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  Long Voyage The (Unabridged)

  Charles Dickens

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  The story concerns a man alone on New Year's Eve, who loves to "sit by the fire, thinking of what I have read in books of voyage and travel" while he himself has never been "around the world, never has been shipwrecked, ice-environed, tomahawked, or eaten." Some of the books he has read concern Christopher Columbus, James Bruce who searched for the source of the Nile, John Franklin who made an "unhappy overland Journey" and was lost searching for the northwest passage in the Canadian Arctic, "Men-selling despots" and the Atlantic slave trade, and Mungo Park, a Scottish explorer (1771-1806) who wrote Travels in the Interior of Africa and other adventure stories. He also touches on "one awful creature" by the name of Alexander Pearce who escaped from a penal colony on an island and cannibalized his fellow escapees.

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  Babylon Revisited - Like his...

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

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  Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born on 24th September 1896 in Saint Paul, Minnesota into an upper-middle class family. Whilst his mother was pregnant with him, his two young sisters tragically died.  Fitzgerald once said this was when his destiny as a writer was ordained. 
   
  His intelligence and talent was recognised from an early age, with his first story, about a detective being published in the school magazine when he was just 13.   
   
  In 1913 he enrolled at Princeton but his devotion to his own literary pursuits resulted in him leaving and, rather bizarrely, joining the Army.  In 1918, stationed at Fort Sheridan near Montgomery, Alabama he met and became infatuated and then inseparable from Zelda Sayre.  Initially though she refused to marry him but with the success of ‘This Side of Paradise’, the fame and the flow of money enabled them both to begin a gilded life.  For them this was The Jazz Age.  For Fitzgerald he was already an alcoholic. 
   
  He continued to write with great mastery and the titles of his novels and many of his 164 short stories are household names.  The Great Gatsby, often cited as The Great American Novel was published to mixed reviews.  As America moved from the Great Depression to the slaughter of the Second World War his works and himself were seen as far too entwined with the decadent twenties. The world had moved on and he hadn’t.   
   
  Further tragedy was never far from his life. Zelda after years of erratic and now intolerable behaviour was committed to an institution in 1936.  His own sales began to decline and he became a hack for hire in Hollywood, dependent on increasing amounts of booze and the weekly pay check.  His drunken state had often resulted in arrest or hospitalisation, further imperiling his talents.   Despite his contribution to many MGM films he received only one credit. 
   
  The end came all too soon for one of America’s greatest ever writers.  On 21st December 1940, at only 44 years of age in Hollywood, F Scott Fitzgerald succumbed to a heart attack. 
   
  In this bittersweet story of a man who enjoyed the boom years of la dolce vita and now, in more straitened times, is unable to get what he really wants; the custody of his daughter.  He returns to Paris to meet the ghosts of those good times and to make amends for his past.

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  A Ghost Story - From their pens...

  Mark Twain

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  Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri on the 30th November 1835 and is far better known by his pen name of Mark Twain.  An American writer and humorist of the first order he is perhaps best known for his novels ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ and its sequel ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ which are often described with that mythic line The Great American Novel. 
  Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri which would later provide the backdrop to these great novels.  Apprenticed to a printer he also became a typesetter and then a master riverboat pilot on the Mississippi.  Later, heading west with his brother Orion to make his fortune, he failed at gold mining and instead turned to journalism and thence his true calling as a writer of humorous stories where his wit and humor sparkled from every paragraph, his craft evident with every page and punctured target. 
  A staunch supporter of copyright protections this helped him keep much of the wealth his writing created, though much money was also lost on investments that he pursued in his love for science and technology as well as investing in his own inventions. 
  Twain was born during a visit by Halley’s comet, and he predicted that he would go out with it as well.  He died the day after its subsequent return on 21st April 1910, at his house, Stormfield, located in Redding, Connecticut.

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  The Cricket on the Hearth The...

  Charles Dickens

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  The Cricket on the Heart is a novella by Charles Dickens, published by Bradbury and Evans, and released 20 December 1845. Dickens began writing the book in October 1845 and finished it by December. Like all of Dickens’s Christmas books, it was published in book form, not as a serial. Dickens described the novel as “quiet and domestic innocent and pretty.” It is subdivided into chapters called “Chirps”, similar to the “Quarters” of The Chimes or the “Staves” of A Christmas Carol. It is the third of Dickens’s five Christmas books, preceded by A Christmas Carol (1843) and The Chimes (1844), and followed by The Battle of Life (1846) and The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain (1848).

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  The Prodigal Parents

  Sinclair Lewis

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  “The Prodigal Parents” is a novel by Sinclair Lewis, an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930. The story revolves around a typical middle-class family of four and is about the revolt of the parents against the revolt of youth. The daughter, inclined towards communism, and the hard-drinking brother want their mother and father to continue to support them.

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  The Flowers of Evil - Charles...

  Charles Baudelaire

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  "Les Fleurs du Mal" (The Flowers of Evil) is a collection of poems by the French poet Charles Baudelaire. It was first published in 1857 and is considered one of the most important works in French literature. The collection is divided into several sections, each exploring different themes such as love, death, beauty, and decadence. 
   
  Baudelaire's poetry in "Les Fleurs du Mal" is known for its rich and innovative language, as well as its exploration of dark and taboo subjects. The poet often expresses a fascination with the beauty found in the midst of decay and decadence. The poems reflect Baudelaire's complex and often contradictory views on the nature of humanity and the modern urban experience. 
   
  One of the most famous poems from "Les Fleurs du Mal" is "To the Reader" ("Au Lecteur"), which serves as an introduction to the collection. In this poem, Baudelaire addresses the reader directly and sets the tone for the themes that will be explored throughout the work. 
   
  Despite its literary significance, "Les Fleurs du Mal" initially faced legal issues due to its perceived obscenity and immorality. Baudelaire and his publisher were fined, and six poems were suppressed. Over time, however, the collection gained recognition and is now celebrated as a masterpiece of French literature. Baudelaire's influence extends beyond literature, as his exploration of the darker aspects of human experience has resonated with artists, philosophers, and thinkers across various disciplines.

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