Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

• 

  Head & Shoulders - A coming of...

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  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.

  Mostra libro

• 

  Stories Of Santa Claus

  L. Frank Baum

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  L. Frank Baum was an American author best known for his children’s books, particularly The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its sequels. He wrote 14 novels in the Oz series, plus 41 other novels (not including four lost, unpublished novels), 83 short stories, over 200 poems, and at least 42 scripts. He made numerous attempts to bring his works to the stage and screen; the 1939 adaptation of the first Oz book became a landmark of 20th-century cinema. The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus is a 1902 children’s book. Santa Claus, as a baby, is found in the Forest of Burzee by Ak, the Master Woodsman of the World (a supreme immortal), and placed in the care of the lioness Shiegra; but thereupon adopted by the Wood Nymph, Necile. Upon reaching young adulthood, Claus is introduced by Ak to human society, wherein he sees war, brutality, poverty, child neglect, and child abuse. Because he cannot reside in Burzee as an adult, he settles in the nearby Laughing Valley of Hohaho, where the immortals regularly assist him, and Peter Knook gives him a little cat named Blinky.

  Mostra libro

• 

  Sawatch Skirmish (Stonecroft...

  B.N. Rundell

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  BLOOD, LUST, AND GREED SEEMED TO LAY IN WAIT FOR THE UNSUSPECTING TRAVELERS. 
  What started as a visit to the families of the women turned into a fight with renegade Apsáalooke warriors. But that was just the beginning of the battles… 
  After a friendly encounter with the Yapudttka Ute, their journey would take them into the middle of a fight between the Mouache Ute and an expedition of gold hungry Spaniards. The prospectors traveled across the southern tier of the land known as New Spain in search of the Seven Cities of Cibola – the same cities of gold once sought by Coronado – now thought to be in the headwaters of a river in the Sawatch mountains of the Rockies. 
  When the leader of the Spaniards tries to enslave the band of Utes to dig for gold, it starts a bloody battle. But when Gabe and company learn about captives and the treatment of them as slaves that does not sit well with Ezra who will fight any form of slavery wherever it is found. 
  Blood will fill the sluice boxes and rivers of the Sawatch Range before this conflict is over!

  Mostra libro

• 

  The Nightingale and the Rose

  Oscar Wilde

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  A nightingale overhears a student complaining that the professor's daughter will not dance with him, as he is unable to give her a red rose;] a lizard, a butterfly and a daisy laugh at the student for doing so. The nightingale visits all the rose-trees in the garden, and one of the roses tells her there is a way to produce a red rose, but only if the nightingale is prepared to sing the sweetest song for the rose all night with her heart pressing into a thorn, sacrificing her life.

  Mostra libro

• 

  The Scandal of Father Brown

  G. K. Chesterton

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  The Scandal of Father Brown was G.K. Chesterton's final set of Father Brown short stories. Also included in this collection is the short story "The Mask of Midas". 
  The enigmatic and diminutive priest continues to fathom the deepest of mysteries in a set of 11 fascinating stories which are set in such diverse locations as a Mexican Hotel, an English Seaside Pier, and an Oxford University Garden. Chesterton presents his humble and blinking detective as an almost childlike contrast to the bizarre and dark machinations of the fallen world. And yet Father Brown is far from a saintly figure; with his enjoyment of good wine and cigars, he is fully in the world but not of the world. Indeed, it is his accurate and insightful reading of Men and Women's souls that often lead him to understand their actions and motives. If any has taken to heart Christ's admonition to be as “wise as serpents and harmless as doves" it is Father Brown! 
  Head Stories Audio presents "The Scandal of Father Brown" :narrated by Simon Hester. With original music.

  Mostra libro

• 

  The Adventure of the...

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

  The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans is one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It is one of eight stories in the cycle collected as His Last Bow, and is the second and final appearance of Mycroft Holmes. Doyle ranked "The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans" fourteenth in a list of his nineteen favourite Sherlock Holmes stories. The monotony of thick smog-shrouded London is broken by a sudden visit from Holmes' brother Mycroft. He has come about some missing, secret submarine plans. Seven of the ten pages—three are still missing—were found with Arthur Cadogan West's body. He was a young clerk in a government office at Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, whose body was found next to the Underground tracks near the Aldgate tube station, his head crushed. He had little money with him (although there appears to have been no robbery), theatre tickets, and curiously, no Underground ticket. The three missing pages by themselves could enable one of Britain's enemies to build a Bruce-Partington submarine.It seems clear that Cadogan West fell from a train and that he stole the plans, meaning to sell them, but the mystery is truly complex...Famous works of the author Arthur Conan Doyle: A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of the Four, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, The Valley of Fear, His Last Bow, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, Stories of Sherlock Holmes, The Lost World.

  Mostra libro