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  Them Others - From their pens to...

  Stacy Aumonier

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  Stacy Aumonier was born at Hampstead Road near Regent’s Park, London on 31st March 1877. 
  He came from a family with a strong and sustained tradition in the visual arts; sculptors and painters. 
  In 1890 the teenage Aumonier attended Cranleigh School in Surrey. Although he would later write critically about English public schools (with articles for the London Evening Standard and New York Times) in how they tried to impose conformity on students, records indicate that he integrated well into Cranleigh. Aumonier was a passionate cricket player, belonged to the Literary and Debating Society, and, in his final year, became a prefect. 
  On leaving school it seemed the family tradition of the visual arts would be his career path. In particular his early talents were that of a landscape painter. He exhibited paintings at the Royal Academy in 1902 and 1903, and 1908. An exhibition of his work would later be held at the Goupil Gallery in London in 1911. 
  In 1907 he married the international concert pianist, Gertrude Peppercorn, at West Horsley in Surrey. She herself was the daughter of a landscape painter (Arthur Douglas Peppercorn, occasionally cited as ‘the English Corot’.) A son, Timothy, was born in 1921. 
  A year after his marriage, Aumonier began a brief career in a second branch of the arts at which he enjoyed outstanding success—as a stage performer writing and performing his own sketches.  
  The Observer newspaper commented that "...the stage lost in him a real and rare genius, he could walk out alone before any audience, from the simplest to the most sophisticated, and make it laugh or cry at will." 
  In 1915, Aumonier published a short story ‘The Friends’ which was well received (and voted one of the best short stories of 1915 by the Boston Magazine, Transcript).  
  Despite his age being 40 in 1917 he was called up for service in World War I. He began as a private in the Army Pay Corps, and then transferred as a draughtsman in the Ministry of National Service. 
  By now he had four books published—two novels and two books of short stories—and his occupation is recorded with the Army Medical Board as ‘author.’ 
  In the mid-1920s, Aumonier received the shattering diagnosis that he had contracted tuberculosis. In the last few years of his life, he would spend long spells in various sanatoria, some better than others. In a letter to his friend, Rebecca West, written shortly before his death, he described the debilitating conditions in a sanatorium in Norfolk during the winter of 1927, where the dampness was so severe that a newspaper left beside the bed would feel "sodden to the touch in the morning." 
  Shortly before his death, Stacy Aumonier sought treatment in Switzerland, but died of the disease in Clinique La Prairie at Clarens beside Lake Geneva on 21st December 1928. He was 55.

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  The Poison Belt

  Arthur Conan Doyle

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  A follow up to Arthur Conan Doyles well known novel, The Lost World, the Poison Belt is a short story set over a single 24 hour span of time. On the Anniversary of their momentous trip to the Plateau, as depicted in The Lost World, the irascible Professor Challenger calls his companions to his home in Rochester with a curious directive: "Bring Oxygen". What can it mean? Does it have anything to do with his dire warnings printed in the Times that morning? Can it truly be, as he says... The End of the World?  
  Written by Arthur Conan Doyle in 1913 and Narrated here by Michael Ward.

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  The Nature Of A Crime

  Joseph Conrad

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  The unnamed narrator of The Nature of a Crime is a lawyer in a difficult situation: he has been entrusted with looking after the assets of a wealthy family—but he's lost most of it gambling. Some small portion remains, and he still has hopes of recovering his losses. But when his client announces that he's getting married and requires his funds returned immediately, the narrator finds himself on the verge of suicide. He writes letters to his lover explaining his predicament in an attempt to come to terms with his actions. This short story, first published in 1909, is the last of three collaborations between Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford . It never saw contemporary critical or commercial success and thus remained out of print for many years. In 1924 it was reissued with new prefaces by the authors written about two months before Conrad's death. Joseph Conrad (died 1924) was a major literary figure of the early 20th century. Their work has endured across generations and continues to be read and studied worldwide. As a work of classic literary fiction, The Nature Of A Crime exemplifies the narrative craft and social insight that defined great storytelling of its era. Literary fiction of this period was characterized by careful attention to character psychology, social milieu, and the moral questions that animated public discourse.

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  Nathaniel Hawthorne - Six of the...

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

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  Six has always been a number we group things around – Six of the best, six of one half a dozen of another, six feet under, six pack, six degrees of separation and a sixth sense are but a few of the ways we use this number. 
   
  Such is its popularity that we thought it is also a very good way of challenging and investigating an author’s work to give width, brevity, humour and depth across six of their very best. 
   
  In this series we gather together authors whose short stories both rivet the attention and inspire the imagination to visit their gems in a series of six, to roam across an author’s legacy in a few short hours and gain a greater understanding of their writing and, of course, to be lavishly entertained by their ideas, their narrative and their way with words. 
   
  These stories can be surprising and sometimes at a tangent to what we expected, but each is fully formed and a marvellous adventure into the world and words of a literary master. 
   
  1 - Six of the Best - Nathaniel Hawthorne -  An Introduction 
  2 - Nathaniel Hawthorne - An Introduction 
  3 - Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne 
  4 - The Devil In Manuscript By Nathaniel Hawthorne 
  5 - The Artist of the Beautiful by Nathaniel Hawthorne 
  6 - The Wedding Knell By Nathaniel Hawthorne 
  7 - Rappaccini's Daughter - Part 1 by Nathaniel Hawthorne 
  8 - Rappaccini's Daughter - Part 2 by Nathaniel Hawthorne 
  9 - Roger Malvin's Burial by Nathaniel Hawthorne

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  Le Morte Darthur

  Thomas Malory

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  We rely on your support to help us keep producing beautiful, free, and unrestricted editions of literature for the digital age. Will you support our efforts with a donation ? Thomas Malory did not invent the stories of Arthur, King of Britain, but it is fair to say that he reinvented them. Although the legends were already hundreds of years old by the fifteenth century, the contemporary stories of Arthur in Malory's day were primarily French. The French had added many of the elements familiar to modern readers, among them Lancelot, and the search for the Holy Grail. Malory combined, edited, and added some of his own material to the stories available to him, and in the process created a uniquely British work. (It was his printer Caxton who gave it a French name.) Le Morte d'Arthur is the source material for almost all modern retellings of King Arthur and his knights, from Hollywood movies and musicals to Nobel-prize winning writers. Malory's identity is still in some dispute, as there are several men of various spellings of the name to choose from. Sir Thomas Malory from Newbold Revel in Warwickshire is the most popular choice, but his life of crime—he was a rapist and serial thief at the minimum—seems to be at odds with the acts of chivalry and moral code present in this book. It is known from the author's own notes that he wrote the book while in prison; perhaps he was trying to make amends for his crimes. Regardless, the result was to give new life to King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.

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  Seduction of the Seducer of...

  Inderpreet Kaur

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  A hungry pythoness on the prowl for Eternal Truth ... 
  Why you should choose me over my competition is because I write from my experience that comes from being exposed to both the eastern and western style of living, where in the first half of my life it was east while the other half of my life in the west, which means it puts the burden of being that missing link that is needed to unite the east and the west!

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