Other books that might interest you

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  The Purloined Letter

  Edgar Allan Poe

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  Edgar Poe was born in Boston Massachusetts on 19th January 1809. His father abandoned his family the following year and within a year his mother had died leaving him an orphan.   
   
  He was taken in by the Allan family but never formally adopted although he now referred to himself as Edgar Allan Poe.  His father alternatively spoiled or chastised him and tension was frequent over gambling debts and monies for his education.  His university years to study ancient and modern languages was cut short by lack of money and he enlisted as a private in the army claiming he was 22, it is more probable he was 18. After 2 years he obtained a discharge in order to take up an appointment at the military academy, West Point, where he failed to become an officer. 
   
  Poe had released his 1st poetry volume in 1827 and after his 3rd turned to prose and placing short stories in several magazines and journals.  At age 26 he obtained a licence to marry his cousin.  She was a mere 13 but they stayed together until her death from tuberculosis 11 years after. 
   
  In January 1845 ‘The Raven’ was published and became an instant classic.  Thereafter followed the prose works for which he is now so rightly famed as a master of the mysterious and the macabre. 
   
  Edgar Allan Poe died at the tragically early age of 40 on 7th October 1849 in Baltimore, Maryland. Newspapers at the time reported Poe's death as ‘congestion of the brain’ or ‘cerebral inflammation’, common euphemisms for death from disreputable causes such as alcoholism but the actual cause of death remains a mystery. 
   
  Poe is also one of a number of authors credited with inventing the detective genre with his Parisian sleuth C. Auguste Dupin.  He featured in three stories including the legendary ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ and by sheer deduction, logic and a touch of Gallic arrogance revealed what was hidden to the rest of us.

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  Aeneid

  Virgil

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  The Aeneid (Latin: Aeneis) is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It comprises 9,896 lines in dactylic hexameter. The first six of the poem's twelve books tell the story of Aeneas's wanderings from Troy to Italy, and the poem's second half tells of the Trojans' ultimately victorious war upon the Latins, under whose name Aeneas and his Trojan followers are destined to be subsumed.The hero Aeneas was already known to Greco-Roman legend and myth, having been a character in the Iliad. Virgil took the disconnected tales of Aeneas's wanderings, his vague association with the foundation of Rome and his description as a personage of no fixed characteristics other than a scrupulous pietas, and fashioned the Aeneid into a compelling founding myth or national epic that tied Rome to the legends of Troy, explained the Punic Wars, glorified traditional Roman virtues, and legitimized the Julio-Claudian dynasty as descendants of the founders, heroes, and gods of Rome and Troy.The Aeneid is widely regarded as Virgil's masterpiece and one of the greatest works of Latin literature.

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  Charles

  A. J. Alan

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  The story opens with the narrator on his way home from the theatre one evening, when his attention is drawn to a crowd gathered around a road accident in the West End of London. A taxi has hit a pedestrian. Out of the crowd emerges Charles, an old friend, supporting a fainting women. They had been the passengers in the taxi, and Charles now charges the narrator with seeing the lady home.This is the start of a highly eventful evening, in which the husband of the woman dies in a mysterious manner and the two of them agree to collude over the evidence to be given at the inquest. The most important thing, however, is to keep Charles's name out of it.

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  The Bogman

  Walter Macken

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  Orphaned as a child, Cahal Kinsella returns from an industrial school in Letterfrack to the small farming village of Caherlo in West Galway, to live under the rule of his tyrannical grandfather. Cahal must learn to assert his individuality if he is to have any hope of freedom from his misery.
  With humour and humanity, Walter Macken paints a haunting, memorable portrait of the hard life of subsistence farming, of loveless arranged marriages, and rebellion against suffocating social mores.
  Written in 1952, this masterpiece is brought back to life in New Island's Modern Irish Classics series.

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  Storm in a Teacup

  William Shakespeare, Edith Nesbit

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  Shakespeare instructed by delighting. His comedies and tragedies contain more actual wisdom than the whole body of English learning. He is the teacher of all good—pity, generosity, true courage, love. His bright wit is cut out into little stars. 
  This collection of Shakespeare tales includes The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing and Cymbeline. These timeless stories are retold in modern English, retaining all key elements of Shakespeare's original story line, characters and wisdom. Read in English, unabridged.

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  Northanger Abbey

  Jane Austen

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  "Northanger Abbey" is one of Jane Austen's earlier works, published posthumously in 1818. The novel is a coming-of-age story that follows the naive and imaginative Catherine Morland during her adventures in Bath and, later, at the eponymous Northanger Abbey. While the book embraces elements of the Gothic novel—a popular genre of its time—it also satirizes the genre's excesses and the naivety of its young heroine. Themes of social class, wealth, and morality are explored against a backdrop of Regency England manners and mores.

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