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Animal Farm [G Orwell]

George Orwell (1903 – 1950) was the pen name of Eric Blair, a British political novelist and essayist whose pointed criticisms of political oppression propelled him into prominence toward the middle of the twentieth century. He could not turn a blind eye to the cruelties and hypocrisies of Soviet Communist Party, which had […]

Rudyard Kipling

[1865 – 1936]

⇒[read]⇐ «The Jungle Book» ⇒[listen]⇐ ⇓ Disney’s Jungle Book _ 1967 [clip]

• ‘I Wanna Be Like You’

Now I’m the king of the swingers – Oh, the jungle VIP I’ve reached the top and had to stop and that’s what botherin’ me I wanna be a man, mancub, […]

Gerald Durrell

←Click to read.

¤ My Family and Other Animals is an autobiographical work by naturalist Gerald Durrell (1925 – 1995) telling of the part of his childhood he spent on the Greek island of Corfu between 1935-39. It describes the life of the Durrell family there in a humorous manner, […]

Robert Louis Stevenson

1850 – 1894 ¤  The Beach of Falesá The story is told in the first person by John Wiltshire, a British copra trader on the fictional South Sea island of Falesá. Upon arriving on the island, he meets a rival trader named Case, who (in an apparently friendly gesture) arranges for him to be «married» to a local girl named Uma […]

Joseph Conrad

[1857–1924]

A Polish-born English novelist, master in the formats of long short story and novella, a form of story longer than conventional short story but shorter than a novel. Some of Conrad’s most acclaimed works have been written in these formats, most notably Heart of Darkness.

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‘Bartleby, the scrivener’

Herman Melville [1819 – 1891]

Fancy reading this sad Tale of Wall Street? → ⇒

Bartleby, an enigmatic man who calmly refuses to carry out his duties…

←Listen

[…]

G.K. Chesterton + M R James

Ver la entrada

•→  G.K. Chesterton in Sight & Sound ← [1874 – 1936]

¤  The Oracle of the Dog →

[included in Gerald Durrell‘s 1990 anthology «Best Dog Stories»]→

The Oracle of the Dog story is what is known as a locked-room puzzle. A murder is committed with out a […]

Dandy: A Story of a Dog

W. H. Hudson [1841 – 1922]

♦ Read this story comprising Gerald Durrell‘s 1990 edition «Best Dog Stories«

He was of mixed breed, and was supposed to have a strain of Dandy Dinmont blood which gave him his name. A big ungainly animal with a rough shaggy coat of blue-grey […]

Jack London

(1876 – 1916)→ http://london.sonoma.edu/←

¤ Call of the Wild →

Buck, a physically impressive dog, is living the good life in California when he gets stolen and put into dog slavery. For him, this means pulling a ridiculously heavy sled through miles and miles of frozen ice with little […]

Carson McCullers

1917 – 1967

Lula Carson Smith (Carson McCullers) was born in Columbus, Georgia. From the age of five McCullers took piano lessons and at the age of 17 she moved to New York to study piano at Juilliard School of Music. However, she never attended the school – she managed […]

John Steinbeck + Ernest Hemingway

¤ John Steinbeck [1902 – 1968]

A leading writer of novels about the working class and a major spokesman for the victims of the Great Depression, John Steinbeck worked as a laboratory assistant and farm laborer to support himself through six years of study at Stanford University, where he took only those […]

Three Ladies . . .

∞ Virginia Woolf ← [1882 – 1941]

◊ Read & listen to «The Haunted House» ↓

◊ ‘The End’ [Flush’s biography]

• Read the last of the stories compiled by Gerald Durrell in his 1990 anthology «Best Dog Stories»

¤ – ¤ :::::: ¤ – ¤

∞ […]

Humorous Realism . . .

O Henry + Ambrose Bierce + Mark Twain ¤ O Henry [1862 – 1910]

William Sydney Porter, a.k.a. O. Henry, wrote mostly about ordinary people going about the daily adventure of living. Not infrequently, his stories involve coincidences or unexpected twists that result in surprise endings like that in “The Gift of the […]

Miriam [T Capote]

1924 – 1984 Capote’s first short story is a haunting account of a widow’s descent into madness courtesy of a precocious child named Miriam.

Truman Capote was just eighteen-years old when Mademoiselle magazine published his first short story, «Miriam,» in 1945. Looking back on his career, Capote claimed to have enjoyed his earlier […]

William Carlos Williams

[1883 – 1963]

← The Use of Force

A physician is summoned to make a house call on a family with whom he has had no prior contact. He quickly sizes up the situation: the household is poor but clean; the patient is a female child whose parents are nervously concerned, […]

Roald Dahl

♦  Man From The South ⇐                                                         1916 – 1990

The narrator of this famous story is never named, but I always presumed him to be an […]

The Destructors [G. Greene]

[1904-1991]

←[read]

A 1954 short story about teenagers destroying a house. The story is ironic—showing how destruction is allegedly a form of creation.

Set in the mid-1950s, it is about a boys’ gang named the «Wormsley Common Gang», after the place […]

James Joyce

¤ James Joyce [1882 – 1941]

‘The Dead’ [«DUBLINERS»] – Gabriel Conroy attends a party, and later, as he speaks with his wife, has an epiphany about the nature of life and death.

At 15–16,000 words this story, closing the short-story cycle ‘Dubliners’, has also been classified as a novella. […]

Frank O’Connor

Pseudonym of Michael O’Donovan [1903-1966], playwright, novelist, and short-story writer

⇒Interview⇐[1957]

¤ «First Confession» ⇓

All the trouble began when my grandfather died and my grand-mother – my father’s mother – came to live with us. Relations in the one house are a […]

Dracula [B Stoker]

[1847 – 1912]

• Click pic for Bram Stoker‘s book →

•→ Listen ←

•→ http://esl-bits.net/ESL.English.Learning.Audiobooks ⇐

÷ ÷ ÷ ÷

Originally released in 1922 as Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie Des Grauens, director F.W. Murnau‘s chilling and eerie adaption of Stoker’s Dracula is a silent masterpiece of terror […]