Other books that might interest you

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  Red-Headed League The (Unabridged)

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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  Jabez Wilson, a pawnbroker, consults Holmes about a job, gained only because of his red hair, which took him away from his shop for long periods each day; the job for to simply copy the Encyclopædia Britannica. After eight weeks, he was suddenly informed that the job ended. After some investigation at Wilson's shop, Holmes contacts a police inspector and the manager of a nearby bank. With Watson, they hide in the bank vault and catch two thieves who had dug a tunnel from the shop while Wilson was at the decoy copying job.

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  Six Short Stories - The Best of...

  Wilkie Collins

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  Six of Wilkie Collins' best short stories: "The Dead Hand", "The Devil's Spectacles", "Major Namby", "Nine O'Clock", "A Terribly Strange Bed", and "My Black Mirror".

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  Bernice Bobs Her Hair

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

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  Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota into an upper-middle class family. Whilst his mother was pregnant with him, his two young sisters tragically died.  Fitzgerald once said this was when his destiny as a writer was ordained. 
   
  His intelligence and talent was recognised from an early age, with his first story, about a detective being published in the school magazine when he was just 13.   
   
  In 1913 he enrolled at Princeton but his devotion to his own literary pursuits resulted in him leaving and, rather bizarrely, joining the Army.  In 1918, stationed at Fort Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama he met and became infatuated and then inseparable from Zelda Sayre.  Initially though she refused to marry him but with the success of ‘This Side of Paradise’, the fame and the flow of money enabled them both to begin a gilded life.  For them this was The Jazz Age.  For Fitzgerald he was already an alcoholic. 
   
  He continued to write with great mastery and the titles of his novels and many of his 164 short stories are household names.  The Great Gatsby, often cited as The Great American Novel was published to mixed reviews.  As America moved from the Great Depression to the slaughter of the Second World War his works and himself were seen as far too entwined with the decadent twenties. The world had moved on and he hadn’t.   
   
  Further tragedy was never far from his life. Zelda after years of erratic and now intolerable behaviour was committed to an institution in 1936.  His own sales began to decline and he became a hack for hire in Hollywood, dependent on increasing amounts of booze and the weekly pay check.  His drunken state had often resulted in arrest or hospitalisation, further imperiling his talents.   Despite his contribution to many MGM films he received only one credit. 
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  The end came all too soon for one of America’s greatest ever writers.  On 21st December 1940, at only 44 years of age in Hollywood, F Scott Fitzgerald succumbed to a heart attack. 
   
  His classic ‘Bernice Bobs Her Hair’ carefully pulls apart the relationship between two cousins one hot summer.  Something has to give and with Fitzgerald its an absolute certainty that the brittle lives of young women finally snap in unique ways.

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  Alice in Wonderland (Argo Classics)

  Lewis Carroll

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  William Collins Books and Decca Records are proud to present ARGO Classics, a historic catalogue of classic fiction read by some of the world’s most renowned voices. Originally released as vinyl records, these expertly abridged and remastered stories are now available to download for the first time. 
  No story captures the uneasy feeling of being in a strange new world quite like Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. 
  The beloved tale, read by the iconic Jane Asher, sees Alice following a peculiar White Rabbit into the bizarre world of Wonderland, where nothing seems to make sense and everything she knows is turned on its head. 
  For fans of Kenneth Grahame (Pagan Papers), Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), Majestic Classics (Dracula Illustrated), Jane Austen (Mansfield Park), and Rocket Classic Collection (Emma).

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  Top 10 Short Stories The - Saki...

  Saki Saki

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  The Top Ten -  Saki - An Introduction 
   
  The name H H Munro is obscured beneath the literary mantle of his nom de plume; Saki.  A writer of his times, the stories perfectly portray society’s whims and tastes in a delicate yet at times, barbed humour.  A divine wit who conjured words into quite extraordinary works. 
   
  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. 
   
  1 - The Top Ten - Saki - An Introduction 
  2 - The Lumber Room by Saki 
  3 - Tobermory by Saki 
  4 - The Open Window by Saki 
  5 - The Reticence of Lady Anne by Saki  
  6 - The Hounds of Fate by Saki 
  7 - Mrs Packletide's Tiger by Saki 
  8 - The Unrest Cure by Saki 
  9 - The Music on the Hill by Saki 
  10 - Sredni Vashtar by Saki 
  11 - The Interlopers by Saki

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  A Horse's Tale - Unabridged

  Mark Twain

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  A Horse's Tale (1907) is a novel by Mark Twain, written against bullfighting. It was written partially in the voice of Soldier Boy, who is Buffalo Bill's favorite horse, at a fictional frontier outpost with the U.S. 7th Cavalry. Excerpt from the book: "I am Buffalo Bill's horse. I have spent my life under his saddle—with him in it, too, and he is good for two hundred pounds, without his clothes; and there is no telling how much he does weigh when he is out on the war-path and has his batteries belted on. He is over six feet, is young, hasn't an ounce of waste flesh, is straight, graceful, springy in his motions, quick as a cat, and has a handsome face, and black hair dangling down on his shoulders, and is beautiful to look at; and nobody is braver than he is, and nobody is stronger, except myself."

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