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  Collected Stories and Poems

  Edgar Allan Poe

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  Hundreds of books and articles have been written about Edgar Allan Poe. Even so, no one is really sure who Poe was. Many people say that he was as crazy as the characters he wrote about. Others say that Poe was a driven man with a simple wish. He wanted to write and to make a living by his writing. Even though Poe lived a miserable life, he wrote some of the most interesting and original literature ever created.Edgar Allan Poe was born in January of 1809, the son of Boston actors. He was orphaned before he was three and was taken in by his godfather, John Allan, a merchant of Richmond, Virginia. After incurring gambling debts at the University of Virginia, he joined the army where, at eighteen, he published his first poems. He was dismissed from West Point, and then worked for various literary magazines. In 1836, while living in Baltimore, he married his fourteen-year-old cousin. He achieved acclaim for the Raven in 1845; two years later his wife died. In October of 1849, shortly after his engagement to a love of his youth, Poe was found semiconscious in the streets of Baltimore. He died days later. 
  Stories and poems included in this collection are: "The Raven", "The Cask of Amontillado", "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Black Cat", "The Bells", The Fall of the House of Usher", "Manuscript Found in a Bottle", "The Sleeper", "The Man of the Crowd", "The Pit and the Pendulum", "Annabel Lee", "The Man That Was Used Up", "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether", "The Oval Portrait", "Eleonora", "The Facts in the Case of Monsieur Valdemar", "Berenice", and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue".

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  Elegies for Uncanny Girls

  Jennifer Colville

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  The ordinary and the extraordinary merge in the strange and complex lives of young women in this “frequently luminous” debut short story collection (Kirkus Reviews).   Unsettling and perceptive, this debut story collection challenges our notion of American girlhood in all its delusions, conflicting messages, and treacherous terrain. Alternately wide-eyed, wise, and mysterious, the girls at the center of these stories leave their realities behind for curious new places where the barrier between real and unreal begins to blur. Still others hover over their Midwestern homes in interior worlds of their own creation.   The stories in Elegies for Uncanny Girls take place at a boundary where both the girls’ bodies and their narratives belong either to themselves or to the cultures that surround them. A young woman whose body continually shrinks and expands moves to Los Angeles to make a movie about tragic merpeople; bewildered and seeking guidance, a new mom strikes up a conversation with a woman with detachable hands; and spurred on by a new ally who might just be a figment of her imagination, a girl decides she can choose her own friends. “Brisk, satisfying, and fiercely observant.” —Publishers Weekly

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  Morphine - This story is perhaps...

  Mikhail Bulgakov

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  Mikhail Bulgakov was born on 15th May 1891 in Kiev, in the Kiev Governorate of the Russian Empire, into a Russian family.  He was one of seven children. 
   
  In 1901, Bulgakov attended the First Kiev Gymnasium, and developed a keen interest in Russian and European literature, theatre and opera.  After the death of his father in 1907, his mother assumed responsibility for his education.  After graduating Bulgakov entered the Medical Faculty of Kiev University and then took up a post as physician at the Kiev Military Hospital. 
   
  At the outbreak of the First World War, he volunteered as a doctor and was sent directly to the front, where he was badly injured at least twice.  To suppress chronic pain, especially in the abdomen, he injected morphine.  It took years to wean himself off. 
   
  He now took up medical posts in various towns and in 1919, he was mobilised by the Ukrainian People's Army and assigned to the Northern Caucasus.  There, he became seriously ill with typhus and barely survived.  
   
  After this illness, Bulgakov abandoned his medicine to pursue writing.  He moved to Vladikavkaz and had two plays staged there with great success.  He wrote too for various newspapers and other outlets, but his critics were many.  And growing. 
   
  When a Moscow's theatre director severely criticised Bulgakov, Stalin personally protected him, saying that a writer of Bulgakov's quality was above ‘party words’ like ‘left’ and ‘right’.   Indeed, it is said that Stalin watched ‘The Days of the Turbins’ at least 15 times. 
   
  It was not to last and by March 1929, Bulgakov's career was ruined when Government censorship stopped publication of any of his work and plays. 
   
  In despair, Bulgakov wrote a personal letter to Stalin.  He requested permission to emigrate.  He received a phone call from the Soviet leader, who asked the writer whether he really desired to leave. He replied that a Russian writer cannot live outside of his homeland.  Stalin thus gave him permission to continue working. In May 1930, he re-joined the theater, as stage director's assistant.  
   
  During the last stressful decade of his life, and in poor health, Bulgakov continued to work on ‘The Master and Margarita’, wrote plays, critical works, stories, and continued translations and dramatisations of novels.  Many of them were not published, others were derided by critics.  
   
  On 10th March 1940, Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov died from nephrosclerosis.  He was 48. 
   
  ‘The Master and Margarita’ was not published in any form until the mid-1960’s 
   
  In this story Bulgakov relates the terrifying and hellish descent into addiction that seems so avoidable and yet so chillingly not.

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  A Possible Life - A Novel in...

  Sebastian Faulks

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  In Second World War Poland, a prisoner closes his eyes and pictures a sunlit cricket ground. Across the yard of a Victorian poorhouse, a man is too ashamed to acknowledge the son he gave away. In a 19th-century French village, an old servant understands the meaning of the Bible story her master is reading. In the Catskills, 1971, a girl steps out of a Chevy with a song that will send shivers through her listeners' skulls. A few years from now, in Italy, a scientist discovers links between time and the human brain, and her lover's novel and his life. Throughout five masterpieces of fiction, exquisitely drawn and unforgettable characters risk their bodies, hearts and minds in pursuit of the manna of human connection.

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  Edna Farmer: Farmer In the Dell

  Edna Ferber

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  You can take the farm boy out of the rural area and send him to the big city, but  you cannot take the farm out of the boy.  Edna Ferber tells here of the farm boy who grew up into a smart man who moved to the city because farm work was just ridiculously too hard.  But perhaps the city life is not as great as he was led to believe; and perhaps the city job just does not answer some deep need in him to feel the soil in his fingers and to watch things grow.  What will he do?  He knows the pain and uncertainty and misery of farm life so is that even an option for a smart man?   Listen and find out.

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  The Wedding Guest

  Guy Boothby

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  Guy Boothby (1867 - 1905) was an Australian by birth, who came to England in 1894 and was quickly acknowledged as a masterly writer of thrillers and crime stories.His best work includes a series of stories which appeared in Pearson's Magazine in 1897 under the title The Prince of Swindlers. These stories describe the exploits of Simon Carne, one of the earliest society criminals whose cunning robberies were executed with oustanding imagination and ingenuity.In The Wedding Guest Simon Carne gets away with an extraordinary heist.

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