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  Washington Irving - A Short...

  Washington Irving

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  Washington Irving was born on 3rd April, 1783, the youngest of 11, in New York. 
    
  Irving found his real interests away from school in literature and the theatre.  An outbreak of yellow fever at 15 moved him away from Manhattan and into the surrounding countryside providing valuable settings for later works such as ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’. 
   
  By 19 Irving was writing regularly to the New York Morning Chronicle, commenting on the theatrical and social scenes.  When his health began to fail, he was sent on the Grand Tour of Europe.  Bizarrely he ignored most of the great sights on offer to concentrate on developing his social and conversational powers.  His health, though, did improve.  
   
  In 1806, back in New York to study law, he scraped a pass at the bar and then founded with several others the literary magazine Salmagundi. Irving nicknamed the city ‘Gotham City’, a name still in use today.  Moderately successful, the magazine spread Irving’s reputation beyond New York. 
   
  In 1809 while mourning the death of his teenage fiancée Irving finished his first significant book, ‘A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynsasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker’.  It satirised local history, local historians and politics.  It received great critical acclaim. 
   
  Unfortunately his family’s established trading company was now facing great upheavals and Irving was dispatched to England to try to sort it out.  After two years he could see no way out but bankruptcy.  This left him in England with no real employment prospects, and so he returned to writing.  
   
  He sent some short stories back to New York to be published as ‘The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent’.  The first part included ‘Rip Van Winkle’ and was extremely successful.  The sixth part contained ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’.  
   
  Beset by literary piracy, with no copyright law at the time, he set about publishing legitimate copies in England to outwit the bootleggers.  From now on Irving published concurrently in America and England in order to render piracy obsolete.  
   
  In August 1824, he published ‘Tales of a Traveller’, which included the famed ‘The Devil and Tom Walker’.  
   
  In 1826, the American Minister to Spain, invited him to Madrid where he could examine the many historical documents that he had access to.  Irving reveled in both the size of the libraries he was granted access to and their rich quality.  Historical works flowed from his pen further enhancing his reputation and fortune.   
   
  Following the completion of ‘Tales of the Alhambra’ in 1832, Irving returned to America after 17 years abroad. He was now a figurehead of American literature and dispensed advice to Edgar Allan Poe amongst others.  Irving also became an advocate for American copyright legislation.  
   
  A later appointment as Minister to Spain in 1842 left him disheartened at the antics of the various political factions he encountered.  It also afforded him no time to write as he had hoped.  
   
  On his return home he began an ‘Author’s Revised Edition’ of his works agreeing an unprecedented deal for 12 per cent of the retail profits.  
   
  Washington Irving died of a heart attack at his ‘Sunnyside’ home on the 28th November 1859 at the age of 76, a few months after completing his five volume George Washington biography, in whose honour he had been named. 
   
  01 - Washington Irving - A Short Story Collection - An Introduction 
  02 - The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving 
  03 - The Devil and Tom Walker by Washington Irving 
  04 - The Art of Book-Making by Washington Irving 
  05 - The Conquest of the Earth by the Moon by Washington Irving 
  06 - John Bull by Washington Irving

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  The Very Best Classic Crime...

  G. K. Chesterton, Edgar Wallace,...

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  A timeless collection of crime short stories full of suspense and twists including stories by G. K. Chesteron, Edgar Wallace and Arthur Conan Doyle. Classic recordings read by Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud and Bart Wolffe.

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  The Call of Cthulhu

  H. P. Lovecraft

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  The Call of Cthulhu is one of Lovecraft's best-known works. It is the only story written by Lovecraft in which the extraterrestrial entity Cthulhu himself makes a major appearance. Narrator Francis Wayland Thurston, recounts his discovery of the strange notes left behind by his granduncle, George Gammell Angell, a prominent Professor of Semitic languages at Brown University. At first the story revolves around a small bas-relief sculpture found among the papers, which the narrator describes: "My somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature.... A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings". The sculpture is the work of Henry Anthony Wilcox, a student at the Rhode Island School of Design who based the work on delirious dreams of "great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror". Frequent references to Cthulhu and R'lyeh are found in papers authored by Wilcox. Angell also discovers reports of "outre mental illnesses and outbreaks of group folly or mania" around the world (in New York City, "hysterical Levantines" mob police; in California, a Theosophist colony dons white robes to await a "glorious fulfillment")...

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  Top 10 Short Stories The - The...

  Frances W Harper

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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. 
   
  Race and gender have denied many their rightful place in literary history.  When we take time to look again we find remarkable jewels of astonishing merit that reveal just how many talented stories have emerged from the pens of these very special women. 
   
  01 - The Top 10 - The African American Women - An Introduction 
  2 - Two Offers by Frances W Harper 
  3 - The Wooing of Pastor Cummings by Georgia F Stewart 
  4 - The Stones of the Village by Alice Dunbar Nelson 
  5 - The Hoodoo by Martha Gruening 
  6 - The Octoroon's Revenge by Ruth D Todd 
  7 - Breaking the Color Line by Annie McCary 
  8 - The Quadroons by Lydia Maria Child 
  9 - The Preacher at Hill Station by Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman 
  10 - Talma by Pauline E Hopkins 
  11 - Aunt Lindy. A Story Founded on Real Life by Victoria Earle Matthews

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  How Santa Claus Came to...

  Bret Harte

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  Originally published in Harte's 1875 short-story collection The Tales of the Argonauts, How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar is set in California in the early 1860s and, like the rest of the tales in that collection, features the gold-seeking Argonauts. In this tale, like many of Harte's others, the folly and grit of human existence balance any good intentions, good cheer, or hope, resulting in a more complicated and somewhat bleak ending than is commonly found in most Christmas tales. This recording of How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar was recorded as part of Dreamscape's Classic Christmas Stories: A Collection of Timeless Holiday Tales.

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  Tainna

  Norma Dunning

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  Drawing on both lived experience and cultural memory, Norma Dunning brings together six powerful short stories centered on modern-day Inuk characters in Tainna. Ranging from homeless to extravagantly wealthy, from spiritual to jaded, from young to elderly, and even from alive to deceased, Dunning’s characters are united by shared feelings of alienation, displacement, and loneliness resulting from their experiences in southern Canada. In Tainna?meaning “the unseen ones” and pronounced Da?e?nn?a?a fraught reunion between sisters Sila and Amak ends in an uneasy understanding. From the spirit realm, Chevy Bass watches over his imperiled grandson, Kunak. And in the title story, the broken-hearted Bunny wanders during a freezing night onto a golf course, where, later, a flock of geese stand vigil until her body is discovered by a kind stranger. Norma Dunning’s masterful storytelling uses humor and incisive detail to create compelling characters who discover themselves in a hostile land where prejudice, misogyny, and inequity are most often found hidden in plain sight. There, they must rely on their wits, artistic talent, senses of humor, and spirituality­ for survival, and there, too, they find solace in shining moments of reconnection with their families and communities.

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