Other books that might interest you

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  Puppy Love Valentine

  C. Coal

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  Julia lives for her puppy Maisey. And there's nothing her pup likes more than to go to the dog park to chase squirrels and play with other pups.Julia's happy with her life, but maybe Maisey will lead her to the love she didn't even know she was missing.This story is part of the Puppy Love series of clean meet cute short stories about puppies bringing two people together. They can be read in any order.

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  Nerves

  Anton Chekhov

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  Nerves is a story by Anton Chekhovs, first published: 1895. Three friends, Mayer (a medical student), Rybnikov (a student of the arts), and Vassilyev (a law student), decide to go out one night to get some girls. Mayer and Rybnikov had to spend some time convincing Vassilyev to come along, as he was far more fastidious and cautious than his friends. Vassilyev himself is envious of his friends, who live their lives in a much more carefree fashion. The three friends visit several different houses containing the girls, but Vassilyev finds himself more eager to talk to the girls and treat them to fancy drinks than to pay his money to get something more. He tries to understand the lives the fallen women are living, but he grows more and more disgusted with them...

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  Super Hathaman

  Kaushik Viswanath

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  "Hathaman wishes to become Super Hathaman - he wants to fly in the sky and
  walk on water! On the advice of an old yogi, he journeys to Tibet to acquire
  super powers. Does he get them?
  This quirky tale by Kaushik Viswanath is illustrated in mixed media by Chetan
  Sharma (Animagic)."

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  The Man Upstairs - Classic Tales...

  P. G. Wodehouse

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  P.G. Wodehouse gives us a delightful romantic comedy of two struggling artists who fantastically misunderstand each other.

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  The Elephanta Suite

  Paul Theroux

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  In this “candid, perceptive and intelligent” trio of novellas, the acclaimed travel writer presents tales of Westerners transformed by sojourns in India (Independent, UK). These three intertwined novellas by the author of The Great Railway Bazaar capture the tumult, ambition, hardship, and serenity that mark today’s India. Theroux’s Westerners risk venturing far beyond the subcontinent’s well-worn paths to discover truth, peace, or woe.    A middle-aged couple on vacation veers heedlessly from idyll to chaos. A buttoned-up Boston lawyer finds succor in Mumbai’s reeking slums. And a young woman befriends an elephant in Bangalore. We also meet Indian characters as singular as they are reflective of the country’s subtle ironies: an executive who yearns to become a holy beggar, an earnest young striver whose personality is rewired by acquiring an American accent, a miracle-working guru, and others. As ever, Theroux’s portraits of people and places explode stereotypes to exhilarating effect.

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  British Short Story The - Volume...

  Anthony Trollope, George Eliot,...

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  These British Isles, moored across from mainland Europe, are more often seen as a world unto themselves.  Restless and creative, they often warred amongst themselves until they began a global push to forge a World Empire of territory, of trade and of language. 
   
  Here our ambitions are only of the literary kind.  These shores have mustered many masters of literature. So this anthology’s boundaries includes only those authors who were born in the British Isles - which as a geographical definition is the UK mainland and the island of Ireland - and wrote in a familiar form of English. 
   
  Whilst Daniel Defoe is the normal starting point we begin a little earlier with Aphra Behn, an equally colourful character as well as an astonishing playwright and poet.  And this is how we begin to differentiate our offering; both in scope, in breadth and in depth.  These islands have raised and nurtured female authors of the highest order and rank and more often than not they have been sidelined or ignored in favour of that other gender which usually gets the plaudits and the royalties. 
   
  Way back when it was almost immoral that a woman should write.  A few pages of verse might be tolerated but anything else brought ridicule and shame.  That seems unfathomable now but centuries ago women really were chattel, with marriage being, as the Victorian author Charlotte Smith boldly stated ‘legal prostitution’.  Some of course did find a way through - Jane Austen, the Brontes and Virginia Woolf but for many others only by changing their names to that of men was it possible to get their book to publication and into a readers hands.  Here we include George Eliot and other examples. 
   
  We add further depth with many stories by authors who were famed and fawned over in their day.  Some wrote only a hidden gem or two before succumbing to poverty and death. There was no second career as a game show guest, reality TV contestant or youtuber. They remain almost forgotten outposts of talent who never prospered despite devoted hours of pen and brain. 
   
  Keeping to a chronological order helps us to highlight how authors through the ages played around with characters and narrative to achieve distinctive results across many scenarios, many styles and many genres. The short story became a sort of literary laboratory, an early disruptor, of how to present and how to appeal to a growing audience as a reflection of social and societal changes.  Was this bound to happen or did a growing population that could read begin to influence rather than just accept? 
   
  Moving through the centuries we gather a groundswell of authors as we hit the Victorian Age - an age of physical mass communication albeit only on an actual printed page.  An audience was offered a multitude of forms: novels (both whole and in serialised form) essays, short stories, poems all in weekly, monthly and quarterly form.  Many of these periodicals were founded or edited by literary behemoths from Dickens and Thackeray through to Jerome K Jerome and, even some female editors including Ethel Colburn Mayne, Alice Meynell and Ella D’Arcy. 
   
  Now authors began to offer a wider, more diverse choice from social activism and justice – and injustice to cutting stories of manners and principles.  From many forms of comedy to mental meltdowns, from science fiction to unrequited heartache.  If you can imagine it an author probably wrote it.  
   
  At the end of the 19th Century bestseller lists and then prizes, such as the Nobel and Pulitzer, helped focus an audience’s attention to a books literary merit and sales worth. Previously coffeehouses, Imperial trade, unscrupulous overseas printers ignoring copyright restrictions, publishers with their book lists as an appendix and the gossip and interchange of polite society had been the main avenues to secure sales and profits.

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