Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  Are You Happy? - Stories

  Lori Ostlund

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  "Once I read the first story in Are You Happy?, I put aside everything else to savor the rest. This is a wise collection, capturing its characters swimming upstream to encounter their fates. With vivid and compassionate prose that explores the countless ways we betray and then rediscover ourselves, Lori Ostlund reminds us of the vitality of the genre." 
  —Jai Chakrabarti, author of A Play for the End of the World and A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness 
   
   
   
  Nine exquisite stories that explore class, desire, identity, and the specter of violence that looms daily over women and the LGBTQ+ community. 
   
   
   
  An aspiring veterinarian survives a plane crash and starts life over in California. A woman mourns the loss of her childhood friend's innocence and rethinks justice. A queer teacher's sense of safety in the classroom is destroyed. With settings ranging from small-town Minnesota to New Mexico, from bars and bedrooms to a furniture store and a community college, Are You Happy? casts a spotlight on people who try—and often fail—to make peace with their pasts while navigating their present relationships and notions of self. In prose that is evocative and restrained, unpredictable and masterful, Lori Ostlund offers a darkly humorous and compassionate examination of America's preoccupation with loneliness, happiness, guns, and violence.

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  The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard

  Arthur Conan Doyle

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  Stories of adventures and derring-do featuring the man who is “after Holmes and Watson, Arthur Conan Doyle’s most successful literary creation” (Julian Symons, Edgar Award–winning British crime writer).   Originally published in The Strand magazine in the 1890s, the tales of Etienne Gerard, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, shows Arthur Conan Doyle at his satiric best. In his own words, Gerard takes readers through his illustrious career, his glorious feats as a lieutenant, squadron officer, colonel, and chief of a brigade. It is a hero’s journey, embarked on by a man known far and wide for his duel with six fencing masters, and who found glory on the battlefield and taught Europe how to fight.   Follow Gerard on his exploits as he encounters a man rumored to be the most wicked in Poland in “How the Brigadier Came to the Castle of Gloom.” “How the Brigadier Slew the Brothers of Ajaccio” portrays the very singular affair which propelled his career upwards and established his secret bond with Emperor Napoleon. And Gerard modestly recounts how he cemented his place in history as one of Napoleon’s greatest confidants in “How the Brigadier Was Tempted by the Devil.”  “In its pages you will find adventure, action, romance, love and self-sacrifice, hair’s-breadth escape and reckless courage, gallantry, panache and a droll, backhand humor that rivals that of P.G. Wodehouse. You will also find yourself, even more than with the celebrated stories of Holmes and Watson, in the hands of an indisputable artist. For more than any other adventure stories I know, these stories have a power to move the reader.” —Michael Chabon on NPR’s You Must Read This

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  The Daughter of Lilith - From...

  Anatole France

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  François-Anatole Thibault was born on the 16th April 1844 in Paris, France, the son of a bookseller and bibliophile. 
  He studied at the Collège Stanislas, a private Catholic school, and after graduating joined his father in the bookstore, which specialised in works on the French Revolution.  Several years later he secured a position as cataloguer at Bacheline-Deflorenne and at Lemerre before being appointed librarian for the French Senate in 1876. 
  His literary career had begun as a journalist and as a poet before publishing his novel ‘Le Crime de Sylvestre Bonnard’ in 1881.  Praised for its elegant prose, it won him a prestigious prize from the Académie Française, which later elected him to its storied ranks. 
  His works were profound and thoughtful and often couched in surreal and outlandish expressions; whether penguins baptized by a near-blind Abbott transformed themselves into humans or of a guardian angel who becomes an atheist, his stories turned established thought into startling literature. 
  His short stories run in the same vein.  The premise may seem plausible but his distinctive style turns them into an individual viewpoint which invokes both discussion and admiration. 
  In his private life his relationships with women were often turbulent.  A Socialist, he was a fervent supporter of the Russian Revolution and the early years of the French Communist party. 
  He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921 but the following year his entire canon of works was placed on the prohibited list of the Catholic Church, which he thought of as a credit to his name. 
  Anatole France died on the 12th October 1924 in Tours.  He was 80.

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  Fyodor Dostovesky - A Short...

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

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  Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow on 11th November, 1821 to distinguished multi-ethnic parents from a Lithuanian background.   
   
  His childhood years were at the family home in hospital grounds which also contained an orphanage, an insane asylum and a cemetery for criminals.  The young Fyodor often disobeyed his father by talking to the ill in the hospital gardens.   
   
  His health was compromised at age 9 when he experienced his first epileptic fit. By the time he was a teenager both parents had died and he was now enrolled in a military academy where he graduated and eventually became a Lieutenant in 1842.  He left military service the next year. 
   
  In 1846 he published his first novel ‘Poor Cow’ to great literary acclaim.  His next was unable to emulate that success but his short stories helped provide an income.  Life as an author was definitely difficult. As he began his next work he was arrested and incarcerated for treason and participation in the political and literary Petrashevsky Circle. Although the case was weak and unjustified he was sentenced to 4 years of hard labour followed by 5 years of military service in a Siberian regiment.  
   
  Despite the undoubted hardships and setbacks in his life, and whether they helped or hindered his writing, his talents produced many exceptional works of literature including ‘Crime and Punishment’, ‘The Idiot’ and ‘The Brothers Karamazov’.   
   
  Dostoevsky’s ability to get under the skin of his characters and show the inner workings of their mind was hugely influential and ahead of its time.  Interwoven with this was the influence of the broader social, spiritual and political forces at work in a person's psyche.   
   
  Fyodor Dostoevsky struggled financially and remained in poor health for much of his adult life.  He died from a lung haemorrhage on 9th February, 1881. 
   
  1 - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - A Short Story Collection - An Introduction 
  2 - The Dream of a Ridiculous Man by Fyodor Dostovesky 
  3 - An Honest Thief by Fyodor Dostoyveskey 
  4 - Bobok by Fyodor Dostoyevsky 
  5 - The Beggar Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree by Fyodor Dostoyevsky 
  6 - The Crocodile. An Extraordinary Incident - Part 1 by Fyodor Dostoyevsky 
  7 - The Crocodile. An Extraordinary Incident - Part 2 by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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  Charles Dickens - Chapter &...

  Charles Dickens

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  Literature is a world of words and wonder, able to take us on almost unimaginable journeys from the wild and fantastic to the grind and minutiae of life. 
   
  An author’s ideas are his building blocks, his architecture of the mind, building a structure on which all else will rest; the narrative, the characters, the words - those few words that begin the adventure. 
   
  In this series we look at some of our leading classic authors across two genres: the short story and the poem.  In this modern world there is an insatiable need to categorise and pigeon-hole everyone and everything.  But ideas, these grains and saplings of the brain, need to roam, to explore and find their perfect literary use vehicle.  Our authors are masters of many literary forms, perhaps known for one but themselves favouring another. 
   
  Story. Poems. Story.  Within these boundaries come all manner of invention and cast of characters.  And, of course, each author has their own way of revealing their own chapter and verse.    
   
  1 - Chapter & Verse - Charles Dickens - An Introduction 
  2 - The Signalman by Charles Dickens 
  3 - The Ivy Green by Charles Dickens 
  4 - The Song of the Wreck by Charles Dickens 
  5 - The Hymn of the Wiltshire Laborers by Charles Dickens 
  6 - A Child's Hymn by Charles Dickens 
  7 - Lucy's Song by Charles Dickens 
  8 - Little Nell's Funeral by Charles Dickens 
  9 - Gabriel Grub's Song by Charles Dickens 
  10 - George Edmund's Song by Charles Dickens 
  11 - Squire Norton's Song by Charles Dickens 
  12 - A Fine Old English Gentleman by Charles Dickens 
  13 - The Trial for Murder by Charles Dickens

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  A Slav Soul - From their pens to...

  Alexander Kuprin

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  Alexander Kuprin was born in Narovchat, Penza in Russia on 7th September 1870. 
  At 3 his Father died and he and mother moved to Moscow. By 10 he was enrolled at the Second Moscow Military High School and there his interest in literature began. The Alexander Military Academy followed and two years later he was a sub-lieutenant and posted to an Infantry Regiment for a further four years. 
  Despite his duties he was a now a keen writer and published his first short story at this time. His military duties also garnered him experiences for his breakthrough work ‘The Duel’.  Leaving the military he left for Kiev to work for local newspapers.  He continued to publish both stories and novels and by 1901 he was in St Petersburg becoming part of a group that included Chekhov, Ivan Bunin, Maxim Gorky and Leonid Andreyev.  
  In the years that followed further controversial works and acclaim followed.  His comments on the regime meant he was also put under secret police surveillance.   
  As World War I erupted, Kuprin opened a military hospital but was then given command of an infantry company in Finland. He was soon discharged on grounds of ill health.  
  The October Revolution saw him praise Lenin, but he warned that the Bolsheviks threatened Russian culture and might cause further widespread suffering to the peasants.  As Civil War raged he took his family to Helsinki and then on to Paris. 
  Exile saw his talents decline further and his succumbing to alcoholism. He became lonely and withdrawn. The family's poverty increased his malaise.   
  In May 1937, the Kuprin’s returned to Moscow.  He now saw his work published but wrote almost nothing new.  In 1938 his health rapidly deteriorated.  Already suffering from a kidney problems and sclerosis, he had now developed cancer of the oesophagus.  
  Alexander Kuprin died on 25th August 1938.

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