Publisher: anamsaleem
Written by quintessential American humor writer Mark Twain, The Prince and the Pauper offers an extraordinarily insightful glimpse into the British system of social classes. Although the novel was intended for children and young adults, it's a rollicking read for all fans of engrossing fiction.
"Euphemia's New Entertainment" by H. G. Wells is a short essay. H. G. Wells once different, humorous social satire and ironic.Euphemia has great ideas of putting people at their ease, a thousand little devices for thawing the very stiffest among them with a home-like glow. Far be it from me to sing her praises, but I must admit that at times she is extremely successful in this-at times almost too successful.Show book
Here is a story of the prairie in the mid 1800's, when American citizens and European immigrants rushed to the Nebraska prairie to secure their free 160 acres and build their homesteads. It's a story of young people in a young country, of Jim Burden from Virginia and barefoot Antonia Shimerda from Bohemia. Neighbors on a vast sea of rolling grass, sharing the hardships of living in sod houses and farming land that had never seen a plow. The prairie was both a lonely and friendly land, lonely with its empty distances and friendly because pioneer settlers felt an instinctive bond with each other. This is their story, how and why they endured and succeeded.Show book
A collection of three short stories and two novellas written between 1897 and 1898. All the stories had first been published in various monthly periodicals and this was the first volume to collect these stories. It contains: "The Crystal Egg", "The Star", "A Story of the Stone Age", "A Story of the Days To Come", "The Man Who Could Work Miracles".Show book
Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was born on 1st April 1809 to a father, descended from Ukrainian Cossacks and a mother with a military background in the Ukrainian town of Sorochyntsi, then part of the Russian Empire and rich in Cossack traditions and folklore. His father wrote poetry and plays which the young Gogol helped stage at his uncle’s home theatre. This helped ignite in him a love of literature and blossomed when he attended, what is now, the Nizhyn Gogol State University at the age of 12. Here he participated in school theatre productions and refined his mastery of his native Ukrainian and also the Russian of his Imperial masters. In 1828 he went to St Petersburg and unsuccessfully tried to begin a career as an actor after finding that with no money and no connections the civil service was barred to him. Embezzling money from his mother he embarked on a trip to Germany. When the money ran out, he returned to St Petersburg but the experiences were used in a series of stories he contributed to periodicals. These tales were steeped in his childhood memories of the Ukrainian landscape and peasantry enlivened with the supernatural of its folklore woven with realistic events of the day. He wrote in Russian in a whimsical, colloquial style with a smattering of Ukrainian words and phrases that provided an authenticity. Eight stories were published as ‘Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka’. Seemingly all at once fame and fortune arrived. Gogol was hailed by his contemporaries, including Pushkin, as a pre-eminent writer of Russian literature. His success continued with his brilliant plays ‘The Inspector General’ and the comedy ‘The Marriage for the Theatre’, both being highly acclaimed. In 1834 he became Professor of Medieval History at the University of St. Petersburg but with little academic or teacher training, failed to adequately fulfil many of his duties and soon resigned this post. With no obligations and using his earnings from his writing, which now included the impressionistic and immortal ‘Dead Souls’, Gogol travelled around Europe, spending the most time in Rome where he studied art, read Italian literature and developed a passion for opera. In the 1840s Gogol became preoccupied with a need to purify his soul and embarked on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In tandem he fell under the influence of a strict and austere spiritual ascetic who persuaded him to observe strict fasts that, allied with his depression and deteriorating health, contributed to his death on 21st April 1852 at the age of only 43. Gogol had a profound and enduring impact on literature which can be evidenced from his masterpiece, ‘The Cloak’, more popularly although wrongly translated as ‘The Overcoat’ published in 1841. A hundred years later Vladamir Nabokov called it ‘The greatest Russian short story ever written.’Show book
In A Hospital Christmas a Civil War-era hospital is the setting for a Christmas story about caring for others, thinking positively and how sharing can make Christmas meaningful for those who have little.Show book
This short story is about a man who is brought in front of the Spanish Inquisition and judgment passed upon him to suffer the horrors of the Pit in Toledo. Toledo, Spain is located just south of Madrid and was the center of the Spanish Inquisition. The Inquisition was originally intended to ensure the belief and practices of those who converted from Judaism and Islam, but the methods used for those who were judged to be heretics was torture. His torture involved being thrown into a pit, being drugged and strapped to a table where a large pendulum blade is slowly lowered directly over his awaiting body. Poe brings a real sense of fear during an intense episode of this single prisoner.Show book
