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  The American Claimant

  Mark Twain

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  The American Claimant is enormous fun. I'm here to celebrate the mad energy of this strange novel. In it we have the pleasure of seeing Mark Twain's imagination go berserk, writes Bobbie Ann Mason in her introduction. The American Claimant is a comedy of mistaken identities and multiple role switches—fertile and familiar Mark Twain territory. Its cast of characters include an American enamored of British hereditary aristocracy and a British earl entranced by American democracy. The central character, Colonel Mulberry Sellers, is an irrepressible, buoyant mad scientist, Mason writes, "brimming with harebrained ideas. Nothing is impossible for him.... He's totally loopy." His voluble wackiness leaves the reader reeling in the wake of inventions that prefigure DNA cloning, fax machines, and photocopiers. Twain uses this over-the-top comic frame to explore some serious issues as well—such as the construction of self and identity, the role of the press in society, and the moral and social questions raised by capitalism and industrialization in the United States. A unique melange of science fiction and fantasy, romance, farce, and political satire, Twain's least-known comic novel is both thought-provoking and entertaining.

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  The Mark on the Wall

  Virginia Woolf

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  Adeline Virginia Woolf (January 1882-1941) was an English writer and one of the preeminent modernists of the 20th century.'The Mark on the Wall' is a description of a chain of thoughts inspired by catching sight of a mysterious mark on the wall. It does not matter what the mark actually is.... What is important is the imaginative images and philosophical considerations which it stimulates in her brain.

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  The Story of the Amulet

  E. Nesbit

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  The Story of the Amulet is a novel for children, written in 1906 by E. Nesbit. It is the final part of a trilogy of novels that also includes Five Children and It (1902) and The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904). In it the children re-encounter the Psammead—the "it" in Five Children and It. As it no longer grants wishes to the children, however, its capacity is mainly advisory in relation to the children's other discovery, the Amulet, thus following a formula successfully established in The Phoenix and the Carpet.

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  Sweet Smell of Success - And...

  Ernest Lehman

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  The screenwriter behind North by Northwest and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? skewers show business in these fifteen tales. 
   
  In Sweet Smell of Success, the main novelette of this collection,Lehman scathingly depicts the dark side of success through the twisted relationship of Sid Wallace, an ambitious publicist, and Harvey Hunsucker, a powerful and vindictive gossip columnist, fashioned after Walter Winchell. As scandals are manufactured and reputations ruined for sport, the story spirals downward toward one last, savage act of revenge. As brutally honest as Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, Sweet Smell of Success is one of the most enduring and provocative stories in the literature of show business. 
   
  In The Comedian, one of America’s most beloved funny men is about to become a television superstar, but a large banana peel awaits him. Meanwhile, the remaining stories dissect the entertainment industry in a way that only Lehman could do . . .  
   
  Both Sweet Smell of Success and The Comedian were adapted for film. Sweet Smell of Success was a 1957 film starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, while The Comedian was a TV movie starring Mickey Rooney and Edmund O’Brien. 
   
  “Sweet Smell of Success is a corrosive valentine to New York, embracing its energy and its clashing ambitions.” —Sam Kashner, Vanity Fair 
   
  “Siddown. Listen to these. They are not Lindy’s cheesecake or long on kisses and schmaltz. But if you like prose pale as a shark’s belly, they do just fine.” —Kirkus Reviews

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  The Border Line

  D H Lawrence

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  'The Border Line' is unusual in that Lawrence dabbles in the supernatural (as he was to do again in 'The Rocking-Horse Winner' two years later) and that this is less a story in the traditional sense and more an exploration of the mind of a particular woman, based on his own wife, Frieda. Katherine, in the story, realises that her real love was her first husband whom she should, according to Lawrence, have submitted to to gain real happiness. As Lawrence says in the story, thinking of his German wife perhaps, 'Beyond all race is the problem of man and woman'.

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  Nights of the Creaking Bed

  Toni Kan

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  Nights of the Creaking Bed is full of colourful characters involved in affecting dramas: a girl who is rejected in love because she has three brothers to look after; a middle aged housewife who finds love again but has an impossible decision to make; a young man who can't get the image of his naked, beautiful mother out of his mind; a child so poor he has to hawk onions on Christmas day - and many others. Some, initially full of hope, find their lives blighted by the cruelty of others, or by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or by just not knowing the "right" people.
  Corruption, religious intolerance, gratuitous violence, the irresponsible attitudes of some men to their offspring and the importance of joy are some of the big themes that underlie this memorable collection.

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