Otros libros que te pueden interesar

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  A Midsummer Night's Dream

  William Shakespeare

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  A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of William Shakespeare's most enchanting and beloved comedies—a magical tale where love, illusion, and mischief collide under the moonlit sky. Set in ancient Athens and an enchanted forest nearby, the play weaves together multiple storylines filled with romance, mistaken identities, playful deception, and whimsical fantasy.
  
  At the heart of the story are four young lovers—Hermia, Lysander, Demetrius, and Helena—who find themselves entangled in a complicated web of affection and jealousy. When Hermia refuses to marry Demetrius, as commanded by her father, she flees into the forest with Lysander, the man she truly loves. Demetrius follows in pursuit, with Helena chasing after him in desperate devotion. What unfolds is a night of chaos and comedy when fairy magic interferes with human emotions.
  
  Hovering over the forest is the quarrel between Oberon, the King of the Fairies, and Titania, his Queen. Their dispute disrupts both the natural world and the lives of the mortals who wander into their realm. Determined to teach Titania a lesson, Oberon enlists the mischievous sprite Puck to use a magical flower whose nectar causes the victim to fall in love with the first creature they see upon waking. However, Puck's playful mistakes lead to hilarious consequences, causing lovers to switch affections and turning order into delightful confusion.
  
  Adding another layer of humor is a group of amateur craftsmen rehearsing a play for the Duke's wedding. Their clumsy performance preparations provide comic relief, especially when one of them, Nick Bottom, becomes the unwitting target of fairy enchantment.
  
  Through poetic language, witty dialogue, and imaginative storytelling, Shakespeare explores themes of love's irrationality, the thin line between dream and reality, the transformative power of imagination, and the unpredictability of desire. The forest becomes a symbolic space where societal rules loosen, identities shift, and characters confront their true feelings.
  
  Both lighthearted and profound, A Midsummer Night's Dream remains a timeless celebration of romance, magic, and the human heart. Its blend of fantasy and humor continues to captivate readers and audiences, reminding us that love—like a dream—can be beautiful, bewildering, and wonderfully unpredictable.

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  The Lost Room - From their pens...

  Clothilde Graves

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  Clotilde Augusta Inez Mary Graves was born on the 3rd June 1863 at Buttevant Castle, Co. Cork, to parents with military backgrounds. 
  At age nine, the family moved to Southsea in England for yet another military posting.  Her father’s postings gave her valuable experiences that would be put to good use in later years in some of her literary works. 
  She was educated at a Catholic convent in Lourdes before returning to London in 1884 to study art in Bloomsbury.  She worked part-time at the British Museum and the Royal Female School of Art and generated further income by drawing little pen-and-ink grotesques for the comic papers.  
  A few years later a chance meeting found her writing extra lyrics for a pantomime version of Puss in Boots.  She followed up with several financially successful plays, both in London and New York, and gained a measure of notoriety in one with the comparison of marriage and prostitution.   
  Despite her dramatic success she published her first novel in 1911 under the pseudonym of Richard Dehan which she continued to use for later works.  As well as novels and plays she published collections of short stories which glow with talent and invention. 
  She was an unusual figure in London society, wearing her hair short, taking on a masculine manner and cut of clothing, and smoking cigarettes in public when such traits were considered eccentric at best.  Add to this her admired collection of Chinese and Japanese trophies, her enthusiasm for fly-fishing and her riding of a tricycle and you have a perfect image of this fascinating writer. 
  Clotilde Graves died at the convent of Our Lady of Lourdes at Hatch End in Middlesex, on the 3rd December 1932.  She was 69.

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  Paul Kelver Volume 1

  Jerome K.

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  Paul Kelver by Jerome K. Jerome follows the coming-of-age journey of Paul Kelver, a sensitive young man growing up in Victorian England. Through childhood struggles, friendships, ambitions, and first love, Paul searches for identity and purpose in a society shaped by class and convention. Blending humor with reflection, the novel explores memory, self-discovery, and the challenges of becoming an adult.

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  The Jacket

  Jack London

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  A framing story is told in the first person by Darrell Standing, a university professor serving life imprisonment in San Quentin State Prison for murder. Prison officials try to break his spirit by means of a torture device called "the jacket," a canvas jacket which can be tightly laced so as to compress the whole body, inducing angina. Standing discovers how to withstand the torture by entering a kind of trance state, in which he walks among the stars and experiences portions of past lives.The jacket itself was actually used at San Quentin at the time and Jack London's descriptions of it were based on interviews with a former convict named Ed Morrell, which is also the name of a character in the novel. For his role in the Sontag and Evans gang which robbed the Southern Pacific Railroad in the 1890s, Morrell spent fourteen years in California prisons (1894-1908), five of them in solitary confinement. London championed his pardon. After his release, Morrell was a frequent guest at London's Beauty Ranch. (Introduction by Wikipedia)

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  The Magic Mountain

  Thomas Mann

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  Hans Castorp is a young man ready to start a career in shipbuilding - but before he does, he decides to visit his cousin Joachim, a patient residing at a tuberculosis sanatorium in the mountains of Switzerland. Castorp enjoys meeting and chatting with the wide array of colorful personalities living at the sanatorium, until its director delivers some bad news: Castorp, too, has symptoms of disease, and must remain at the sanatorium indefinitely. Thus begins a black comedy spanning years, in which he lives and learns in this self-contained world in the mountains.
  The Magic Mountain is a bildungsroman and an allegory of the years surrounding World War I, in which Castorp, a naive blank slate symbolizing the Weimar Republic, spends time with the motley crew in the sanatorium, who each represent the nations and ideologies of Europe vying for his attention. World War I broke out and concluded as Mann was writing the novel; at first, he was opposed to the Weimar Republic, but he later changed his mind, and this development in his personal philosophy is reflected in how Castorp and the patients interact over the years, and in Castorp's ultimate fate.
  Adding to the novel's staying power are its many layers of allegory and allusion, including Greek mythology, European fable, music, opera, and theater, literature, mysticism, numerology, medicine, and philosophy. Above these layers is Mann's overarching message of illness and death as necessary struggles to overcome before reaching a fulfilled life, a theme from his earlier novella, "Death in Venice," that he explicitly wished to revisit and expand upon.

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  Since I Died - From their pens...

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

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  Mary Gray Phelps was born on 31st August 1844 in Boston, Massachusetts. 
  Her mother, who wrote the Kitty Brown children’s book series, died when she was only 8.  The young girl asked to be renamed in honor of her mother. 
  Two years later her father married her mother's sister, Mary Stuart, also a writer, but she died of tuberculosis only 18 months later. A mere six months later he married for a third time to Mary Ann Johnson, and they had two sons. 
  Phelps received an upper-class education through her attendance at the Abbot Academy and Mrs. Edwards' School for Young Ladies. She had a natural gift for story-telling and at 13 she had a story published in Youth's Companion and other stories in various Sunday School publications. 
  In most of her writings she used her mother's name ‘Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ as a pseudonym, even after her marriage in 1888 to Herbert Dickinson Ward, a journalist (and later co-author with her) 17 years her junior. Such was her talent that she gained a wide audience from her first publications.  
  At age 19 she sent her Civil War story ‘A Sacrifice Consumed’ to Harper's Magazine. A generous payment was made together with a request for more works to be sent for publication.  
  During the 1860s she wrote her first books for children, the ‘Tiny’ series and followed up with the 4-volume ‘Gypsy Breynton’ series.   
  In 1868, three years after the Civil War, came ‘The Gates Ajar’, a controversial but best-selling Spiritualist work which told of an afterlife replete with home comforts and reunited families, and their pets, for eternity.  Its success led her to write two more books to complete the trilogy and she was wont to use the word ‘Gates’ in later book titles to allude to this success. She stated that she wrote ‘The Gates Ajar’ to comfort a generation of women devastated by the loss of their loved ones who found no comfort in traditional religion.  
  Phelps became a determined advocate through her lectures and other work for social reform, temperance, women's emancipation, and even clothing reform for women, and in 1874, urging them to burn their corsets. 
  Her deteriorating health was now restricting some of her activities and kept her contributions to mostly literary in nature rather than public appearances. 
  In 1876 Phelps was the first woman to present a lecture series at Boston University. Her presentations, ‘Representative Modern Fiction’, analyzed the works of George Eliot. 
  In 1877 she published ‘The Story of Avis’. The work focuses on many of the era’s early feminist issues, portraying a woman's struggle to balance her married life and domestic responsibilities with her longing to become a painter.  At no time did she attempt to hide, either in real life or her stories, her contempt of the inequities of the then class structure and gender disparities. Her work, ‘Mary Elizabeth’ depicts a homeless girl's choices between theft and begging as a means of survival. ‘One Way to Get An Education’ tells of a child laborer's desire for a better life than mill work offers and sees self-injuring as a way to a better education. Her work often depicted women succeeding in non-traditional careers such as physicians, ministers, and artists. 
  In 1884 came her well-regarded poetry collection ‘Songs of the Silent World’ 
  Along with her husband she wrote two Biblical romances in 1890 and 1891. Her autobiography, ‘Chapters from a Life’ was serialized and then published in book form in 1896.  
  Phelps continued to write short stories and novels up to her death and over her life authored 57 volumes of fiction, poetry and essays.  
  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps died 28th January 1911, in Newton Center, Massachusetts. She was 66.

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