Publisher: anamsaleem
Before his literary career took off and he emerged as one of America's foremost men of letters, Mark Twain worked as a steamboat pilot in the antebellum South and Midwest. This fascinating account offers a brief history of commercial boating in the period and a probing, insightful, and eminently entertaining look at Twain's own experiences.
Victor-Marie Hugo (26 February 1802 - 22 May 1885) was a French poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. During a literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote abundantly in an exceptional variety of genres: lyrics, satires, epics, philosophical poems, epigrams, novels, history, critical essays, political speeches, funeral orations, diaries, and letters public and private, as well as dramas in verse and prose.BOOK 8: CEMETERIES TAKE THAT WHICH IS COMMITTED THEM: It was into this house that Jean Valjean had, as Fauchelevent expressed it, "fallen from the sky." He had scaled the wall of the garden which formed the angle of the Rue Polonceau.Show book
When an avid pipe collector receives an unexpected gift from a rival, he suspects an ulterior motive. Inside the box is the most unusual and uncanny pipe he has ever set eyes upon. But when he tries to smoke it, a chain of events is unleashed which even the most credulous ghost hunter could not foresee.... A macabre mystery of unsurpassed suspense and horror. Not for the faint hearted!Show book
"The Adventure of the Retired Colourman" (1926), one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is one of 12 stories in the cycle collected as The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes is hired by a retired art supply dealer from Lewisham, Josiah Amberley, to look into his wife's disappearance. She has left with a neighbour, Dr. Ray Ernest, taking a sizeable quantity of cash and securities. Amberley wants the two tracked down.Show book
During the Civil War, five Union soldiers and a dog quietly escape from the clutches of the Confederate Army at Richmond, Virginia by hot air balloon. Their intention was to simply drift safely over to the Union lines and rejoin their own troops. Instead, while aloft, they were caught in a high wind and whisked hundreds of miles out to sea. The men carried no provisions for survival and had no idea where they were. Under those circumstances their future was bleak. Worse yet, the balloon was leaking air and slowly deflating. As the balloon made its slow descent from the sky, the men were fortunate to spot an island in the distance. As the balloon dropped lower and lower it also drifted closer to the island. When the basket hit the sea, the partially deflated balloon dragged it violently across the surface and scattered the men among the waves. The men were able to swim to their only refuge...The Mysterious Island. At first the island was accomodating, but then it became more mysterious as unusual and strange happenings occured. Something deep in the depths of the island seemed to have control...something mysterious and unidentifiable....Show book
A vivid love story and adventure tale, Oroonoko is a heroic slave narrative about a royal prince and his fight for freedom. The eponymous hero, Oroonoko, deemed royalty in one world and slave in another, is torn from his noble status and betrayed into slavery in Surinam, where he is reduced to chains, fetters and shackles. But his high spirit and admirable character will not be suppressed. The book was groundbreaking at the time and is considered to be one of the first novels written in English. Its condemnation of slavery and Europeans, and striking portrayal of sexuality and violence, shrouded Behn’s name in controversy for years after it was published.Show book
"The Adventure of the Lion's Mane" (1926), one of the 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories written by British author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, is one of 12 stories in the cycle collected as The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes. It is notable for being narrated by Holmes himself, instead of by Dr. Watson (who does not appear in the story). Holmes is enjoying his retirement in Sussex when one day at the beach, he meets his friend Harold Stackhurst, the headmaster of a nearby preparatory school called The Gables. No sooner have they met than Stackhurst's science teacher, Fitzroy McPherson, staggers up to them, clearly in agony and wearing only an overcoat and trousers. He collapses, manages to say something about a "lion's mane", and then succumbs. He is observed to have red welts all over his back, possibly administered by a flexible weapon of some kind, for the marks curve over his shoulder and round his ribs.Show book
