Publisher: Jules verne
1886 novel by Andre Laurie and Jules Gabriel Verne. Verne was a French author who pioneered the science-fiction genre and, among others, is often popularly referred to as the "Father of Science Fiction."
From the ambitious and mad titular character to his devilish wife Lady Macbeth to the moral and noble Banquo to the mysterious Three Witches, Macbeth is one of William Shakespeare's more brilliantly populated plays and remains among the most widely read, performed in innovative productions set in a vast array of times and locations, from Nazi Germany to Revolutionary Cuba. Macbeth is a distinguished warrior hero, who over the course of the play, transforms into a brutal, murderous villain and pays an extraordinary price for committing an evil act. A man consumed with ambition and self-doubt, Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's most vital meditations on the dangerous corners of the human imagination. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom investigates Macbeth's interiority and unthinkable actions with razor-sharp insight, agility, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are seventeen and another when we are forty, Bloom writes about his shifting understanding—over the course of his own lifetime—of this endlessly compelling figure, so that the book also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity.Show book
Little Women (Part 2): Three years later, Meg and John marry and learn how to live together. When they have twins, Meg is a devoted mother but John begins to feel neglected and left out. Meg seeks advice from Marmee, who helps her find balance in her married life by making more time for wifely duties and encouraging John to become more involved with child rearing. - Laurie graduates from college, having put in the effort to do well in his last year with Jo's prompting. Amy is chosen over Jo to go on a European tour with her aunt. Beth's health is weak due to complications from scarlet fever and her spirits are down. While trying to uncover the reason for Beth's sadness, Jo realizes that Laurie has fallen in love. At first she believes it's with Beth, but soon senses it's with herself. Jo confides in Marmee, telling her that she loves Laurie like a brother and that she could not love him in a romantic way. Little Women is a coming-of-age novel written by American novelist Louisa May Alcott, originally published in two volumes in 1868 and 1869. The story follows the lives of the four March sisters—Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy—and details their passage from childhood to womanhood. Loosely based on the lives of the author and her three sisters, it is classified as an autobiographical or semi-autobiographical novel.Show book
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. Across the American continent African Americans have never achieved equal status. Civil war, societal upheavals white ignorance have still left many at the bottom of the heap. For them the American dream is just that, a long way from real life. Yet these authors are unafraid to spell out their lives for future generations, it is a powerful legacy. Hope endures. 01 - The Top 10 - The African American Short Story - An Introduction 2 - The Scapegoat by Paul Laurence Dunbar 3 - The Grist in the Mill by Wallace Thurman 4 - The Stones of the Village by Alice Dunbar Nelson 5 - The Quadroons by Lydia Maria Child 6 - Two Offers by Frances W Harper 7 - The Wife of His Youth by Charles W Chesnutt 8 - The City of Refuge by Rudolph Fisher 9 - Talma by Pauline E Hopkins 10 - The Hoodoo by Martha Gruening 11 - The Black Vampyre by Uriah Derick D'ArcyShow book
Heart of Darkness is a novella written by Joseph Conrad. It is widely regarded as a significant work of English literature and part of the Western canon. The story tells of Charles Marlow, an Englishman who took a foreign assignment from a Belgian trading company as a ferry-boat captain in Africa. Heart of Darkness exposes the myth behind colonization while exploring the three levels of darkness that the protagonist, Marlow, encounters—the darkness of the Congo wilderness, the darkness of the European's cruel treatment of the natives, and the unfathomable darkness within every human being for committing heinous acts of evil. Although Conrad does not give the name of the river, at the time of writing the Congo Free State, the location of the large and important Congo River, was a private colony of Belgium's King Leopold II. Marlow is employed to transport ivory downriver. However, his more pressing assignment is to return Kurtz, another ivory trader, to civilization, in a cover-up. Kurtz has a reputation throughout the region. This symbolic story is a story within a story or frame narrative. It follows Marlow as he recounts from dusk through to late night, to a group of men aboard a ship anchored in the Thames Estuary his Congolese adventure. The passage of time and the darkening sky during the fictitious narrative-within-the-narrative parallel the atmosphere of the story.Show book
Thomas Hood (1799-1845) was an English writer and great friend of Lamb, Hazlitt and De Quincey. Hood wrote regularly for The London Magazine, the Athenaeum, and Punch. He later published a magazine largely consisting of his own works."A Tale of the Great Plague" is an ironic piece set in the time of the Black Death, about how an old man outwits a gang of ruthless cutthroats.Show book
Flaubert's first published novel, Madame Bovary is awash in exquisite 19th century realism and detail. Frequently cited as one of the great masterpieces of literature, Madame Bovary is also renown for it's notorious history. Emma Bovary lived in a world of romantic dreams. Her selfish and demanding ways led to a gradual corruption that showed her to be an utterly shallow and vain woman, but her escapades and caprices draw us into her story.Show book
