The Yellow Sofa

José Maria de Eça de Queiroz

Sinossi

A compassionate tale of marriage, manners, and betrayal, from the Portuguese master
José Maria Eça de Queirós, the first great modern Portuguese novelist, wrote The Yellow Sofa with (in his own words) “no digressions, no rhetoric,” creating a book where “everything is interesting and dramatic and quickly narrated.” The story, a terse and seamless spoof of Victorian bourgeois morals, concerns a successful businessman who returns home to find his wife “on the yellow damask sofa, leaning in abandon on the shoulder of a man.” The man is none other than his best friend and business partner. While struggling with the need to defend his honor, he fights a stronger inner desire for domestic tranquility and forgiveness. The Yellow Sofa firmly establishes Eça de Queirós in the literary pantheon that includes Dickens, Flaubert, Balzac, and Tolstoy.

Disponibile da: 18/04/2016.

Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

Phantom Rickshaw The (Unabridged)

Rudyard Kipling

This story was first published in Quartette, the Christmas Annual of the Civil and Military Gazette for 1885, which included four stories by the nineteen-year-old Kipling with other items of prose and verse by his parents and sister. It was revised before being collected in The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Tales, Volume 5 of the Indian Railway Library, of 1890. It was included in Wee Willie Winkie and Other Stories, published in 1890, and in numerous later editions of that collection.Jack Pansay has had a passionate ship-board romance with Agnes Keith-Wessington, the golden-haired wife of an officer. He wearies of her and tells her so, but she refuses to accept his rejection, insisting that it is all "a hideous mistake". She grows wan and thin, but he continues to respond curtly and brutally. He becomes engaged to Kitty Mannering, a lively young woman, whom he deeply loves, and - not long after - Agnes dies of a broken heart. Soon after, his rides out with Kitty around Simla are disrupted by the ghost of Agnes, in her familiar yellow-panelled rickshaw, which only he can see. She is still insisting that it is all "a hideous mistake". His friends think he is mad or drunk, his doctor is mystified, and Kitty breaks off the engagement. His life is ruined, and he goes to his death, still haunted by the golden-haired ghost.

Mostra libro

Great Poets The: John Masefield

John Masefield

John Masefield (1878–1967) was one of the most prolific, popular and successful poets of the twentieth century. Masefield broke upon Edwardian literature with the startling work entitled The Everlasting Mercy, which described the spiritual enlightenment of a drunken poacher. Over the span of his lifetime, he was appointed Poet Laureate and amassed a large number of admirers, which included such high-profile names as John Betjeman, Robert Graves and W.B. Yeats. This collection contains thirty-six poems and spans Masefield’s entire career. There are early poems from Salt-Water Ballads (1902) and Ballads (1903), followed by extracts from the narrative poems The Everlasting Mercy, Dauber and Reynard the Fox. The selection also includes a number of sonnets including ‘On Growing Old’, as well as his poetry on the Romans, alongside a number of rarities.

Mostra libro

Doug Bradley's Spinechillers...

H. P. Lovecraft, Rudyard...

Volume 10 launches with Doug Bradley's well researched insight into the stories and their authors.  This is followed by HP Lovecraft's evocative tale of exploration 'The Strange High House in the Mist'.  Next we hear Ambrose Bierce's truly chilling 'A Diagnosis of Death', and Jeffery Combs reads Edgar Allan Poe's classic revenge tale 'The Cask of Amontillado'.  Disc 2 presents us with Rudyard Kipling's tale of ghosts 'They', before disc 3 takes us down into Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The New Catacomb' in his tale of a heartbroken lover's revenge.  Jeffery Combs brings us part three of 'Herbert West Reanimator', and Robert Englund rounds off this volume with his sublime reading of Edgar Allan Poe's poem 'The Sleeper'.

Mostra libro

Book of Myths - Booktrack Edition

Jean Land

Listen to Book of Myths with a movie-style soundtrack and amplify your audiobook experience. 
Just as a little child holds out its hands to catch the sunbeams, to feel and to grasp what, so its eyes tell it, is actually there, so, down through the ages, men have stretched out their hands in eager endeavor to know their God. And because only through the human was the divine knowable, the old peoples of the earth made gods of their heroes and not infrequently endowed these gods with as many of the vices as of the virtues of their worshipers. 
As we read the myths of the East and the West we find ever the same story. That portion of the ancient Aryan race which poured from the central plain of Asia, through the rocky defiles of what we now call “The Frontier,” to populate the fertile lowlands of India, had gods who must once have been wholly heroic, but who came in time to be more degraded than the most vicious of lustful criminals. And the Greeks, Latins, Teutons, Celts, and Slavonians, who came of the same mighty Aryan stock, did even as those with whom they owned a common ancestry...

Mostra libro

The Dragon's Secret

Augusta Huiell Seaman

The Dragon's Secret (1921) is a youth adventure novel by Augusta Huiell Seaman. Leslie Crane is a lively teenager companion to her sick aunt on a holiday spent on the beach. The aunt should have some calm repose to have her health recovered, but Leslie in her age of unrest finds the situation rather boring. She is not totally alone, though: she has a dog. Her dog digs out a box of metal, with a delicately carved dragon on it. The box was found close to a cottage, which was thought to be empty, but it is full of adventure: strange lights, visitors at stormy nights, and so on. Though there are no living dragons in it, the well-written mystery catches and maintains your attention.

Mostra libro

What Not

Rose Macaulay

Rose Macaulay was a fascinating and influential British writer, known for her wit and intellect. She wrote numerous novels, essays and biographies, and she was highly regarded for her versatility as a writer. Her works often explored themes of social change, women’s rights and the complexities of human relationships. She had a unique ability to capture the essence of her characters and the world they inhabited, making her a much-admired figure in the literary world.
The satirical novel What Not was published in 1918. Foreshadowing Orwell’s 1984, it is set in a futuristic England where a government agency, known as the Ministry of Brains, is responsible for regulating and controlling relationships and marriages based on intelligence and eugenics. The story follows the main character, Kitty Grammont, as she navigates and rebels against the strict rules and regulations imposed by the Ministry. What Not is notable for its biting social commentary on government control, bureaucracy and the dangers of sacrificing personal liberty for societal ideals.

Mostra libro