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  A New Cook

  Neil Munro

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  Neil Munro (1863-1930) was a Scottish journalist, newspaper editor, author, and literary critic who is now mainly known for his humorous short stories. 
  "A New Cook" is one of Munro's hilarious tales of Para Handy, Sunny Jim and the rest of the crew of the Vital Spark. The ship is welcoming a new cook whose talents include dancing, melodian playing, practical joking... but sadly not culinary skill.

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  Hard Times

  Charles Dickens

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  "Hard Times" is unusual in several respects. It is by far the shortest of Dickens' novels, barely a quarter of the length of those written immediately before and after it. Also, unlike all but one of his other novels, "Hard Times" has neither a preface nor illustrations. Moreover, it is his only novel not to have scenes set in London. Instead the story is set in the fictitious Victorian industrial Coketown, a generic Northern English mill-town, in some ways similar to Manchester, though smaller. Coketown may be partially based upon 19th-century Preston. One of Dickens's reasons for writing "Hard Times" was that sales of his weekly periodical, Household Words, were low, and it was hoped its publication in instalments would boost circulation - as indeed proved to be the case.
   
  Since publication it has received a mixed response from critics. Critics such as F. R. Leavis, George Bernard Shaw, and Thomas Macaulay have mainly focused on Dickens's treatment of trade unions and his post-Industrial Revolution pessimism regarding the divide between capitalist mill owners and undervalued workers during the Victorian era.

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  Referred Pain - Stories

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz

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  Everyone has a face that they show to the outside world—but our thoughts, fears, and perversions lie just beneath“Referred pain” describes the sensation of pain, not at the actual point of injury, but somewhere else in the body. This disorientation of the senses is felt, in one way or another, by many of the characters in this collection from Lynne Sharon Schwartz, one of America’s foremost chroniclers of contemporary life. In the title novella, a son of Holocaust survivors circumvents his discomfort over his parents’ history through a Kafkaesque series of dental procedures. In another story, a professor’s sexual attraction to one of his students leads him down a twisted path of misplaced identity. Laced with Schwartz’s satirical, acidly intelligent wit, Referred Pain displays the peak of her ability.

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  Every Man His Own University

  Russell H. Conwell

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  A distinct university walks about under each man's hat. The only man who achieves success in the other universities of the world, and in the larger university of life, is the man who has first taken his graduate course and his post-graduate course in the university under his hat. There observation furnishes a daily change in the curriculum. Books are not the original sources of power, but observation, which may bring to us all wide experience, deep thinking, fine feeling, and the power to act for oneself, is the very dynamo of power,

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  The Ranger Objective - An...

  Jason Kasper

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  “Jason Kasper’s American Mercenary series boils with bold action, exotic locales, and spellbinding intrigue.” Mark Greaney, #1 NYT Bestselling Author of the Gray Man seriesBefore he was an assassin, David Rivers was a patriot. 
  One year after the 9/11 attacks, he serves as an Army Ranger in Afghanistan. 
  His patrol enters the Shigal Valley, a desolate place with a fearsome reputation for enemy fighters—a reputation that David is about to experience firsthand. 
  As the first shots ring out over the valley, David must decide between military orders and gut instinct...and in the process, discover a hidden truth about himself.

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  Kashtanka

  Anton Chekhov

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  Kashtanka, a shaggy-dog story penned by Anton Chekhov in seven parts and first published in 1887, relates the experiences of its eponymous heroine, a fox-faced, reddish dachshund-mix, whose name means 'little chestnut.' After her detestation of music causes her to become separated from the carpenter with whose family she had been living, Kashtanka finds herself taken up by an unusual vaudevillian and goes to live among an assortment of other intelligent animals, each of whom is observed with the characteristic empathy and humor that stamp Chekhov's work. (Summary by Grant Hurlock)

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