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  Three Short Stories

  E. T. A. Hoffmann

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  E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) was a German Romantic author of fantasy and horror as well as a jurist, composer, music critic, draftsman and caricaturist. His stories were highly influential during the 19th century, and he is one of the major authors of the Romantic movement.  
  'The Mines of Falun' tells the story of Elis Fröbom, a sailor who returns from the East Indies to Gothenburg in Sweden, only to discover that his mother has died and he is alone in the world. He tells his story to an old miner who befriends him on the quay, and the miner tells him about the magical mines of Falun and urges him to become a miner. Soon after this, he sets out on a journey and constantly sees the mysterious old miner ahead of him, showing him the way, and he realises that he is on the way to Falun. 
  Once there he is taken into the house of the mine owner, Pehrson Dahlsjö, and falls in love with his lovely daughter, Ulla Dahlsjö. But the ghostly old miner will not permit Elis to be distracted from mining by his love for an earthly woman, and Elis is torn between his love for Ulla and his obsession with the underground world of fires and minerals. It is this obsession, and the pull of the ghost of the miner, which leads to his destruction.  
  'Gambler's Luck' tells the story of a young German baron who is enjoying a streak of beginner's luck at the gambling tables. As his winnings mount up, the young man is gradually becoming sucked into the addictive habit of gambling. One night a stranger appears at the gambling table and watches the baron intently. The stranger appears night after night, until the baron is infuriated and challenges the man. A later chance meeting between the two results in the stranger relating a most unusual and gripping tale...  
  'The Cremona Violin' is the story of Councillor Krespel, an eccentric violin maker who lives with a mysterious woman, Antonia, who has the most beautiful singing voice ever heard by anyone in the town, but she was only ever heard to sing once. Krespel makes the best violins in the world but never sells any and plays each violin only once. There is a strange secret behind this odd behaviour...but it is only years later that the strange truth comes out.

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  The Prophet

  Kahlil Gibran

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  The Prophet is a book of 26 prose poetry fables written in English by the Lebanese-American poet and writer Khalil Gibran. It was originally published in 1923 by Alfred A. Knopf. It is Gibran's best known work. The Prophet has been translated into over 100 different languages, making it one of the most translated books in history, and it has never been out of print.The prophet, Al Mustafa, has lived in the city of Orphalese for 12 years and is about to board a ship which will carry him home. He is stopped by a group of people, with whom he discusses topics such as life and the human condition. The book is divided into chapters dealing with love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, houses, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death.

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  Les Misérables: Volume 2:...

  Victor Hugo

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  Victor-Marie Hugo (26 February 1802 - 22 May 1885) was a French poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. During a literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote abundantly in an exceptional variety of genres: lyrics, satires, epics, philosophical poems, epigrams, novels, history, critical essays, political speeches, funeral orations, diaries, and letters public and private, as well as dramas in verse and prose.BOOK 4: THE GORBEAU HOVEL: Forty years ago, a rambler who had ventured into that unknown country of the Salpêtrière, and who had mounted to the Barrière d'Italie by way of the boulevard, reached a point where it might be said that Paris disappeared.

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  Elizabeth and Her German Garden

  Elizabeth Von Arnim

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  Elizabeth von Arnim, who is best known for her later novel The Enchanted April, married a Prussian aristocrat and, with their five children, lived in Nassenheide, Pomerania. Elizabeth and Her German Garden is a semi-autobiographical novel about the joy that the protagonist finds in the delights of her Pomeranian garden, which provides relief from the stifling environment of her household. The novel was originally published anonymously because von Arnim feared that her husband, whom she satirised in the book, would disapprove.Each season of the year is wittily recorded, bringing new events and visitors, conveyed through von Arnim’s idiosyncratic perspective, while the ‘kingdom of heaven’ of the garden provides a calm place where the author finds solace.

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  Pal Joey

  John O'Hara

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  For its 75th anniversary and Frank Sinatra's centennial: the Jazz Age masterpiece that inspired the iconic Sinatra film and the hit Broadway musical.  
  On the seedy side of Chicago nightlife in the 1930s, Joey Evans is a poor man's Bing Crosby - a big-talking small-time nightclub crooner down on his luck but always on the make. In slangy, error-littered letters signed "Pal Joey", he recounts his exploits with brash nightclub managers, shady business partners, and every pretty girl ("mouse") he meets. Charismatic yet conniving, Pal Joey is a smooth operator whose bravado and big ideas disguise a far less self-assured soul caught up in the rags-to-riches dream of the Jazz Age.  
  Originally serialized in The New Yorker and the inspiration for the 1940 Rodgers and Hart musical of the same name and the 1957 film starring Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak, and Rita Hayworth, Pal Joey is the story of a true "heel", as complex and memorable as any antihero in American literature.

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  The Pistol-Shot

  Alexander Pushkin

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  Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799 – 1837) was a Russian author of the Romantic era who is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. He was notoriously sensitive about his own personal honour and is believed to have fought as many as twenty-nine duels... the last of which proved fatal for him.A duel is the crux of his masterful short story "The Pistol-Shot" - but it is a duel with a difference. It starts out normally enough... an insult, a challenge, a meeting with pistols at dawn. But when the first shot misses, the insolent nonchalence of the first shooter (who goes on eating cherries while is adversary takes aim) prompts the other dueller to delay taking his shot until such a time as shall suit him. He is determined to pick a moment when death will be most unwelcome and inconvenient for his adversary. One day a letter arrives for him... and he knows that the moment has come.

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