Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  The Wrong Box

  Robert Louis Stevenson

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  the Wrong Box is a comedy about the ending of a tontine (a tontine is an arrangement whereby a number of young people subscribe to a fund which is then closed and invested until all but one of the subscribers have died. That last subscriber then receives the whole of the proceeds). The story involves the last two such survivors and their relations, a train crash, missing uncles, surplus dead bodies and innocent bystanders. A farce really.

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  About Love and Other Stories

  Anton Chekhov

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  Raymond Carver called Anton Chekhov "the greatest short story writer who has ever lived." This unequivocal verdict on Chekhov's genius has been echoed many times by writers as diverse as Katherine Mansfield, Somerset Maugham, John Cheever and Tobias Wolf. While his popularity as a playwright has sometimes overshadowed his achievements in prose, the importance of Chekhov's stories is now recognized by readers as well as by fellow authors. Their themes--alienation, the absurdity and tragedy of human existence--have as much relevance today as when they were written, and these superb new translations capture their modernist spirit. Elusive and subtle, spare and unadorned, the stories in this selection are among Chekhov's most poignant and lyrical. The book includes well-known pieces such as "The Lady with the Little Dog", as well as less familiar work like "Gusev", inspired by Chekhov's travels in the Far East, and "Rothschild's Violin", a haunting and darkly humorous tale about death and loss. The stories are arranged chronologically to show the evolution of Chekhov's art.

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  Gothic Tales of Terror Volume 8

  Mark Twain, Robert Louis...

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  GOTHIC TALES OF TERROR - VOLUME 8. This collection of short stories contains several gothic tales to bear macabre and chilling witness to writers as diverse as Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jerome K Jerome and Edgar Allan Poe. These tales are designed to unsettle you, just a little, as you sit back, and take in their words as they lead  you on a walk to places you’d perhaps rather not visit on your own.   Our stories are A Ghost Story by Mark Twain, Ollah by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Doctor’s Story by Jerome K Jerome and Murders In The Rue Morgue By Edgar Allan Poe. These stories are read for you by many readers including Hubert Gregg and Stuart Milligan.

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  Russian Short Story The - Volume...

  Nikolai Gogol, IVAN TURGENEV,...

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  The Russian novel has a reputation that is immense, both in narrative and in length.  Unquestionably though the ideas, themes and characters make many novels rightly revered as world class, as icons of literature. 
   
  Perhaps an easier way to enjoy a wider selection of the Russian heritage, with its varied and glorious literary talents, is with the short story.  These gems sparkle and beguile the mind with their characters and narrative, exploring facets of society and the human condition that more Western authors somehow find more difficult to navigate, or to explore, explain and relate to.   
   
  The Russian short story is, in many respects, in a genre of its own.  It is at its captivating best whether it’s an exploration of real-life experiences, through fantasy and fables and on to total absurdity. 
   
  In a land so vast it is unsurprising that it is a world almost unto itself. Cultures and landscapes of differing hues are packed together bound only by the wilful bonds and force of Empire. 
   
  The stories in this collection traverse the decades where one might be a serf under an absolute monarch, and the reality of that was pretty near to slavery, into an emancipation of sorts in the fields, or towns under the despotic will of landowners and the rich into the upheavals of Empire and then the overthrow of the ruling class and its replacement by the communists, who promised equality for all and delivered a society where the down-trodden remained the lowest yet vital cog of the state machine and its will.  
   
  Whilst Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Chekhov are a given in any Russian collection we also explore and include Andreyev, Korolenko, Turgenev, Blavatsky and many others to create a world rich and dense across a sprawling landscape of diverse people, riddled with the class and unfairness in perhaps some of the most turbulent times that Russia has ever experienced. 
   
  01 - The Russian Short Story - Volume 2 - An Introduction 
  02 - Diary of a Madman by Nikolai Gogol 
  03 - Taman by Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov 
  04 - The Jew by Ivan Turgenev 
  05 - The Rendezvous by Ivan Turgenev 
  06 - A Strange Story by Ivan Turgenev 
  07 - Mumu by Ivan Turgenev 
  08 - The District Doctor by Ivan Turgenev 
  09 - The Dream of a Ridiculous Man by Fyodor Dostoyevsky 
  10 - The Beggar Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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  The Thing in the Hall

  E.F. Benson

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  Edward Frederic Benson (1867-1940) was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist, archaeologist, and short story writer, best known for his evocative and beautifully narrated ghost and horror stories.'The Thing in the Hall' is one of the creepiest supernatural tales ever told. Two old friends live next door to one another. One, Louis Fielder dies unexpectedly in horrific and mysterious circumstances.At the inquest a verdict of suicide while of unsound mind is reached, largely based on the evidence of his friend and neighbour, Dr. Francis Assheton. But when Dr. Assheton himself dies only a week later...and in exactly the same gruesome circumstances as Fielder, the mystery needs to be investigated.

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  The Rabbi in the Attic - And...

  Eileen Pollack

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  “Never sentimental or simplistic, these low-key stories, written with a contemporary flair and humor, are a rich blend of moral and artistic sensibility.” —Kirkus Reviews   In an age of minimalists, Eileen Pollack is a writer of rare generosity. The women and men in The Rabbi in the Attic are complex, vivid people to whom something happens. Their stories take place in small towns in the Catskills, a laboratory of mutant mice in nowhere Tennessee, the backwoods of New Hampshire, the “City of Five Smells” in America’s heartland—worlds rendered with such love and intensity that the simplest objects seem magical. Many of the narrators look back on their pasts. But don’t expect to be lulled by nostalgia. Expect to laugh. To be jolted. And to be moved.   Like most of us, these characters are struggling to understand what they have gained and lost by abandoning the passions and moral certainties of youth. As the narrator of the first story discovers when “barbarian” rock fans invade her town, it can be terrifying to be knocked from the “tiny fixed orbit” of conventional life. But if a person can stretch her imagination far enough, she might also be able to glimpse an “elsewhere” beyond the boundaries of ordinary human limitations.   This battle between the real and ideal is taken to mythic heights in the title novella, in which a novice rabbi must try to evict her Orthodox predecessor from the house provided by her prickly congregation. Only when she tempers her enthusiasm for the new ways with compassion for those who follow the old ways can Rabbi Bloomgarten begin to care for their souls.   Eileen Pollack writes from a Jewish point of view, but her subject is the search for principles that we must all undertake in a world in which religious truths are no longer handed down from parent to child.   Just as one of her characters decides to become a “value assessor,” the author herself helps us to sort through the jumble of objects, ideas, and memories in our own attics. In doing so, she appeals to our minds and our hearts. Her characters teach us that imagination and empathy are our best hope if we are to understand—and perhaps transcend—the pain in our world. Her language is lyrical, rhythmic, and lush. The images in her stories—a chef’s severed hand, a plummeting air conditioner, a village sunk beneath a reservoir—will stay in your mind long after you have finished her book.

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