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  Cohen of Trinity - From their...

  Amy Levy

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  Amy Levy was born in London, England in 1861, the second of seven in a fairly wealthy Anglo-Jewish family. The children read and participated in secular literary activities and became firmly integrated into Victorian life. 
  Her education was at Brighton High School, Brighton, before studies at Newnham College, Cambridge; she was the first Jewish student when she arrived in 1879, but left after four terms. 
  Amy’s writing career began early; her poem ‘Ida Grey’ appeared when she was only fourteen. Her acclaimed short stories ‘Cohen of Trinity’ and ‘Wise in Their Generation,’ were published by Oscar Wilde in his magazine ‘Women's World’. 
  Her poetic writings reveal feminist concerns; ‘Xantippe and Other Verses’, from 1881 includes a poem in the voice of Socrates's wife. ‘A Minor Poet and Other Verse’ from 1884 comprises of dramatic monologues and lyric poems. 
  In 1886, Amy began a series of essays on Jewish culture and literature for the Jewish Chronicle, including ‘The Ghetto at Florence’, ‘The Jew in Fiction’, ‘Jewish Humour’ and ‘Jewish Children’. 
  That same year while travelling in Florence she met the writer Vernon Lee. It is generally assumed they fell in love and this inspired the poem ‘To Vernon Lee’. 
  Her first novel ‘Romance of a Shop’, written in 1888 is based on four sisters who experience the pleasures and hardships of running a London business during the 1880s. This was followed by Reuben Sachs (also 1888) and concerned with Jewish identity and mores in the England of her time and was somewhat controversial. 
  Her final book of poems, ‘A London Plane-Tree’ from 1889, shows the beginnings of the influence of French symbolism. 
  Despite many friendships and an active life, Amy suffered for many years with serious depressions and this, together with her growing deafness, led her to commit suicide by inhaling carbon monoxide on September 10th, 1889. She was 27.

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  Russian Short Story The - Volume...

  Leonid Andreyev, Mikhail...

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  The Russian novel has a reputation that is immense, both in narrative and in length.  Unquestionably though the ideas, themes and characters make many novels rightly revered as world class, as icons of literature. 
   
  Perhaps an easier way to enjoy a wider selection of the Russian heritage, with its varied and glorious literary talents, is with the short story.  These gems sparkle and beguile the mind with their characters and narrative, exploring facets of society and the human condition that more Western authors somehow find more difficult to navigate, or to explore, explain and relate to.   
   
  The Russian short story is, in many respects, in a genre of its own.  It is at its captivating best whether it’s an exploration of real-life experiences, through fantasy and fables and on to total absurdity. 
   
  In a land so vast it is unsurprising that it is a world almost unto itself. Cultures and landscapes of differing hues are packed together bound only by the wilful bonds and force of Empire. 
   
  The stories in this collection traverse the decades where one might be a serf under an absolute monarch, and the reality of that was pretty near to slavery, into an emancipation of sorts in the fields, or towns under the despotic will of landowners and the rich into the upheavals of Empire and then the overthrow of the ruling class and its replacement by the communists, who promised equality for all and delivered a society where the down-trodden remained the lowest yet vital cog of the state machine and its will.  
   
  Whilst Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Chekhov are a given in any Russian collection we also explore and include Andreyev, Korolenko, Turgenev, Blavatsky and many others to create a world rich and dense across a sprawling landscape of diverse people, riddled with the class and unfairness in perhaps some of the most turbulent times that Russia has ever experienced. 
   
  01 - The Russian Short Story - Volume 6 - An Introduction 
  02 - Cain by Alexander Kuprin 
  03 - Anathema by Alexander Kuprin 
  04 - An Evening Guest by Alexander Kuprin 
  05 - Silence by Leonid Andreyev 
  06 - Lazarus by Leonid Andreyev 
  07 - The Lie by Leonid Andreyev 
  08 - The City by Leonid Andreyev 
  09 - The Republic of the Southern Cross by Valery Bryusov 
  10 - The Revolutionist by Mikhail Petrovich Artzybashev 
  11 - Light by Achmed Abdullah 
  12 - Morphine by Mikhail Bulgakov 
  13 - The Murderer by Mikhail Bulgakov 
  14 - The Blind Ones by Isaac Babel

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  Flatland

  Edwin A. Abbott

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  "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions" is a satirical novella by Edwin A. Abbott, first published in 1884. The story takes place in a two-dimensional world and follows the experiences of A. Square, a mathematician and resident of Flatland. As A. Square discovers the existence of a third dimension, the book delves into themes of dimensionality, hierarchy, and social constraints. Though it might seem like a straightforward mathematical or geometric allegory, "Flatland" also offers insightful commentary on the social and cultural mores of Victorian England.

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  Brideshead Revisited

  Evelyn Waugh

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  Brideshead Revisited details the journey of Charles Ryder, who, through the memories of his interactions with an aristocratic English family, encounters various episodes of conversion and experiences the illuminating power of divine grace—which, in the words of G.K. Chesterton, tugs on human hearts “with a twitch upon the thread.” Lodged between two world wars and burdened by the stark collapse of culture, Charles Ryder comes face to face with the perils of sin and confronts the inescapable yearnings of faith.

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  Les Misérables: Volume 4: The...

  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 14: THE GRANDEURS OF DESPAIR: As yet, nothing had come. Ten o'clock had sounded from Saint-Merry. Enjolras and Combeferre had gone and seated themselves, carbines in hand, near the outlet of the grand barricade. They no longer addressed each other, they listened, seeking to catch even the faintest and most distant sound of marching.

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  The Fortune of the Rougons

  Émile Zola

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  We enter the world of a fictional town of Plassans in Zola's native region of Provence and we are introduced to the eccentric heroine Adelaide Fouque, later known as Tante Dide, who becomes the common ancestor for both the Rougon and Macquart families. Her legitimate son from her short marriage to her late husband, a labourer named Rougon who worked on Dide's land, is forced to grow up alongside two illegitimate children.

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