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  Notes From The Underground - The...

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

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  Notes from Underground is an 1864 novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Notes is considered by many to be the first existentialist novel. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man) who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. The first part of the story is told in monologue form or the underground man's diary, and attacks emerging Western philosophy, especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?. The second part of the book is called "Àpropos of the Wet Snow," and describes certain events that, it seems, are destroying and sometimes renewing the underground man, who acts as a first person, unreliable narrator. 
   
  Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was a Russian novelist, short story writer, essayist, and journalist. His literary works explore human psychology in the troubled political, social, and spiritual atmospheres of 19th-century Russia, and engage with a variety of philosophical and religious themes. His most acclaimed novels include Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), Demons (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). 
   
  Many literary critics rate him as one of the greatest novelists in all of world literature, as multiple of his works are considered highly influential masterpieces.

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  Heathen The (Unabridged)

  Jack London

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  The Heathen is a short story by Jack London. John Griffith "Jack" London (born John Griffith Chaney, January 12, 1876 - November 22, 1916) was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. He is best remembered as the author of The Call of the Wild and White Fang, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories "To Build a Fire", "An Odyssey of the North", and "Love of Life". He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as "The Pearls of Parlay" and "The Heathen", and of the San Francisco Bay area in The Sea Wolf. London was a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers and wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics such as his dystopian novel The Iron Heel, his non-fiction exposé The People of the Abyss, and The War of the Classes. On July 12, 1897, London (age 21) and his sister's husband Captain Shepard sailed to join the Klondike Gold Rush. This was the setting for some of his first successful stories. London's time in the Klondike, however, was detrimental to his health.

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  Curried Cow

  Ambrose Bierce

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  My Aunt Patience, who tilled a small farm in the state of Michigan, had a favorite cow. This creature was not a good cow, nor a profitable one, for instead of devoting a part of her leisure to secretion of milk and production of veal she concentrated all her faculties on the study of kicking.The demon cow of Michigan will attack any living being she comes across...and when Aunt Patience resolves to marry, every single man in the county goes to extreme lengths to become unavailable for the honour. Such was their fear of being married alive by my Aunt Patience.Finally she does wed a Methodist parson by the name of Huggins. This is the story of one man's battle against the most ferocious cow in Michigan.

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  She

  Henry Rider Haggard

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  Ludwig Horace Holly, a Cambridge professor, travels to Africa with his   adopted son Leo to investigate the death of Kallicrates, Leo’s ancestor, who was murdered by an unknown woman centuries before. 
  They encounter the Amahagger, a fierce tribe of cannibals who live in the caves of Kôr, a huge burial ground of an ancient civilisation decimated by plague.The tribe are ruled over by She-who-must-be-obeyed [Ayesha], a mysterious and ruthless Queen who has the secret of eternal life while still possessing the beauty and radiance of a young woman. She has lived, virtually alone, for 2,000 years awaiting the return of her lover Kallicrates, whom she killed in a fit of jealous rage. When Ayesha sees Leo she believes him to be the reincarnation of the man who spurned her. A bewitching temptress, naively flirtatious but capable of horrific acts of malevolence, she will not be thwarted a second time. They will both bathe in the Eternal Flame before their marriage! 
  Not without sudden flashes of humour She is an intriguing story set in the "Dark Continent" with a mix of sex and the supernatural which thrilled the Victorians and still - one hundred years later -  continues to enthrall.

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  The Sign of the Four

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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  "By the table, in a wooden arm-chair, the master of the house was seated all in a heap, with his head sunk upon his left shoulder, and that ghastly, inscrutable smile upon his face. He was stiff and cold, and had clearly been dead many hours. It seemed to me that not only his features but all his limbs were twisted and turned in the most fantastic fashion. By his hand upon the table there lay a peculiar instrument,—a brown, close-grained stick, with a stone head like a hammer, rudely lashed on with coarse twine. Beside it was a torn sheet of note-paper with some words scrawled upon it. Holmes glanced at it, and then handed it to me.“You see,” he said, with a significant raising of the eyebrows.In the light of the lantern I read, with a thrill of horror, “The sign of the four.”“In God’s name, what does it all mean?” I asked.“It means murder,” said he, stooping over the dead man."Published in 1890 in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, the Sign of the Four or The Problem of the Sholtos is the second of the Sherlock Holmes stories penned by Arthur Conan Doyle. Presenting Sherlock and Watson with a case of a mysterious murder in a seemingly locked room, with the theft of over half a million pounds in jewels seemingly as the motive. Can even Sherlock Holmes track down the criminals before they escape the country?Narrated by Michael Ward.

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  Top Ten The - The 1880s - The...

  Rudyard Kipling, Anton Chekhov,...

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  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. 
   
  A decade of exuberance as the world became a plaything of the Western Imperial powers to exploit for their own ends.  Whole cultures were sequestrated and suspended and another overplanted in its place. 
   
  But short story authors created some of literature’s brightest jewels as they explored genres and styles in ambitious claims to be the chronicler of the age. 
   
  01 - The Top 10 - The 1880's - An Introduction 
  02 - A Horseman In The Sky by Ambrose Bierce 
  03 - The Bet by Anton Chekhov 
  04 - The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant 
  05 - The Withered Arm by Thomas Hardy 
  06 - A White Heron by Sarah Orne Jewett 
  07 - The Man Who Would Be King 
  08 - Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  09 - The Lady, or the Tiger by Frank Stockton 
  10 - How Much Land Does A Man Need by Leo Tolstoy 
  11 - The Nightingale and the Rose by Oscar Wilde

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