Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  The Whale - (or Moby Dick)

  Herman Melville

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  "Moby Dick" (or "The Whale" as it was one known) is the unforgettable story of Captain Ahab’s quest to avenge the whale that ‘reaped’ his leg.  The quest and the novel is a story of how man can become blindly obsessed.  The tale is also a testament to democracy and liberation, as the ship's crew work together for a common end. 
  Ishmael, the novel’s narrator is a young, ordinary sailor learning the practice of whaling. 
  Moby Dick is one of the greatest novels ever written and a timeless classic.

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  35+ Anthology of Christmas...

  Charles Dickens, L. M....

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  Enchanting, tragic, and hilarious fairy tales for adults and children grace these pages. An initial glance might lead you to assume that these are satirical versions of classic Christmas ghost stories. However, beneath the humorous stories involving ghosts, repentant sinners, miracles, and good peasants who find well-deserved happiness, lies a psychological undercurrent that sharpens the sense of intrigue and plot movement. Often this is aided by the unrelenting social exposure of the authors who always understood how intangible the "bourgeois paradise" truly was. Even today, idyllic dreams of tolerance, equality, and the triumph of justice have failed to materialize. Perhaps that is why people continue to read these classic stories while the snow falls outside and the lights glow on the Christmas tree.
  Contents:
  Charles Dickens
   A Christmas Carol
   The Chimes
  G.K. Chesterton
   A Christmas Carol
  L.M. Montgomery
   The Red Room
   A Christmas Mistake
   A Christmas Inspiration
   The Josephs' Christmas
   Aunt Cyrilla's Christmas Basket
   The Osbornes' Christmas
   Bertie's New Year
   Ida's New Year Cake
   The Christmas Surprise at Enderly Road
   Clorinda's Gifts
   The Falsoms' Christmas Dinner
   The Unforgotten One
   Christmas at Red Butte
   Uncle Richard's New Year's Dinner
  L. Frank Baum
   A Kidnapped Santa Claus
   Little Bun Rabbit
  Mark Twain
   A Letter from Santa Claus
  Louisa May Alcott
   A Merry Christmas
  Leo Tolstoy
   A Russian Christmas Party
  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
   Christmas Bells
   The Three Kings
  Nikolay Gogol
   Christmas Eve
  William Dean Howells
   Christmas Everyday
   The Pony Engine and the Pacific Express
  Joseph Rudyard Kipling
   Christmas in India
  Elizabeth Harrison
   Little Gretchen and the Wooden Shoe
  John Milton
   On the Morning of Christ's Nativity
  Hans Christian Andersen
   The Fir Tree
  Selma Lagerlof
   The Holy Night
  Hans Christian Andersen
   The Little Match Girl
  Clement Moore
   The Night Before Christmas
  Henry van Dyke
   The Other Wise Man
  Beatrix Potter
   The Tailor of Gloucester
  Anton Chehov
   Vanka

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  Seeking Fortune Elsewhere - Stories

  Sindya Bhanoo

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  These intimate stories of South Indian immigrants and the families they left behind center women's lives and ask how women both claim and surrender power—a stunning debut collection from an O. Henry Prize winner 
   
   
   
  Traveling from Pittsburgh to Eastern Washington to Tamil Nadu, these stories about dislocation and dissonance see immigrants and their families confront the costs of leaving and staying, identifying sublime symmetries in lives growing apart. 
   
   
   
  In "Malliga Homes," selected by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for an O. Henry Prize, a widow in a retirement community glimpses her future while waiting for her daughter to visit from America. In "No. 16 Model House Road," a woman long subordinate to her husband makes a choice of her own after she inherits a house. In "Nature Exchange," a mother grieving in the wake of a school shooting finds an unusual obsession. In "A Life in America," a professor finds himself accused of having exploited his graduate students. 
   
   
   
  Sindya Bhanoo's haunting stories show us how immigrants' paths, and the paths of those they leave behind, are never simple. Bhanoo takes us along on their complicated journeys where regret, hope, and triumph appear in disguise.

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  The Lightning-Rod Man

  Herman Melville

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  After spending the summer of 1853 in the Berkshire Mountains, where he supposedly had a real life encounter with a lightning-rod salesman, Melville published “The Lightning-Rod Man." At the end of this short story, the lightning-rod salesman is exposed for the fraud that he is. However, that will not keep his successors from fanning out to the Middle West, where lightning storms abound and farmers were gullible. On another level, the story can be interpreted as a confrontation between Good and Evil. Through description and diction, the narrator is understood as a follower of God, someone who believes in The Almighty watching over him. On the other hand, the lightning-rod man is seen as a negative character, someone who only has faith in the product he's peddling.

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  Anathema - From their pens to...

  Alexander Kuprin

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  Alexander Kuprin was born in Narovchat, Penza in Russia on 7th September 1870. 
  At 3 his Father died and he and mother moved to Moscow. By 10 he was enrolled at the Second Moscow Military High School and there his interest in literature began. The Alexander Military Academy followed and two years later he was a sub-lieutenant and posted to an Infantry Regiment for a further four years. 
  Despite his duties he was a now a keen writer and published his first short story at this time. His military duties also garnered him experiences for his breakthrough work ‘The Duel’.  Leaving the military he left for Kiev to work for local newspapers.  He continued to publish both stories and novels and by 1901 he was in St Petersburg becoming part of a group that included Chekhov, Ivan Bunin, Maxim Gorky and Leonid Andreyev.  
  In the years that followed further controversial works and acclaim followed.  His comments on the regime meant he was also put under secret police surveillance.   
  As World War I erupted, Kuprin opened a military hospital but was then given command of an infantry company in Finland. He was soon discharged on grounds of ill health.  
  The October Revolution saw him praise Lenin, but he warned that the Bolsheviks threatened Russian culture and might cause further widespread suffering to the peasants.  As Civil War raged he took his family to Helsinki and then on to Paris. 
  Exile saw his talents decline further and his succumbing to alcoholism. He became lonely and withdrawn. The family's poverty increased his malaise.   
  In May 1937, the Kuprin’s returned to Moscow.  He now saw his work published but wrote almost nothing new.  In 1938 his health rapidly deteriorated.  Already suffering from a kidney problems and sclerosis, he had now developed cancer of the oesophagus.  
  Alexander Kuprin died on 25th August 1938.

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  Before the Law - From their pens...

  Franz Kafka

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  Franz Kafka was born on 3rd July 1883 in Prague, then in Bohemia, the eldest of 6, into a middle-class Jewish family. 
  Life for the young Kafka and his passion for literature was often made an ordeal by his over-bearing and domineering entrepreneur of a father.   
  In 1889 Kafka was sent to the Deutsche Knabenschule, an elementary school in Prague. His father would only allow him to be educated in German-speaking schools and even went so far as to limit visits to the synagogue to four a year. 
  In 1901 he graduated from the classics-oriented Altstädter Gymnasium. Kafka did well there and across a large range of subjects.  He now enrolled at the Charles Ferdinand University, to study chemistry, but quickly switched to law for which he obtained his degree in June 1906 and then performed the mandatory year of unpaid service as clerk at the civil and criminal courts. 
  A job at an Italian insurance company left him little time to write and after a year he took another job with the Worker's Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia where he stayed until ill health led to his resignation in 1922. 
  Although he saw work as a means to pay the bills and to allow him time to write, he received several promotions and was noted as a good employee. 
  By 1917 Kafka was suffering from tuberculosis, which required frequent periods of convalescence. Interspersed with this, were several intense affairs before he settled in Berlin with Dora Diamant, a 25-year-old kindergarten teacher who herself having left the ghetto now influenced Kafka's interest in the book of Jewish law, the Talmud. 
   
   
  Kafka’s on-going health was littered with problems. Apart from TB there were several other ailments, including migraines, insomnia, boils, depression, all usually brought on by excessive stresses and strains. He attempted to counteract all of this by naturopathic treatments, a vegetarian diet and consuming large quantities of unpasteurized milk. 
  His tuberculosis still worsened. He returned to Prague, where he died on 3rd June 1924. He was 40.

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