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  A Farewell to Arms

  Ernest Hemingway

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  A moving love story set against the turmoil of war. 
  American Lieutenant Frederic Henry serves in the ambulance corps of the Italian army during World War I. While stationed in northern Italy, he meets beautiful English nurse Catherine Barkley and falls in love with her. However, the passionate romance between the two is overshadowed by the horrors of war. Frederic heads to the front with a small unit, which he loses during an offensive, and must decide whether to become a deserter or die. Can he count on a stroke of luck in such grim times? 
  Writing A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway drew inspiration from his own war experiences. In this captivating, semi-autobiographical prose written in a spare style, he captures the harsh realities of war, its senselessness and mindless cruelty, as well as the suffering of lovers trapped in the grip of forces greater than individual desires. His portrayal of the main character reflects the loneliness and disillusionment of the "lost generation" – people who entered adulthood during World War I. 
  First published in 1929, the novel is one of Hemingway's finest works.

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  A Middle-Sized Artist - From...

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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  Charlotte Perkins Gilman was born on 3rd July 1860 in Hartford, Connecticut, to an unaffectionate mother and a father who abandoned her and her older brother to a life of poverty. 
  Inevitably her schooling was limited and by 15 she had attended seven different schools but received only four years education.  However Charlotte was resourceful and did spend time with her father’s aunts – the suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker and the ‘Uncle Tom Cabin’s’ author, Harriet Beecher Stowe as well as many hours at the public library studying ancient civilisations. 
  In 1878, she enrolled in classes at the Rhode Island School of Design where she met Martha Luther and they developed a close relationship until Luther married in 1881. Charlotte was devastated and detested romance and love until she met and married the artist Charles Walter Stetson.  
  Their only child, Katharine Beecher Stetson, was born in 1885 but left Charlotte with post-natal depression, then often dismissed as a case of hysteria or nerves.  Unsuited to domestic life she ruptured her life and moved to California with Katherine.  She divorced in 1894 and then sent Katharine east to live with her father and his second wife confirming that his paternal rights be acknowledged and that Katherine establish a relationship with her father. 
  After her mother died in 1893, Charlotte moved back east and became involved with her first cousin, Wall Street attorney, Houghton Gilman who she married in 1900. After his death she moved back to California, where Katherine now lived.   
  Her most popular story is ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ which touched on her own post-partum depression and underlined the need for women to be responsible for their mental and physical well-being, as the narrator is ordered by her husband/doctor to take compete rest in her room where she is isolated and becomes obsessed with the revolting yellow wallpaper.   
  She wrote other notable short stories the best of which we also include.   
  Charlotte lectured widely for social reform, wrote important non-fiction works that questioned our patriarchal system and left a legacy as a leading and positive spokesperson for feminism.  
  She was diagnosed with incurable breast cancer in 1932 and, as she wrote in her suicide note and autobiography, she ‘chose chloroform over cancer’    
  Charlotte Perkins Gilman took her own life on 17th August 1935, aged 75, in Pasadena, California.

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  The Adventures of a Lady Pearl...

  Beatrice Heron-Maxwell

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  The bookshelves of British literature are incredible collections that have gathered together centuries of very talented authors.  From these Isles their fame spread and whilst among their number many are now forgotten or neglected their talents endure.  Among them is Beatrice Heron-Maxwell.

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  The Nutcracker and the Mouse King

  E. T. A. Hoffman

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  This timeless story written in 1816 continues to enchant audiences of all ages. When young Marie Stahlbaum's favorite Christmas toy, the Nutcracker, comes alive, she realizes that she is about to start the adventure of a lifetime. After defeating the evil Mouse King in battle, her handsome Nutcracker whisks her away to a magical kingdom populated by dolls.

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  Edgar Allan Poe - Six of the...

  Edgar Allan Poe

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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 - Edgar Allan Poe - An Introduction 
  2 - Edgar Allan Poe - An Introduction 
  3 - The Fall of the House of Usher - Part 1 by Edgar Allan Poe 
  4 - The Fall of the House of Usher - Part 2 by Edgar Allan Poe 
  5 - The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe 
  6 - The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe 
  7 - The Premature Burial by Edgar Allan Poe 
  8 - The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe 
  9 - The Murders in the Rue Morgue - Part 1 by Edgar Allan Poe 
  10 - The Murders in the Rue Morgue - Part 2 by Edgar Allan Poe

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  The Adventure of the Missing...

  Arthur Conan Doyle

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  The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter, one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is one of 13 stories in the cycle collected as The Return of Sherlock Holmes. It was originally published in The Strand Magazine in 1904 with illustrations by Sidney Paget.Mr. Cyril Overton of Trinity College, Cambridge, comes to Holmes seeking his help in Godfrey Staunton's disappearance. Staunton is the key man on Overton's rugby union team (who plays at the three-quarters position, hence the story's title) and they will not win the important match tomorrow against Oxford if Staunton cannot be found. Holmes has to admit that sport is outside his field, but he shows the same care he has shown to his other cases.Staunton had seemed a bit pale and bothered earlier in the day, but late in the evening, according to a hotel porter, a rough-looking, bearded man came to the hotel with a note for Staunton which, judging from his reaction, contained rather devastating news. He then left the hotel with the bearded stranger and the two of them were seen running in the direction of the Strand at about half past ten. No one has seen them since.Overton has wired to Cambridge to find out if Staunton has been seen there; he has not. He has also wired Lord Mount-James, Staunton's very wealthy and thoroughly miserly uncle and nearest living relative, but has heard no answer. Staunton is the almost-eighty-year-old Lord Mount-James's heir, but he must meanwhile live in relative poverty owing to his uncle's miserly behaviour...Famous works of the author Arthur Conan Doyle: A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of the Four, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, The Valley of Fear, His Last Bow, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, Stories of Sherlock Holmes, The Lost World.

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