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  Liza of Lambeth

  W. Somerset Maugham

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  An extraordinarily popular author during his lifetime, W. Somerset Maugham created a literary legacy  that includes such classics as The Moon and Sixpence and The Razor' s Edge. Maugham' s first novel, Liza of Lambeth is the story of 18-year-old Liza Kemp, a London factory  worker near the beginning of the 20th century who falls deeply in love with a 40-year-old father of nine children. As the affair escalates, Liza pays little mind to the damage her reputation is suffering. But society becomes increasingly troubled by the relationship.

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  Boule de Suif

  Guy De Maupassant

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  Maupassant's early story "Boule de Suif," ("Ball-of-Tallow") from 1880, remains a hallmark and a natural starting point. It's about a prostitute whose refrain, like Bartleby's, is that she would prefer not to—in this case, a Prussian officer asks repeatedly for the pleasure of her intimate company, and she invariably denies him. Unlike Bartleby, though, Boule de Suif must eventually give in, not by any defect of will but because of peer pressure.

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  Fox and the Horse The - Story...

  Brothers Grimm

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  The Brothers Grimm, or Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, knew how to spin a good fairy tale. In this story, a fox and a horse team up to convince a farmer that the horse still had a lot of strength left in him. Students will read the story and answer questions on the theme, the language, and the plot.

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  The Red Flower - This deep...

  Vsevelod Garshin

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  Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin was born on 14th February 1855 in what is now Dnipro in the Ukraine, but then part of the Russian Empire. 
   
  After attending secondary school he studied at the Saint Petersburg Mining Institute.  
   
  Wars between and on behalf of Empires were a regular feature of the decades then.  Garshin volunteered to serve in the Russian army at the beginning of the Russo-Turkish War in 1877.  
   
  He began as a private in the Balkans campaign and was wounded in action.  By the end of the war, in 1878, he had been promoted to officer rank.  
   
  By now Garshin, having previously published some articles and reviews in newspapers, wished to devote himself to a literary career.  The decision made he resigned his army commission. 
   
  His time as a soldier provided rich experiences for his early stories. His first ‘Four Days’ was related as the interior monologue of a wounded soldier left for dead on the battlefield for four days, face to face with the corpse of a Turkish soldier he had killed, gained him early admiration as an author of note.  
   
  He wrote perhaps only 20 stories, but their influence was immense, although in these more modern times he is barely remembered and lives in the more prolific shadows of others.  His characters are superbly worked into stories that come alive in the intensity and reality of his prose.   
   
  Garshin’s most well-known story is ‘The Red Flower’, also known as ‘Scarlet Blossom’ and is easily amongst the first rank of stories dealing with mental health issues. 
    
  Despite early literary success, he himself experienced periodical bouts of mental illness.   
   
  In one such bout Garshin attempted to commit suicide by throwing himself down the stone stairs leading into his apartment building.  Although not immediately fatal, Vsevolod Garshin died as a result of his injuries in a St Petersburg hospital on 5th April 1888.  He was 33. 
   
  In this captivating story a man is placed into an insane asylum.  Life may be grim within its walls but he has a plan to remove evil from the world.  All it takes is further sacrifice from himself.

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  Confession of a Murderer

  Joseph Roth

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  An exiled Russian spy shares his dramatic life story from a Paris restaurant in this novel by the author of The Radetzky March. In a Russian restaurant on Paris’s Left Bank, Russian exile Golubchik alternately fascinates and horrifies a rapt audience with a wild story of collaboration, deception, and murder in the days leading up to the Russian Revolution.Praise for Confession of a Murderer “Worthy to sit beside Conrad’s and Dostoevsky’s excursions into the twisted world of secret agents. Joseph Roth is one of the great writers in German of this century; and this novel is a fine introduction to this view of intrigue, necessity, and moral doubt.” —The Times (London)

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  The Cask of Amontillado

  Edgar Allan Poe

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  Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is celebrated for his tales of the macabre and the supernatural. “The Cask of Amontillado” is one of his terrifying tales of premature burial. In it the narrator Montresor has suffered from “insults and injuries” from his “friend” Fortunato and plans to murder him while he is drunk at the carnival by luring him  to a wine tasting in the cellars of his palazzo. He chains him to the wall in a niche which he seals up with mortar thus entombing him alive.

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