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  The House of Cobwebs

  George Gissing

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  George Robert Gissing was born on November 22nd, 1857 in Wakefield, Yorkshire.  
   
  He was educated at Back Lane School in Wakefield. Gissing loved school. He was enthusiastic with a thirst for learning and always diligent.  By the age of ten he was reading Dickens, a lifelong hero. 
   
  In 1872 Gissing won a scholarship to Owens College. Whilst there Gissing worked hard but remained solitary. Unfortunately, he had run short of funds and stole from his fellow students. He was arrested, prosecuted, found guilty, expelled and sentenced to a month's hard labour in 1876. 
    
  On release he decided to start over.  In September 1876 he travelled to the United States. Here he wrote short stories for the Chicago Tribune and other newspapers. On his return home he was ready for novels. 
    
  Gissing self-published his first novel but it failed to sell.  His second was acquired but never published. His writing career was static.  Something had to change.  And it did. 
   
  By 1884 The Unclassed was published.  Now everything he wrote was published. Both Isabel Clarendon and Demos appeared in 1886. He mined the lives of the working class as diligently as any capitalist. 
   
  In 1889 Gissing used the proceeds from the sale of The Nether World to go to Italy. This trip formed the basis for his 1890 work The Emancipated. 
   
  Gissing's works began to command higher payments. New Grub Street (1891) brought a fee of £250.  
   
  Short stories followed and in 1895, three novellas were published; Eve's Ransom, The Paying Guest and Sleeping Fires. Gissing was careful to keep up with the changing attitudes of his audience.  
   
  Unfortunately, he was also diagnosed as suffering from emphysema. The last years of his life were spent as a semi-invalid in France but he continued to write. 1899; The Crown of Life. Our Friend the Charlatan appeared in 1901, followed two years later by The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft. 
   
  George Robert Gissing died aged 46 on December 28th, 1903 after catching a chill on a winter walk.

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  The Return of the Native

  Thomas Hardy

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  One of Thomas Hardy's classic statements about modern love, courtship, and marriage, The Return of the Native is set in the pastoral village of Egdon Heath. The fiery Eustacia Vye, wishing only for passionate love, believes that her escape from Egdon lies in her marriage to Clym Yeobright, the returning "native," home from Paris and discontented with his work there. Clym wishes to remain in Egdon, however-a desire that sets him in opposition to his wife and brings them both to despair. Surrounding them are Clym's mother, who is strongly opposed to his marriage; Damon Wildeve, who is in love with Eustacia but married to Clym's cousin Thomasin; and the oddly ambiguous observer Diggory Venn, whose frustrated love for Thomasin turns him into either a guardian angel or a jealous manipulator-or perhaps both. This stew of curdled love and conflicting emotions can only boil over into tragedy, and the book's darkly ironic ending marks it as both a classically Victorian novel and a forerunner of the modernist fiction that followed it.

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  The Beautiful and the Damned

  F Scott itzgerald

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  F. Scott Fitzgerald's second novel is a cautionary tale of reckless ambition and squandered talent set amid the glitter of Jazz-Age New York. The novel tells the story of Anthony Patch (a 1920s socialite and presumptive heir to a tycoon's fortune), the relationship with his wife Gloria, his service in the army, and alcoholism.  At once a morality tale, a meditation on love, money and decadence, and a social document, the novel provides an excellent portrait of the Eastern elite as the Jazz Age begins its ascent, engulfing all classes into what will soon be known as Café Society. As with his other novels, it is a brilliant character study and an early account of the complexities of marriage and intimacy, believed to be largely based on Fitzgerald's relationship and marriage with Zelda Fitzgerald.

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  The Black Monk

  Anton Chekhov

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  "The Black Monk" by Anton Chekhov follows the life of Andrey Vasilievich Kovrin, a brilliant scholar who experiences hallucinations of a mystical black monk. As his visions intensify, Kovrin grapples with the blurred lines between genius and madness, leading to a tragic confrontation with reality and his own aspirations. The novella explores themes of creativity, mental instability, and the pursuit of an idealized self. Read in English, unabridged.

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  Magic Shop The (Unabridged)

  H. G. Wells

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  Out for a walk in London one day, Gip and his father happen upon a magic shop. At Gip's urging, the two go in - and things grow more and more curious by the minute. Counters, store fixtures, and mirrors seem to move around the room, and the shopkeeper is most mysterious of all. Gip is thrilled by all he sees, and his father is at first amused, but when things become stranger and sinister father is no longer sure where reality ends and illusion begins. Fantastical illustrations underscore the macabre atmosphere of the tale, make this a perfect book read aloud together again and again.

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  Bell The - Story Time Episode 63...

  Hans Christian Andersen

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  The Bell (1845): In the narrow streets of a large town people often heard in the evening, when the sun was setting, and his last rays gave a golden tint to the chimney-pots, a strange noise which resembled the sound of a church bell; it only lasted an instant, for it was lost in the continual roar of traffic and hum of voices which rose from the town. "The evening bell is ringing," people used to say; "the sun is setting!" Those who walked outside the town, where the houses were less crowded and interspersed by gardens and little fields, saw the evening sky much better, and heard the sound of the bell much more clearly. It seemed as though the sound came from a church, deep in the calm, fragrant wood, and thither people looked with devout feelings.

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