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  Among the Night People

  Clara Dillingham Pierson

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  No need to be afraid of the dark - here is a wonderful collection of stories about the creatures and personalities who live at night and sleep in the day. - Summary by Jude Somers

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  Anton Chekhov - A Short Story...

  Anton Chekhov

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  Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on 29th January 1860 in Taganrog, on the south coast of Russia.  
   
  His family life was difficult; his father was strict and over-bearing but his mother was a passionate story-teller, a subject Chekhov warmed to. As he later said; ‘our talents we got from our father, but our soul from our mother’.  
   
  At school Chekhov was distinctly average. At 16 his father mis-managed his finances and was declared bankrupt. His family fled to Moscow. Chekhov remained and eked out a living by various means, including writing and selling short sketches to newspapers, to finish his schooling. That completed and with a scholarship to Moscow University obtained he rejoined his family. 
   
  He was able to help support them by selling satirical sketches and vignettes of Russian lifestyles and gradually obtained further commissions. In 1884, he qualified as a physician and, although it earned him little, he often treated the poor for free, he was fond of saying ‘Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress.’ 
   
  His own health was now an issue as he began to cough up blood, a symptom of tuberculosis.  Despite this his writing success enabled him to move the family into more comfortable accommodation.  
   
  Chekhov wrote over 500 short stories which included many, many classics including ‘The Kiss’ and ‘The Lady with a Dog’.  His collection ‘At Dusk’ won him the coveted Pushkin Prize when was only 26.  
   
  He was also a major playwright beginning with the huge success of ‘Ivanov’ in 1887.   
   
  In 1892 Chekhov bought a country estate north of Moscow. Here his medical skills and money helped the peasants tackle outbreaks of cholera and bouts of famine. He also built three schools, a fire station and a clinic.  It left him with less time for writing but the interactions with real people gained him detailed knowledge about the peasantry and their living conditions for his stories.  
   
  His most famous work, ‘The Seagull’ was received disastrously at its premiere in St Petersburg. It was later restaged in Moscow to highlight its psychological aspects and was a huge success. It led to ‘Uncle Vanya’, ‘The Three Sisters’ and ‘The Cherry Orchard’.  
   
  Chekhov suffered a major lung hemorrhage in 1897 while visiting Moscow. A formal diagnosis confirmed tuberculosis and the doctors ordered changes to his lifestyle.  
   
  Despite a dread of weddings the elusive literary bachelor quietly married the actress Olga Knipper, whom he had met at rehearsals for ‘The Seagull’, on 25th May 1901. 
   
  By May 1904 with his tuberculosis worsening and death imminent he set off for the German town of Badenweiler writing cheerful, witty letters to his family and assuring them his health was improving.  
   
  On 15th July 1904 Anton Chekhov died at Badenweiler.  He was 44.  
  1 - Anton Chekhov - A Short Story Collection - An Introduction 
  2 - The Lady with the Dog by Anton Chekhov 
  3 - Volodya by Anton Chekhov 
  4 - Misery by Anton Chekhov 
  5 - The Death of a Government Clerk by Anton Chekhov 
  6 - The Bet by Anton Chekhov 
  7 - A Chameleon by Anton Chekhov  
  8 - Vanka by Anton Chekhov 
  9 - The Student by Anton Chekhov 
  10 - The Looking Glass by Anton Chekhov 
  11 - Gooseberries by Anton Chekhov 
  12 - About Love by Anton Chekhov 
  13 - The Kiss by Anton Chekhov

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  The Music on the Hill

  Saki Saki

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  This short story is about a woman named Sylvia who moves with her new husband to his country house. They spend days roaming through the woods, but when Sylvia scoffs at a statue of the Greek God Pan she sets in motion events that seem to come from a much deeper and darker part of the forest nymph. 
  This story is a selection from the book "The Chronicles of Clovis"

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  Wren's Story - Epilogue For The...

  Beca Lewis

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  When friendship is stronger than fear…  
  When Wren’s friend Meg sacrifices her life to save the people of Thamon, Wren realizes that what she has hidden on her home planet may return Meg to life. 
  Returning home to get help, Wren discovers her planet is dying, and she alone knows the answer to how to save it. 
  But will anyone listen to her? Her parents banished her for disobeying the prophecy that she must marry Oloron. 
  Does Wren prove the prophecies are false in time? Or will the evil king, Oloron, find what she had hidden before she can retrieve it and use it to destroy the planet with his lust for power. 
  Read this short story on its own, or to learn the answer to the question posed at the end of Discovered, the third book in the Chronicles of Thamon.

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  Let's All Kill Constance

  Ray Bradbury

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  On a dismal evening in the previous century, an unnamed writer in Venice, California, answers a furious pounding at his beachfront bungalow door and again admits Constance Rattigan into his life. 
  An aging, once-glamorous Hollywood star, Constance is running in fear from something she dares not acknowledge—and vanishes as suddenly as she appeared, leaving the narrator two macabre books: twin listings of the Tinseltown dead and soon to be dead, with Constance's name included among them. 
  And so begins an odyssey as dark as it is wondrous, as the writer sets off in a broken-down jalopy with his irascible sidekick Crumley to sift through the ashes of a bygone Hollywood—a graveyard of ghosts and secrets where each twisted road leads to grim shrines and shattered dreams ... and, all too often, to death.

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  The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

  Arthur Conan Doyle

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  The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, originally published in 1894, by Arthur Conan Doyle.

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