Hawthorne / London / Woolf Big Book of Best Short Stories - Volume 2

1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-3-96858-132-3
Verlag: Tacet Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, Band 2, 1994 Seiten

Reihe: Big Book of Best Short Stories

This book contains70 short storiesfrom 10 classic, prize-winning and noteworthy authors. The stories were carefully selected by the criticAugust Nemo, in a collection that will please theliterature lovers. For more exciting titles, be sure to check out our 7 Best Short Stories and Essential Novelists collections. This book contains: - Nathaniel Hawthorne:Endicott and the Red Cross Young Goodman Brown Ethan Brand My Kinsman, Major Molineux Earth's Holocaust The Gray Champion The Minister's Black Veil - Virginia Woolf:A Haunted House Kew Gardens An Unwritten Novel Solid Objects The Mark on the Wall Mrs. Dalloway in the Bond Street The Lady in the Looking Glass - Henry James:The Beast ih the Jungle The Figure in the Carpet Paste The Romance of Certain Old Clothes The Story of a Year The Altar of the Dead Married Son - Mark Twain:About Barbers A Dog's Tale A Ghost Story A Monument to Adam Eve's Diary Extracts from Adam's Diary The Stolen White Elephant - Guy de Maupassant:The Necklace Mademoiselle Fifi Miss Harriet My Uncle Jules Boule de Suif The Wreck The Hand - Charlotte Perkins:When I Was a Witch The Yellow Wallpaper If I were a man The Giant Wistaria The Boys And The Butter! The Cottagette A Middle Sized Artist - Elizabeth Gaskell:The Old Nurse Story The Poor Clare Lois The Witch The Grey Woman Curious If True Six Weeks At Heppenheim Disappearances - Herman Melville:Bartleby, the Scrivener Benito Cereno The Encantadas The Chase Cock-A-Doodle-Doo! I and My Chimney The Lightning-Rod Man - Katherine Mansfield:The Garden Party The Daughters of the Late Colonel Bliss Prelude At the bay Je ne parle pas francais How Pearl Button was Kidnapped - Jack London:The Law of Life To Build a Fire That Spot All Gold Canyon An Odyssey of the North A Piece of Steak Lost Face

Nathaniel Hawthorne: American novelist and short-story writer who was a master of the allegorical and symbolic tale. One of the greatest fiction writers in American literature, he is best known for The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851). *** Virginia Woolf: Born into a privileged English household in 1882, author Virginia Woolf was raised by free-thinking parents. She began writing as a young girl and published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. She wrote modernist classics including Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando, as well as pioneering feminist works, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. In her personal life, she suffered bouts of deep depression. She committed suicide in 1941, at the age of 59. *** Henry James: Born on April 15, 1843, in New York City, Henry James became one of his generation's most well-known writers and remains so to this day for such works as The Portrait of a Lady and The Turn of the Screw. Having lived in England for 40 years, James became a British subject in 1915, the year before his death. He died on February 28, 1916, in London, England.d in 1916. *** Mark Twain: Born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, Samuel L. Clemens wrote under the pen name Mark Twain and went on to author several novels, including two major classics of American literature: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He was also a riverboat pilot, journalist, lecturer, entrepreneur and inventor. Twain died on April 21, 1910, in Redding, Connecticut. *** Guy de Maupassant: French writer Guy de Maupassant is famous for his short stories, which paint a fascinating picture of French life in the 19th century. He was prolific, publishing over 300 short stories and six novels, but died at a young age after ongoing struggles with both physical and mental health. *** Charlotte Perkins: A prominent American sociologist, novelist, short story writer, poet, and lecturer for social reform, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (July 3, 1860 August 17, 1935) was a 'utopian feminist.' Her vast achievements, recorded during a period of American history where such feats were quite difficult for women, cast here as a role model for women everywhere. And her unorthodox concepts and lifestyles cast her as a role model for future generations of feminists. *** Elizabeth Gaskell: was a Victorian era British novelist and short story writer, well regarded for her ghost stories in the genre of Gothic Literature. *** Herman Melville: Born in New York City in 1819. He worked as a crew member on several vessels beginning in 1839, his experiences spawning his successful early novels. Subsequent books, including his masterpiece Moby-Dick, sold poorly, and by the 1860s Melville had turned to poetry. Following his death in New York City in 1891, he posthumously came to be regarded as one of the great American writers. *** Katherine Mansfield: Born on October 14, 1888, in Wellington, New Zealand. After moving to England at age 19, Mansfield secured her reputation as a writer with the story collection Bliss (1920). She reached the height of her powers with her 1922 collection The Garden Party. Her last five years were shadowed by tuberculosis; she died from the disease on January 9, 1923, at the age of 34. *** Jack London: Jack London was born John Griffith Chaney on January 12, 1876, in San Francisco, California. After working in the Klondike, London returned home and began publishing stories. His novels, including The Call of the Wild, White Fang and Martin Eden, placed London among the most popular American authors of his time. London, who was also a journalist and an outspoken socialist, died in 1916.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel

London, Jack

Woolf, Virginia

Nemo, August

James, Henry

Twain, Mark

de Maupassant, Guy

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins

Gaskell, Elizabeth

Melville, Herman

Mansfield, Katherine

Leseproben

Virginia Woolf was an English author, feminist, essayist, publisher, and critic, considered as one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century along with T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. Her parents were Sir Leslie Stephen, who was a notable historian, author, critic and mountaineer, and Julia Prinsep Duckworth, a renowned beauty. According to Woolf's memoirs, her most vivid childhood memories were not of London but of St. Ives in Cornwall, where the family spent every summer until 1895. This place inspired her to write one of her masterpieces, To the Lighthouse. The sudden death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of her half-sister Stella two years later, led to the first of Virginia's several nervous breakdowns. but it was the death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly institutionalised. Some scholars have suggested that her mental instability was also due to the sexual abuse to which she and her sister Vanessa were subjected by their half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth. Woolf came to know the founders of the the Bloomsbury Group. She became an active member of this literary circle. Later, Virginia Stephen married writer Leonard Woolf on 10 August 1912. Despite his low material status (Woolf referring to Leonard during their engagement as a "penniless Jew") the couple shared a close bond. Virginia's most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." In some of her novels she moves away from the use of plot and structure to employ stream-of-consciousness to emphasise the psychological aspects of her characters. After completing the manuscript of her last (posthumously published) novel, Between the Acts, Woolf fell into a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. On 28 March 1941, Woolf put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, and walked into the River Ouse near her home and drowned herself. Woolf's body was not found until 18 April 1941. Her husband buried her cremated remains under an elm in the garden of Monk's House, their home in Rodmell, Sussex. A Haunted House
WHATEVER HOUR YOU WOKE there was a door shutting. From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure—a ghostly couple. "Here we left it," she said. And he added, "Oh, but here tool" "It's upstairs," she murmured. "And in the garden," he whispered. "Quietly," they said, "or we shall wake them." But it wasn't that you woke us. Oh, no. "They're looking for it; they're drawing the curtain," one might say, and so read on a page or two. "Now they've found it,' one would be certain, stopping the pencil on the margin. And then, tired of reading, one might rise and see for oneself, the house all empty, the doors standing open, only the wood pigeons bubbling with content and the hum of the threshing machine sounding from the farm. "What did I come in here for? What did I want to find?" My hands were empty. "Perhaps its upstairs then?" The apples were in the loft. And so down again, the garden still as ever, only the book had slipped into the grass. But they had found it in the drawing room. Not that one could ever see them. The windowpanes reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves were green in the glass. If they moved in the drawing room, the apple only turned its yellow side. Yet, the moment after, if the door was opened, spread about the floor, hung upon the walls, pendant from the ceiling—what? My hands were empty. The shadow of a thrush crossed the carpet; from the deepest wells of silence the wood pigeon drew its bubble of sound. "Safe, safe, safe" the pulse of the house beat softly. "The treasure buried; the room . . ." the pulse stopped short. Oh, was that the buried treasure? A moment later the light had faded. Out in the garden then? But the trees spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun. So fine, so rare, coolly sunk beneath the surface the beam I sought always burned behind the glass. Death was the glass; death was between us, coming to the woman first, hundreds of years ago, leaving the house, sealing all the windows; the rooms were darkened. He left it, left her, went North, went East, saw the stars turned in the Southern sky; sought the house, found it dropped beneath the Downs. "Safe, safe, safe," the pulse of the house beat gladly. 'The Treasure yours." The wind roars up the avenue. Trees stoop and bend this way and that. Moonbeams splash and spill wildly in the rain. But the beam of the lamp falls straight from the window. The candle burns stiff and still. Wandering through the house, opening the windows, whispering not to wake us, the ghostly couple seek their joy. "Here we slept," she says. And he adds, "Kisses without number." "Waking in the morning—" "Silver between the trees—" "Upstairs—" 'In the garden—" "When summer came—" 'In winter snowtime—" "The doors go shutting far in the distance, gently knocking like the pulse of a heart. Nearer they come, cease at the doorway. The wind falls, the rain slides silver down the glass. Our eyes darken, we hear no steps beside us; we see no lady spread her ghostly cloak. His hands shield the lantern. "Look," he breathes. "Sound asleep. Love upon their lips." Stooping, holding their silver lamp above us, long they look and deeply. Long they pause. The wind drives straightly; the flame stoops slightly. Wild beams of moonlight cross both floor and wall, and, meeting, stain the faces bent; the faces pondering; the faces that search the sleepers and seek their hidden joy. "Safe, safe, safe," the heart of the house beats proudly. "Long years—" he sighs. "Again you found me." "Here," she murmurs, "sleeping; in the garden reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. Here we left our treasure—" Stooping, their light lifts the lids upon my eyes. "Safe! safe! safe!" the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry "Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart." Kew Gardens
FROM THE OVAL SHAPED flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end. The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer breeze, and when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed one over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the most intricate colour. The light fell either upon the smooth, grey back of a pebble, or, the shell of a snail with its brown, circular veins, or falling into a raindrop, it expanded with such intensity of red, blue and yellow the thin walls of water that one expected them to burst and disappear. Instead, the drop was left in a second silver grey once more, and the light now settled upon the flesh of a leaf, revealing the branching thread of fibre beneath the surface, and again it moved on and spread its illumination in the vast green spaces beneath the dome of the heart-shaped and tongue-shaped leaves. Then the breeze stirred rather more briskly overhead and the colour was flashed into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens in July. The figures of these men and women straggled past the flower-bed with a curiously irregular movement not unlike that of the white and blue butterflies who crossed the turf in zig-zag flights from bed to bed. The man was about six inches in front of the woman, strolling carelessly, while she bore on with greater purpose, only turning her head now and then to see that the children were not too far behind. The man kept this distance in front of the woman purposely, though perhaps unconsciously, for he wished to go on with his thoughts. "Fifteen years ago I came here with Lily," he thought. "We sat somewhere over there by a lake and I begged her to marry me all through the hot afternoon. How the dragonfly kept circling round us: how clearly I see the dragonfly and her shoe with the square silver buckle at the toe. All the time I spoke I saw her shoe and when it moved impatiently I knew without looking up what she was going to say: the whole of her seemed to be in her shoe. And my love, my desire, were in the dragonfly; for some reason I thought that if it settled there, on that leaf, the broad one with the red flower in the middle of it, if the dragonfly settled on the leaf she would say 'Yes' at once. But the dragonfly went round and round: it never settled anywhereof course not, happily not, or I shouldn't be walking here with Eleanor and the childrenTell me, Eleanor. D'you ever think of the past?" "Why do you ask, Simon?" "Because I've been thinking of the past. I've been thinking of Lily, the woman I might have married.... Well, why are you silent? Do you mind my thinking of the past?" "Why should I mind, Simon? Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees,... one's happiness, one's reality?" "For me, a square silver shoe buckle and a...