Other books that might interest you

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  Top 10 Short Stories The - The...

  Fyodor Dostevesky, Mark Twain,...

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  Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart.  A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere. 
   
  In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?  
   
  The theme itself will form the boundaries for our stories which range from well-known classics, newly told, to stories that modern times have overlooked but perfectly exemplify the theme.  Throughout the volume our authors whether of instant recognition or new to you are all leviathans of literature. 
   
  Some you may disagree with but they will get you thinking; about our choices and about those you would have made.  If this volume takes you on a path to discover more of these miniature masterpieces then we have all gained something. 
   
  The Century moves on decade by decade. War once again scars Europe, in America wagons roll west.  Social unrest continues even as conditions improve markedly for the few and only a little for the many.  The list of problems and of challenges described by our authors is long and their stories once again full of valuable and telling insights. 
   
  01 - The Top 10 - The 1870's - The Men - An Introduction 
  02 - Bobok by Fyodor Dostevesky 
  03 - A Ghost Story by Mark Twain 
  04 - God Sees The Truth But Waits by Leo Tolstoy 
  05 - Dickon the Devil by Sheridan Le Fanu 
  06 - The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller by Gustave Flaubert 
  07 - A Strange Story by Ivan Turgenev 
  08 - A Lonely Ride by Bret Harte 
  09 - Coward by Vsevolod Garshin 
  10 - The Man Without a Body by Edward Page Mitchell 
  11 - The Vampire by Jan Neruda

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  Miss Cross and Other Stories

  Norman Schwenk

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  'Dipping into Miss Cross & Other Stories is like dipping into a box of strange and delicious biscuits or being offered a platter of unusual fruits that you don't know the name of but taste, in some aspects, familiar... an enticing, exciting, and enlivening read: a great book by a great writer—a big tick for Miss Cross.' – Mab Jones, Buzz Magazine
  Norman Schwenk's animal stories are a long way from Disneyland. They focus on the strange, complicated links people forge with animals, and how they illuminate the even more mysterious links

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  The Man Who Spoke Latin

  Samuel Hopkins Adams

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  In addition to writing as a reporter uncovering the conditions of public health in the United States, Samuel Hopkins Adams was a prolific ficiton writer, who wrote numerous novels and hundreds of short stories. "The Man Who Spoke Latin" features protagonist Average Jones, a detective who finds cases, clues, witnesses—and often solves the crime—through classified ads. 
  Samuel Hopkins Adams was born in Dunkirk, New York. From 1891 to 1900, he was a reporter for the New York Sun, and later McClure's Magazine, where he gained a reputation as a muckraker for his articles on the conditions of public health in the United States. In addition, Adams was a prolific writer, who wrote numerous, novels, and hundreds of short stories. 
  Heather Myre, a resident of western Michigan, is a university-trained audio narrator and voice-over actress. She can be heard in a variety of regional radio and television commercials.

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  Winter Dreams - Author of the...

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

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  Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota into an upper-middle class family. Whilst his mother was pregnant with him, his two young sisters tragically died.  Fitzgerald once said this was when his destiny as a writer was ordained. 
   
  His intelligence and talent was recognised from an early age, with his first story, about a detective being published in the school magazine when he was just 13.   
   
  In 1913 he enrolled at Princeton but his devotion to his own literary pursuits resulted in him leaving and, rather bizarrely, joining the Army.  In 1918, stationed at Fort Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama he met and became infatuated and then inseparable from Zelda Sayre.  Initially though she refused to marry him but with the success of ‘This Side of Paradise’, the fame and the flow of money enabled them both to begin a gilded life.  For them this was The Jazz Age.  For Fitzgerald he was already an alcoholic. 
   
  He continued to write with great mastery and the titles of his novels and many of his 164 short stories are household names.  The Great Gatsby, often cited as The Great American Novel was published to mixed reviews.  As America moved from the Great Depression to the slaughter of the Second World War his works and himself were seen as far too entwined with the decadent twenties. The world had moved on and he hadn’t.   
   
  Further tragedy was never far from his life. Zelda after years of erratic and now intolerable behaviour was committed to an institution in 1936.  His own sales began to decline and he became a hack for hire in Hollywood, dependent on increasing amounts of booze and the weekly pay check.  His drunken state had often resulted in arrest or hospitalisation, further imperiling his talents.   Despite his contribution to many MGM films he received only one credit. 
   
  The end came all too soon for one of America’s greatest ever writers.  On 21st December 1940, at only 44 years of age in Hollywood, F Scott Fitzgerald succumbed to a heart attack. 
   
  In ‘Winter Dreams’ Fitzgerald carefully unravels the life of a young entrepreneur who, many years before, meets a hauntingly beautiful woman at the summer resort where he caddies.

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  The Story of B24 - From their...

  Arthur Conan Doyle

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  Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, Scotland on 22nd May 1859.  His childhood was blighted by his father’s heavy drinking which for some years broke up the family. Fortunately, wealthy uncles were willing to support them by paying for education and clothing.  
  He was accepted at the University of Edinburgh to study medicine and also began to write short stories the first, ‘The Haunted Grange of Goresthorpe’, was published in Blackwood’s Magazine.  Despite several other stories and some articles in the British Medical Journal his medical studies took priority. 
  When these finished he was appointed as Doctor on the Greenland whaler ‘Hope of Peterhead’ in 1880 and then, after graduation, as ship’s surgeon on the SS Mayumba on its voyage to West Africa. 
  1882 saw a move to Plymouth and his own independent practice. With few patients he resumed writing and completed his first novel, ‘The Mystery of Cloomber’, although most of his output was short stories based on his experiences at sea.  
  He married Louisa Hawkins in 1885. However, two years later he met and fell in love with Jean Elizabeth Leckie, though they remained platonic out of respect for, and loyalty to, his wife. 
  His literary career suddenly burst into life in November 1886 with ‘A Study In Scarlet’, the first of the fabulously successful Sherlock Holmes stories.  
  With two children to support he now revisited his haphazard commercial arrangements and curtailed everything save for commissions from the Strand Magazine.  
  As a sportsman he was remarkably proficient. He was goalkeeper for Portsmouth Association Football Club and played ten first-class cricket matches for the Marylebone Cricket Club as well as captain of the Crowborough Beacon Golf Club in East Sussex.  
  In 1891 tired of writing Holmes stories, he began a series of historical novels and even went so far as to apparently kill off Holmes in a lethal brawl with his arch-nemesis Moriarty. 
  Despite heavy and sustained criticism he continued to write in support of the Boer War, a fact he thought contributed to his knighthood in 1902.  The following year to great relief and acclaim he brought Sherlock Holmes back from the dead in his first outing for a decade. 
  Sadly, his wife Louisa died from TB in 1906 and, a year later, he at last married Jean.  
  During the War and for several years after family deaths had left him depressed. In a search for solace and answers he alighted upon spiritualism and, such was his interest, that he wrote several books on the subject. 
  On 7th July 1930 Conan Doyle was discovered in the hall of Windlesham Manor, his house in East Sussex, clutching his chest dying of a heart attack.  He was 71.

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  Top 10 Short Stories The - The...

  Leo Tolstoy, Oscar Wilde, Robert...

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  Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart.  A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere. 
   
  In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?  
   
  The theme itself will form the boundaries for our stories which range from well-known classics, newly told, to stories that modern times have overlooked but perfectly exemplify the theme.  Throughout the volume our authors whether of instant recognition or new to you are all leviathans of literature. 
   
  Some you may disagree with but they will get you thinking; about our choices and about those you would have made.  If this volume takes you on a path to discover more of these miniature masterpieces then we have all gained something. 
   
  Across the globe many European nations are trading with and conquering new lands in a frantic burst of Empire building.  At home, governments and societies eye one another with alarm, greed and even fear.  What will tomorrow bring?  For literature its sons and daughters, of whatever tongue, are bringing new stories with new ambitions to the eyes and ears of a hungry public. 
   
  1 - The Top 10 - The 1880's - The Europeans - An Introduction 
  2 - How Much Land Does A Man Need by Leo Tolstoy 
  3 - Lord Arthur Savile's Crime - Part 1 by Oscar Wilde 
  4 - Lord Arthur Savile's Crime - Part 2 by Oscar Wilde 
  5 - Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  6 - The Kiss by Anton Chekhov 
  7 - The Daughter of Lilith by Anatole France 
  8 - A Legend of Old Egypt by Boleslaw Prus 
  9 - Cohen of Trinity by Amy Levy 
  10 - Arachne by Marcel Schwob 
  11 - Cavalleria Rusticana by Giovanni Verga 
  12 - The Signal by Vsevolod Garshin

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