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  Impromptu Dance An

  A. J. Alan

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  A. J. Alan was the pseudonym of Leslie Harrison Lambert (1883-1941), an English magician, intelligence officer, short-story writer, and radio broadcaster. He was hugely popular in the '20s and '30s for his radio broadcasts, wherein he performed his own humorous and often macabre short stories, which he always delivered wearing full evening dress.In An Impromptu Dance A. J. Alan is in his pyjamas and bathrobe in an hotel, where he is staying in London, when he inadvertently gets mixed up in a fancy-dress ball which is going on. Nobody realises he isn't in fancy dress, and he ends up dancing and drinking champagne with a delightful, scantily dressed lady. When he does finally get to bed, the adventures continue and get significantly weirder...until eventually he has to flee the city.

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  The Portrait of a Lady

  Henry James

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  The American lady in the title of this masterpiece, Isabel Archer; beautiful, young and spirited, visits her wealthy relatives in England, rejects marriage proposals by two more or less worthy suitors, inherits a fortune and then is manipulated into marriage to one of the most cruel creatures imaginable: Gilbert Osmond...This is just scratching the surface of this colossal, monumental work; so rich in both its prose, its characters and its many, many themes. A few of the major ones being love, death, personal responsibility, personal identity, freedom, ethics or (lack thereof) and the New world versus the Old world. This work (its story takes place mostly in England and Italy) finds new admirers from generation to generation...

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  War and Peace Book 01: 1805

  Leo Tolstoy

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  War and Peace (Russian: ????? ? ???, Voyna i mir; in original orthography: ????? ? ????, Voyna i mir") is an epic novel by Leo Tolstoy, first published from 1865 to 1869 in Russki Vestnik, which tells the story of Russian society during the Napoleonic Era. It is usually described as one of Tolstoy's two major masterpieces (the other being Anna Karenina) as well as one of the world's greatest novels. 
  War and Peace offered a new kind of fiction, with a great many characters caught up in a plot that covered nothing less than the grand subjects indicated by the title, combined with the equally large topics of youth, age and marriage. While today it is considered a novel, it broke so many novelistic conventions of its day that many critics of Tolstoy's time did not consider it as such. Tolstoy himself considered Anna Karenina (1878) to be his first attempt at a novel in the European sense. (Summary by Wikipedia)Note: The novel is split in 15 books. This is the recording of book one, which covers the events in the year 1805.

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  The Upper Berth - A sailor...

  F. Marion Crawford

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  Francis Marion Crawford, an only child, was born on 2nd August 1854 at Bagni di Lucca, Italy. He was a nephew to Julia Ward Howe, the American poet and writer of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’.  
   
  Crawford was educated at St Paul's School, Concord, New Hampshire and then on to Cambridge University, the University of Heidelberg and the University of Rome.  
   
  In 1879 he went to India, to study Sanskrit and then to edit The Indian Herald. In 1881 he returned to America to continue his Sanskrit studies at Harvard University. 
   
  His family became increasingly concerned about his employment prospects.  After an attempt at a singing career as a baritone was ruled out, he was encouraged to write.  
   
  In December 1882 his first novel, ‘Mr Isaacs’, was published and was an immediate hit as was his second novel ‘Dr Claudius’ in 1883.  
   
  In October 1884 he married Elizabeth Berdan and encouraged by his excellent start to a literary career they returned to Sant Agnello, Italy to make a permanent home, buying the Villa Renzi that then became Villa Crawford.  
   
  In the late 1890s, Crawford began work on his historical works which would later include ‘Corleone’, in 1897, the first major treatment of the Mafia in literature.  
   
  Crawford is also exceedingly popular and anthologized as a short story writer of bizarre and creepy tales.   
   
  In 1908 came his classic ‘The Screaming Skull’. Without doubt its unsettling nature is heightened as the reader/listener is drawn into to the story by its narrator.  Everything is explained and plausible until, of course, it isn’t. 
   
  Francis Marion Crawford died at Sorrento on Good Friday 1909 at Villa Crawford of a heart attack.  
   
  In this classic supernatural story by F Marion Crawford a man takes a room on a liner and discovers that its previous occupants have all committed suicide.  When his room mate on the Upper Berth also disappears the evidence points to some unearthly sequence of happenings.

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  private papers of Henry Ryecroft...

  George Gissing

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  The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft is a semi-fictional autobiographical work by George Gissing in which the author casts himself as the editor of the diary of a deceased acquaintance, selecting essays for posthumous publication. Observing "how suitable many of the reflections were to the month with which they were dated", he explains that he "hit upon the thought of dividing the little book into four chapters, named after the seasons".

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  Paul's Case

  Willa Cather

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  Willa Sibert Cather had Welsh ancestry but like her parents Charles and Mary, was born in Virginia, on 7th December 1873.  Despite strong roots in the community, Willa was 9, when the family moved to Nebraska, to work the rich soil and avoid TB of which there were numerous outbreaks in Virginia.   
   
  The vastness and drama of the Nebraska prairie and its’ extreme weather conditions as well as the many diverse cultures of the local families proved to be a major influence on her and can be evidenced in much of her later writing.   
   
  Her first writing was for the local journal when she was at the University of Nebraska and later became the managing editor of the student newspaper.    
   
  In 1896 she obtained work for a woman’s magazine in Pittsburgh and soon after became a regular contributor to the Pittsburgh Leader and wrote poetry and short stories for 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’ and ‘Paul's Case.’ As a writer Cather was now taking immense strides forward.   
   
  Between 1913 and 1918 Cather wrote her Prairie Trilogy: ‘O Pioneers!’, ‘The Song of the Lark’, and ‘My Ántonia’ and in 1922 the Pulitizer Prize was hers for her novel ‘One of Ours’ set during WWI.  
   
  Acknowledged as one of America's greatest writers’ further honours flowed. In 1943 she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The following year Cather received the gold medal for fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.  
   
  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. 
   
  On 24th April 1947, Willa Siebert Cather died of a cerebral haemorrhage at her Manhattan home. She was 73.

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