The Connoisseur's Collections

Before Twilight and True Blood, even before Buffy and Anne Rice and Bela Lugosi, vampires haunted the 19th century, when brilliant writers everywhere indulged their bloodthirsty imaginations, culminating in Bram Stoker's legendary 1897 novel, Dracula. Michael Sims brings together the very best vampire stories of the Victorian era - from England, America, France, Germany, Transylvania, and even Japan - into a unique collection that highlights their cultural variety.

The Dead Witness gathers the finest adventures among private and police detectives from the 19th century and into the early 20th - including a wide range of overlooked gems creating the finest ever anthology of Victorian detective stories. "The Dead Witness", the 1866 title story by Australian writer Mary Fortune, is the first known detective story by a woman, a suspenseful clue-strewn manhunt in the Outback. This forgotten treasure sets the tone for the whole anthology....

Bloomsbury presents The Phantom Coach Edited by Michael Sims, read by William Hope and Penelope Rawlins. Ghost stories date back centuries, but those written in the Victorian era have a unique atmosphere and dark beauty. Michael Sims, whose previous Victorian collections Dracula’s Guest...

Bloomsbury presents The Phantom Coach Edited by Michael Sims, read by William Hope and Penelope Rawlins. Ghost stories date back centuries, but those written in the Victorian era have a unique atmosphere and dark beauty. Michael Sims, whose previous Victorian collections have been widely praised...

Long before 1984, Star Wars, or The Hunger Games, Victorian authors imagined a future where new science and technologies reshaped the world and universe they knew. The great themes of modern science fiction showed up surprisingly early: space and time travel, dystopian societies, even dangerously independent machines, all inspiring the speculative fiction of the Victorian era.