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  The Enchanter

  Vladimir Nabokov

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  The Enchanter is the Ur-Lolita, the precursor to Nabokov's classic novel. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls, whose coltish grace and subconscious coquetry reveal, to his mind, a special bud on the verge of bloom.

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  Malachi's Cove

  Anthony Trollope

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  Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) was one of the most successful and respected English novelists. Malachi's Cove tells the story of Mally, the granddaughter of an old seaweed collector, who takes over the family trade as her "Dada" becomes too old and infirm to carry on. Mally is plagued by interlopers from local farms who come down to collect seaweed in her cove. One in particular, Barty Gunliffe, she resents above all others. So when Mally sees Barty going out towards the great hole, a swirling, seething bottomless whirlpool among the rocks, she is gleeful at the thought of the danger he is in. But when Barty does slip on the rocks, things take a very unexpected turn.

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  The Ash-Tree

  M.R. James

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  Sir Matthew Fell witnesses an enigmatic woman perform curious night rituals to a strange Ash Tree, as tragedies befall the local people. What dark powers does the tree invoke.

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  Satan's Circus

  Eleanor Smith

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  Lady Eleanor Furneaux Smith (1902-1945) was an English author, journalist and film critic. Many of her books, including her extensive oeuvre of ghost stories, involve a circus or gypsy setting, based on her own research and her (unsubstantiated) belief that she had a Romany great grandmother.Satan's Circus is a creepy tale of a circus run by a sinister and manipulative couple, Carl and Lya Brandt. When a new circus hand, Anatole, joins the troupe in North Africa, he is assigned to work with the menagerie. But as they travel through Spain towards France, Anatole becomes uneasy.Eventually, as they reach the Basque country, he tries to hand in his notice. But Lya Brandt has guessed his secret, and she uses blackmail to prevent his leaving...and then exacts her grisly revenge for his disloyalty.

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  The Wound Dresser - The Lost...

  Walt Whitman

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  Walter Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse. His work was controversial in its time, particularly his 1855 poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described as obscene for its overt sensuality. Whitman's own life came under scrutiny for his presumed homosexuality. 
   
  Born in Huntington on Long Island, as a child and through much of his career, he resided in Brooklyn. At age 11, he left formal schooling to go to work. Later, Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, and a government clerk. Whitman's major poetry collection, Leaves of Grass, was first published in 1855 with his own money and became well known. The work was an attempt at reaching out to the common person with an American epic. He continued expanding and revising it until his death in 1892. During the American Civil War, he went to Washington, D.C. and worked in hospitals caring for the wounded. His poetry often focused on both loss and healing. On the death of Abraham Lincoln, whom Whitman greatly admired, he wrote his well-known poems, "O Captain! My Captain!" and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", and gave a series of lectures. After a stroke towards the end of his life, Whitman moved to Camden, New Jersey, where his health further declined. When he died at age 72, his funeral was a public event. 
   
  Whitman's influence on poetry remains strong. Mary Whitall Smith Costelloe argued: "You cannot really understand America without Walt Whitman, without Leaves of Grass ... He has expressed that civilization, 'up to date,' as he would say, and no student of the philosophy of history can do without him." Modernist poet Ezra Pound called Whitman "America's poet ... He is America.

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  Tales From Ariosto - retold for...

  Ludovico Ariosto

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  My young readers ought to be told that the poem of the ' Mad Orlando ' is a continuation by Ariosto of a poem by Boiardo, an earlier poet, called ' Orlando in Love.' This helps to account for the abruptness with which the characters appear on the scene, and for the allusions to adventures in which they have taken part in an earlier period of their history. I have been obliged to retain some few of these, which abound in Ariosto — such as the allusions to an earlier visit of Angelica to Europe with her brother Argalia, who was slain by Terrau, and whose helmet was carried off by that knight; to the magic ring stolen from Angelica in Albracca bv Brunello, who also on that occasion committed the thefts mentioned in the story of ' Ruggiero and Bradamante'; and others which refer to a time when Angelica loved Rinaldo and he disliked her, a state of things completely changed before the first story opens. This little explanation may, I hope, make all such allusions tolerably intelligible.

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