Publisher: MB Cooltura
'My name is Hercule Poirot and I am probably the greatest detective in the world.´ This collection brings together several of superb short stories including The Mystery of Hunter´s Lodge; The Adventure of Cheap Flat and The Jewel Robbery at the Great Metropolitan. Poirot and Captain Hasting will make the most of their little gray cells to solve these cases.
A poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge after awaking from an opium induced dream of Xanadu, the summer palace of the Emperor Kublai Khan. A much more extensive poem came to him upon awaking, but he was interrupted while writing it down and then could not remember the remaining lines.Show book
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was born on 1st April 1809 to a father, descended from Ukrainian Cossacks and a mother with a military background in the Ukrainian town of Sorochyntsi, then part of the Russian Empire and rich in Cossack traditions and folklore. His father wrote poetry and plays which the young Gogol helped stage at his uncle’s home theatre. This helped ignite in him a love of literature and blossomed when he attended, what is now, the Nizhyn Gogol State University at the age of 12. Here he participated in school theatre productions and refined his mastery of his native Ukrainian and also the Russian of his Imperial masters. In 1828 he went to St Petersburg and unsuccessfully tried to begin a career as an actor after finding that with no money and no connections the civil service was barred to him. Embezzling money from his mother he embarked on a trip to Germany. When the money ran out, he returned to St Petersburg but the experiences were used in a series of stories he contributed to periodicals. These tales were steeped in his childhood memories of the Ukrainian landscape and peasantry enlivened with the supernatural of its folklore woven with realistic events of the day. He wrote in Russian in a whimsical, colloquial style with a smattering of Ukrainian words and phrases that provided an authenticity. Eight stories were published as ‘Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka’. Seemingly all at once fame and fortune arrived. Gogol was hailed by his contemporaries, including Pushkin, as a pre-eminent writer of Russian literature. His success continued with his brilliant plays ‘The Inspector General’ and the comedy ‘The Marriage for the Theatre’, both being highly acclaimed. In 1834 he became Professor of Medieval History at the University of St. Petersburg but with little academic or teacher training, failed to adequately fulfil many of his duties and soon resigned this post. With no obligations and using his earnings from his writing, which now included the impressionistic and immortal ‘Dead Souls’, Gogol travelled around Europe, spending the most time in Rome where he studied art, read Italian literature and developed a passion for opera. In the 1840s Gogol became preoccupied with a need to purify his soul and embarked on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In tandem he fell under the influence of a strict and austere spiritual ascetic who persuaded him to observe strict fasts that, allied with his depression and deteriorating health, contributed to his death on 21st April 1852 at the age of only 43. 1 - Nikolai Gogol - A Short Story Collection - An Introduction 2 - The Nose by Nikolai Gogol 3 - The Cloak by Nikolai Gogol also known as 'The Overcoat' 4 - Old Fashioned Landowners by Nikolai Gogol 5 - St Johns Eve by Nikolai Gogol 6 - Diary of a Madman by Nikolai GogolShow book
In this “candid, perceptive and intelligent” trio of novellas, the acclaimed travel writer presents tales of Westerners transformed by sojourns in India (Independent, UK). These three intertwined novellas by the author of The Great Railway Bazaar capture the tumult, ambition, hardship, and serenity that mark today’s India. Theroux’s Westerners risk venturing far beyond the subcontinent’s well-worn paths to discover truth, peace, or woe. A middle-aged couple on vacation veers heedlessly from idyll to chaos. A buttoned-up Boston lawyer finds succor in Mumbai’s reeking slums. And a young woman befriends an elephant in Bangalore. We also meet Indian characters as singular as they are reflective of the country’s subtle ironies: an executive who yearns to become a holy beggar, an earnest young striver whose personality is rewired by acquiring an American accent, a miracle-working guru, and others. As ever, Theroux’s portraits of people and places explode stereotypes to exhilarating effect.Show book
Morning in Whitehorse, and everything is the normal. All too normal. A girlfriend who loves him, an evening at the farmer’s market in Shipyard’s Park. Idyllic, relaxing, peaceful. What more could a man want? John Lee isn’t sure, but stray thoughts intrude, and memories of a different time, a different place, a different world keep intruding. Angst-ridden, exhausting memories of a world of pain and struggle. Nothing like the paradise he lives in. Now, if only John wasn’t so attracted to them. This short story is set between Books 9 and 10. Minor spoilers included within.Show book
Wildest among the fisher-folk may be accounted the Chinese shrimp-catchers. It is the habit of the shrimp to crawl along the bottom in vast armies till it reaches fresh water, when it turns about and crawls back again to the salt. And where the tide ebbs and flows, the Chinese sink great bag-nets to the bottom, with gaping mouths, into which the shrimp crawls and from which it is transferred to the boiling-pot. This in itself would not be bad, were it not for the small mesh of the nets, so small that the tiniest fishes, little new-hatched things not a quarter of an inch long, cannot pass through. The beautiful beaches of Points Pedro and Pablo, where are the shrimp-catchers villages, are made fearful by the stench from myriads of decaying fish, and against this wasteful destruction it has ever been the duty of the fish patrol to act.These stories are set in the waterways around San Francisco Bay and involve the fish patrol with a variety of characters of different ethnicity and cultural backgrounds.Show book
A collection of short stories by D. H. Lawrence.Show book
