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  The Picture of Dorian Gray

  Oscar Wilde

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  "It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done," said Lord Henry, languidly. "You must certainly send it next year to the Grosvenor. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. The Grosvenor is the only place."    "I don't think I will send it anywhere," he answered, tossing his head back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him at Oxford. "No: I won't send it anywhere."    Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows, and looked at him in amazement through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whorls from his heavy opium-tainted cigarette. "Not send it anywhere? My dear fellow, why? Have you any reason? What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw it away. It is silly of you, for there is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about. A portrait like this would set you far above all the young men in England, and make the old men quite jealous, if old men are ever capable of any emotion."    "I know you will laugh at me," he replied, "but I really can't exhibit it. I have put too much of myself into it."    Lord Henry stretched his long legs out on the divan and shook with laughter.  "Yes, I knew you would laugh; but it is quite true, all the same."    "Too much of yourself in it! Upon my word, Basil, I didn't know you were so vain; and I really can't see any resemblance between you, with your rugged strong face and your coal-black hair, and this young Adonis, who looks as if he was made of ivory and rose-leaves. Why, my dear Basil, he is a Narcissus, and you--well, of course you have an intellectual expression, and all that.    But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself an exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of course, in the Church. But then in the Church they don't think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age of eighty what he was told to say when he was a boy of eighteen, and consequently he always looks absolutely delightful. Your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks. I feel quite sure of that. He is a brainless, beautiful thing, who should be always here in winter when we have no flowers to look at, and always here in summer when we want something to chill our intelligence. Don't flatter yourself, Basil: you are not in the least like him."

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  The Seed of McCoy

  Jack London

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  “The Seed of McCoy” written by Jack London: The Pyrenees, her iron sides pressed low in the water by her cargo of wheat, rolled sluggishly, and made it easy for the man who was climbing aboard from out a tiny outrigger canoe. As his eyes came level with the rail, so that he could see inboard, it seemed to him that he saw a dim, almost indiscernible haze. It was more like an illusion, like a blurring film that had spread abruptly over his eyes. He felt an inclination to brush it away, and the same instant he thought that he was growing old and that it was time to send to San Francisco for a pair of spectacles.

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  The Iron Heel

  Jack London

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  The Iron Heel is a science fiction novel novel by American writer Jack London, first published in 1908. 
  It is considered to be "the earliest of the modern dystopian" fiction, it chronicles the rise of an oligarchic tyranny in the United States. In The Iron Heel, Jack London's socialist views are explicitly on display. A forerunner of soft science fiction novels and stories of the 1960s and 70s, the book stresses future changes in society and politics while paying much less attention to technological changes.
  The Iron Heel is cited by George Orwell's biographer Michael Shelden as having influenced Orwell's most famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell himself described London as having made "a very remarkable prophecy of the rise of Fascism", in the book and believed that London's understanding of the primitive had made him a better prophet "than many better-informed and more logical thinkers." Specifically, Orwell's protagonist Winston Smith, like London's Avis Everhard, keeps a diary where he writes down his rebellious thoughts and experiences. However, while Everhard's diary remained hidden during the centuries of tyranny to be discovered and published later, Smith's diary falls into the hands of the book's harsh Thought Police, whose interrogator tells Smith not to expect posterity to vindicate him: "Posterity will never hear of you, we will vaporize you".

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  The Diary of a God - From their...

  Barry Pain

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  Barry Eric Odell Pain was born at 3 Sydney Street in Cambridge on 28th September 1864. He was one of 4 children. 
  He was educated at Sedbergh School and then Corpus Christi College, Cambridge where he read classics and contributed to and edited Granta. 
  Four years of service as an Army coach followed before he moved to London. In 1889, Cornhill Magazine published his short story ‘The Hundred Gates’.  This opened the way for Pain to advance his literary career on several fronts. He became a contributor to Punch and The Speaker, as well as joining the staff of both the Daily Chronicle and Black and White.  
  In 1897 he succeeded Jerome K Jerome as editor of To-Day but still contributed regularly, until 1928, to the Windsor Magazine. 
  It is often said that Pain was discovered by Robert Louis Stevenson, who compared his work to that of Guy de Maupassant.  It’s an apt comparison. Pain was also a master of disturbing prose but able to inject parody and light comedy into many of his works.  A simple premise could in his hands suddenly expand into a world very real but somehow emotionally fraught and on the very edge of darkness as many of these short stories demonstrate.   
  Despite applying his talents to several genres and forms today Pain is more readily thought of, especially during the first decade of the 20th Century, as perhaps the leading British humorist of his day.  These stories reveal a darker side and beg to differ. 
  Barry Pain died on 5th May 1928 in Bushey, Hertfordshire.

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  Object Lessons (Unabridged)

  Booker T. Washington

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  Booker Taliaferro Washington (April 5, 1856 - November 14, 1915) was an American educator, author, orator, and adviser to several presidents of the United States. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the dominant leader in the African American community and of the contemporary black elite. Washington was from the last generation of black American leaders born into slavery and became the leading voice of the former slaves and their descendants. They were newly oppressed in the South by disenfranchisement and the Jim Crow discriminatory laws enacted in the post-Reconstruction Southern states in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
  OBJECT LESSONS: Not long ago an old coloured man living in this State said to me: "I's done quit libin' in de ashes. I's got my second freedom." That remark meant, in this case, that that old man by economy, hard work and proper guidance, after twenty years of struggle, had freed himself from debt, had paid for fifty acres of land, had built a comfortable house, and was a tax-payer.

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  Fair Exchange and No Robbery...

  L. M. Montgomery

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  Lucy Maud Montgomery (November 30, 1874 - April 24, 1942), published as L. M. Montgomery, was a Canadian author best known for a series of novels beginning in 1908 with Anne of Green Gables. The book was an immediate success. The title character, orphan Anne Shirley, made Montgomery famous in her lifetime and gave her an international following.
  Fair Exchange and No Robbery: Katherine Rangely was packing up. Her chum and roommate, Edith Wilmer, was sitting on the bed watching her in that calm disinterested fashion peculiarly maddening to a bewildered packer.

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