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  Classic Short Stories - Volume...

  H. P. Lovecraft, Ford Maddox,...

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  Stories are one of mankind’s greatest artistic achievements.  Whether written down or spoken they have an ability to capture our imagination and thoughts, and take us on incredible journeys in the space of a phrase and the turn of a page. 
   
  Within a few words of text or speech, new worlds and characters form, propelling a narrative to a conclusion with intricate ease. Finely crafted, perfectly formed these Miniature Masterpieces, at first thought, seem remarkably easy to conjure up. But ask any writer and they will tell you that distilling the essence of narrative and characters into a short story is one of the hardest acts of their literary craft.  Many attempt, but few achieve.

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  Tales of the Fish Patrol

  Jack London

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  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.

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  Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes The...

  Arthur Conan Doyle

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  In The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, the consulting detective's notoriety as the arch-despoiler of the schemes concocted by the criminal underworld at last gets the better of him. Though Holmes and his faithful sidekick Dr Watson solve what will become some of their most bizarre and extraordinary cases - the disappearance of the race horse Silver Blaze, the horrific circumstances of the Greek Interpreter and the curious mystery of the Musgrave Ritual among them - a criminal mastermind is plotting the downfall of the great detective. Half-devil, half-genius, Professor Moriarty leads Holmes and Watson on a grisly cat-and-mouse chase through London and across Europe, culminating in a frightful struggle which will turn the legendary Reichenbach Falls into a water double-grave

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  The Bogman

  Walter Macken

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  Orphaned as a child, Cahal Kinsella returns from an industrial school in Letterfrack to the small farming village of Caherlo in West Galway, to live under the rule of his tyrannical grandfather. Cahal must learn to assert his individuality if he is to have any hope of freedom from his misery.
  With humour and humanity, Walter Macken paints a haunting, memorable portrait of the hard life of subsistence farming, of loveless arranged marriages, and rebellion against suffocating social mores.
  Written in 1952, this masterpiece is brought back to life in New Island's Modern Irish Classics series.

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  Great Expectations

  Charles Dickens

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  In what may be Dickens's best novel, humble, orphaned Pip is apprenticed to the dirty work of the forge but dares to dream of becoming a gentleman—and one day, under sudden and enigmatic circumstances, he finds himself in possession of "great expectations." In this gripping tale of crime and guilt, revenge and reward, the compelling characters include Magwitch, the fearful and fearsome convict; Estella, whose beauty is excelled only by her haughtiness; and the embittered Miss Havisham, an eccentric jilted bride.

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  The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll...

  Robert Louis Stevenson

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  Robert Louis Stevenson's masterpiece of the duality of good and evil in man's nature sprang from the darkest recesses of his own unconscious—during a nightmare from which his wife awakened him, alerted by his screams. More than a hundred years later, this tale of the mild-mannered Dr. Jekyll and the drug that unleashes his evil, inner persona—the loathsome, twisted Mr. Hyde—has lost none of its ability to shock.  
    
  Its realistic police-style narrative chillingly relates Jekyll's desperation as Hyde gains control of his soul—and gives voice to our own fears of the violence and evil within us. Written before Freud's naming of the ego and the id, Stevenson's enduring classic demonstrates a remarkable understanding of the personality's inner conflicts—and remains the irresistibly terrifying stuff of our worst nightmares.

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