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  Russian Short Story The - Volume...

  Anton Chekhov, Helena Blavatsky,...

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  The Russian novel has a reputation that is immense, both in narrative and in length.  Unquestionably though the ideas, themes and characters make many novels rightly revered as world class, as icons of literature. 
   
  Perhaps an easier way to enjoy a wider selection of the Russian heritage, with its varied and glorious literary talents, is with the short story.  These gems sparkle and beguile the mind with their characters and narrative, exploring facets of society and the human condition that more Western authors somehow find more difficult to navigate, or to explore, explain and relate to.   
   
  The Russian short story is, in many respects, in a genre of its own.  It is at its captivating best whether it’s an exploration of real-life experiences, through fantasy and fables and on to total absurdity. 
   
  In a land so vast it is unsurprising that it is a world almost unto itself. Cultures and landscapes of differing hues are packed together bound only by the wilful bonds and force of Empire. 
   
  The stories in this collection traverse the decades where one might be a serf under an absolute monarch, and the reality of that was pretty near to slavery, into an emancipation of sorts in the fields, or towns under the despotic will of landowners and the rich into the upheavals of Empire and then the overthrow of the ruling class and its replacement by the communists, who promised equality for all and delivered a society where the down-trodden remained the lowest yet vital cog of the state machine and its will.  
   
  Whilst Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Chekhov are a given in any Russian collection we also explore and include Andreyev, Korolenko, Turgenev, Blavatsky and many others to create a world rich and dense across a sprawling landscape of diverse people, riddled with the class and unfairness in perhaps some of the most turbulent times that Russia has ever experienced. 
   
  01 - The Russian Short Story - Volume 4 - An Introduction 
  02 - The Sentry by Nikolai Lyeskov 
  03 - A Witch's Den by Helena Blavatsky 
  04 - The General's Will by Vera Jelihovsky 
  05 - The Old Bell Ringer by Vladimir Korolenko 
  06 - The Shades, A Phantasy by Vladimir Korolenko 
  07 - The Signal by Vsevolod Garshin 
  08 - Dethroned by I N Potapenko 
  09 - The Kiss by Anton Chekhov 
  10 - The Lady with the Dog by Anton Chekhov 
  11 - The Bet by Anton Chekhov 
  12 - Gooseberries by Anton Chekhov

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  The Island of Doctor Moreau

  H. G. Wells

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  Ranked among the classic novels of the English language and the inspiration for several unforgettable movies, this early work of H. G. Wells was greeted in 1896 by howls of protest from reviewers, who found it horrifying and blasphemous. They wanted to know more about the wondrous possibilities of science shown in his first book, The Time Machine, not its potential for misuse and terror. In The Island of Dr. Moreau, a shipwrecked gentleman named Edward Prendick, stranded on a Pacific island lorded over by the notorious Dr. Moreau, confronts dark secrets, strange creatures, and a reason to run for his life.While this riveting tale was intended to be a commentary on evolution, divine creation, and the tension between human nature and culture, modern readers familiar with genetic engineering will marvel at Wells's prediction of the ethical issues raised by producing "smarter" human beings or bringing back extinct species. These levels of interpretation add a richness to Prendick's adventures on Dr. Moreau's island of lost souls without distracting from what is still a rip-roaring good read.

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  The Effigy

  G. Ranger Wormser

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  Gwendolyn Ranger Wormser was a Victorian writer best known for her weird psychological horror stories.'The Effigy' is the story of Genevieve Evans, a young woman in an unhappy marriage who is dominated by her unscrupulous, controlling father and belittled by her uncaring husband. Her frustration and rage, particularly at her father, whose portrait hangs over the fireplace, are extreme. But then Genevieve discovers a very strange thing about the portrait...and at once she finds she has a wicked, dangerous power at her fingertips with which she can take her terrible revenge.

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  Lafcadio Hearn - A Short Story...

  Lafcadio Hearn

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  Lafcadio Hearn was born on the 27th June 1850 on the Ionian isle of Levkás in Greece to a British Army officer and a Greek Mother. 
   
  His father, fearing for his career prospects at being married to a Greek Orthodox wife, sent them to Dublin whilst he continued to advance his career with further postings.  Life there was difficult for mother and son.  His father returned, wounded and traumatised, when Lafcadio was three.  He annulled the marriage and she remarried but had to give up care of Lafcadio to her sister-in law.   
   
  After brief periods for Catholic education in England and France he emigrated to Ohio in the United States when he was 19, taking on a series of casual jobs before embarking on a career as a journalist, publishing poems and essays in Cincinnati.  It was whilst here that he began a side-line in translating, starting with Gautier and Flaubert.  He married in 1874 to a 20 year old African-American woman in violation of Ohio's anti-miscegenation law.  The marriage soon failed. 
   
  In 1877 he relocated to New Orleans to write on a variety of themes before picking up a two year assignment from Harper’s to write in the West Indies, where he also wrote his first novel. 
   
  In 1890 Harper’s sent him to Japan.  Here he left journalism and took the remarkable decision to become a schoolteacher in the north of Japan.   Enraptured by the culture he was driven to explain it in various Western publications to those who had little, if any, knowledge of its culture.  Within the year he had fallen in love with, and married, a high-born Japanese lady, together they would have four children.   
   
  In 1895 he became a Japanese national and took the name Koizumi Yakumo, Koizumi being his wife’s family name. 
   
  The following few years, whilst a professor of Literature at the Imperial University of Japan, were his most creative and admired period.   
   
  Lafcadio Hearn died of heart failure on the 26th of September 1904, in Tokyo, Japan shortly before leaving to deliver a series of lectures at Cornell University in New York State.  He was 54. 
   
  1 - Lafcadio Hearn - A Short Story Collection - An Introduction 
  2 - A Dead Secret by Lafcadio Hearn 
  3 - Before the Supreme Court by Lafcadio Hearn 
  4 - Diplomacy by Lafcadio Hearn 
  5 - L'Amour Apres La Mort by Lafcadio Hearn 
  6 - Of A Promise Broken by Lafcadio Hearn 
  7 - Stranger Than Fiction by Lafcadio Hearn 
  8 - The Corpse Rider by Lafcadio Hearn 
  9 - The Ghostly Kiss by Lafcadio Hearn 
  10 - The Undying One by Lafcadio Hearn 
  11 - The Vision of the Dead Creole by Lafcadio Hearn

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  The Unrest Cure

  Saki Saki

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  J.P Huddle and his sister live a staid life in the country where they have settled a little too comfortably into elderly middle-age. When Clovis, a fellow passenger on the train hears of their dilemma he decides that instead of a rest cure, what they need is an un-rest cure. Listen to the humorous chaos that ensues when the Huddle household is turned upside down in the name of an UNREST CURE.

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  The Wind in the Portico

  John Buchan

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  Colonel John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir (1875 - 1940) was a Scottish novelist, historian and politician. He is best known for his mystery and ghost stories.The Wind in the Portico is a strange tale of a visit by a classical scholar, Nightingale, to an odd castle set in a park in Shropshire where a rare manuscript is housed.The owner of the castle is the amiable but eccentric Dubellay, an amateur historian who inherited his title and mansion ten years earlier and took the opportunity to excavate the site of an old Roman temple in the grounds. Since then he has spent a fortune building a huge and bizarre portico onto one side of his house as a home for the carvings and altar from the temple.Nightingale is puzzled by the oppressive heat in the house, the strange hot wind which blows through the portico... and most of all by the very odd behaviour of Dubellay. It appears that Dubellay is in terrible danger and something highly sinister has taken up residence in the portico.

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