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  Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual...

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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  "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual" is a short story by Arthur Conan Doyle, featuring his fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. The story was originally published in Strand Magazine in 1893, and was collected later in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Unlike the majority of Holmes stories, the main narrator is not Doctor Watson, but Sherlock Holmes himself. With Watson providing an introduction, the story within a story is a classic example of a frame tale. It is one of the earliest recorded cases investigated by Holmes, and establishes his problem solving skills. In the story, Holmes recounts to Watson the events arising after a visit from a university acquaintance, Reginald Musgrave. Musgrave visits Holmes after the disappearance of two of his domestic staff, Rachel Howells, a maid, and Richard Brunton, the longtime butler. The pair vanished after Musgrave had dismissed Brunton for secretly reading a family document, the Musgrave Ritual. The Ritual, which dates from the 17th century, is a riddle set in question/response form. It reads:...

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  Day's Lodging A (Unabridged)

  Jack London

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  Jack London (born John Griffith Chaney, January 12, 1876 - November 22, 1916) was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone.A DAY'S LODGING: It was the gosh-dangdest stampede I ever seen. A thousand dog-teams hittin' the ice. You couldn't see 'm fer smoke. Two white men an' a Swede froze to death that night, an' there was a dozen busted their lungs. But didn't I see with my own eyes the bottom of the water-hole? It was yellow with gold like a mustard-plaster. That's why I staked the Yukon for a minin' claim. That's what made the stampede. An' then there was nothin' to it.

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  Frankenstein

  Mary Shelley

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  Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus is a novel written by the British author Mary Shelley. Shelley wrote the novel when she was 18 years old. The first edition was published anonymously in London in 1818, and this audiobook is read from that text. The title of the novel refers to the scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who learns how to create life and creates a being in the likeness of man, but larger than average and more powerful. In modern popular culture, people have tended to refer to the Creature as "Frankenstein" (especially in films since 1931), despite this being the name of the scientist, and the creature being unnamed in the book itself. Frankenstein is a novel infused with elements of the Gothic novel and the Romantic movement. It was also a warning against the "over-reaching" of modern man and the Industrial Revolution, alluded to in the novel's subtitle, The Modern Prometheus. The story has had an influence across literature and popular culture and spawned a complete genre of horror stories and films. It is arguably considered the first fully-realised science fiction novel and raises many issues still relevant to today's society. 

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  Mary E Mann - A Short Story...

  Mary E. Mann

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  Mary Rackham was born in Norwich on 14th August 1848 to a merchant family.  Little is known of her early life and her biography only re-appears in September 1871 with marriage to Fairman Joseph Mann, a farmer with 800 acres.   
   
  Mary moved to Shropham, Norfolk and became involved with the workhouse, visiting the sick and other unfortunates of the parish, her observations and experiences a valuable source for her later stories.  
   
  She took up writing, partly to offset the dreary village life of her surroundings, in the 1880s and published her first novel, ‘The Parish of Hilby’ (1883) at her own expense. It was well received by the critics.  
   
  Thus began a career that spanning three decades provided thirty-three novels, hundreds of short stories, and fourteen plays.? Her work was largely focused on rural life in Norfolk and centered on the fictional town of Dulditch, with grim but authentic accounts of poverty and deprivation.  
   
  Her marriage produced one boy and three girls. With her husband's death in 1913, she moved to Sheringham.  
   
  She is regarded as a major contributor to East Anglian literature with particular praise given to her short stories. 
   
  Mary E Mann died on 19th May 1929.  She was 80.  Her grave-marker is a carved open book with the epitaph ‘We bring our years to an end, as if it were a tale that is told’. 
   
  1 - The Short Stories of Mary E Mann - An Introduction 
  2 - Wolf Charlie by Mary E Mann 
  3 - Ben Pitcher's Elly by Mary E Mann 
  4 - Some of the Shipwrecked by Mary E Mann 
  5 - Rats by Mary E Mann 
  6 - Clomayne's Clerk by Mary E Mann 
  7 - The Country Doctor by Mary E Mann 
  8 - Little Brother by Mary E Mann

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  The Idiots

  Joseph Conrad

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  Conrad's truly first short story, written during his honeymoon (1896), published in The Savoy periodical, 1896, and collected in Tales of Unrest, 1898.A Breton farmer, returning from national service, takes over the family farm and marries a local girl, hoping to have sons who will inherit the family farm and carry on his own traditions.All appears to be going to plan, when the first pregnancy produces twin boy. But the children turn out to be mentally disabled. When the next child arrives, also a boy, he too turns out to have the same condition. The farmer turns to religion and takes up going to mass.The next child is a girl... and she also shares the same medical condition as her brothers. The farmer cannot accept this terrible blow of fate and becomes increasinly drunk and irrational - but it is his long-suffering wife who cracks first - and when she does, the results are both dramatic and tragic.

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  Howards End

  E. M. Forster

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  "Howards End" is one of E.M. Forster's most celebrated novels, first published in 1910. At the heart of the story is the country house, Howards End, which becomes a symbol for the narrative's exploration of the social, economic, and class divisions in early 20th-century England. The novel intertwines the lives of three families: the idealistic, intellectual Schlegel sisters, the wealthy, pragmatic Wilcoxes, and the working-class Basts. Through their interconnected relationships, Forster scrutinizes the changing societal landscape, especially the diminishing values of the Edwardian era and the rise of modernity. Themes of inheritance, belonging, love, and betrayal are delicately interwoven, showcasing Forster's profound understanding of human nature and societal constraints.

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