Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  The Willows

  Algernon Blackwood

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  Perhaps Blackwood's most celebrated story, The Willows was influenced heavily by his own trips down the Danube River. It tells the story of two campers who pick the wrong place to sleep for the night, a place where another dimension impinges on our own. H.P. Lovecraft considered this the finest supernatural tale in English literature.

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  Hard Times - Full Cast Drama

  Carles Dickens

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  In Charles Dickens' "Hard Times," the industrial landscape of Coketown serves as a bleak backdrop to a tale that explores the harsh realities of the 19th-century British society, a world driven by utilitarianism and the dehumanizing effects of industrialization. The novel is a powerful narrative that delves into the lives of the characters living in this grim, factory-dominated town. 
   
  The story is centered around two contrasting characters: Thomas Gradgrind, a strict and utilitarian-minded schoolmaster, and Josiah Bounderby, a wealthy factory owner. Gradgrind's rigid belief in facts and statistics and Bounderby's promotion of the idea that anyone can rise from poverty through hard work represent the heart of the utilitarian philosophy that permeates the town. However, as the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that these ideals come at a great cost. Children are educated to suppress their imagination and emotions, while the workers in Bounderby's factories endure miserable conditions and are denied any sense of dignity. 
   
  Amid this grim setting, Dickens introduces characters like Stephen Blackpool, an honest and hardworking millhand, and Sissy Jupe, the daughter of a circus performer. These characters bring a sense of humanity and compassion to the story, challenging the utilitarian principles that have stripped Coketown of its soul. As the narrative progresses, the lives of the characters intersect in a series of hardships and trials, ultimately leading to moments of redemption and transformation. 
   
  "Hard Times" is a narrative that critiques the dehumanizing effects of an overly rational, industrial society while emphasizing the importance of compassion, imagination, and the recognition of the complexities of human nature.

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  The Devil Light - Former soldier...

  Edgar Wallace

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  Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was born on the 1st April 1875 in Greenwich, London.  Leaving school at 12 because of truancy, by the age of fifteen he had experience; selling newspapers, as a worker in a rubber factory, as a shoe shop assistant, as a milk delivery boy and as a ship’s cook.  
   
  By 1894 he was engaged but broke it off to join the Infantry being posted to South Africa. He also changed his name to Edgar Wallace which he took from Lew Wallace, the author of Ben-Hur.  
   
  In Cape Town in 1898 he met Rudyard Kipling and was inspired to begin writing. His first collection of ballads, The Mission that Failed! was enough of a success that in 1899 he paid his way out of the armed forces in order to turn to writing full time.  
   
  By 1904 he had completed his first thriller, The Four Just Men. Since nobody would publish it he resorted to setting up his own publishing company which he called Tallis Press. 
    
  In 1911 his Congolese stories were published in a collection called Sanders of the River, which became a bestseller. He also started his own racing papers, Bibury’s and R. E. Walton’s Weekly, eventually buying his own racehorses and losing thousands gambling.  A life of exceptionally high income was also mirrored with exceptionally large spending and debts.  
   
  Wallace now began to take his career as a fiction writer more seriously, signing with Hodder and Stoughton in 1921. He was marketed as the ‘King of Thrillers’ and they gave him the trademark image of a trilby, a cigarette holder and a yellow Rolls Royce. He was truly prolific, capable not only of producing a 70,000 word novel in three days but of doing three novels in a row in such a manner. It was estimated that by 1928 one in four books being read was written by Wallace, for alongside his famous thrillers he wrote variously in other genres, including science fiction, non-fiction accounts of WWI which amounted to ten volumes and screen plays. Eventually he would reach the remarkable total of 170 novels, 18 stage plays and 957 short stories. 
   
  Wallace became chairman of the Press Club which to this day holds an annual Edgar Wallace Award, rewarding ‘excellence in writing’.  
   
  Diagnosed with diabetes his health deteriorated and he soon entered a coma and died of his condition and double pneumonia on the 7th of February 1932 in North Maple Drive, Beverly Hills. He was buried near his home in England at Chalklands, Bourne End, in Buckinghamshire.

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  Top 10 Short Stories The - Mens...

  Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain,...

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  Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart.  A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere. 
   
  In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?  
   
  The theme itself will form the boundaries for our stories which range from well-known classics, newly told, to stories that modern times have overlooked but perfectly exemplify the theme.  Throughout the volume our authors whether of instant recognition or new to you are all leviathans of literature. 
   
  Some you may disagree with but they will get you thinking; about our choices and about those you would have made.  If this volume takes you on a path to discover more of these miniature masterpieces then we have all gained something. 
   
  As the new nation gathered its strength it pushed into new territories, underwent a tumultuous civil war and tried to reconcile itself into a whole.  Its authors wrote stories of intense beauty and detailed witness.  Literature was engaging and persuasive and now a mass-market industry open to a far wider audience. 
   
  1 - The Top 10 -  The 19th Century - The American Men - An Introduction 
  2 - The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe 
  3 - The Million Pound Bank Note by Mark Twain 
  4 - The Romance of Certain Old Clothes by Henry James 
  5 - The Devil and Tom Walker by Washington Irving 
  6 - The Open Boat by Stephen Crane 
  7 - An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce 
  8 - The Luck of Roaring Camp by Bret Harte 
  9 - The Repairer of Reputations Part 1 by Robert W Chambers 
  10 - The Repairer of Reputations Part 2 by Robert W Chambers 
  11 - The Lady, or the Tiger by Frank Stockton 
  12 - Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne

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  Not to Be Taken

  Anthony Berkeley

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  In the comfortable English Dorsetshire village of Anneypenny in the 1930s, fruit farmer Douglas Sewell – narrator of the story – sees his friend John die in agony. The death certificate states gastric ulcers but the post mortem’s revealing of poison punctures Anneypenny’s idyllic backdrop. Soon every friend and neighbour seems to harbour something suspicious. Douglas challenges his readers, or listeners, to answer the key questions before throwing out several scenarios and turning them upside-down in a tantalising path to the truth. 
  A journalist as well as a novelist, Anthony Berkeley was a founding member of the Detection Club and one of crime fiction’s greatest innovators. He was one of the first to predict the development of the ‘psychological’ crime novel.

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  Mansfield Park

  Jane Austen

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  When shy Fanny Price arrives at Mansfield Park to live with her cousins, she is overwhelmed and only put at ease by her cousin, Edmund Bertram, whom she soon comes to love. But Edmund's head is turned by the beautiful Mary Crawford and she and her brother Henry spark a series of romantic entanglements that lead the Bertram family to the brink of social disaster. It becomes apparent to Fanny that pretty manners and fine words are no substitute for integrity.

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