Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  Bittersweet Moments

  Kimberly Thomas

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  Jules needed a fresh start, that's why she moved halfway across the world to attend college in Seoul. What she didn't need was to get pregnant. Being pregnant was not part of the plan, neither was finding her Prince Charming. But when her happily ever after turns out not to be who he says he is, Jules is left heartbroken and jaded. Left with no one else to turn to but her mother, Cora, Jules finds herself heading back to the US to the coastal town of Oak Harbor. She's dreading the looks of disappointments and questions that she knows will be waiting for her. When her ex shows up unannounced, she receives new and shocking information that makes her question everything. 
   
   
   
  Cora is also struggling to accept that she is about to lose another parent in such a short period of time along with her youngest daughter being pregnant and secretive about who the father is. Why is all of this happening now? She was just settling into her new life after a nasty divorce—still it seems the fates are not through with her yet. Her doubts put her relationship with Jamie to the test and she calls for a pause to deal with her family problems. 
   
   
   
  Will Cora and Jules be able to resolve their issues? Will Cora come to accept losing the woman that she has loved so much and give in to love without hesitation? Will Jules get her happily ever after?

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  A Capitalist - From their pens...

  George Gissing

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  George Robert Gissing was born on November 22nd, 1857 in Wakefield, Yorkshire.  
  He was educated at Back Lane School in Wakefield. Gissing loved school. He was enthusiastic with a thirst for learning and always diligent.  By the age of ten he was reading Dickens, a lifelong hero. 
  In 1872 Gissing won a scholarship to Owens College. Whilst there Gissing worked hard but remained solitary. Unfortunately, he had run short of funds and stole from his fellow students. He was arrested, prosecuted, found guilty, expelled and sentenced to a month's hard labour in 1876. 
  On release he decided to start over.  In September 1876 he travelled to the United States. Here he wrote short stories for the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers. On his return home he was ready for novels. 
  Gissing self-published his first novel but it failed to sell.  His second was acquired but never published. His writing career was static.  Something had to change.  And it did. 
  By 1884 The Unclassed was published.  Now everything he wrote was published. Both Isabel Clarendon and Demos appeared in 1886. He mined the lives of the working class as diligently as any capitalist. 
  In 1889 Gissing used the proceeds from the sale of The Nether World to go to Italy. This trip formed the basis for his 1890 work The Emancipated. 
  Gissing's works began to command higher payments. New Grub Street (1891) brought a fee of £250.  
  Short stories followed and in 1895, three novellas were published; Eve's Ransom, The Paying Guest and Sleeping Fires. Gissing was careful to keep up with the changing attitudes of his audience.  
  Unfortunately, he was also diagnosed as suffering from emphysema. The last years of his life were spent as a semi-invalid in France but he continued to write. 1899; The Crown of Life. Our Friend the Charlatan appeared in 1901, followed two years later by The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. 
  George Robert Gissing died aged 46 on December 28th, 1903 after catching a chill on a winter walk.

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  Bush Meat

  Mandy Sutter

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  For Sarah's family, memories of early Sixties Aba in south-eastern Nigeria are scorched onto their hearts. A days-old burial mound exposed as an 'exploded diagram' of bones picked clean by beasts. Adaku the Barbary duck with a 'melted face', who was conscripted into friendship by six-year-old Sarah in the first of a lifetime's unlikely alliances, forged by necessity and relocation. The narcotic puff let out from the freezer in the meat-man's shack off the Ikot Ekpene road, where Maureen, Sarah's lonely mother, gave up aspirations to be a 'proper oil company wife' to Jim, and risked buying 'bush meat'. The dry 'snakeskin' bark of the old iroko tree on the bend of the town's river, under whose shade Jim sought sanctuary from people, and whose 'two long white catkins the tree one day bestowed onto his head like confetti.'
  Back home, Jim swaps adventure and agency for woodwork and more whisky. Maureen, denying her love of Igbo crafts and cloth, considers reinventing herself as an Oxfam shop assistant. In the days before her grandmother's funeral, Sarah finds the platitudes of her father evasive compared to the wisdom and ritual taught by servant Chidike while burying the household monkey. Sarah's hard-won Nigerian barter goods, a silver thumb-ring and a dare taken to eat fried-fat market 'snack', become devalued. At Aba's Sancta Maria, unaccustomed food was a cone of hot roast groundnuts paid for by a penny with a hole. In Britain, 'unaccustomed' means milk with a 'thickened band of yellow'. Now, the currency is a dare Sarah first honours, then refuses.
  As people of that time and place are scattered like those bleached bones, Aba acts as centripetal force on their imagination. Today's city was a small town the like of which Tim Winton gnaws at from different angles in The Turning. Mandy Sutter's approach is similarly innovative. Her themes are substitution, racism, and whether the spirit can ever survive transaction.

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  My Own True Ghost Story

  Rudyard Kipling

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  In My Own True Ghost Story, Rudyard Kipling delivers a hauntingly humorous tale set in the shadowy outposts of British India—where the rational mind meets the inexplicable. When a weary English traveler spends the night in a decrepit dâk-bungalow, the howling wind, flickering candles, and creaking walls seem to come alive. Then comes the unmistakable sound of a billiard game—played in a room far too small to hold a table, and by players who no longer exist. 
  Kipling’s mastery of tone—balancing wit, irony, and eerie suspense—makes this one of his most memorable supernatural stories. A blend of colonial realism and gothic unease, My Own True Ghost Story reminds us that even the most skeptical traveler may find himself haunted when logic and legend collide. 
  Narrated with crisp wit and quiet tension by Michael Lyons, this performance captures both the humor and horror of Kipling’s classic ghost tale.

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  A Dialogue Among Clever People -...

  Leo Tolstoy

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  Leo Tolstoy was born in 1828 in the Russian province of Tula to a wealthy noble family. As a child, he had private tutors but he showed little interest in any formal education. When he went to the University of Kazan in 1843 to study oriental languages and law, he left without completing his courses.  Life now was relaxed and idle but with some writing also taking place.  Gambling debts forced an abrupt change of path and he joined the army to fight in the Crimean War.  He was commended for his bravery and promoted but was appalled at the brutality and loss of life.  He recorded these and other earlier experiences in his diaries which formed the basis of several of his works. 
  In 1852 ‘Childhood’ was published to immediate success and was followed by ‘Boyhood’ and ‘Youth’. 
  His experience in the army and the horrors he witnessed resulted in ‘The Cossacks’ in 1862 and the trilogy ‘Sevastopol Tales’. After the war he travelled around Europe, visiting London and Paris and meeting such luminaries as Victor Hugo and Charles Darwin.  
  It was now that Tolstoy began his masterpiece, ‘War and Peace’. Published in 1869 it was an epic work that changed literature. He quickly followed this with ‘Anna Karenina’.  
  These successes made Tolstoy rich and helped him accomplish many of his dreams but also brought problems as he grappled with his faith and the lot of the oppressed poor. These revolutionary views became so popular that the authorities now kept him under surveillance.  
  He led a life of asceticism and vegetarianism and put his socialist ideals into practice by establishing numerous schools for the poor and food programmes. He also believed in giving away his wealth, which caused much discord with his wife.  
  His writing continued to bring forth classics such as ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ and many brilliant and incisive short stories such as ‘How Much Land Does A Man Need’.  
  In 1901 Tolstoy was excommunicated from the Church and controversially deselected for the Nobel Prize for Literature. 
  Whilst undertaking a pilgrimage by train in October 1910 with his daughter Aleksandra he caught pneumonia in the nearby town of Astapovo.  Leo Tolstoy died on November 9th, 1910, he was 82.

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  The Top 10 Short Stories – The...

  Robert Louis Stevenson, Charles...

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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. 
   
  In these Isles of Imperial Empire the English language is now the lingua franca of the globe.  But between the Home nations tensions remain, they rise and fall, all is not well.  Authors born abroad and returning have new views, unique, a little off-kilter and literature feeds well on this fuel.  Together the men of these islands produce literature of quite sumptuous quality. 
   
  1 - The Top 10 - The British & Irish Men - The 19th Century - An Introduction 
  2 - The Body Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  3 - The Signalman by Charles Dickens 
  4 - The Withered Arm by Thomas Hardy 
  5 - The Canterville Ghost - Part 1 by Oscar Wilde 
  6 - The Canterville Ghost - Part 2 by Oscar Wilde 
  7 - The Phantom Rickshaw by Rudyard Kipling 
  8 - The Dream Woman by Wilkie Collins 
  9 - The Story of B24 by Arthur Conan Doyle 
  10 - The Inconsiderate Waiter by J M Barrie 
  11 - Lost Hearts by M R James 
  12 - Youth - Part 1 by Joseph Conrad 
  13 - Youth - Part 2 by Joseph Conrad

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