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  Vampyre The - A Tale

  John William Polidori

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  John William Polidori was born on 7th September 1795 in London to Gaetano Polidori, an Italian political émigré scholar, and Anna Maria Pierce, an English governess. He was the eldest of 8 children. 
   
  From 1804 Polidori was a pupil at the recently formed Ampleforth College. In 1810 he proceeded to the University of Edinburgh, where he wrote a thesis on sleepwalking and received his degree as a doctor of medicine on 1st August 1815. He was 19. 
   
  In 1816, Dr. Polidori was given the job of Byron’s personal physician and accompanied him on a trip through Europe. The publisher John Murray offered Polidori £500 to keep a diary of their travels. At the Villa Diodati, Byron’s rented villa at Lake Geneva in Switzerland, the pair met with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont. 
   
  One night in June, after the company had read aloud from a French collection of German horror tales, Byron suggested they each write a ghost story. There were to be two outstanding works from that evening; ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley and Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’ which would be the first published modern vampire story in English. 
   
  Dismissed by Byron, Polidori traveled in Italy and then returned to England. His story, ‘The Vampyre’, was published in the April 1819 issue of New Monthly Magazine without his permission. Much to the annoyance of both Polidori and Byron it was the latter who was credited as author.   
   
  Polidori also had published ‘Ximenes, The Wreath & Other Poems’ in 1819 and his long theological and sacred poem ‘The Fall of the Angels’ in 1821 as well as two plays, essays and his diary.  
   
  Despite his youth Polidori was increasingly worn down by gambling debts and depression.   
   
  John William Polidori died on 24th August 1821 at the age of only 25 in London.  Although his death was recorded as death by natural causes, strong evidence asserts that it was suicide by means of cyanide.

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  Call of Cthulhu The (Unabridged)

  H. P. Lovecraft

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  "The Call of Cthulhu" is one of H. P. Lovecraft's best-known short stories. Written in the summer of 1926, it was first published in Weird Tales, February 1928. It is the only story written by Lovecraft in which the extraterrestrial entity Cthulhu himself makes a major appearance. It is written in a documentary style, with three independent narratives linked together by the device of a narrator discovering notes left by a deceased relative. The narrator pieces together the whole truth and disturbing significance of the information he possesses, illustrating the story's first line: "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity; and it was not meant that we should voyage far."

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  The Loosened Cord

  Alexander W. Drake

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  Alexander W. Drake (1843-1916) was a successful American wood engraver and art collector and director of the art department for Scribner’s and Century magazines. The weird tales he wrote were collected by friends to memorialize him following his death.'The Loosened Cord' (1894) describes an elaborate dinner party which includes an unusual decoration - a small bird in a gilded cage attached to a balloon by a silk cord. The cord comes loose, and the cage floats away with its captive bird. What happens next to the bird is more than extraordinary.

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  Black Beauty

  Anna Sewell

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  Black Beauty spent her youthful days grazing in grassy meadows, with ponds of clear water, shade trees and apples. But soon these pleasures would severely change into a life of hard and often dangerous work. She hoped that one day she would return to the meadows and be with her old friends by the apple trees.

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  A Tale of Two Cities

  Charles Dickens

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  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’. A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens’s only historical novel, sets personal happiness against the terrors of the French Revolution where the search for social justice sacrifices individual rights. Dr Manette has emerged from eighteen years’ unjust imprisonment in the Bastille: by an ironic twist of fate, his daughter Lucie’s marriage draws the family into a terrifying web of circumstance which, it seems, can only end in death by the guillotine.

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  On the Decay of the Art of Lying

  Mark Twain

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  This humorous short essay is written with all the wit and biting sarcasm that is one of the trademarks of Mark Twain. The Decay of the Art of Lying does not reveal why one should not lie, but reveals in detail the proper way to lie — told from a true expert.

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