Maison d'édition: Bu Classics Books
Continuing the exploration of rural existence, this collection delves deeper into the human spirit facing the rigors of the frontier, remaining rooted in the authentic, dusty experience of those who work the land.
Leslie Harrison Lambert was born on 11th November 1883 in Nottingham. After attending Rugby School he trained to be a surveyor. One of his passions was magic and such was his prowess that he joined The Magic Circle, and performed at society events. By the beginning of World War I he was an amateur radio ham and volunteered to work at a coastguard station in Norfolk to intercept German radio transmissions. By November 1914 he was with the Admiralty at Naval Intelligence Room 40. By 1919 this had become part of the new Government Code and Cypher School. He was still there as World War II erupted across Europe and with many of his colleagues he transferred to Bletchley Park. There, in Hut 8, he was quoted as saying that "in contrast to his outrageously unconventional stories" that he led his life on "a monotonously regular timetable". Life outside the Intelligence services was very different. He married but the couple had no children. They lived at Holland Park with a second home at Potter Heigham for sailing on the Norfolk Broads. Other interests were as an amateur radio operator, using the call sign G2ST, and an authority on food and wine. He contacted the BBC to suggest he might tell one of his own short stories on the radio. Thus was born A J Alan, and his broadcast of ‘My Adventure in Jermyn Street’, on New Year’s Eve, 1924. It was an immediate success and although he only broadcast a handful of times a year he was one of the most popular radio personalities of the time. He spent weeks working on each short story, honing his conversational style, making his stories seem like anecdotes that had peculiarly happened to him. A live broadcast was, in fact, a performance. He used cards to avoid any rustling noises and kept a candle lit in case the lights failed. His attire was a dinner jacket with eye glass, and a slim black briefcase. Many of his stories were subsequently printed in newspapers and magazines. By 1937 his health had deteriorated and he reduced his radio work making his last broadcast on 21st March 1940. A J Alan died on 13th December 1941.Voir livre
One of Marryat's most ambitious works, 'The King's Own' begins with the famous Mutiny at the Nore in 1797. It follows the life of a young boy whose father is executed for mutiny, leading him to be raised by the Navy as 'The King's Own.' A masterful blend of authentic naval detail, political intrigue, and heart-wrenching tragedy, expertly narrated by Amber Burkett.Voir livre
“Enthralling . . . Boyne’s novel can stand comparison with William Golding’s Rites of Passage . . . Mutiny is storytelling at its most accomplished.” —The Independent (UK) Internationally bestselling author John Boyne has been praised as “one of the best and original of the new generation of Irish writers” by the Irish Examiner. With Mutiny, he’s created an eye-opening story of life—and death—at sea. Fourteen-year-old pickpocket John Jacob Turnstile has just been caught red-handed and is on his way to prison when an offer is put to him—a ship has been refitted over the last few months and is about to set sail with an important mission. The boy who was expected to serve as the captain’s personal valet has been injured and a replacement must be found immediately. Given the choice of prison or a life at sea, John soon finds himself on board, meeting the captain, just as the ship sets sail. The ship is the Bounty, the captain is William Bligh, and their destination is Tahiti. Their journey, however, will become one of the most infamous in naval history. Mutiny is the first novel to explore all the events relating to the Bounty’s voyage, from the long passage across the ocean to their adventures on the island of Tahiti and the subsequent forty-eight-day expedition toward Timor. This vivid retelling of the notorious mutiny is packed with humor, violence, and historical detail, while presenting an intriguingly different portrait of Captain Bligh and Mr. Christian than has ever been presented before. “The writing grows into a mesmerizing tour-de-force . . . this is a remarkable and compelling piece of storytelling.” —The Irish TimesVoir livre
What if ordinary language hid extraordinary secrets? Philip K. Dick’s delightfully strange short story The Eyes Have It takes a single misunderstanding and spirals it into full-blown paranoia in the way only Dick can. When an unsuspecting reader opens a simple paperback, he discovers bizarre phrases that seem to describe humans casually removing eyes, hands, and limbs as if it were nothing. Horrified, he becomes convinced he has stumbled onto a hidden truth: alien beings who can detach their body parts walk among us — and the book is their confession. What follows is a hilarious and unsettling descent into misunderstanding, speculation, and fear. With Dick’s trademark mix of satire, sci-fi curiosity, and slippery reality, the story skewers the way we interpret the world around us — and how easily imagination can outrun truth. Narrated with sharp wit and perfect comic timing by Drew Caton, this short tale delivers a punch of classic speculative weirdness in just minutes. A must-listen for fans of retro sci-fi, humor with a paranoid twist, and the early works of Philip K. Dick.Voir livre
"The Ransom of Red Chief" is a short story by O. Henry first published in the July 6, 1907 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. It follows two men who kidnap, and demand a ransom for, a wealthy Alabamian's son. Eventually, the men are driven crazy by the boy's spoiled and hyperactive behavior, and they pay the boy's father to take him back. The story and its main idea have become a part of popular culture, with many children's television programs depicting versions of the story as one of their episodes. It has also been often used as a classic example of two ultimate comic ironies – a supposed "hostage" actually liking his abductors and enjoying being captured, and his captors getting their just deserts by having the tables turned on them, and being compelled to pay to be rid of him.Voir livre
Indeed, the world of Oceania in George Orwell's famous novel is routinely described as oppressive, and hopeless, and variously deemed a horror story, an elegy, a threnody, a shriek of terror, a wail of despair, a death cry. Isaac Deutscher, the biographer of both Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, referred to it in 1955—in the wake of the controversial BBC broadcasts and their "fatal" consequences—as the "Black Millennium," when George Orwell turned a segment of time forever into charcoal dust. Literary and cultural critics have described 1984—or rather Nineteen Eighty-Four, to use the British title that Orwell himself preferred—as the vengeful death wish of a cynic, the tubercular projection of a dying man, the paranoid fantasy of a writer in despair, the Schadenfreude of a neurotic adult schoolboy who sent the entire world to room 101, and a totalitarian tract devised as a desperate invalid's futile protest against the specter of totalitarianism, whether in the form of Hitler's on the right or Stalin's on the left.Nineteen Eighty-Four is none of these.Rather, it is instead an affirming flame, even an optimistic vision of a hope-filled time just over the horizon.Voir livre
