Join us on a literary world trip!
Add this book to bookshelf
Grey
Write a new comment Default profile 50px
Grey
Subscribe to read the full book or read the first pages for free!
All characters reduced
The Greatest Short Stories of W Somerset Maugham - cover

The Greatest Short Stories of W Somerset Maugham

William Somerset Maugham

Publisher: Good Press

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

Summary

W. Somerset Maugham is one of the greatest short story writers in English literature. His complex characters and fascinating themes haunt people long after they are finished with reading his works.  Maugham's stories mostly deal with lives of Western, mostly British, colonists in the Pacific Islands and Asia. They typically express the emotional toll the colonists bear by their isolation. Rain and Outstation are considered especially notable. This edition includes: The Punctiliousness of Don Sebastian A Bad Example De Amicitia Faith The Choice of Amyntas Daisy The Pacific Mackintosh The Fall of Edward Barnard Red The Pool Honolulu Rain Envoi Before the Party P. & O. The Outstation The Force of Circumstance The Yellow Streak The Letter A Marriage of Convenience The Happy Couple The Mother Red The Taipan Jane Mayhew German Harry In a Strange Land The Luncheon The Round Dozen The Happy Man Mr Know-All The Ant and the Grasshopper The End of the Flight The Consul The Creative Impulse
Available since: 12/26/2023.
Print length: 691 pages.

Other books that might interest you

  • Shoveling snow - cover

    Shoveling snow

    Alexander Tsypkin, Paul Lazarus

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    From acclaimed, Russian writer, Alexander Tsypkin, translated by Paul Lazarus, SHOVELING SNOW is a mystical story about facing mortality and coming to terms with those we leave behind. From a collection of short stories titled, Sammynolie and Other Stories.
    Show book
  • A Broken People's Playlist - Stories (from Songs) - cover

    A Broken People's Playlist -...

    Chimeka Garricks

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    ""A dozen interlinked, music-oriented stories set in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where Garricks was raised... Each songlike story feels like a breakout hit encapsulating the brokenness and the beauty in life’s soundtrack.""—Booklist, starred review 
    “Beautifully woven . . . a magical delight.”—Hari Kunzru, author of White Tears 
    A Broken People’s Playlist is set to the soundtrack of life, comprised of twelve music-inspired tales about love, the human condition, micro-moments, and the search for meaning and sometimes, redemption. It is also Chimeka Garricks’s love letter to his native city, Port Harcourt, introducing us to a cast of indelible characters in these loosely interlocked tales. 
    There is the teenage wannabe-DJ eager to play his first gig even as his family disastrously falls apart—who reappears many years later as an unhappy middle-aged man drunk-calling his ex-wife; a man who throws a living funeral for his dying brother; three friends who ponder penis captivus and one’s peculiar erectile dysfunction; a troubled woman who tries to find her peace-place in the world, helped by a headful of songs and a pot of ginger tea. 
    Infused with the author’s resonant and evocative storytelling, each page holds “the depth of a novel” (Hari Kunzru); a character, a moment that will—like a favorite song—long linger in the heart and mind.
    Show book
  • The Red Dust - cover

    The Red Dust

    Murray Leinster

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    You who have read "The Mad Planet" by Murray Leinster, will welcome the sequel to that story. The world, in a far distant future, is peopled with huge insects and titanic fungus growths. Life has been greatly altered, and tiny Man is now in the process of becoming acclimated to the change. We again meet our hero Burl, but this time a far greater danger menaces the human race. The huge insects are still in evidence, but the terror they inspire is as nothing compared to the deadly Red Dust. You will follow this remarkable story with breathless interest. "Burl raised his spear, and plunged down on the back of the moving thing, thrusting his spear with all the force he could command. He had fallen upon the shining back of one of the huge, meat-eating beetles, and his spear had slid across the horny armor and then stuck fast, having pierced only the leathery tissue between the insect's head and thorax." (Summary from the magazine blurb)
    Show book
  • The Burglar's Christmas - cover

    The Burglar's Christmas

    Willa Cather

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Originally published in a 1896 edition of The Home Monthly, The Burglar's Christmas tells the story Crawford, a homeless man in Chicago who has not eaten recently and considers stealing food on Christmas Eve. Reminiscent of The Parable of the Prodigal Son, this tale reflects on the nature of forgiveness. This recording of The Burglar's Christmas was recorded as part of Dreamscape’s Classic Christmas Stories: A Collection of Timeless Holiday Tales.
    Show book
  • The Thackery T Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities - Exhibits Oddities Images & Stories from Top Authors & Artists - cover

    The Thackery T Lambshead Cabinet...

    Jeff VanderMeer, Ann VanderMeer

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    “Some of the most interesting fantasist-fabulists writing today,” including China Miéville, Mike Mignola, Ted Chiang, Holly Black, and others (Los Angeles Times). 
     
    You’ll be astonished by what you’ll find in The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities. Editors Ann and Jeff Vandermeer have gathered together a spectacular array of exhibits, oddities, images, and stories by some of the most renowned and bestselling writers and artists in speculative and graphic fiction, including Ted Chiang, Mike Mignola (creator of Hellboy), China Miéville, and Michael Moorcock. A spectacularly illustrated anthology of Victorian steampunk devices and the stories behind them, The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities is a boldly original, enthrallingly imaginative, and endlessly entertaining entry into a hidden world of weird science and unnatural nature that will appeal equally to fantasy lovers and graphic novel aficionados. 
     
    “A book likely to become a classic at the intersection of fantasy, horror, steampunk and magical realism . . . Every fantasy lover, and all you postmodernists out there, need to take a tour of the Cabinet.” —PopMatters 
     
    “Working with an impressive stable of sf and fantasy writers, including Holly Black, Cherie Priest, Tad Williams, and Lev Grossman, and styles ranging from short, detailed write-ups to fascinating tales of objects, the duo have created a fascinating, entertaining, and intriguing tome of sf with a dose of steampunk.” —Library Journal (starred review) 
     
    “A science-fiction symphony of strangeness . . . The Cabinet of Curiosities will give you a good jolt of wonder.” —Gainesville Times 
     
    “A book that will be absolutely cherished by fantasy, science fiction, and steampunk aficionados alike.” —Paul Goat Allen
    Show book
  • Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street An - Irish author Le Fanu brings us a timeless classic and true example of a haunted house story - cover

    Account of Some Strange...

    Sheridan Le Fanu

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was born on August 28th, 1814, at 45 Lower Dominick Street, Dublin, into a literary family with Huguenot, Irish and English roots 
     
    The children were tutored but, according to his brother William, the tutor taught them little if anything. Le Fanu was eager to learn and used his father's library to educate himself about the world. He was a creative child and by fifteen had taken to writing poetry. 
     
    Accepted into Trinity College, Dublin to study law he also benefited from the system used in Ireland that he did not have to live in Dublin to attend lectures, but could study at home and take examinations at the university as and when necessary. 
     
    This enabled him to also write and by 1838 Le Fanu's first story The Ghost and the Bonesetter was published in the Dublin University Magazine. Many of the short stories he wrote at the time were to form the basis for his future novels.  Indeed, throughout his career Le Fanu would constantly revise, cannabilise, embellish and re-publish his earlier works to use in his later efforts. 
     
    Between 1838 and 1840 Le Fanu had written and published twelve stories which purported to be the literary remains of an 18th-century Catholic priest called Father Purcell. Set mostly in Ireland they include classic stories of gothic horror, with grim, shadowed castles, as well as supernatural visitations from beyond the grave, together with madness and suicide. One of the themes running through them is a sad nostalgia for the dispossessed Catholic aristocracy of Ireland, whose ruined castles stand in mute salute and testament to this history.  
     
    On 18 December 1844 Le Fanu married Susanna Bennett, the daughter of a leading Dublin barrister. The union would produce four children.  Le Fanu was now stretching his talents across the length of a novel and his first was The Cock and Anchor published in 1845. 
     
    A succession of works followed and his reputation grew as well as his income.  Unfortunately, a decade after his marriage it became an increasing source of difficultly. Susanna was prone to suffer from a range of neurotic symptoms including great anxiety after the deaths of several close relatives, including her father two years before.  
     
    In April 1858 she suffered an "hysterical attack" and died in circumstances that are still unclear. The anguish, profound guilt as well as overwhelming loss were channeled into Le Fanu’s work.  Working only by the light of two candles he would write through the night and burnish his reputation as a major figure of 19th Century supernaturalism. His work challenged the focus on the external source of horror and instead he wrote about it from the perspective of the inward psychological potential to strike fear in the hearts of men.  
     
    A series of books now came forth: Wylder's Hand (1864), Guy Deverell (1865), The Tenants of Malory (1867), The Green Tea (1869), The Haunted Baronet (1870), Mr. Justice Harbottle (1872), The Room in the Dragon Volant (1872) and In a Glass Darkly. (1872). 
     
    But his life was drawing to a close.  Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu died in Merrion Square in his native Dublin on February 7th, 1873, at the age of 58.  
     
    In this famous story two college students rent rooms in Dublin’s Aungier Street once owned by a brutal hanging judge who seems to still haunt both place and mind…..
    Show book