Robin Hood is the best-loved outlaw of all time. In this edition Henry Gilbert tells of the adventures of the Merry Men of Sherwood Forest - Robin himself, Little John, Friar Tuck, Will Scarlet, and Alan-a-Dale, as well as Maid Marian, good King Richard, and Robin's deadly enemies Guy of Gisborne and the evil Sheriff of Nottingham.
Cervantes’tale of the deranged gentleman who turns knight-errant,tilts at windmills and battles with sheep in the service of the lady of his dreams, Dulcinea del Toboso, has fascinated generations of readers, and inspired other creative artists such as Flaubert, Picasso and Richard Strauss. The tall, thin knight and his short, fat squire, Sancho Panza, have found their way into films, cartoons and even computer games. Supposedly intended as a parody of the most popular escapist fiction of the day, the "books of chivalry", this precursor of the modern novel broadened and deepened into a sophisticated, comic account of the contradictions of human nature. On his "heroic" journey Don Quixote meets characters of every class and condition, from the prostitute Maritornes, who is commended for her Christian charity, to the Knight of the Green Coat,who seems to embody some of the constraints of virtue. Cervantes’ greatest work can be enjoyed on many levels, an suffused with a subtle irony that reaches out
Winterborne sped on his way to Sherton Abbas without elation and without discomposure. Had he regarded his inner self spectacularly, as lovers are now daily more wont to do, he might have felt pride in the discernment of a somewhat rare power in him--that of keeping not only judgment but emotion suspended in difficult cases. But he noted it not.
This is a fascinating selection of Kipling's most famous short stories, bringing together the very best of his work. Life's Handicap reflects his experiences of India, and contains two horror stories which permeate the collection with an air of haunted destinies. Delusions and obsessions, past lives and the slums of London in 1890 are the diverse topics featured in Many Inventions. While Traffics and Discoveries is Kipling's well-loved story about a polo pony.
Motherless Sara Crewe was sent home from India to school at Miss Minchin’s. Her father was immensely rich and she became ’show pupil’ - a little princess. Then her father dies and his wealth disappears, and Sara has to learn to cope with her changed circumstances. Her strong character enables her to fight successfully against her new-found poverty and the scorn of her fellows.
Grade 9 Up-The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes II is narrated by British theatre, film, and television actor David Timson. His Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson are near perfect. The only place where Timson's narration is less than perfect is his female and German characters. All in all, this is a fine production, with piano and string music by Paganini and others sprinkled throughout. All of the stories take place after Dr. Watson has married and moved from Baker Street. "The Scandal in Bohemia" is a good story with which to begin, because in it Watson describes both Holmes' singular lifestyle of old books, the violin and cocaine, and his extraordinary powers of deduction and disguise. This information may help to reel in students who are unfamiliar with the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. The four cases are interconnected in that, although Holmes solves each case, in each he has to admit a failure, which adds a humanizing quality to the otherwise invincible Holmes. In "The Scandal in Bohemia," Watson and Holme
Old Martin Chuzzlewit has a great fortune, but to whom can he leave it? He and his likable grandson, young Martin, have fallen out. Beyond that, a tangle of sly, grasping relatives coil about him. Throughout, the reader is rooting for the gentle Tom Pinch and his lovely sister, Mary. But before all can be decided, Dickens puts both Tom and young Martin through murder, mayhem and a brief purgatory in the United States. Reader Davidson quickly tunes into Dickens's ferocious irony, but his paramount strength is his uncanny ability to find and maintain the perfect voice for each of the vintage characters: drippy, insinuous, vicious, sly, bold American backwoods, or London Cheapside. Each is a distinct creation! Dickens lovers will treasure every tape in this two-volume masterpiece. P.E.F.An AUDIOFILE Earphones Award winner. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.
This comic novel describes the boating expedition on the Thames of three friends and their dog, Montmerency. The difficulties and vicissitudes of these innocents abroad are magnified to epic proportions, and give the book an air of fresh innocence.
Since his first appearance in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes has been one of the most beloved fictional characters ever created. Now, in two paperback volumes, Bantam Classics presents all fifty-six short stories and four novels featuring Conan Doyle’s classic hero—a truly complete collection of Sherlock Holmes’s adventures in crime! Volume I includes the early novel A Study in Scarlet, which introduced the eccentric genius of Sherlock Holmes to the world. This baffling murder mystery, with the cryptic word Rache written in blood, first brought Holmes together with Dr. John Watson. Next, The Sign of Four presents Holmes’s famous “seven percent solution” and the strange puzzle of Mary Morstan in the quintessential locked-room mystery. Also included are Holmes’s feats of extraordinary deception in such famous cases as the chilling “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” the baffling riddle of “The Musgrave Ritual,” and the ingeniously plot
This beautiful and eloquent story tells of a simple peasantwoman in a primitive village in India whose whole life is a gallantand persistent battle to care for those she loves-an unforgettablenovel that "will wring your heart out" (Associated Press).
When Alice follows a white rabbit in a waistcoat down a hole, she finds herself in a mixed-up world where nothing is as she expects it to be, and anything can happen! Alice meets a pipe-smoking caterpillar, a grinning cat, a Mad Hatter and the formidable Queen of Hearts.
Hugely popular in its time, Collins's mystery-suspense novel is now largely forgotten. Its decline has been due partly to an extravagantly intricate plot (one improved by abridgment) and partly to an equally convoluted structure. The story is told through the accounts of several characters in succession. Because the accounts contain dialogue, listeners are treated to the unusual spectacle of hearing every character filtered through each of the others. Such complexity would have overwhelmed anything less than virtuoso performances. Fortunately, both Nigel Anthony and Susan Jameson rise to the occasion. Listeners will be excused in mistaking this for a full-cast dramatization, so expertly distinguished is the multitude of voices within voices. S.J.L.(c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
It's one of the most famous novels of the 19th century, and probably the one that's least actually read. *The Invisible Man,* first published in 1897, became the basis for the classic 1933 film starring Claude Rains-as well as its many spinoffs-but the novel is quite different: it's an early example of science fantasy that was as much about character as it was about concept. One of the most enduringly popular writers of modern literature, Wells here assured his position as one of the fathers of imaginative literature with his psychologically complex tale of a scientist who renders himself invisible and eventually goes mad because of it. And because it focuses more on people than on technology, it remains a compelling tale even more than a century after it was written. British author HERBERT GEORGE WELLS (1866-1946) is best known for his groundbreaking science fiction novels *The Time Machine* (1895), *The Invisible Man* (1897), and *The War of the Worlds* (1898).
Tender is the Night is a story set in tile hedonistic high society of Europe during the 'Roaring Twenties'.A wealthy schizophrenic. Nicole Warren, falls in love with Dick Diver - her psychiatrist. Tile resulting saga of the Divers troubled marriage and their circle of friends.includes a cast of aristocratic and beautiful people.unhappy love affairs, a duel. incest, and the problems inherent in the possession of great wealth. Despite cataloguing a maelstronl of interpersona conflict. Tender is the Night has a poignancy and warmth which springs frorn the quality of F. Scott Fitzgerald's writing and the tragic personal experiences on which the book is based.
With an Introduction and Notes by Dr T.C.B.Cook Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) is best known for War and Peace and Anna Karenina, commonly regarded as amongst the greatest novels ever written. He also, however, wrote many masterly short stories, and this volume contains four of the longest and best in distinguished translations that have stood the test of time. In the early story 'Family Happiness', Tolstoy explores courtship and marriage from the point of view of a young wife. In 'The Kreutzer Sonata' he gives us a terrifying study of marital breakdown, in 'The Devil' a powerful depiction of the power of sexual temptation, and, in perhaps the finest of all, 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich', he portrays the long agony of a man gradually coming to terms with his own mortality.
Few children's classics can match the charm and originality of Frances Hodgson Burnett's THE SECRET GARDEN, the unforgettable story of sullen, sulky Mary Lennox, "the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen." When a cholera epidemic leaves her an orphan,Mary is sent to England to live with her reclusive uncle, Archibald Craven, at Misselthwaite Manor.Unloved and unloving, Mary wanders the desolate moors until one day she chances upon the door of a secret garden. What follows is one of the most beautiful tales of trans for mation in children's literature, as Mary,her sickly and tyrannical cousin Colin, and a peasant boy named Dickon secretly strive to make the garden bloom once more.A unique blend of realism and magic,THE SECRET GARDEN remains a moving expression of every child's need to nurture and be nurtured--a story that has captured for all time the rare andenchanted world of childhood.
在线阅读本书 Collected for the first time in one volume. How does money--or the lack of it--affect our lives? What happenswhen the rich meet the poor, when status comes with a price tag,when personal desires do battle with financial concerns? Thisunique anthology offers a mosaic of answers, with stories by: T.C. Boyle * Barbara Kingsolver * Alice Walker * John Cheever *Francine Prose * F. Scott Fitzgerald * Jack London * Kate Chopin *Ethan Canin * Gloria Naylor * Sandra Cisneros * O. Henry * TheodoreDreiser * Stephen Crane * Kate Braverman * James T. Farrell *Charlotte Perkins Gilman * and more. * An outstanding lineup of authors both classic andcontemporary
With an Introduction and Notes by Joe Andrew, Professor ofRussian Literature, Keele University Anton Chekhov is widelyregarded as one of the greatest writers of short stories. Heconstructs stories where action and drama are implied rather thandescribed openly, and which leave much to the reader's imagination.This collection contains some of the most important of his earliestand shortest comic sketches, as well as examples of his great,mature works. Throughout, the doctor-turned-writer displayscompassion for human suffering and misfortune, but is always ableto see the comical, even farcical aspects of the humancondition.
It is among such communities as these that happiness will find her last refuge on earth..". Against this backdrop Hardy tells a vivid story of life in rural Wessex which centres on the independent and beautiful Bathsheba Everdene. She decides to manage the farm she has inherited and finds herself in a powerful position for a woman of the 1840s. But power brings tragic complications when she has to decide between three rival suitors.
Since its publication in 1913, D. H. Lawrence's powerful and passionate third novel stands as one of the greatest autobiographical novels of the twentieth century. Here is the story of artist Paul Morel as a young man, his powerful relationship with his possessive mother, his passionate love affair with Miriam Leivers, his intense liaison with married Clara Dawes. Here, too, England's Derbyshire springs to life with both is sooty mining villages and deep green pastures, a setting as full of contrasts as the deep emotions that rule this remarkable book.
With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Patsy Stoneman, University of Hull Set in the mid-19th century, and written from the author's first-hand experience, North and South follows the story of the heroine's movement from the tranquil but moribund ways of southern England to the vital but turbulent north. Elizabeth Gaskell's skilful narrative uses an unusual love story to show how personal and public lives were woven together in a newly industrial society. This is a tale of hard-won triumphs - of rational thought over prejudice and of humane care over blind deference to the market. Readers in the twenty-first century will find themselves absorbed as this Victorian novel traces the origins of problems and possibilities which are still challenging a hundred and fifty years later: the complex relationships, public and private, between men and women of different classes.
Introduction and Notes by Ian F.A. Bell. Professor of English Literature. University of Keele Washington Square marks the culmination of James's apprentice period as a novelist. With sharply focused attention upon just four principal characters, James provides an acute analysis of middle-class manners and behaviour in the New York of the 1870s, a period of great change in the life of the city. This change is explored through the device of setting the novel's action during the 1840s, similarly a period of considerable turbulence as the United States experienced the onset of rapid commercial and industrial expansion. Through the relationships between Austin Sloper, a celebrated physician, and his sister Lavinia Penniman, his daughter Catherine, and Catherine's suitor, Morris Townsend, James observes the contemporary scene as a site of competing styles and performances where authentic expression cannot be articulated or is subject to suppression.
In 1915, Lawrence's frank representation of sexuality inThe Rainbow caused a furore and the novel was seized by thepolice and banned almost as soon as it was published. Todayit is recognised as one of the classic English novels of thetwentieth century. The Rainbow is about three generations of the Brangwen familyof Nottinghamshire from the 1840s to the early years of thetwentieth century. Within this historical framework Lawrence'sessential concern is with the passional lives of his charactersand he explores the pressures that determine their lives, usinga religious symbolism in which the 'rainbow' of the title ishis unifying motif. His primary focus is on the individual'sstruggle to growth and fulfilment within marriage and changingsocial circumstances, a process shown to grow more difficultthrough the generations. Young Ursula Brangwen, whose storyis continued in Women in Love, is ,finally the central figure inLawrence's anatomy of the confining structures of Englishsocial life and the impact of indust
