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Willa Sibert Cather was born on 7th December, 1873 on her grandmother's farm in the Back Creek Valley near Winchester, Virginia. After several years and moves the family eventually settled in Red Cloud, Nebraska and for the first time Cather could now attend school. In Red Cloud Cather had her earliest writings published in the local Red Cloud Chief newspaper. Her time in the mid-West created a vivid tranche of experiences for the young woman. It was still, for the most part, the frontier; a landscape of dramatic environment and weather, the vastness of the Nebraska prairie, as well as the many diverse cultures of the local families. Attending the University of Nebraska she published a well received essay on Thomas Carlyle in the Nebraska State Journal and thereafter became a regular contributor to its offerings. After being hired to write for the Home Monthly, in 1896, Cather moved to Pittsburgh. Within a year she became a telegraph editor and drama critic for the Pittsburgh Leader as well as contributing poetry and short fiction to The Library, another local publication. Her first collection of short stories,'The Troll Garden', was published in 1905 and contains several of her most famous including'A Wagner Matinee,''The Sculptor's Funeral,'and'Paul's Case.'As a writer Cather was now taking immense strides forward. By 1912 she had finished her first novel'Alexander's Bridge'which was serialized in McClure's to favourable reviews. Cather now began her Prairie Trilogy:'O Pioneers!'(1913),'The Song of the Lark'(1915), and'My Ántonia'(1918). All three were popular and critical successes nationwide. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, Cather continued to establish herself as a major American writer and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1922 for her novel'One of Ours'. A determinedly private person, Cather destroyed many old drafts, personal papers, and letters. Her will would also restrict the ability of scholars to quote from personal papers that remained. In 1932, Cather published her final collection of short stories,'Obscure Destinies'which contained the highly regarded'Neighbour Rosicky.'She now began work on'Lucy Gayheart', a novel that was rather darker than those before it. With her career settled as one of America's greatest writers honours began to flow. In 1943 she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The following year, 1944, Cather received the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. However time was about to settle scores with her. On April 24th, 1947, Willa Siebert Cather died of a cerebral haemorrhage at her home at 570 Park Avenue in Manhattan. She was 73.

George Robert Gissing was born on November 22nd, 1857 in Wakefield, Yorkshire.He was educated at Back Lane School in Wakefield. Gissing loved school. He was enthusiastic with a thirst for learning and always diligent. By the age of ten he was reading Dickens, a lifelong hero.In 1872 Gissing won a scholarship to Owens College. Whilst there Gissing worked hard but remained solitary. Unfortunately, he had run short of funds and stole from his fellow students. He was arrested, prosecuted, found guilty, expelled and sentenced to a month's hard labour in 1876. On release he decided to start over. In September 1876 he travelled to the United States. Here he wrote short stories for the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers. On his return home he was ready for novels. Gissing self-published his first novel but it failed to sell. His second was acquired but never published. His writing career was static. Something had to change. And it did. By 1884 The Unclassed was published. Now everything he wrote was published. Both Isabel Clarendon and Demos appeared in 1886. He mined the lives of the working class as diligently as any capitalist. In 1889 Gissing used the proceeds from the sale of The Nether World to go to Italy. This trip formed the basis for his 1890 work The Emancipated. Gissing's works began to command higher payments. New Grub Street (1891) brought a fee of £250. Short stories followed and in 1895, three novellas were published; Eve's Ransom, The Paying Guest and Sleeping Fires. Gissing was careful to keep up with the changing attitudes of his audience. Unfortunately, he was also diagnosed as suffering from emphysema. The last years of his life were spent as a semi-invalid in France but he continued to write. 1899; The Crown of Life. Our Friend the Charlatan appeared in 1901, followed two years later by The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. George Robert Gissing died aged 46 on December 28th, 1903 after catching a chill on a winter walk.

The Trial (German: Der Process) is a novel by Franz Kafka about a character named Josef K., who awakens one morning and, for reasons never revealed, is arrested and prosecuted for an unspecified crime. According to Kafka's friend Max Brod, the author never finished the novel and wrote in his will that it was to be destroyed. After his death, Brod went against Kafka's wishes and edited The Trial into what he felt was a coherent novel and had it published in 1925.

Sax Rohmer was born on February 15th, 1883 as Arthur Henry Sarsfield in Birmingham to working class parents.Rohmer started his career as a civil servant but soon had ambitions to write full time.Not content with just fiction he wrote poetry, songs as well as comedy sketches for music hall performers. From these varied beginnings he reinvented himself as Sax Rohmer.He first published in 1903, age 20, with the short story ‘The Mysterious Mummy'which was published in the magazine Pearson's Weekly.Rohmer published his first book Pause! anonymously in 1910 and followed this, in 1911, with a stint as ghost-writer on the autobiography of Little Tich, the famous music hall entertainer.The serialization of his first Fu Manchu novel, The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu, from October 1912 to June 1913 brought him instant success.The first three Fu Manchu books were published in the four years 1913–1917. Rohmer then put the character on hiatus whilst he attended to other works and characters. It was only after a 14-year absence in 1931 that Rohmer added a fourth to the series with The Daughter of Fu Manchu.The incredible commercial success of Fu Manchu had brought Rohmer both fame and fortune and he wanted to use both to allow him to explore and create other characters as well as other interests.Rohmer also wrote several novels of supernatural horror, including Brood of the Witch-Queen, which has been described as Rohmer's masterpiece.Unfortunately, despite his ability to generate income, Rohmer was very poor at managing his wealth and made several very poor business decisions that hobbled him throughout his career.His final success came with a series of novels featuring a female variation on Fu Manchu, Sumuru. This series would run to five novels.After World War II, Rohmer and his wife moved to New York, only returning to London shortly before his death. Sax Rohmer died on June 1st, 1959, due to an outbreak of influenza, ironically named'Asian Flu'.

An imaginative twelve-year-old Georgia tomboy is jealous of her brother's upcoming wedding in this classic Southern novel. Carson McCullers's classic The Member of the Wedding charmed generations of readers and became an award-winning play and a major motion picture. It tells the story of the inimitable twelve-year-old Frankie, who is utterly, hopelessly bored with life until she hears about her older brother's upcoming marriage. Bolstered by lively conversations with the family maid, Berenice, and her six-year-old male cousin—not to mention her own unbridled imagination—Frankie takes on an overly active role in the wedding. She hopes even to go, uninvited, on the honeymoon, so deep is her desire to become part of something larger, more accepting, than herself. “A marvelous study of the agony of adolescence” (Detroit Free Press), The Member of the Wedding showcases Carson McCullers at her most sensitive, most astute, and lasting best.Praise for The Member of the Wedding“McCullers's best. An unusual story of a very sensitive child... [that] holds you by the very brilliance of its writing.” —Atlanta Journal Constitution“A serious attempt to recapture that elusive moment when childhood melts into adolescence... touching.” —Time“Rarely has emotional turbulence been so delicately conveyed.” —New York Times

The beloved classic that turned Carson McCullers into an overnight literary sensation and one of the Modern Library's top 20 novels of the 20th century.“A remarkable book…From the opening page, brilliant in its establishment of mood, character, and suspense, the book takes hold of the reader.”In a Georgia Mill town during the 1930s, an enigmatic John Singer, draws out the haunted confessions of an itinerant worker, a doctor, a widowed café owner, and a young girl. Each yearns for escape from small town life, but the young girl, Mick Kelly, the book's heroine (loosely based on McCullers), finds solace in her music.Wonderfully attuned to the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition, and with a deft sense for racial tensions in the South, McCullers spins a haunting, unforgettable story that gives voice to the rejected, the forgotten, and the mistreated—and, through Mick, gives voice to the quiet, intensely personal search for beauty.

A New York Times–bestselling novel of love, money, and ambition among the employees of a white-shoe law firm. From a renowned chronicler of American high society, this is a novel set in the small but distinguished New York law firm of Shepard, Putney & Cox in the early 1970s. The son of a rich mother and a socially ambitious father, Beekman “Beeky” Ehninger makes a successful career for himself in the narrow upper echelons of his profession. For years, he has quietly guided his firm through numerous periods of transition—not to mention marital strife, forgery, and fraud. But as times have changed, Beeky and his colleagues must decide whether to join forces with a new and different breed—tough, but undeniably successful. The Partners is a masterful characterization of moral men navigating an amoral world, of lawyers, their families, and the rich and powerful people they serve. “Vintage Auchincloss—sensitive, ironic, sympathetic, affecting. Auchincloss is particularly good with the interior reality of seemingly minor conflicts; he also shows, over and over again, that seemingly large and dramatic conflicts are often not the important ones.” —New York magazine

Once again, Thomas Berger brings a satiric and irreverent perspective to the human experience, evoking a world that most dare not even imagine and effectively dismantling all existing definitions of sex and gender.

On the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis, American and French intelligence agents are plunged into a maze of Cold War intrigue In Paris, 1962, French intelligence chief André Devereaux and NATO intelligence chief Michael Nordstrom have uncovered Soviet plans to ship nuclear arms to Cuba. But when Devereaux reports his findings and nobody acts—and he is targeted in an assassination attempt—he soon realizes he's tangled in a plot far greater than he first understood. The two agents, along with a small band of Cuban exiles and Soviet defectors, chase leads around the globe in a quest to save NATO, themselves, and perhaps the world itself. Topaz is a fast-paced but deeply informed thriller. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Leon Uris including rare photos from the author's estate.

Henry Free, they called him now, or Frey in the dialect; and they knew him well in all the Pennsylvania land his own Palatine fellow countrymen had settled. They had even sent him to represent them in the Congress at Washington. Captain Free, they said, when they thought how he had fought for the freedom of the colonies a year before the Declaration of Independence. But few of them remembered that he had been Henner Dellicker in the old country, where he was born beside the Neckar; or the tale of his voyage to the new land in the crowded and starved emigrant ship; or of his indentured service in the rich Bayley house in Philadelphia; or of the cruel discipline that Miss Amity visited upon him; or how he fled the King's jailers to the wild frontier, and returned later to settle his accounts with Miss Amity in a way he had not expected. In this novel, the author of The Trees has written of those early Americans who were among his own forebears—the sturdy, courageous, hard-working, liberty-loving Palatine Germans who with the Alsatians and Swiss came to farm in Pennsylvania and stayed to win their collective freedom on the battlefields of the Revolution. As a footnote to history The Free Man is freshly revealing of an important but unfamiliar aspect of our growth to nationhood and the part played in it by the founding fathers of the Pennsylvania Dutch, their “little Declaration of Independence” as early as April and May 1775, and their introduction and development of that great American influence, the pioneer rifle.

A collection of essential pieces by an American master • “A real contribution to the study of Faulkner's work.”—Edmund Wilson In prose of biblical grandeur and feverish intensity, William Faulkner reconstructed the history of the American South as a tragic legend of courage and cruelty, gallantry and greed, futile nobility and obscene crimes. He set this legend in a small, minutely realized parallel universe that he called Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. No single volume better conveys the scope of Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha legend than The Essential Faulkner. The book includes self-contained episodes from the novels The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Sanctuary; the stories “The Bear,” “Spotted Horses,” “A Rose for Emily,” and “Old Man,” among others; a map of Yoknapatawpha County and a chronology of the Compson family created by Faulkner especially for this edition; and the complete text of Faulkner's 1950 address upon receiving the Nobel Prize in literature. Malcolm Cowley's critical introduction was praised as “splendid” by Faulkner himself. Also includes: “A Justice” “The Courthouse” (from Requiem for a Nun) “Red Leaves” “Was” (from Go Down, Moses) “Raid” (from The Unvanquished) “Wash” “An Odor of Verbena” (from The Unvanquished) “That Evening Sun” “Ad Astra” “Dilsey” (from The Sound and the Fury) “Death Drag” “Uncle Bud and the Three Madams” (from Sanctuary) “Percy Grimm” (from Light in August) “Delta Autumn” (from Go Down, Moses) “The Jail” (from Requiem for a Nun)

The latest release in the Christian Epic series is an exciting novel that takes place shortly after Christ's death and resurrection. Basil is called to design the case which will hold the silver cup that Christ and His disciples drank from at the Last Supper, and plans to sculpt their likenesses upon it. As he seeks out these followers of Christ, he encounters grave danger.

A sweeping anthology of works by an American original, including the complete text of The Sound and the Fury, a foreword by the author, his Nobel Prize address, and a selection of brilliant novellas and short stories, including: “The Bear” (from Go Down, Moses) “Old Man” (from The Wild Palms) “Spotted Horses” (from The Hamlet) “A Rose for Emily” “Barn Burning” “Dry September” “That Evening Sun” “Turnabout” “Shingles for the Lord” “A Justice” “Wash” “An Odor of Verbena” (from The Unvanquished) “Percy Grimm” (from Light in August) “The Courthouse” (from Requiem for a Nun)

In The Summer Book Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summer—its sunlight and storms—into twenty-two crystalline vignettes. This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia's grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland. The grandmother is unsentimental and wise, if a little cranky; Sophia is impetuous and volatile, but she tends to her grandmother with the care of a new parent. Together they amble over coastline and forest in easy companionship, build boats from bark, create a miniature Venice, write a fanciful study of local bugs. They discuss things that matter to young and old alike: life, death, the nature of God and of love. “On an island,” thinks the grandmother, “everything is complete.” In The Summer Book, Jansson creates her own complete world, full of the varied joys and sorrows of life.Tove Jansson, whose Moomintroll comic strip and books brought her international acclaim, lived for much of her life on an island like the one described in The Summer Book, and the work can be enjoyed as her closely observed journal of the sounds, sights, and feel of a summer spent in intimate contact with the natural world.

A classic novel of family, isolation, and a blighted Ireland from the Man Booker-prize winning author of The Sea—about the end of innocence for a boy and his country. I am therefore I think. So starts John Banville's 1973 novel Birchwood, a novel that centers around Gabriel Godkin and his return to his dilapidated family estate. After years away, Gabriel returns to a house filled with memories and despair. Delving deep into family secrets—a cold father, a tortured mother, an insane grandmother—Gabriel also recalls his first encounters with love and loss. Birchwood is a remarkable and complex story, told in the brilliantly styled prose of one of our most essential writers.

In the future, exceptional characteristics are regarded as undesirable, and the perfect human specimen is someone who is average in every possible way. Ellaby, a man who embodies middle-of-the-road mediocrity, sees a rare opportunity to seize power and makes the most of it.

LILITH is a powerfully drawn portrait of innocence corrupted by evil—an evil so brilliant, so beautiful, so imaginatively conceived that even its violence and amorality have a fantastic splendor of their own. This is the evil of Lilith, a wildly deranged young woman who creates for herself a strange paradise of fantasy, poetry, and passion which she inhabits in preference to the real world. Her world has its own language, its own philosophy, its own music and art, all exquisitely constructed and richly sensual in their design. And it has its own religion, a religion which demands an insidious and dreadful form of human sacrifice. First published in 1961, LILITH instantly became a classic of American literature, with over one million copies in print and a 1964 film adaptation of the same name starring Warren Beatty and Jean Seberg.

'When I was a boy of eight in the Platte Valley of Nebraska, my father made the first of the many moves that would prove to be of interest to a future writer of fiction. They were east to Chicago, the point on the map where all the lines pointed. Almost twenty years would pass before I would seek to recapture the past that I had experienced. The Works of Loveis the first fruit of that effort, and the linchpin in my novels concerned with the plains. The reader who has read The Home Place or The Field of Vision will find in this novel the crux of an experience I frequently return to but never exhaust.'—Wright Morris

Wright Morris's'Nebraska Trilogy'(1946-49) embodies his attempt to capture and come to terms with his past. According to David Madden, in his study Wright Morris,'In The Inhabitants [a picture collection] the emphasis is on the artifacts inhabited and on the land; in The Home Place [narrative and pictures], on the inhabitants themselves; and in The World in the Attic, on what the land and the people signify to one man, Clyde Muncy, writer and self-exiled Nebraskan.... What was only suggested to Muncy in The Home Place is further developed, although not entirely resolved, in The World in the Attic.... [In it], Morris achieves the kind of objective conceptualization that is characteristic of his best novels. The first half of the book is impressionistic, a series of reminiscences like The Home Place; but the second half has a novelist narrative line. In The Home Place, the past, saturated in the immediate present, is merely alluded to. In The World in the Attic, however, the past is specifically and dramatically related to the present.'

Madame Bovary scandalized its readers when it was first published in 1857. And the story itself remains as fresh today as when it was first written, a work that remains unsurpassed in its unveiling of character and society. It tells the tragic story of the romantic but empty-headed Emma Rouault. When Emma marries Charles Bovary, she imagines she will pass into the life of luxury and passion that she reads about in sentimental novels and women's magazines. But Charles is an ordinary country doctor, and provincial life is very different from the romantic excitement for which she yearns. In her quest to realize her dreams she takes a lover, Rodolphe, and begins a devastating spiral into deceit and despair. And Flaubert captures every step of this catastrophe with sharp-eyed detail and a wonderfully subtle understanding of human emotions.

In the fall of 1948, Ernest Hemingway made his first extended visit to Italy in thirty years. His reacquaintance with Venice, a city he loved, provided the inspiration for Across the River and into the Trees, the story of Richard Cantwell, a war-ravaged American colonel stationed in Italy at the close of the Second World War, and his love for a young Italian countess. A poignant, bittersweet homage to love that overpowers reason, to the resilience of the human spirit, and to the worldweary beauty and majesty of Venice, Across the River and into the Trees stands as Hemingway's statement of defiance in response to the great dehumanizing atrocities of the Second World War. Hemingway's last full-length novel published in his lifetime, it moved John O'Hara in The New York Times Book Review to call him “the most important author since Shakespeare.”

A quirky, brilliant novel starring Chauncey Gardiner, an enigmatic man who rises from nowhere to become a media phenomenon—“a fabulous creature of our age” (Newsweek). One of the most beloved novels by the New York Times–bestselling and National Book Award–winning author of The Painted Bird and Pinball, Being There is the story of a mysterious man who finds himself at the center of Wall Street and Washington power—including his role as a policy adviser to the president—despite the fact that no one is quite sure where he comes from, or what he is actually talking about. Nevertheless, Chauncey “Chance” Gardiner is celebrated by the media, and hailed as a visionary, in this satirical masterpiece that became an award-winning film starring Peter Sellers. As wise and timely as ever, Being There is “a tantalizing knuckleball of a book delivered with perfectly timed satirical hops and metaphysical flutters” (Time).

From the Nobel Prize–winning author: “One of the great short novels of the 20th century” (The Wall Street Journal). Internationally acclaimed as one of the world's most influential writers, Kenzaburō Ōe brings to the fore the post-WWII rage and anxiety of a decorous society in this “deathly black comedy... dripping with nuclear terror” (The Japan Times). Bird is an antisocial twenty-seven-year-old intellectual hanging on to a failing marriage with whiskey. He dreams of going to Africa where the sky sprawls with possibilities. Then, as though walloped by a massive invisible fist, Bird's Utopian fantasies are shattered when his wife gives birth to what he calls their “monster baby.” Now, Bird is left with one question: How can he and his wife spend the rest of their lives with this damaged thing clinging to their backs? As shameful, disgraceful, and unthinkable a desire as it is, Bird has an answer. Not sealed. Not just yet. Not before Bird flees on a bender of indiscriminate (and frustratingly impotent) sex, hard liquor, self-delusion, and most terrifying of all—self-discovery. “Very close to a perfect contemporary novel.” —The New York Times “An astonishing novel.” —Mother Jones

A classic by a Russian master Prince Myshkin, the idiot, is an almost comically innocent Christ figure in a land of sinners, one whose faith in beauty contrasts sharply with that of his society's.

“They moved along in the bobbing, springy gait of a family that followed the woods as some families follow the sea.” In that first sentence Conrad Richter sets the mood of this magnificent epic of the American wilderness. Toward the close of the eighteenth century the land west of the Alleghenies and north of the Ohio river was an unbroken sea of trees. Beneath them the forest trails were dark, silent, and lonely, brightened only by a few lost beams of sunlight. Here the Lucketts, a wild, woodsfaring family, lived their roaming life, pushing ever westward as the frontier advanced and as new settlements threatened their isolation. Richter has written, not a historical novel, of which there are so many, but a novel of authentic early American life, of which there are so few. It is the primitive story of Worth Luckett, the hunter, and of Jary, his woman; of Genny, Wyitt, Achsa, and Sulie, their woods-wild children; of the bound boy and the Solitary and Jake Tench; but principally of the oldest girl, Sayward Luckett, whos people as far back as she knew had always been hunters and gunsmiths to hunters, but who, through the quiet, growing, and yet tragic oppression of the trees, turns her back at last on her life as a hunter's child and becomes a tiller of the soil. This novel of great lyrical beauty and high excitement tells the story of the transition of American pioneers from the ways of the wilderness to the ways of civilization. Here is the true American epic. Here is the raw adventure, swift and cruel in its episodes; but here too is the poetry of loneliness. Here is a portrait of frontier life as it really must have seemed to the pioneers. Here in short is a masterpiece by the man who gave us The Sea of Grass.

The Magnificent Century, the second volume of Costain's A History of the Plantagenets, covers Henry III's long and turbulent reign, from 1216 to 1272. During his lifetime Henry was frequently unpopular, unreliable and inconsistent. Yet his reign saw spectacular advancement in the arts, sciences and theology, as well as in government. Despite all, it was truly a magnificent century.'Combines a love of the subject with factual history...a great story.'—San Francisco ChronicleA History of the Plantagenets includes The Conquering Family, The Magnificent Century, The Three Edwards and The Last Plantagenets.

Thomas B. Costain's four-volume history of the Plantagenets begins with THE CONQUERING FAMILY and the conquest of England by William the Conqueror in 1066, closing with the reign of John in 1216. The troubled period after the Norman Conquest, when the foundations of government were hammered out between monarch and people, comes to life through Costain's storytelling skill and historical imagination.

Hayford and Sealts's text was the first accurate version of Melville's final novel. Based on a close analysis of the manuscript, thoroughly annotated, and packaged with a history of the text and perspectives for its criticism, this edition will remain the definitive version of a profoundly suggestive story.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born on 11th November 1821.He was introduced to literature very early. At age three, it was heroic sagas, fairy tales and legends. At four his mother used the Bible to teach him to read and write. His immersion in literature was wide and varied. His imagination, he later recalled, was brought to life by his parents'nightly readings.On 27th September 1837 tragedy struck. Dostoyevsky's mother died of tuberculosis.Dostoyevsky and his brother were now enrolled at the Nikolayev Military Engineering Institute, their academic studies abandoned for military careers. Dostoyevsky disliked the academy, his interests were drawing and architecture.His father died on 16th June 1839 and perhaps triggered Dostoyevsky's epilepsy. However, he continued his studies, passed his exams and obtained the rank of engineer cadet.Dostoyevsky's first completed work was a translation of Honoré de Balzac's novel Eugénie Grandet, published in 1843. It was not successful. He believed his financial difficulties could be overcome by writing his own novel. The result was ‘Poor Folk', published in 1846, and a commercial success.His next novel, ‘The Double', appeared in January 1846. Dostoyevsky now became immersed in socialism. However, ‘The Double'received bad reviews and he now had more frequent seizures. With debts mounting he joined the utopian socialist Betekov circle, which helped him to survive. When that dissolved he joined the Petrashevsky Circle, which proposed social reforms. The Petrashevsky Circle was then denounced and Dostoyevsky accused of reading and distributing banned works. Arrests took place in late April 1849 and its members sentenced to death by firing squad. The Tsar commuted the sentence to four years of exile with hard labour in Siberia.His writings on these prison experiences, ‘The House of the Dead'were published in 1861.In Saint Petersburg that September he promised his editor he would deliver ‘The Gambler', a novella on gambling addiction, by November, although work had yet to begin. It was completed in a mere 26 days.Other works followed but a different approach helped immensely. In 1873 ‘Demons'was published by the'Dostoyevsky Publishing Company'. Only payment in cash was accepted and the bookshop was the family apartment. It sold around 3,000 copies.However, Dostoyevsky's health continued to decline, and in March 1877 he had four epileptic seizures. In August 1879 he was diagnosed with early-stage pulmonary emphysema. He was told it could be managed, but not cured.On 26th January 1881 Dostoyevsky suffered a pulmonary haemorrhage. After the second the doctors gave a poor prognosis. A third haemorrhage followed shortly afterwards.Fyodor Dostoyevsky died on 9th February, 1881.

Honest and evocative, George Orwell's first novel is an examination of the debasing effect of empire on occupied and occupier.Burmese Days focuses on a handful of Englishmen who meet at the European Club to drink whisky and to alleviate the acute and unspoken loneliness of life in 1920s Burma—where Orwell himself served as an imperial policeman—during the waning days of British imperialism. One of the men, James Flory, a timber merchant, has grown soft, clearly comprehending the futility of England's rule. However, he lacks the fortitude to stand up for his Indian friend, Dr. Veraswami, for admittance into the whites-only club. Without membership and the accompanying prestige that would protect the doctor, the condemning and ill-founded attack by a bitter magistrate might bring an end to everything he has accomplished. Complicating matters, Flory falls unexpectedly in love with a newly arrived English girl, Elizabeth Lackersteen. Can he find the strength to do right not only by his friend, but also by his conscience?

Neighbors on a New York City street struggle to achieve their dreams during the Great Depression—from the New York Times–bestselling author of Spartacus. On Apple Place, John Edwards aspires to poetry and love, while his neighbor Claus Silverman dreams of a life of music. Meyer runs a cigar stand, saving each penny to build a better future for his family, while Mary sells herself on the corner to provide for her children. Ground down by poverty during some of the city's bleakest years, the characters that mix and mingle in Place in the City all yearn for more, striving constantly for the American Dream lying just beyond their reach. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Howard Fast including rare photos from the author's estate.

This single volume brings together all of Poe's stories and poems, and illuminates the diverse and multifaceted genius of one of the greatest and most influential figures in American literary history.

Museums and Women gathers twenty-nine short stories from the 1960s and early 1970s. It is John Updike's most various collection, a book as full of departures and surprises as the historical period that produced them. Some stories, such as the title piece, have the tone and personality of essays. Others objectify the chimeras of middle-class life, especially life in a fictional New England enclave called Tarbox. The illustrated jeux d'esprit in the section called “Other Modes” place Updike somewhere between Robert Benchley and Donald Barthelme as a toymaker in prose. Crowning the collection are five scenes from the marriage of Richard and Joan Maple, a story sequence with the narrative interest and cumulative power of a novel.

'Perhaps the best book by the foremost stylist of his generation'(New York Times), J. D. Salinger's Franny and Zooey collects two works of fiction about the Glass family originally published in The New Yorker.'Everything everybody does is so--I don't know--not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and--sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way.'A novel in two halves, Franny and Zooey brilliantly captures the emotional strains and traumas of entering adulthood. It is a gleaming example of the wit, precision, and poignancy that have made J. D. Salinger one of America's most beloved writers.

This comes to you courtesy of Miniature Masterpieces who have an excellent range of quality short stories from the masters of the craft. Do search for Miniature Masterpieces at any digital store for further information.This audiobook is also duplicated in print as an ebook. Same title, same words. Perhaps a different experience but with Amazon's whispersync you can pick up and put down on any device. Start on audio, continue in print and any which way after that. This, and these are, Miniature Masterpieces. Join us for the journey.J.M. BARRIE – AN INTRODUCTIONSir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet, OM, was born in Kirriemuir, Angus on 9th May, 1860.Barrie knew from an early age that he wished to be an author. His family wished otherwise. The compromise was that he would attend university to study literature at the University of Edinburgh. He graduated with an M.A. in April, 1882.His first job was as a staff journalist for the Nottingham Journal. The London editor of the St. James's Gazette'liked that Scotch thing'in Barrie's work and he wrote several stories for them and later several novels based on his mother's early life.Barrie though was increasingly drawn to working in the theatre. His first plays achieved little attention but in 1901 and 1902, Barrie had back-to-back theatre successes with Quality Street and The Admirable Crichton.The character of ‘Peter Pan'first appeared in The Little White Bird in 1902. This most famous and enduring of his works; Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up had its first stage performance on December 27th, 1904.Peter Pan would overshadow all his other works. But his short stories cannot be overlooked. Indeed, from today's vantage point they are excellent gems of social manners, of class and the way characters, sometimes in the most mundane of circumstances, react in the most surprising of ways.

Born in 1857 in Poland, Joseph Conrad became a British citizen just before he turned 30. In the intervening years he lost both parents; as an orphan aged 11 he was therefore raised by an uncle, who at 16 let the boy go to Marseille to work on merchant ships where the colourful life of the sea was further enhanced by stints gun running and intriguingly political conspiracy. At age 36 his life turned from one of ships to one of literary pursuit. In doing so Conrad brought to English Literature a further layer of style and a deeper examination of the human psyche in a wealth of work.He wrote many novels, rightly regarded today, as some of the finest in English literature. Among their canon are Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Shadow Line and, of course, Heart Of Darkness. For this volume we dwell among his numerous short stories. In these condensed, narrative structures much is said in beautiful language.His characters may be brave, comic, serious, trapped by their own constraints, but are always fully formed and true to his word.This comes to you courtesy of Miniature Masterpieces who have an excellent range of quality short stories from the masters of the craft. Do search for Miniature Masterpieces at any digital store for further information.This audiobook is also duplicated in print as an ebook. Same title, same words. Perhaps a different experience but with Amazon's whispersync you can pick up and put down on any device. Start on audio, continue in print and any which way after that. This, and these are, Miniature Masterpieces. Join us for the journey.

'Hear and attend and listen...'Rudyard Kipling is a supreme master of the short story in English and a poet of brilliant gifts. His energy and inventiveness poured themselves into every kind of tale, from the bleakest of fables to the richest of comedies, and he illuminated every aspect of human behaviour, of which he was a fascinated (and sometimes appalled) observer. This generous selection of stories and poems, first published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series, covers the full range of Kipling's career from the youthful volumes that brought him fame as the chronicler of British India, to the bittersweet fruits of age and bereavement in the aftermath of the First World War. It includes stories such as'The Man who would be King','Mrs Bathurst', and'Mary Postgate', and poems from Barrack-Room Ballads and other collections. In his introduction and notes Daniel Karlin addresses the controversial political engagement of Kipling's art, and the sources of its imaginative power.

Henry Miller's famously banned book is “a matter-of-fact celebration of chucking one's dreary life and following your heart to Paris” (Richard Price). Now hailed as an American classic, Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller's masterpiece, was banned as obscene in this country for twenty-seven years after its first publication in Paris in 1934. Only a historic court ruling that changed American censorship standards, ushering in a new era of freedom and frankness in modern literature, permitted the publication of this first volume of Miller's famed mixture of memoir and fiction, which chronicles with unapologetic gusto the bawdy adventures of a young expatriate writer, his friends, and the characters they meet in Paris in the 1930s. Tropic of Cancer is now considered, as Norman Mailer said, “one of the ten or twenty great novels of our century.”

One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris (1910-1998) wrote thirty-three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award and The Home Place, both available from the University of Nebraska Press.

The mother of'Anna'in this novel dies in childbirth and she brought up by her father and a governess, in a remote Pyrenean village. When she is thirteen, her father shoots himself and she Is adopted by a rich, beautiful and ruthless aunt who stows her in a boarding school. She forms friendships at the school but her freedom is abruptly curtailed when the aunt forces her into a loveless marriage: she comes to detest her husband and bourgeois family but cannot break away and finds herself marooned with him in Burma, where the story climaxes.

In the almost-novella-length short story'The Death of the Lion,'literary giant Henry James pokes sardonic fun at the vagaries of literary fame. The author at the center of the tale, one Neil Paraday, is gushingly praised by the newspapers and journals -- but very few of his admirers seem to have actually read his work. It's a thought-provoking look at the celebrity culture of the turn of the twentieth century.

Fast's epic novel, about one man's family tree stretching through history from the Revolutionary War, portrays the best and worst of the American experiment Broken and sick, a young Revolutionary War soldier from New York is taken in by an innkeeper's family and nursed to health. The soldier, John Preswick, falls in love with the innkeeper's daughter, even as his wife Inez waits back home. Through five generations, the two families he starts share an intertwined fate. The Preswicks take part in some of the country's most significant episodes, from the Civil War to the California Gold Rush, with fortunes discovered, lost, and made on the backs of others. A tenacious chronicler of American history, Howard Fast was one of the most prolific historical novelists of the twentieth century. Strange Yesterday is perhaps his most sweeping, ambitious novel. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Howard Fast including rare photos from the author's estate.

Today, French writer Honore de Balzac is best remembered for The Human Comedy, a sprawling story cycle in which he attempted -- and some would argue, succeeded -- to capture the ebb and flow of everyday life in nineteenth-century Europe. But Balzac was an intrepid literary experimenter, and his prolific output encompassed every form and genre. The Resources of Quinola is a drama set in the Spanish Inquisition.

The unforgettable stories of three women, told with poignancy and compassion by one of the most important writers of our century3 Lives consists of three character studies of women;'The Good Anna'–a kind but domineering German servingwoman;'Melanctha'–an uneducated but sensitive black girl;'The Gentle Lena'–a young German maid.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral comes a brilliantly indignant response to the phenomenon that was Richard M. Nixon. • “Disturbing, logical...and very funny.... In short, a masterpiece'—The New York Times Book Review In the character of Trick E. Dixon, Roth shows us a man who outdoes the severest cynic, a peace-loving Quaker and believer in the sanctity of human life who doesn't have a problem with killing unarmed women and children in self-defense. A master politician with an honest sneer, he finds himself battling the Boy Scouts, declaring war on Pro-Pornography Denmark, all the time trusting in the basic indifference of the voting public.

This novel from the acclaimed author of Driftless is “an arresting work about the salvation of a disintegrating Iowa family” (The New York Times).Survival has been the Sledge way since Reuben Sledge's father first moved to Des Moines. Yet the family seems cursed, and one by one the Sledges are slipping away. Reuben's oldest brother is hanged for the murder of his wife. Then another brother is committed to an asylum for spying on the woman he loves. But it's the rape and disgrace of his beloved sister Nellie that drives Reuben into a deep despair. Into the depths of this depression wanders vulnerable, delightful Tabor, who sets Reuben alive with the promise of her love. When Reuben learns that Tabor has descended into the City, he determines, in a moment of panic, to enter and bring her out. Thus begins the novel's second act, a harrowing journey through the horrors of the City and among a ghastly assemblage of dwellers who've crafted new lives for themselves in the underworld.“David Rhodes proves that there is still vigorous life in the dark Gothic roots of great American novels.” —The Tennessean

Though best remembered for her contributions to juvenile literature as the creator of the beloved Pollyanna novels, author Eleanor H. Porter also wrote a number of novels intended for general audiences. Her gift for creating memorable characters is on full display in Oh, Money! Money!, in which an idiosyncratic aristocrat decides to determine which of his relatives is worthy of being bequeathed his vast fortune by giving them each a large sum of money and observing their subsequent actions, choices, and behaviors.

In 1969, Per Seyersted gave the world the first collected works of Kate Chopin. Seyersted's presentation of Chopin's writings and biographical and bibliographical information led to the rediscovery and celebration of this turn-of-the-century author. Newsweek hailed the two-volume opus --'In story after story and in all her novels, Kate Chopin's oracular feminism and prophetic psychology almost outweigh her estimable literary talents. Her revival is both interesting and timely.'Now for the first time, Seyersted'sComplete Works is available in a single-volume paperback. It is the first and only paperback edition of Chopin's total oeuvre. Containing twenty poems, ninety-six stories, two novels, and thirteen essays -- in short, everything Chopin wrote except several additional poems and three unfinished children's stories -- as well as Seyersted's original revelatory introduction and Edmund Wilson's foreword, this anthology is both a historical and a literary achievement. It is ideal for anyone who wishes to explore the pleasures of reading this highly acclaimed author.

Virginia Woolf's intention to publish her best short stories was posthumously carried out in this volume shortly after her death, this collection making available Virginia Woolf's most representative short works of fiction.