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  The Sonnets of Michael Angelo...

  Michelangelo Buonarroti

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  Michael Angelo and Campanella represent widely sundered, though almost contemporaneous, moments in the evolution of the Italian genius. Michael Angelo was essentially an artist, living in the prime of the Renaissance. Campanella was a philosopher, born when the Counter-Reformation was doing all it could to blight the free thought of the sixteenth century; and when the modern spirit of exact enquiry, in a few philosophical martyrs, was opening a new stage for European science. The one devoted all his mental energies to the realisation of beauty: the other strove to ascertain truth. The one clung to Ficino's dream of Platonising Christianity: the other constructed for himself a new theology, founded on the conception of God immanent in nature. Michael Angelo expressed the aspirations of a solitary life dedicated to the service of art, at a time when art received the suffrage and the admiration of all Italy. Campanella gave utterance to a spirit, exiled and isolated, misunderstood by those with whom he lived, at a moment when philosophy was hunted down as heresy and imprisoned as treason to the public weal.The marks of this difference in the external and internal circumstances of the two poets might be multiplied indefinitely. Yet they had much in common. Both stood above their age, and in a sense aloof from it. Both approached poetry in the spirit of thinkers bent upon extricating themselves from the trivialities of contemporary literature. The sonnets of both alike are contributions to philosophical poetry in an age when the Italians had lost their ancient manliness and energy. Both were united by the ties of study and affection to the greatest singer of their nation, Dante, at a time when Petrarch, thrice diluted and emasculated, was the Phoebus of academies and coteries.This common antagonism to the degenerate genius of Italian literature is the link which binds Michael Angelo, the veteran giant of the Renaissance, to Campanella, the audacious Titan of the modern age. - Summary by Prefatory note to this volume

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  Irish Girl - Stories

  Tim Johnston

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  In this award-winning collection, listeners will find spellbinding stories of loss, absence, and the devastating effects of chance—of what happens when the unthinkable bad luck of other people, of other towns, becomes our bad luck, our town. Taut, lucid, and engrossing, provocative and dark—and often darkly funny—these stories have much to offer the lover of literary fiction as well as the listener who just loves a great story.

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  The Empty House and Other Stories

  Algernon Blackwood

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  An abandoned house whose horrific past is re-enacted for those who dare visit; a terrifying trip down the Danube River; a malevolent half-beast creature who abducts a member of a hunting party; and a tale of paranoia, mental deterioration and all-consuming feelings of doom: here are four feverish, spine-tingling tales that will chill the blood and make the flesh creep. The collection includes: The Empty House, The Willows, The Listener and The Wendigo.

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  The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson

  Mark Twain

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  At the beginning of Pudd'nhead Wilson a young slave woman, fearing for her infant's son's life, exchanges her light-skinned child with her master's.  From this rather simple premise Mark Twain fashioned one of his most entertaining, funny, yet biting novels.  On its surface, Pudd'nhead Wilson possesses all the elements of an engrossing nineteenth-century mystery:  reversed identities, a horrible crime, an eccentric detective, a suspenseful courtroom drama, and a surprising, unusual solution.  Yet it is not a mystery novel.  Seething with the undercurrents of antebellum southern culture, the book is a savage indictment in which the real criminal is society, and racial prejudice and slavery are the crimes.  Written in 1894, Pudd'nhead Wilson glistens with characteristic Twain humor, with suspense, and with pointed irony:  a gem among the author's later works.

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  The Casuarina Tree

  W. Somerset Maugham

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  A collection of six stories—including the acclaimed “The Outstation”—by the renowned twentieth-century author of the classic Of Human Bondage.   Set in the Federated Malay States during the 1920s, these stories portray the lives of the English living abroad and the clashes that occur with the native Malaysians—and among themselves.   In “Before the Party,” a widow who lies about the cause of her husband’s death in Borneo is confronted by her family and blithely reveals the truth of his untimely death. “P. & O.” follows a woman sailing home to England to seek a divorce; struggling with fears of aging and loneliness, she finds a way to be at peace with herself after a fellow passenger succumbs to a mysterious illness. Though in Borneo for decades, a British Resident Officer holds tightly to English customs and traditions, but his snobbery and classism come under attack when he is saddled with a boorish new assistant in “The Outstation.”   In “The Force of Circumstance,” the new marriage of a British official and his wife reaches a breaking point when she learns of his not-so-secret past in Sembulu. “The Yellow Streak” follows two British men who are swept away by a tidal bore on a river in Borneo; though they both survive, one is nearly driven to madness by his suspicions that his companion knows he left him to drown. “The Letter” opens in Singapore with a British woman accused of murder in an act of self-defense; when evidence comes to light that proves she is lying, her lawyer and her husband must face their convictions—and the woman they thought they knew . . .

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  The Cards - A Jack Nightingale...

  Stephen Leather

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  Tarot cards predict the future, right? Trust Jack Nightingale to find a pack that can change that future...and of course he 'borrows' a card and signs a Latin contract he can’t read in his own blood.  
  Can Jack and his longtime assistant Jenny McLean thwart the cards and destroy his and dozens of other contracts? Would anyone put money on a demon triumphing when Nightingale is on a mission?

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