Outros livros que poderiam interessá-lo

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  The Octave of Jealousy

  Stacy Aumonier

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  Stacy Aumonier's famous depiction of human nature in action. An eight-part series of snapshots, starting with a tramp who feels pangs of envy when he sees someone with a more settled and domesticated life. The focus of the story shifts to this individual, who we discover is jealous of someone else...who in turn is envious of another person and so on.James Hilton (author of Goodbye, Mr Chips and Lost Horizon) said of Aumonier: "I think his very best works ought to be included in any anthology of the best short stories ever written." Asked to choose "My Favourite Short Story" for the March 1939 edition of Good Housekeeping, James Hilton chose The Octave of Jealousy, which the magazine described as a bitterly brilliant tale.

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  A Piece of Steak - American...

  Jack London

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  John Griffith Chaney was born on January 12th, 1876 in San Francisco.   
   
  His father, William Chaney, was living with Flora Wellman when she became pregnant.  Chaney insisted she have an abortion.  Flora's response was to turn a gun on herself.  Although her wounds were not severe the trauma made her temporarily deranged. 
   
  In late 1876 his mother married John London and the young child was brought to live with them as they moved around the Bay area, eventually settling in Oakland where now, calling himself Jack, he completed grade school. 
   
  Jack worked hard at several jobs, sometimes 12-18 hours a day, but his dream was university.  He studied hard and borrowed the money to enrol in the summer of 1896 at the University of California in Berkeley. 
   
  In 1897, at 21, Jack searched out newspaper accounts of his mother's suicide attempt and for the name of his biological father. He wrote to Chaney, then living in Chicago, who claimed he could not be Jack’s father because he was impotent and casually asserted that London's mother had relations with other men.  Jack, devastated by the response, quit Berkeley and went to the Klondike. Other accounts suggest that his dire finances presented Jack with the excuse he needed to leave. 
   
  In the Klondike Jack began to gather material for his writing but also accumulated many health problems, including scurvy, which together with hip and leg problems he would carry for the rest of his life. 
   
  During the late 1890's Jack was regularly publishing short stories and by the turn of the century full blown novels. 
   
  By 1904 Jack had married, fathered two children and was now in the process of divorcing.  A stint as a reporter on the Russo-Japanese war of 1904 was equal amounts trouble and experience. But that experience was always put to good use in a continuing and remarkable output of work. 
   
  In 1905 he married Charmian Kittredge who at last was a soul and companion who brought him some semblance of peace despite his advancing alcoholism and his incurable wanderlust. 
   
  Twelve years later Jack had amassed both wealth and a literary reputation through such classics as ‘The Call of the Wild’, ‘White Fang’ and many others. He had a reputation as a social activist and was a tireless friend of the workers.   
   
  Jack London died suffering from dysentery, late-stage alcoholism and uremia, aged only 40, on November 22nd 1916 at his property in Glen Elen in California 
   
  In ‘A piece of Steak’ an ageing prizefighter seeks one last win. Not for glory, or to revisit fame, but simply to put food on the table and keep his family together.  But to do that he must beat a highly rated up and coming adversary.

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  Vampyre The - A Tale

  John William Polidori

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  John William Polidori was born on 7th September 1795 in London to Gaetano Polidori, an Italian political émigré scholar, and Anna Maria Pierce, an English governess. He was the eldest of 8 children. 
   
  From 1804 Polidori was a pupil at the recently formed Ampleforth College. In 1810 he proceeded to the University of Edinburgh, where he wrote a thesis on sleepwalking and received his degree as a doctor of medicine on 1st August 1815. He was 19. 
   
  In 1816, Dr. Polidori was given the job of Byron’s personal physician and accompanied him on a trip through Europe. The publisher John Murray offered Polidori £500 to keep a diary of their travels. At the Villa Diodati, Byron’s rented villa at Lake Geneva in Switzerland, the pair met with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont. 
   
  One night in June, after the company had read aloud from a French collection of German horror tales, Byron suggested they each write a ghost story. There were to be two outstanding works from that evening; ‘Frankenstein’ by Mary Shelley and Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’ which would be the first published modern vampire story in English. 
   
  Dismissed by Byron, Polidori traveled in Italy and then returned to England. His story, ‘The Vampyre’, was published in the April 1819 issue of New Monthly Magazine without his permission. Much to the annoyance of both Polidori and Byron it was the latter who was credited as author.   
   
  Polidori also had published ‘Ximenes, The Wreath & Other Poems’ in 1819 and his long theological and sacred poem ‘The Fall of the Angels’ in 1821 as well as two plays, essays and his diary.  
   
  Despite his youth Polidori was increasingly worn down by gambling debts and depression.   
   
  John William Polidori died on 24th August 1821 at the age of only 25 in London.  Although his death was recorded as death by natural causes, strong evidence asserts that it was suicide by means of cyanide.

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  Omnilingual

  H. Beam Piper

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  An expedition to Mars discovers the remains of an advanced civilization, which died out many thousands of years ago. They recovered books and documents left behind, and are puzzled by their contents. Would the team find their “Rosetta Stone” that would allow them to unlock the Martian language, and learn the secrets of this long-dead race? (Summary by Mark Nelson)

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  The Garden Lodge

  Willa Cather

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  "The Garden Lodge" is a short story by Willa Cather, first published in 1905. It tells the story of a woman asked by her husband if she would agree to tear down their garden lodge and build a new summer house there instead. She grows nostalgic as she remembers spending fond times there with tenor Raymond d'Esquerre when he was visiting. Although a moderate and no-nonsense woman, the singer rekindled her passion for music during his stay. She had to let go of it after her lazy brother killed himself and her father was crippled with debts. She then proceeds to go to the garden lodge and plays a piece of opera that she played with the tenor the previous summer. However, after a night's sleep she comes around and tells her husband she agrees the lodge should go.

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  Mad Hope

  Heather Birrell

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  In the stories of Mad Hope, Journey Prize winner Heather Birrell finds the heart of her characters and lets them lead us into worlds both recognizable and alarming. A science teacher and former doctor is forced to re-examine the role he played in CeauÅ?escu’s Romania after a student makes a shocking request; a tragic plane crash becomes the basis for a meditation on motherhood and its discontents; women in an online chat group share (and overshare) their anxieties and personal histories; and a chance encounter in a waiting room tests the ties that bind us. Using precise, inventive language, Birrell creates astute and empathetic portraits of people we thought we knew – and deftly captures the lovely, maddening mess of being human.

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