Publisher: Diamond Book Publishing
A young woman is found dead in a train compartment and her valuable jewels have been stolen. Her wealthy father asks Poirot to find her killer, Hercule Poirot is on the case in this early adventure by Agatha Christie.
Edgar Poe was born in Boston Massachusetts on 19th January 1809. His father abandoned his family the following year and within a year his mother had died leaving him an orphan. He was taken in by the Allan family but never formally adopted although he now referred to himself as Edgar Allan Poe. His father alternatively spoiled or chastised him and tension was frequent over gambling debts and monies for his education. His university years to study ancient and modern languages was cut short by lack of money and he enlisted as a private in the army claiming he was 22, it is more probable he was 18. After 2 years he obtained a discharge in order to take up an appointment at the military academy, West Point, where he failed to become an officer. Poe had released his 1st poetry volume in 1827 and after his 3rd turned to prose and placing short stories in several magazines and journals. At age 26 he obtained a licence to marry his cousin. She was a mere 13 but they stayed together until her death from tuberculosis 11 years after. In January 1845 ‘The Raven’ was published and became an instant classic. Thereafter followed the prose works for which he is now so rightly famed as a master of the mysterious and the macabre. Edgar Allan Poe died at the tragically early age of 40 on 7th October 1849 in Baltimore, Maryland. Newspapers at the time reported Poe's death as ‘congestion of the brain’ or ‘cerebral inflammation’, common euphemisms for death from disreputable causes such as alcoholism but the actual cause of death remains a mystery. Poe is also one of a number of authors credited with inventing the detective genre with his Parisian sleuth C. Auguste Dupin. He featured in three stories including the legendary ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ and by sheer deduction, logic and a touch of Gallic arrogance revealed what was hidden to the rest of us.Show book
They received a letter. They dismissed it as a prank, but as they soon will learn, you never...ever ignore a chain letter. Chain Letter is a spine-chilling horror-novella from international best-selling author Willow Rose.Show book
This Christmas tale set in Colonial New England was originally published in the 1895 collection A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others. The short story takes place in a fictionalized version of Litchfield, Connecticut, the town where Stowe grew up, which is also the setting of her novel Poganuc People: Their Loves and Lives. This version of Christmas in Poganuc was recorded as part of Dreamscape's Classic Christmas Stories: A Collection of Timeless Holiday Tales.Show book
The nine stories and one poem in this volume formed the basis for the astonishingly original film Short Cuts, directed by Robert Altman. Collected altogether in this volume, these stories form a searing and indelible portrait of American innocence and loss. With deadpan humor and enormous tenderness, this is the work of "one of the true contemporary masters" (The New York Review of Books).Show book
De Profundis (Latin: "from the depths") is a 50,000 word letter written by Oscar Wilde during his imprisonment in Reading Gaol, to Lord Alfred Douglas, his lover. Wilde wrote the letter between January and March 1897; he was not allowed to send it, but took it with him upon release. In it he repudiates Lord Alfred for what Wilde finally sees as his arrogance and vanity; he had not forgotten Douglas's remark, when he was ill, "When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting." He also felt redemption and fulfillment in his ordeal, realizing that his hardship had filled the soul with the fruit of experience, however bitter it tasted at the time.Show book
A wide-ranging fictional portrait of life in postwar America by an acclaimed New Yorker short story writer and #1 New York Times–bestselling novelist. Irwin Shaw was a star of the New Yorker’s fiction pages in the 1930s and ’40s. His prose helped shape the landscape of post-war fiction, and his work drew from a remarkable life that spanned from American football fields to European battlefields, Broadway to Hollywood, Depression-era saloons to the McCarthy hearings. Among these sixty-three stories are iconic works such as “The Eighty-Yard Run,” a tale of an American dream crippled on Black Monday, and “Main Currents in American Thought,” in which a hack radio copywriter is tormented by the glitz of show business. Through the decades, Shaw’s writing —as demonstrated in these pages—maintains the clear-eyed moral purpose, rich in wit and startling insight, of a tough kid with a philosopher’s soul. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Irwin Shaw including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.Show book
