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  Father Sergius

  Leo Tolstoy

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  Prince Stepan Kasatsky experiences a disappointment with his fiancé and decides to become a monk! There is a story line, but beneath it, Father Sergius struggles to find peace and, if not happiness, then at least contentment. But he is always disillusioned and ultimately unsatisfied. Only in the end does he find his way by letting go of what he struggled to attain all his life, i.e. to be better than everyone else in whatever he did, and settle for the mundane.

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  The Robe of Peace

  O. Henry

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  O. Henry was the pen name of William Sydney Porter (1862-1910), an American writer of outstanding short stories, known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization and surprise endings.'The Robe of Peace' is a story which explains the mysterious disappearance of New York's leading swell, the fashion king Johnny Bellchambers.

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  The Sonnets of Michael Angelo...

  Michelangelo Buonarroti

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  Michael Angelo and Campanella represent widely sundered, though almost contemporaneous, moments in the evolution of the Italian genius. Michael Angelo was essentially an artist, living in the prime of the Renaissance. Campanella was a philosopher, born when the Counter-Reformation was doing all it could to blight the free thought of the sixteenth century; and when the modern spirit of exact enquiry, in a few philosophical martyrs, was opening a new stage for European science. The one devoted all his mental energies to the realisation of beauty: the other strove to ascertain truth. The one clung to Ficino's dream of Platonising Christianity: the other constructed for himself a new theology, founded on the conception of God immanent in nature. Michael Angelo expressed the aspirations of a solitary life dedicated to the service of art, at a time when art received the suffrage and the admiration of all Italy. Campanella gave utterance to a spirit, exiled and isolated, misunderstood by those with whom he lived, at a moment when philosophy was hunted down as heresy and imprisoned as treason to the public weal.The marks of this difference in the external and internal circumstances of the two poets might be multiplied indefinitely. Yet they had much in common. Both stood above their age, and in a sense aloof from it. Both approached poetry in the spirit of thinkers bent upon extricating themselves from the trivialities of contemporary literature. The sonnets of both alike are contributions to philosophical poetry in an age when the Italians had lost their ancient manliness and energy. Both were united by the ties of study and affection to the greatest singer of their nation, Dante, at a time when Petrarch, thrice diluted and emasculated, was the Phoebus of academies and coteries.This common antagonism to the degenerate genius of Italian literature is the link which binds Michael Angelo, the veteran giant of the Renaissance, to Campanella, the audacious Titan of the modern age. - Summary by Prefatory note to this volume

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  The Devoted Friend - Classic...

  Oscar Wilde

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  How far are you willing to go to secure your friend’s good opinion? Little Hans gives freely of all he possesses, in order that the miller will esteem him as a true friend. The miller even promises to give little Hans his wheelbarrow. Hans’ gratitude is never-ending, and he learns too late what it sometimes means to be a devoted friend.

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  Thunderstruck - & Other Stories

  Elizabeth McCracken

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  From the author of the beloved novel The Giant's House comes a beautiful new story collection. In 'Property,' a young scholar, grieving the sudden death of his wife, decides to refurbish a rental house by removing his landlord's possessions. In 'Peter Elroy: A Documentary by Ian Casey,' the household of a successful filmmaker is visited years later by his famous first subject, whose trust he betrayed. In 'The Lost & Found Department of Greater Boston,' the manager of a grocery store becomes fixated on the famous case of a missing local woman. And in 'Thunderstruck,' a family makes a quixotic decision to flee to Paris for a summer, only to find their lives altered in an unimaginable way by their teenage daughter's risky behavior.

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  In a German Pension

  Katherine Mansfield

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  First published in 1911, Katherine Mansfield's collection "In a German Pension" was inspired by her extended stay in a spa town in Bavaria in 1909, during which she suffered a miscarriage. The collection brought her instant fame and popularity as a short story writer, particularly as her amusing - though less than favourable - caricatures of the Germans were very popular at that time: - Germans at Meat -The Baron - The Sister of the Baroness - Frau Fischer - Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding - The Modern Soul - At Lehmann’s - The Luft Bad - A Birthday - The Child-who-was-tired - The Advanced Lady - The Swing of the Pendulum - A Blaze

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