"Typhoon and Other Stories" is a collection of four shorter works by Joseph Conrad. In the title work «Typhoon» we have a classic tale of the sea which describes how Captain MacWhirr sails the Siamese steamer «Nan-Shan» into a typhoon. «Typhoon» excellently depicts sea-faring life at the turn of the 20th century. Also included in this collection is «Amy Foster», the story of a Polish immigrant who on his way to America becomes shipwrecked o ...
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), French novelist and short story writer, was considered to be a master of style, obsessively devoted to finding the right word («le mot juste»), in every piece of literature he produced. Although Flaubert is remembered for his novels, most notably «Madame Bovary,» he took a hiatus from longer pieces near the end of his career to produce a wonderful collection of short stories. Four of these stories are featured in th ...
"Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories" is a collection of short stories that includes «Dracula's Guest,» «The Judge's House,» «The Squaw,» «The Secret of the Growing Gold,» «A Gipsy Prophecy,» «The Coming of Abel Behenna,» «The Burial of the Rats,» «A Dream of Red Hands,» and «Crooken Hands.» Among the most captivating of these tales is «Dracula's Guest,» which is widely believed to be the first chapter of Stoker&apos ...
Jack London was born into abject poverty in the slums of San Francisco during the winter of 1876. His writing was to reflect the hard life he lived, perpetually chronicling men facing the wild as he did throughout his life. After his eighth grade year, poverty forced London to leave school. This did not stop him, as he furthered his literary knowledge and skill at the Oakland Public Library, borrowing books and educating himself. London faced gr ...
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was a master of the short story. The son of a former serf in southern Russia, he attended Moscow University to study medicine, writing short stories for periodicals in order to support his family. What began as a necessity became a legitimate career in 1886 when he was asked to write in St. Petersburg for the Novoye Vremya (New Times), owned by millionaire magnate Alexey Suvorin. Chekhov began paying more attention to h ...
"The Awakening" is the story of Edna Pontellier, an attractive twenty-eight year old woman who is a wife and mother of two sons living in the Creole south in the late 19th century. Edna finds herself trapped in her life as a wife and a mother and feels unable to express her passionate sensuality within the confines of her marriage. She seeks a spiritual and sexual awakening through an affair with a younger man during one summer while her hu ...
"The Man Who Would be King and Other Stories" is a classic collection of some of the most loved short stories of Rudyard Kipling. Contained here in this volume are the following short stories: The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes; The Phantom 'Rickshaw; Gemini; A Wayside Comedy; At Twenty-Two; The Education of Otis Yeere; The Hill of Illusion; Dray Wara Yow Dee; The Judgment of Dungara; With the Main Guard; In Flood Time; Only a Subalte ...
Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) is credited alongside James Joyce as the creator of the modern short story. The New Zealand-born Englishwoman embraced a Bohemian lifestyle and became involved in a series of scandalous relationships, which greatly influenced some of her most significant work. Her best-known writings were produced in her final years, as she was plagued by illness. Her fiction is dominated by themes of male-female relationships, se ...
In «Gothic Tales,» Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), the eminent Victorian author, brings us nine chilling gothic stories. Collected here are tales that set a precedent for ghost and horror stories of the era. In «The Poor Clare» a young innocent girl named Lucy is haunted by an unrelenting ghost invoked by her aging grandmother. In the novella «Lois the Witch» the young Lois sails to America to join her distant family. She is greeted by a New Engl ...
