Publisher: Project Gutenberg
"The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge" is one of the fifty-six Sherlock Holmes short stories written by British author Arthur Conan Doyle.
"You should be here; he's simply magnificent." These are the final words a biologist hears before his Margaret Mead-like wife dies at the hands of Godzilla. The words haunt him as he studies the kaiju (Japan's giant monsters) on an island reserve, attempting to understand the beauty his wife saw. "The Return to Monsterland" opens Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone, a collection of twelve fabulist and genre-bending stories inspired by Japanese folklore, historical events, and pop culture. In "Rokurokubi," a man who has the demonic ability to stretch his neck to incredible lengths tries to save a marriage built on secrets. The recently dead find their footing in "The Inn of the Dead's Orientation for Being a Japanese Ghost." In "Girl Zero," a couple navigates the complexities of reviving their deceased daughter via the help of a shapeshifter. And, in the title story, a woman instigates a months-long dancing frenzy in a Tokyo where people don't die but are simply reborn without their memories. Every story in the collection turns to the fantastic, the mysticism of the past, and the absurdities of the future to illuminate the spaces we occupy when we are at our most vulnerable."Show book
A charming little book full of the most gorgeous illustrations which can be viewed along with the Gutenberg text at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/15661. We see a number of stories in which kindness is rewarded and selfishness is punished but Brooke squeezes a number of intriguing and quite bizarre twists and turns into the story so it is not nearly so predictable as you might imagine. Victorian moral fairy tales from a delightfully inventive mind. (Summary by Jim)Show book
Mrs Henrietta Dorothy Everett (1851-1923) was one of the most renowned Victorian horror writers, often publishing her spine-tingling tales under the pen name Theo Douglas. The Death Mask is one of the weirdest and most chilling of her short stories. It tells the tale of a widower who had made a peculiar promise to his late wife on her deathbed. At face value it had seemed such a simple thing... just to cover the dead woman's face with a particular cloth. But the events which follow this act, at the moment itself and in subsequent years, are terrifying in the extreme.Show book
A collection of some of Hans Christian Andersen's works. He is a Danish author and poet most famous for his fairy tales. - Summary by KristingjShow book
A satiric masterpiece about the allure and peril of money, Our Mutual Friend revolves around the inheritance of a dust-heap where the rich throw their trash. When the body of John Harmon, the dust-heap's expected heir, is found in the Thames, fortunes change hands surprisingly, raising to new heights "Noddy" Boffin, a low-born but kindly clerk who becomes "the Golden Dustman." Charles Dickens's last complete novel, Our Mutual Friend encompasses the great themes of his earlier works: the pretensions of the nouveaux riches, the ingenuousness of the aspiring poor, and the unfailing power of wealth to corrupt all who crave it. With its flavorful cast of characters and numerous subplots, Our Mutual Friend is one of Dickens's most complex—and satisfying—novelsShow book
Vera (1921) by Elizabeth von Arnim is a black comedy based on her disastrous second marriage to Earl Russell: a mordant analysis of the romantic delusions through which wives acquiesce in husbands' tyrannies. In outline the story of this utterly unromantic novel anticipates DuMaurier's Rebecca. Naive Lucy Entwhistle is swept into marriage by widower, Everard Wemyss. His mansion "The Willows" is pervaded by the spectre of his dead wife Vera, with whom Lucy becomes obsessed. ... Here the servants are partisan for both wives, and lose no opportunity to disrupt Everard's unctuous, oppressive household routines. An extraordinarily black vision of marriage, also continuously funny, the novel's power lies in the wit and economy of the usually prolix Von Arnim.(Introduction by Wikipedia)Show book
