Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  Dethroned - Ukranian born...

  I N Potapenko

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  Ignaty Nikolayevich Potapenko was born on 30th December 1856 in the village of Fyodorovka in the Kherson Governorate of what was then the Russian Empire. 
   
  After an education that included studying at the Odessa University and the St Petersburg Conservatory Potapenko began his literary career, at first in tales detailing the lives of those Ukrainians all around him. 
   
  His undoubted talent soon took his canon beyond short stories to include both novels and plays.  
   
  I N Potapenko died on 17th May 1929 in Leningrad.  He was 72.

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  After Twenty years - From their...

  O Henry

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  William Sydney Porter was born on 11th September 1862 in Greensboro, North Carolina. At age 3 his mother died from tuberculosis. From an early age it was clear Porter had a large appetite for reading as he absorbed the world around him. 
  He first attended at a school run by his aunt before enrolling at the Lindsey Street High School and then worked at his uncle’s drugstore and gained a pharmacists’ license in 1881.  
  A persistent cough took him to Texas in the hope that a change of climate would help his symptoms. He took on various types of work, initially from ranch hand and cook and then as varied as pharmacist, draftsman, bank teller and journalist. He also began to write, though for now, purely as a hobby. 
  He was a member of several singing and dramatic groups when he met 17 year old Athol Estes, daughter of a wealthy Austin family. Despite her mother’s objection owing to Athol’s tuberculosis, they began courting and in July 1887, they eloped and soon married. 
  Athol, impressed by his writing, encouraged him to get them published. A job as a draftsman at the Texas General Land Office paid a healthy $100 dollars per month and life was good. 
  But then life turned cruel. His son died a few hours after birth although a daughter, Margaret, came the following year.  His job had to be vacated but another was found at the First National Bank of Austin. The bank operated informally and Porter was careless in keeping the books. He lost that job but began writing for the humourous weekly The Rolling Stone and the Houston Post. Some time later the federal Bank auditors went through his former accounts and he was arrested on charges of embezzlement. 
  Porter fled the day before his trial to Honduras. Holed up for several months he began to write.  Athol had become too ill to travel to meet him and learning that her health was deteriorating he surrendered to the court in February 1897.  Bail was obtained so that he could stay with Athol during her final days.  
  Porter was sentenced to five years at the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus. His pharmacy qualifications got him the job of night druggist.  His sentence also gave him time to write and publish fourteen short stories. In December 1899 in McClure’s Magazine he published a short story as O Henry.  
  He was released two years early in July 1901, and reunited with Margaret, now 11, in Pittsburgh.  He now began his most prolific period of writing; a short story per week for the New York World, while also publishing works in other magazines.  Eventually over 600 of his short stories were published. 
  Porter was a heavy drinker and in 1908 his health, which had deteriorated for several years, took a dramatic turn for the worse, as did his writing. 
  O Henry died of cirrhosis of the liver complicated by diabetes and an enlarged heart on 5th June 1910.<

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  A Wicked Voice - Violet Paget...

  Vernon Lee

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  Vernon Lee was born Violet Paget on 4th October 1856 in Boulogne, France to intellectual expatriate British parents.   
   
  In common with several other very talented literary women of the day she felt it necessary to publish under a masculine pseudonym in order for her writing to be taken seriously.  Indeed she seems to have adopted that persona across her whole lifestyle becoming personally known and acknowledged by all as Vernon Lee and accordingly dressed as a man.    
   
  Her first published work, in 1880, was taken from her collection of essays that had originally appeared in Fraser’s Magazine with the scholarly title of; ‘Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy.’ It reflected her passion for music and centered on the rich creative lives of poet-librettist Pietro Metastasio and dramatists Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi.   
   
  She wrote over a dozen volumes of essays on art, music, and travel with her scholarly appreciation animated by wit and imagination.  Lee was well-regarded as an expert on the Italian Renaissance and was a proponent of the Aesthetic movement. 
   
  Her literary talents were extensive and she wrote a number of novels and plays.  Perhaps her best remembered works are her haunting and powerful short stories exploring the supernatural.  Lee has often received accolades for these and glowingly compared to other authors such as M R James. 
    
  A committed pacifist she was resolved to protest against World War I. Her social activism in other areas was perhaps fueled by her feminist beliefs.  In her private life she was a lesbian and had long-term passionate relationships with three women including the doomed author and poet, Amy Levy.   
   
  Vernon Lee died on 13th February 1935 in San Gervasio Bresciano, Italy.  
   
  In this story a writer of Operas discovers the history of a venetian singer whose very voice could lift an audience to ecstasy, love and even death.

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  The Summer Flood

  Goronwy Rees

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  With a foreword by Mike Parker and an afterword by Norena Shopland.
  
  
  
  "if he was to love and be loved he must make such open confession of love and receive the assurance of love in return"
  
  
  
  Owen Morgan, an Oxford undergraduate, returns to his family home on the rural north coast of Wales for the summer.
  
  The world has changed for Morgan. He is a man coming to terms with himself. University has offered new experiences, desires he had suspected but never acted upon have become real. It was a crime against both the law and God. He asks for forgiveness each time.
  
  A month in the decadence of Weimar Germany has shocked and enthralled him. At home, his cousin Nest waits for him; patient, loving. Matthews will be waiting for him in college; impatient, demanding.

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  Top 10 Short Stories The - The...

  George Eliot

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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. 
   
  In this Century England assembles more of the world’s territories, people and materials for her own Empire.  The arts also flourish with names in this volume that are bywords for talent beyond the reach of almost all other writers.  An ever hungry audience demands yet more and more. 
   
  1 - The Top 10 - The 19th Century - The English - An Introduction 
  2 - The Lifted Veil - Part 1 by George Eliot 
  3 - The Lifted Veil - Part 2 by George Eliot 
  4 - The Signalman by Charles Dickens 
  5 - The Man Who Would Be King - Part 1 by Rudyard Kipling 
  6 - The Man Who Would Be King - Part 2 by Rudyard Kipling 
  7 - The Magic Shop by H G Wells 
  8 - The Withered Arm by Thomas Hardy 
  9 - The Old Nurse's Story by Elizabeth Gaskell 
  10 - A Little Dinner At Timmin's by William Makepeace Thackeray 
  11 - Father Giles of Ballymoy by Anthony Trollope 
  12 - Lost Hearts by M R James 
  13 - A Terribly Strange Bed by Wilkie Collins

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  The New Catacomb

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

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  Though Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is best known for his detective stories, he also wrote other short stories which are masterpieces of mystery and suspense. In some of the stories, a suppressed uneasiness gradually builds up and evolves into sheer horror; in others, the story line unexpectedly changes and comes to an unexpected conclusion.  In "The New Catacomb," deceit and terror are buried in the deep recesses of an Roman archeological find.

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