Other books that might interest you

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  The Lang Men O'Larut

  J. R. Kipling

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  Joseph Rudyard Kipling was a British writer, poet and a novelist, the first English Nobel Prize winner in literature. His most famous works include The Jungle Book, Kim, a lot of short stories and poems. His language full of metaphors contributed a lot into the treasury of the English language. The story is told by the Chief Engineer of a steamer, who tries to beat the one of the men from Orizava. They were talking about tall people, so he decides to tell what happened in Larut, where three enormously huge men lived. Once an American came on a business to Larut and recklessly made a remark that he was the tallest man on the island. The three men of Larut put it in doubt, but the American bet his substance. As he saw he lost the height competition, he turned the situation upside down. Read the story and get to know the ending that will definitely cheer you up!A SmartTouch Media production.

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  Count Magnus

  M. R. James

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  Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936), who wrote as M. R. James, was an English author, medieval scholar, and provost of King's College, Cambridge, and of Eton College. He is best known for his outstanding ghost stories. James reinvented the ghost story for the modern audience by moving away from Gothic elements and using realistic contemporary settings. His protagonists and plots often reflected his own antiquarian interests. Accordingly he is known as the originator of the "antiquarian ghost story". 
  
  
  "Count Magnus" is the story of an amateur scholar travelling in a remote part of Sweden, whose researches lead him to the mausoleum where the infamous Count Magnus is interred. As he researches the history of the long dead count, and learns more about his ill deeds and the mysterious "black pilgimage" from which he returned with something or someone evil...strange and horrifying events begin to overtake him.

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  The Nose - Gogol uses the absurd...

  Nikolai Gogol

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  Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was born on 1st April 1809 to a father, descended from Ukrainian Cossacks and a mother with a military background in the Ukrainian town of Sorochyntsi, then part of the Russian Empire and rich in Cossack traditions and folklore.   
   
  His father wrote poetry and plays which the young Gogol helped stage at his uncle’s home theatre.  This helped ignite in him a love of literature and blossomed when he attended, what is now, the Nizhyn Gogol State University at the age of 12.  Here he participated in school theatre productions and refined his mastery of his native Ukrainian and also the Russian of his Imperial masters. 
   
  In 1828 he went to St Petersburg and unsuccessfully tried to begin a career as an actor after finding that with no money and no connections the civil service was barred to him. 
   
  Embezzling money from his mother he embarked on a trip to Germany. When the money ran out, he returned to St Petersburg but the experiences were used in a series of stories he contributed to periodicals.  These tales were steeped in his childhood memories of the Ukrainian landscape and peasantry enlivened with the supernatural of its folklore woven with realistic events of the day.  He wrote in Russian in a whimsical, colloquial style with a smattering of Ukrainian words and phrases that provided an authenticity.  Eight stories were published as ‘Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka’.  Seemingly all at once fame and fortune arrived. Gogol was hailed by his contemporaries, including Pushkin, as a pre-eminent writer of Russian literature.   
   
  His success continued with his brilliant plays ‘The Inspector General’ and the comedy ‘The Marriage for the Theatre’, both being highly acclaimed.   
   
  In 1834 he became Professor of Medieval History at the University of St. Petersburg but with little academic or teacher training, failed to adequately fulfil many of his duties and soon resigned this post.  With no obligations and using his earnings from his writing, which now included the impressionistic and immortal ‘Dead Souls’, Gogol travelled around Europe, spending the most time in Rome where he studied art, read Italian literature and developed a passion for opera.  
   
  In the 1840s Gogol became preoccupied with a need to purify his soul and embarked on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In tandem he fell under the influence of a strict and austere spiritual ascetic who persuaded him to observe strict fasts that, allied with his depression and deteriorating health, contributed to his death on 21st April 1852 at the age of only 43. 
   
  In the Nose Gogol reaches out with the absurd premise that a Nose can have, and enjoy, a life of its own regardless of the complications and consequences to its former owner.

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  Horrid Henry: Purple Power

  Lucinda Whiteley

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  Join Horrid Henry and his family and friends in this Purple Power volume! Contains 5 Horrid Henry stories, performed by the show's full cast. Join in with the fun and games in "Hotel Horrid", "Jumper Jinx", "Marvellous Mindreader", "Red Roof Gang" and "Silly Siblings".

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  The Death of Justina

  John Cheever

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  Read by Meryl Streep 
  Here is one of twelve magnificent stories, originally part of The John Cheever Audio Collection, in which John Cheever celebrates—with unequaled grace and tenderness—the deepest feelings we have. 
  As Cheever writes in his preface, ""These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.""

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  Christmas Eve at a Cornish Manor...

  Clara Venn

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  A pair of sisters travel to Waddonscombe in Cornwall where they enjoy their hosts’ ghost stories around the manor house fire. A cliché, perhaps? Yet events may not play out entirely as expected.  Christmas Eve at a Cornish Manor is taken from the Victorian Anthologies series featuring short stories by classic writers of the spooky, the scary and the supernatural. Guaranteed to give you the shivers, each collection includes familiar and loved creepy tales as well as those less well-known.

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