Other books that might interest you

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  Panzerkraftwagen

  F. Britten Austin

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  F. Britten Austin's famous story in which he imagines the scene as German soldiers on the Somme come face-to-face with Britain's new secret weapon...the first tanks.

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  What is Coming? - A Forecast of...

  H. G. Wells

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  Prophecy may vary between being an intellectual amusement and a serious occupation; serious not only in its intentions, but in its consequences. For it is the lot of prophets who frighten or disappoint to be stoned. But for some of us moderns, who have been touched with the spirit of science, prophesying is almost a habit of mind.

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  Tales Of Unrest

  Joseph Conrad

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  Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. He came to be regarded a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote stories and novels, many with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of what he saw as an impassive, inscrutable universe.Conrad is considered a literary impressionist by some and an early modernist by others, though his works also contain elements of 19th-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters, as in Lord Jim, for example, have influenced numerous authors. Many dramatic films have been adapted from and inspired by his works. Numerous writers and critics have commented that his fictional works, written largely in the first two decades of the 20th century, seem to have anticipated later world events.Writing near the peak of the British Empire, Conrad drew on the national experiences of his native Poland—during nearly all his life, parceled out among three occupying empires—and on his own experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world—including imperialism and colonialism—and that profoundly explore the human psyche.

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  The Invisible Man

  H. G. Wells

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  " I had not expected the suffering. A night of racking anguish, sickness and fainting. I became insensible and woke languid in the darkness. I shall never forget that dawn, and the strange horror of seeing that my hands had become as clouded glass, and watching them grow clearer and thinner as the day went by. My limbs became glassy, the bones and arteries faded, vanished, and the little white nerves went last. At last only the dead tips of the fingernails remained, pallid and white. I went and stared at nothing in my shaving glass. I had become an invisible man."  Vicki Morgan' s entertaining narration of this science fiction classic is a great introduction to the fantastic world of H.G. Wells and the brilliant imagination, the psychological insight, and startlingly accurate scientific predictions that made him one of the most influential writers of his day.

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  The Web and the Root

  Thomas Wolf

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  A man journeys from a small town to the big city in this prequel to the classic You Can’t Go Home Again. 
   
  Shortly before his death in 1938 at a tragically young age, author Thomas Wolfe presented his editor with an epic masterwork that was subsequently published as three separate novels: You Can’t Go Home Again, The Hills Beyond, and The Web and the Rock. 
   
  The Web and the Root features the three initial sections of the The Web and the Rock, widely considered to be the book’s strongest material. A prequel to You Can’t Go Home Again, with strong autobiographical undertones, it is the story of George Webber’s momentous journey from Libya Falls, North Carolina, to the Golden City of the North—offering vivid, sometimes cutting depictions of rural pleasures and small-town clannishness while exploring boundless urban possibility and the complex, violent undercurrents of the metropolis. 
   
  “Among his and my contemporaries, I ranked Wolfe first.” —William Faulkner 
   
  “The only contemporary writer who can be mentioned in the same breath as Dickens and Dostoevsky.” —The New Republic

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  In the Penal Colony

  Franz Kafka

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  Franz Kafka was born on 3rd July 1883 in Prague, then in Bohemia, the eldest of 6, into a middle-class Jewish family. 
   
  Life for the young Kafka and his passion for literature was often made an ordeal by his over-bearing and domineering entrepreneur of a father.   
   
  In 1889 Kafka was sent to the Deutsche Knabenschule, an elementary school in Prague. His father would only allow him to be educated in German-speaking schools and even went so far as to limit visits to the synagogue to four a year. 
   
  In 1901 he graduated from the classics-oriented Altstädter Gymnasium. Kafka did well there and across a large range of subjects.  He now enrolled at the Charles Ferdinand University, to study chemistry, but quickly switched to law for which he obtained his degree in June 1906 and then performed the mandatory year of unpaid service as clerk at the civil and criminal courts. 
   
  A job at an Italian insurance company left him little time to write and after a year he took another job with the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia where he stayed until ill health led to his resignation in 1922. 
   
  Although he saw work as a means to pay the bills and to allow him time to write, he received several promotions and was noted as a good employee. 
   
  By 1917 Kafka was suffering from tuberculosis, which required frequent periods of convalescence. Interspersed with this, were several intense affairs before he settled in Berlin with Dora Diamant, a 25-year-old kindergarten teacher who herself having left the ghetto now influenced Kafka's interest in the book of Jewish law, the Talmud. 
   
  Kafka’s on-going health was littered with problems. Apart from TB there were several other ailments, including migraines, insomnia, boils, depression, all usually brought on by excessive stresses and strains. He attempted to counteract all of this by naturopathic treatments, a vegetarian diet and consuming large quantities of unpasteurized milk. 
   
  His tuberculosis still worsened. He returned to Prague, where he died on 3rd June 1924. He was 40. 
   
  His literary works are few in number but towering in influence.  His masterpieces include ‘The Trial’, ‘The Metamorphosis’ as well as a number of short stories which reveal facets of humankind that truthfully could only be born from Kafka’s brain and pen. 
   
  His classic short story ‘In the Penal Colony’ begins with the innocuous words “It’s a peculiar apparatus,” as the Officer explains to the Traveller, what this grisly machine will do to the prisoners who serve their time here.

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