen “Mysterious Kor” (1945)   J. B. Priestley “Coming to London” (1957)   Jean Rhys “Tigers are Better-Looking” (1964)   Muriel Spark “Daisy Overend” (1967)   Doris Lessing “In Defence of the Underground” (1992)   Irma Kurtz “Islington” (1997)   Hanif Kureishi “The Umbrella” (1999)   

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Jack London’s Best Books and Short Stories 📚 

Jack London is best known for his adventure novels, like The Call of the Wild and White Fang. But, throughout his career, he published several well-loved books and short stories. 

Quick Facts

Written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

Throughout his career, Jack London published novels and short stories in the adventure fiction, science fiction, and dystopian fiction genres. Although best known for the former, his work in the latter two genres was groundbreaking. He also spent time working as a journalist. Explore the best Jack London books and short stories below. 

The Call of the Wild

‘ The Call of the Wild ‘ is Jack London’s best-loved novel. It was published in 1903 and is set in the Yukon, as are many of his best stories. It focuses on the story of Buck, a pet dog from California who is stolen from his home and sold in the Yukon as a sled dog. He adapts to his environment throughout the novel, becoming wild and learning how to survive. It was famously inspired by London’s year in the Yukon, where he came to understand the true struggle of living in that kind of environment. 

White Fang 

‘ White Fang ‘ is one of American novelist London’s best-known and commonly studied novels. It follows a wild dog who, throughout the novel, becomes a loving, domesticated pet. It takes an opposite approach to the storyline in ‘ The Call of the Wild ‘. The book was published in Outing magazine between May and October 1906 and then in book form at the end of that year. Much of the novel is written from the wolfdog’s point of view, which allows an exploration of how a wild animal understands the world and human beings. 

The Scarlet Plague 

‘ The Scarlet Plague ‘ is a post-apocalyptic, dystopian novel published in 1912. Similarities between London’s depiction of a plague and the COVID-19 pandemic were noted in 2020. The specific novel takes place in 2073, a few years after an epidemic known as the “Red Death” swiftly destroyed most life on earth. The main character, James Smith, is one of the few survivors.

The Sea-Wolf

‘ The Sea-Wolf ‘ is a classic London adventure novel that was published in 1904. It focuses on Humphrey Van Weyden, a literary critic rescued from a shipwreck by Wolf Larsen. Inspired by a real-life London sailor, Captain Alex McLean. Additionally, some scholars and readers have noted similarities between wolf, the character in London (sometimes known as “Wolf” by his friends). 

‘ Iron Heel ‘ is a 1908 political novel that engages with the science fiction genre (something that some readers of London’s work may be surprised by). It focuses on the fictional rise of a socialist movement in the United States. Threatened by its appearance, conservatives gain power and establish a brutal dictatorship. 

It is an early example of modern dystopian fiction and dystopian political novels of the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Additionally, the book also stands apart from others of the time because London wrote it from a woman’s first-person perspective.

Martin Eden 

‘ Martin Eden ‘ is a 1909 novel inspired by London’s struggles to find success in the literary world. It was first serialized in The Pacific Monthly and published as a book a year later. The book includes London’s frustrations through the character of Martin Eden, as he comes close to and continues to lose out on opportunities. The book includes this memorable quote : 

Who are you, Martin Eden? he demanded of himself in the looking-glass, that night when he got back to his room. He gazed at himself long and curiously. Who are you? What are you? Where do you belong? You belong by rights to girls like Lizzie Connolly. You belong with the legions of toil, with all that is low, and vulgar, and unbeautiful.

A Thousand Deaths 

‘ A Thousand Deaths ‘ was first published in 1899 in The Black Cat. It describes a sailor who is rescued by a mysterious man with a machine that brings him back to life. It breaks from the traditional adventure story genre that London is known for and instead delves into the category of science fiction. The recently resuscitated man learns that his savior is a mad scientist who intends to use him to see through various other experiments.

An Odyssey of the North 

‘ An Odyssey of the North ‘ is another Jack London short story. It is set during the Klondike Gold Rush and tells the adventurous story of an Aleutian man’s life-long quest to retrieve his stolen wife. This short story, like others London wrote, was developed into a film. It was released in 1914. Like “Grit of Women,” it too is a story within a story or a frame narrative. 

Grit of Women 

‘ Grit of Women ‘ is a short story first published in 1900 in McClure’s. It was later included in London’s collection ‘ The God of His Fathers .’ It focuses on the story of Passuk, a Native American woman who traveled 700 miles across the Yukon Territory. The story includes the following quote that demonstrates London’s writing style and the “grit” of the main character of this story:  

So we pulled on, light-stomached and heavy-hearted, with half a thousand miles of snow and silence between us and Haines Mission by the sea. The darkness was at its worst, and at midday the sun could not clear the sky-line to the south. But the ice-jams were smaller, the going better;

The Complete Short Stories of Jack London

‘ The Complete Short Stories of Jack London ‘ is best for reading Jack London’s literary works. The book includes 210 stories and some of his most famous works, including those mentioned above. Many of these are set in the wild and are categorized as adventure stories. The book includes stories like: 

• “The Race for Number Three”
• “Keesh, Son of Keesh”
• “To Build a Fire” 
• “The Water Baby” 
• “The Terrible Solomons”

It’s stories like these that truly solidified his worldwide celebrity and helped the public see him as both a literary pioneer and social activist.

What is Jack London’s best book? 

‘ The Call of the Wild ‘ is considered Jack London’s best book. It was published in 1903 and was inspired by the time the author spent in the Yukon as part of the Klondike Gold Rush.

What order should I read Jack London?

When first starting Jack London’s books, it is best to begin with ‘ The Call of the Wild .’ Follow this up with ‘ White Fang ‘ and then move on to a few of his best-known short stories, such as “An Odyssey of the North.”

What is Jack London’s best-selling book?

Jack London’s best-selling book is ‘ The Call of the Wild .’ When it was first printed, the initial 10,000 copies sold out immediately. Since then, the novel has sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide.

What is Jack London most famous for?

Jack London was born in San Francisco, California, in January 1876. He is best known for his adventure novels, like ‘ White Fang ‘, ‘ The Call of the Wild ,’ and ‘ The Sea Wolf .’ These, and others, solidified his reputation as one of the most important American writers of the 20th century.

What genre is White Fang ?

The novel ‘ White Fang ‘ is categorized in the adventure fiction genre. Its this genre of novels and short stories that Jack London is best known for and which his most popular novel, ‘ The Call of the Wild ,’ is also categorized in.

About Emma Baldwin

Emma Baldwin, a graduate of East Carolina University, has a deep-rooted passion for literature. She serves as a key contributor to the Book Analysis team with years of experience.

What is the Jack London story where the stubborn woman won’t walk across the lake. She insists on riding the sled so they all drown.

Hey Jackie! That story is ‘The White Silence.’ Ruth’s choice leads to the tragic outcome. This story, like many others by London, vividly captures the harsh realities of life in the far North and the strength of human and animal endurance. Hope this helps!

Cite This Page

Baldwin, Emma " Jack London's Best Books and Short Stories 📚  " Book Analysis , https://bookanalysis.com/jack-london/books-short-stories/ . Accessed 2 April 2024.

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Read Your Way Through London

Bernardine Evaristo, whose “Girl, Woman, Other” won the Booker Prize, invites readers into London, a city whose rich literary landscape is “for everyone, not just the privileged few.”

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By Bernardine Evaristo

Read Your Way Around the World is a series exploring the globe through books.

The literary landscape of London is as varied as the city itself. According to the 2011 census, 40 percent of residents identified as “Asian, Black, Mixed or Other.” While this is no multi-culti utopia, it is undeniably an intensely multicultural metropolis where more than 300 languages are spoken.

Born here, raised here, living here, I am proud of this heteroglot city that has been my muse ever since I started writing , just as it has inspired the literary imagination of scribes for hundreds of years.

Every kind of literary activity is available here in abundance: festivals, public talks and debates, spoken word slams, workshops, cross art form collaborations. It is also the heartland of British publishing, the media and many of the national arts institutions and government-funded literary organizations that help writers progress to performance or publication, as well as projects to nurture new readers. Literary London is more than the books we read, the plays we watch or the poets who bestride its stages: It has a thriving infrastructure designed to widen participation and create a literary culture for everyone, not just the privileged few.

An eccentric city with a live-and-let-live vibe, London is a place where people can be free to be themselves, find the communities to which they belong and write whatever they want. There are, in a sense, many Londons for writers to explore. It is a city where rich and poor often live side by side: Even the most expensive districts, such as Mayfair and Westminster, will have affordable housing projects. There are also towns that were once villages, each with their own distinct identities and increasingly fluid demographics.

No single writer can define London because it can never be essentialized. It is a sprawling, complicated, very historical and heterogenous city, about which writers through the ages have offered their own versions. Here are some of my personal choices.

What should I read before I pack my bags?

“ London: The Biography ,” by Peter Ackroyd, might sound like a stolid, academic tome but it’s anything but. It’s an incredibly stylish and idiosyncratic account of the city from prehistory onward, told through section headings such as “Crime and Punishment” and “Cockney Visionaries” rather than a straightforward chronology.

Ignatius Sancho, the author of “ Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho ,” is believed to have been born on a slave ship en route to the West Indies in 1729. He was brought to London as a small child, remaining until his death in 1780. As an adult, he ran a grocery shop in Westminster, was an abolitionist and composer and moved in leading literary, political and artistic circles, which was exceptional for a Black man at that time. His letters were published posthumously.

My favorite Virginia Woolf book is the classic “ Mrs. Dalloway, ” a psychologically penetrating, modernist short novel set on a single day in central London, 1923 — the city vividly brought to life through two main characters of different classes.

And for a comic take on British class and snobbery, read “ The Diary of a Nobody, ” published in 1892, by George and Weedon Grossmith. It’s quite a skill to make boring fictional characters interesting, but the Grossmith brothers do just this with Charles Pooter and his family, who reside in north London.

Finally, for insight into teenagers in London, read Hannah Lowe’s poetry collection “ The Kids ,” inspired by the youngsters she taught in an inner city London school for 10 years.

What books can show me other facets of the city?

“ The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, ” by Hallie Rubenhold, offers just what it says on the cover. It’s quite shocking to read how egregiously these women have been misrepresented since their murders in the 19th century. Rubenhold untangles the myths of history-making and writes with great empathy about the hardships the women endured when alive and the rampant misogyny they faced when dead.

Roger Robinson, who is originally from Trinidad, has a poetry collection, “A Portable Paradise,” that should be read for its emotional honesty and vulnerability, and for a sequence of poems about the Grenfell Tower fire , in which a public housing block in west London caught fire in 2017, killing 72 people and injuring hundreds more. It was an avoidable tragedy: The fire spread because of cladding that defied building regulations, due to government neglect. The building still stands, wrapped in protective scaffolding with green love hearts and the words “Forever in Our Hearts” at the top. Take Robinson’s book to the site and read his poems about it.

Set in south London, “ Ordinary People ,” a soulful novel by Diana Evans, subtly explores the web of desires and disappointments around Black British relationships, family, work and parenting. Evans’s first novel, “ 26a ,” centers on twins from an interracial British-Nigerian family living in northwest London.

“ Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day ,” by Peter Ackroyd, again, is an important and entertaining corrective to the overwhelmingly heteronormative recording of British history. And in “ Night Haunts: A Journey Through the London Night ,” by Sukhdev Sandhu, you’ll discover the urban dwellers who work in the dark, from the avian police to the cleaners to the Thames bargers and flushers.

What writer is everyone talking about?

Isabel Waidner, and deservedly so. A German-British Londoner, they published two novels before winning the Goldsmiths Prize for experimental fiction in 2022 with “Sterling Karat Gold.” They write about the politics of state oppression, the politics of rebellion, the politics of the imagination. Their explosive sensibility and style are as far removed from mediocre prose and middle-class manners as you can imagine. This alone is reason to read them.

If I have no time for day trips, what books could take me there instead?

There aren’t enough writers from working-class backgrounds writing novels about people from working-class backgrounds, but two outstanding Scottish storytellers have made names for themselves in recent years doing just that: Douglas Stuart , whose novels, “ Shuggie Bain ” and “ Young Mungo ,” feature young, gay, Glaswegian protagonists, and Kerry Hudson, novelist and memoirist, whose first novel, “ Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma ,” centers on a young girl born in Aberdeen and the women in her family. These two writers will wring out your emotions: Their writing is heartbreaking and heartwarming in equal measure.

What audiobook would make for good company while I walk around?

“ London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City ,” by Tom Chivers, is perfect. He’s previously written poetry books and brings a poet’s sensibility to this prose nonfiction book about the hidden parts of the capital, mixing the past with the present, the known with the unknown and his personal story with social history and geology.

Who are the literary icons I’ll see on public monuments?

St. Thomas’ Hospital, in Waterloo, is definitely worth a visit. There you’ll find an impressive statue of Mary Seacole , the Jamaican nurse, hotelier and traveler whose frank and entertaining autobiography, “ Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands ,” was published in 1857.

Not too far from the hospital you’ll find a hallowed place for writers: Poets’ Corner, in Westminster Abbey. More than 100 poets and writers are buried or commemorated there; the first among them was Geoffrey Chaucer, the author of “The Canterbury Tales” — a long poem charting the journey of a group of pilgrims who travel from south London to Canterbury — who died in 1400. In 2014, the poet Patience Agbabi published a witty, remixed version of the poem, “ Telling Tales .”

Also entombed in Poets’ Corner are Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and there are memorial tablets to many more writers, including John Betjeman; Jane Austen; Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Ted Hughes; Henry James; William Shakespeare; Oscar Wilde and Philip Larkin. In a noisy, hectic city, this is a quiet space where you can commune with the spirits of the literary past and reflect on the power of literature to resonate far beyond a writer’s life.

What are some good places to read or find new books?

Newham Bookshop , in the East End, has been a passionate and stalwart supporter of a truly diverse range of writers and readers since it was founded in 1978, decades before diversity became a buzzword. The Second Shelf , a women’s bookshop in the West End, is the place to go to buy rare and current books, art and ephemera, such as Sylvia Plath’s plaid skirt .

The British Library in Kings Cross is one of my favorite places to meet people in London for a coffee. Its vaults, which contain copies of every book, play or other document published in the United Kingdom, descend the equivalent of eight stories below ground. Readers can access most books through the Reading Rooms .

The St. Cuthbert Gospel , the oldest European book to survive fully intact, is frequently on display there. The Library purchased it for a staggering 9 million pounds in 2012. The value of literature is so much more than financial, but nothing beats seeing a physical book from the 8th century and reflecting on the world as it was then, and the world as it is now.

Bernardine Evaristo’s London Reading List

“London: The Biography” and “Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day,” Peter Ackroyd

“Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho,” Ignatius Sancho

“Mrs. Dalloway,” Virginia Woolf

“The Diary of a Nobody,” George and Weedon Grossmith

“The Kids,” Hannah Lowe

“The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper,” Hallie Rubenhold

“A Portable Paradise,” Roger Robinson

“Ordinary People” and “26a,” Diana Evans

“Night Haunts: A Journey Through the London Night,” Sukhdev Sandhu

“Sterling Karat Gold,” Isabel Waidner

“Shuggie Bain” and “Young Mungo,” Douglas Stuart

“Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma,” Kerry Hudson

“London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City,” Tom Chivers

“Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands,” Mary Seacole

“The Canterbury Tales,” Geoffrey Chaucer

“Telling Tales,” Patience Agbabi

Bernardine Evaristo — that’s Bernardine with two R’s! — is the author of 10 books and other writings spanning multiple genres. There are now over 60 translations of her books in more than 40 languages, and she has received more accolades and honors than could ever be squeezed at the bottom of this page.

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