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  Scenes from a Courtesan's Life

  Honoré de Balzac

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  This audiobook delves into the scandalous world of high society, love affairs, and social maneuvering in 19th-century Paris. The story revolves around Esther, a beautiful and ambitious courtesan, and her rise to power through relationships with wealthy and influential men. Balzac's vivid depiction of the character's motivations and manipulations exposes the underbelly of Parisian society, where desire, ambition, and greed drive the actions of the elite. With its incisive critique of societal values, "Scenes from a Courtesan's Life" remains a significant work within Balzac's panoramic exploration of French society. 
   
  Honoré de Balzac, a French novelist, and playwright, is renowned for his ambitious project "La Comédie Humaine," a vast collection of interconnected novels and stories depicting various aspects of French society in the early 19th century. Balzac's realistic portrayals of characters and society set a new standard for French literature and earned him a lasting place in literary history.

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  Top 10 Short Stories The - The...

  Edith Wharton, Guy de...

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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 this volume we enjoy a favourite device of authors; the story is heading one way and suddenly twists in another direction entirely. In the pens of Ambrose Bierce, Nikolai Gogol, Saki and a host of others where you end up is the very question they propose.  
   
  01 - The Top 10 - The Twist - An Introduction 
  02 - Roman Fever by Edith Wharton 
  03 - The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant 
  04 - The Nose by Nikolai Gogol 
  05 - Miss Brill by Katherine Mansfield 
  06 - The Gift of the Magi by O Henry 
  07 - Desiree's Baby by Kate Chopin 
  08 - Man Size in Marble by Edith Nesbit 
  09 - An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce 
  10 - The Open Window by Saki 
  11 - The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe

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  About Love - From their pens to...

  Anton Chekhov

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  Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on 29th January 1860 in Taganrog, on the south coast of Russia.  
  His family life was difficult; his father was strict and over-bearing but his mother was a passionate story-teller, a subject Chekhov warmed to. As he later said; ‘our talents we got from our father, but our soul from our mother’.  
  At school Chekhov was distinctly average. At 16 his father mis-managed his finances and was declared bankrupt. His family fled to Moscow. Chekhov remained and eked out a living by various means, including writing and selling short sketches to newspapers, to finish his schooling. That completed and with a scholarship to Moscow University obtained he rejoined his family. 
  He was able to help support them by selling satirical sketches and vignettes of Russian lifestyles and gradually obtained further commissions. In 1884, he qualified as a physician and, although it earned him little, he often treated the poor for free, he was fond of saying ‘Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress.’ 
  His own health was now an issue as he began to cough up blood, a symptom of tuberculosis.  Despite this his writing success enabled him to move the family into more comfortable accommodation.  
  Chekhov wrote over 500 short stories which included many, many classics including ‘The Kiss’ and ‘The Lady with a Dog’.  His collection ‘At Dusk’ won him the coveted Pushkin Prize when was only 26.  
  He was also a major playwright beginning with the huge success of ‘Ivanov’ in 1887.   
  In 1892 Chekhov bought a country estate north of Moscow. Here his medical skills and money helped the peasants tackle outbreaks of cholera and bouts of famine. He also built three schools, a fire station and a clinic.  It left him with less time for writing but the interactions with real people gained him detailed knowledge about the peasantry and their living conditions for his stories.  
  His most famous work, ‘The Seagull’ was received disastrously at its premiere in St Petersburg. It was later restaged in Moscow to highlight its psychological aspects and was a huge success. It led to ‘Uncle Vanya’, ‘The Three Sisters’ and ‘The Cherry Orchard’.  
  Chekhov suffered a major lung hemorrhage in 1897 while visiting Moscow. A formal diagnosis confirmed tuberculosis and the doctors ordered changes to his lifestyle.  
  Despite a dread of weddings the elusive literary bachelor quietly married the actress Olga Knipper, whom he had met at rehearsals for ‘The Seagull’, on 25th May 1901. 
  By May 1904 with his tuberculosis worsening and death imminent he set off for the German town of Badenweiler writing cheerful, witty letters to his family and assuring them his health was improving.  
  On 15th July 1904 Anton Chekhov died at Badenweiler.  He was 44.

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  Benediction - From their pens to...

  F Scott itzgerald

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  Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota into an upper-middle class family. Whilst his mother was pregnant with him, his two young sisters tragically died.  Fitzgerald once said this was when his destiny as a writer was ordained. 
  His intelligence and talent was recognised from an early age, with his first story, about a detective being published in the school magazine when he was just 13.   
  In 1913 he enrolled at Princeton but his devotion to his own literary pursuits resulted in him leaving and, rather bizarrely, joining the Army.  In 1918, stationed at Fort Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama he met and became infatuated and then inseparable from Zelda Sayre.  Initially though she refused to marry him but with the success of ‘This Side of Paradise’, the fame and the flow of money enabled them both to begin a gilded life.  For them this was The Jazz Age.  For Fitzgerald he was already an alcoholic. 
  He continued to write with great mastery and the titles of his novels and many of his 164 short stories are household names.  The Great Gatsby, often cited as The Great American Novel was published to mixed reviews.  As America moved from the Great Depression to the slaughter of the Second World War his works and himself were seen as far too entwined with the decadent twenties. The world had moved on and he hadn’t.   
  Further tragedy was never far from his life. Zelda after years of erratic and now intolerable behaviour was committed to an institution in 1936.  His own sales began to decline and he became a hack for hire in Hollywood, dependent on increasing amounts of booze and the weekly pay check.  His drunken state had often resulted in arrest or hospitalisation, further imperiling his talents.   Despite his contribution to many MGM films he received only one credit. 
  The end came all too soon for one of America’s greatest ever writers.  On 21st December 1940, at only 44 years of age in Hollywood, F Scott Fitzgerald succumbed to a heart attack.

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  Midsummer Night in the Workhouse

  Diana Athill

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  A woman trapped in an agonising love affair; a writer avoiding the group seducer at a writers’ retreat; a girl experiencing her first kiss. Set in 1950s England, as well as Italy and France, Midsummer Night in the Workhouse is a collection of short stories written and read  by distinguished editor and author, Diana Athill. Written in the late 1950s, these short stories mainly centre around female protagonists. Several stories are based on events from Athill’s own life. From holidays abroad to love affairs and sexual encounters, these brilliant, touching narratives provide subtle snapshots of human experiences and stage portrayals of memory, conflict and adventure. Midsummer Night in the Workhouse is part of the Persephone Audiobook Collection, a series of forgotten classics including neglected fiction and non-fiction by women writers. First published in 1962, this edition includes a preface by the author.

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  Désirée's Baby - From their pens...

  Kate Chopin

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  Katherine O'Flaherty was born on the 8th February 1850 in St Louis, Missouri to parents of French and Irish descent. 
  At age 5, she was sent to the Sacred Heart Academy and, apart from a 2 year period at home when her father died, remained there until graduating in 1868.  Whilst there she began writing and became an avid reader of almost anything that crossed her path.   
  Kate married Oscar Chopin in 1870 and the couple moved to New Orleans, and later to the rural setting of Cloutierville, Louisiana to raise their 6 children.  
  In 1882 her husband died leaving her in a deep trench of debt.  Despite her best efforts to turn the businesses around they were sold, and she moved the family back to St Louis and the financial help of her mother.  Sadly, her mother died within the year.  Kate, now struggling with depression, pushed herself to write and gained a local reputation as a writer of short stories that captured the local color and vibrancy of her surroundings.  
  By the early 1890’s her short stories were published nationally.  With this widespread audience also came negative reviews, controversy, and cries of immorality as themes such as interracial relationships, the rights of women and other burning issues of the day were written about. 
  Despite the criticism, which unnerved her, she continued to write though in the main her works, around 100 short stories and two novels, were not attributed with any literary worth. 
  Kate Chopin died from a brain haemorrhage in St Louis Missouri on the 22nd of August 1904.  She was 54. 
  For much of the 20th Century her work was forgotten and out of print.  It was only in early 1970’s, with the rise of feminism and the call for a more just society that she was given the status her works had long described and shone a literary light at.  She is now safely revered as one of America’s great authors.

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