Altri libri che potrebbero interessarti

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  Diary Of A Dead Man

  Bernard Gregor-Smith

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  A distinguished Russian concert pianist vanishes while on tour in New Zealand. His estranged daughter seeks to unravel this mysterious disappearance. She will need help. And help is available. But is it human, angelic or something else?

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  About Love - From their pens to...

  Anton Chekhov

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  Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on 29th January 1860 in Taganrog, on the south coast of Russia.  
  His family life was difficult; his father was strict and over-bearing but his mother was a passionate story-teller, a subject Chekhov warmed to. As he later said; ‘our talents we got from our father, but our soul from our mother’.  
  At school Chekhov was distinctly average. At 16 his father mis-managed his finances and was declared bankrupt. His family fled to Moscow. Chekhov remained and eked out a living by various means, including writing and selling short sketches to newspapers, to finish his schooling. That completed and with a scholarship to Moscow University obtained he rejoined his family. 
  He was able to help support them by selling satirical sketches and vignettes of Russian lifestyles and gradually obtained further commissions. In 1884, he qualified as a physician and, although it earned him little, he often treated the poor for free, he was fond of saying ‘Medicine is my lawful wife, and literature is my mistress.’ 
  His own health was now an issue as he began to cough up blood, a symptom of tuberculosis.  Despite this his writing success enabled him to move the family into more comfortable accommodation.  
  Chekhov wrote over 500 short stories which included many, many classics including ‘The Kiss’ and ‘The Lady with a Dog’.  His collection ‘At Dusk’ won him the coveted Pushkin Prize when was only 26.  
  He was also a major playwright beginning with the huge success of ‘Ivanov’ in 1887.   
  In 1892 Chekhov bought a country estate north of Moscow. Here his medical skills and money helped the peasants tackle outbreaks of cholera and bouts of famine. He also built three schools, a fire station and a clinic.  It left him with less time for writing but the interactions with real people gained him detailed knowledge about the peasantry and their living conditions for his stories.  
  His most famous work, ‘The Seagull’ was received disastrously at its premiere in St Petersburg. It was later restaged in Moscow to highlight its psychological aspects and was a huge success. It led to ‘Uncle Vanya’, ‘The Three Sisters’ and ‘The Cherry Orchard’.  
  Chekhov suffered a major lung hemorrhage in 1897 while visiting Moscow. A formal diagnosis confirmed tuberculosis and the doctors ordered changes to his lifestyle.  
  Despite a dread of weddings the elusive literary bachelor quietly married the actress Olga Knipper, whom he had met at rehearsals for ‘The Seagull’, on 25th May 1901. 
  By May 1904 with his tuberculosis worsening and death imminent he set off for the German town of Badenweiler writing cheerful, witty letters to his family and assuring them his health was improving.  
  On 15th July 1904 Anton Chekhov died at Badenweiler.  He was 44.

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  HorrorBabble's Ghost Stories:...

  E.F. Benson, Algernon Blackwood,...

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  A second, broad selection of ghost stories both classic and obscure. 
  Contents: 
  "The Third Shadow" by H. R. Wakefield 
  A mountaineer's fate is sealed by a vengeful supernatural force. 
  "The Dance of Death" by Algernon Blackwood 
  Ignoring warnings, a frail man dances—death is his final partner. 
  "The Demon Lover" by Elizabeth Bowen 
  A wartime letter rekindles a long-forgotten, ghostly appointment. 
  "The Suicide" by Malcolm Ford Henry 
  A dead man mourns his own passing, filled with vain regret. 
  "Lens-Shy" by W. M. Clayton 
  A photographer of corpses discovers death's unsettling final portrait. 
  "The Last of Mrs. DeBrugh" by H. Sivia 
  A maid's promised inheritance vanishes with the widow’s cold refusal. 
  "Mommy" by Mary Elizabeth Counselman 
  An orphan girl claims visits from her mother—long since dead. 
  "Yuki-onna" by Lafcadio Hearn 
  A snow spirit haunts a woodcutter after a chilling encounter. 
  "Graves and Goblins" by Nathaniel Hawthorne 
  A ghostly narrator seeks peace from limbo’s lonely eternity. 
  "The House Party at Smoky Island" by L. M. Montgomery 
  Strangers gather at a remote house to share chilling tales. 
  "Keeping His Promise" by Algernon Blackwood 
  A man receives a ghostly visit from a forgotten friend. 
  "The Frontier Guards" by H. R. Wakefield 
  Curiosity leads Brinton into a haunted house’s invisible defences. 
  "The Theater Upstairs" by Manly Wade Wellman 
  A cinema screens forgotten films starring actors long since dead. 
  "The Terror by Night" by E. F. Benson 
  Ghosts, illusions, or madness? Night brings terror either way. 
  "The Burned House" by Vincent O'Sullivan 
  A traveller sees a burning house that never truly existed.

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  Under the shade of the feijoa...

  Hayley Ann Solomon

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  Under the shade of the feijoa trees offers a representative sample of Hayley Ann Solomon’s particular brand of high quality, emotionally resonant short stories. The styles and intensities vary extensively, but the common denominator is humanity in all its complexity, woven with philosophy. 
  “This eclectic and very personal collection of short stories by successful writer of genre fiction and emerging poet, Hayley Ann Solomon, describes in lyrical detail widely dispersed places and situations. The stories are well-constructed and intensely-felt and the author’s joy in the sounds and sequencing of beautiful words is evident.”—Philip Chatting, Winner of the Proverse Prize 2014, author of The Snow Bridge and Other Stories (Proverse, 2015). 
  Hayley Ann Solomon is an award winning author and poet.  A Librarian by training, Hayley has been a full time author for some years, winning repeated recognition in commercial genre fiction. In 2017—a new departure—her first poetry collection, Celestial Promise, received a Proverse Publication Prize. She travelled to Hong Kong for the launch of her book in November 2017 and was interviewed on Radio Television Hong Kong on Phil Whelan’s Morning Brew programme.

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  A Perplexing Case - From their...

  H D Everett

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  Henrietta Dorothy Huskisson was born in January 1851 in Gillingham, Kent. 
  Little reliable information on her life is available and almost nothing on her early life.   
  The first concrete information concerns her marriage at age 18 to the solicitor Isaac Edward Everett. 
  It was only at the age of 44 that she began her literary career under the pseudonym of Theo Douglas, a popular device in a society that still frowned upon women writing for income. 
  During her lifetime she was a popular author and wrote 22 books and those were published by 17 different publishers. 
  Although she wrote some historical novels her main output was centered on fantasy and supernatural themes. 
  Henrietta Dorothy Everett died in Weston-on-Trent in Derbyshire in September 1923.

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  Human Sacrifices

  María Fernanda Ampuero

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  A groundbreaking voice in contemporary Latin American literature, María Fernanda Ampuero's writing is "raw and savage" as she confronts machismo, inequity, and violence in this acclaimed short story collection (Vistazo). 
   
   
   
  An undocumented woman answers a job posting only to find herself held hostage, a group of outcasts obsess over boys drowned while surfing, and an unhappy couple finds themselves trapped in a terrifying maze. With scalpel-like precision, Ampuero considers the price paid by those on the margins so that the elite might lounge comfortably, considering themselves safe in their homes. 
   
   
   
  Simultaneously terrifying and exquisite, Human Sacrifices is "tropical gothic" at its finest—decay and oppression underlie our humid and hostile world, where working-class women and children are consistently the weakest links in a capitalist economy. Against this backdrop of corrosion and rot, these twelve stories contemplate the nature of exploitation and abuse, illuminating the realities of those society consumes for its own pitiless ends. 
   
   
   
  Contains mature themes.

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