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  The Young Lady in Black

  Amyas Northcote

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  Amyas Northcote (1864–1923) was an English writer and a contemporary of M. R. James. He is best known for his ghost stories."The Young Lady in Black" is an eerie tale of a woman who died, leaving one crucial task in her life unfinished. The tale poses at the outset the question of whether the dead can return to earth to bring incomplete tasks to their conclusion... and the weird circumstances of this story appear to confirm the theory.

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  Selections from Battle-Pieces...

  Herman Melville

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  Published in 1866, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War is a collection of poems about the Civil War by Herman Melville. Many of the poems are inspired by second- and third-hand accounts from print news sources (especially the Rebellion Record) and from family and friends. A handful of trips Melville took before, during, and after the war provide additional angles of vision into the battles, the personalities, and the moods of war. In an opening note, Melville describes his project not so much as a systematic chronicle (though many of the individual poems refer to specific events) but as a kind of memory piece of national experience. The "aspects" to which he refers in the title are as diverse as "the moods of involuntary meditation-moods variable, and at times widely at variance." Much of the verse is stylistically conventional (more so than modern readers perhaps expect from the author of Moby-Dick), but the shifting subjectivities and unresolved traumas that unfold in the collection merit repeated contemplation. Melville's Battle-Pieces do not offer a neatly versified narrative of the Civil War but rather kaleidescopic glimpses of shifting emotions and ambivalent reflections of post-war America

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  The Model Millionaire

  Oscar Wilde

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  Hughie Erskine has a problem. He is madly in love with Laura Merton, but both of them are flat broke. Laura's father will only give his consent to their marriage if Hughie can prove he has a thousand pounds to his name.When Hughie drops in on his friend, the artist, Alan Trevor, he finds him painting a portrait of a ragged beggar. Sympathising with the poor man's plight, Hughie gives the old man a sovereign he can little afford. But the beggar is not all he seems, and Hughie's fortunes are about to change dramatically...

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  Ghost Stories of an Antiquary

  M. R. James

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  Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1931) is the title of M. R. James' first collection of ghost stories. He wrote many of his ghost stories to be read aloud in the long tradition of spooky Christmas Eve tales. By contrast to the gothic tales of his predecessors, James's stories often use rural settings, with a quiet, scholarly protagonist getting caught up in the activities of supernatural forces. The details of horror are almost never explicit, the stories relying on a gentle, bucolic background to emphasize the awfulness of the otherworldly intrusions.

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  Life's Enthusiasms

  David Starr Jordan

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  Mumu - Turgenev brilliantly...

  Ivan Turgenev

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  Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was born on 9th November 1818 in Oryol, Russia to parents from the nobility.  He and his two brothers were raised by their mother on the family estate.  Surrounded by foreign governesses he became fluent in French, German, and English.  Their father spent little time with them and this undoubtedly had an effect on him and his brothers.  When he was nine the family moved to Moscow to give their children a better education. 
   
  Turgenev studied for a year at the University of Moscow and then at the University of St Petersburg to study Classics, Russian literature, and philology.  During that time his father died from kidney stone disease.  In 1838 Turgenev studied philosophy and history at the University of Berlin for 3 years before returning to St Petersburg for his master's. 
   
  He started his career with the Russian Civil Service and it was only in 1852, after several earlier publications, that he made his name with his short story collection, ‘A Sportsman's Sketches’, based on his observations of peasant life and nature. 
    
  That same year he wrote an obituary for Nikolai Gogol: "Gogol is dead!... What Russian heart is not shaken by those three words?... He is gone, that man whom we now have the right (the bitter right, given to us by death) to call great."  The St Petersburg censor banned publication but the Moscow censor allowed it.  He was dismissed but Turgenev was held responsible and imprisoned for a month, and then exiled to his country estate.  
   
  Along with many other intellectuals Turgenev left Russia and settled in Paris in 1854.  During this period he wrote his finest stories and four novels.  
   
  Alexander II ascended the Russian throne in 1855, and the political climate relaxed.  Turgenev returned home.  
   
  ‘Fathers and Sons’, Turgenev's most famous and enduring novel, appeared in 1862. Its leading character is considered the first ‘Bolshevik’ in Russian literature. But the hostile reaction prompted Turgenev's decision to again leave Russia.  
   
  His health declined during his later years.  In January 1883, an aggressive malignant tumor was removed but by then it had metastasized in his upper spinal cord, causing him intense pain in his final few months of life.  
   
  Ivan Turgenev died on 3rd September 1883 of a spinal abscess, a complication of the metastatic liposarcoma, in his house near Paris.  He was buried in St Petersburg.  
   
  In Mumu, Turgenev hauntingly tells the story of a Gerasim, a six foot five deaf mute with the menial job of yard-porter who is ostracized by all those around him.  A dog, Mumu, becomes his only true and faithful friend.  One day he is given a dreadful and agonizing choice.

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