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1921 – 1995
←The Talented Mr. Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith, is the first of five books featuring the con man Tom Ripley. As the story begins, Tom is a twenty-three-year-old living in New York. He comes from a fairly disadvantaged background, but has aspirations to a better life. An accomplished liar and fraudster, […]
1888 – 1959
In Raymond Chandler’s 1949 novel The Little Sister, Philip Marlowe takes on what seems like a fairly routine missing persons case. Orrin Quest was a young man from Manhattan, Kansas who arrived in LA and then disappeared from sight. His sister hires Marlowe to find him. The […]
¤ ‘Brave New World’
←Listen to Aldous Huxley (1894 – 1963) himself introducing a radio adaptation (in two parts) of his book in 1956, revisiting his predictions in 1931…
«Brave New World» is a fantastic parable about the dehumanization of human beings. In the negative utopia described in my story, man has […]
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 […]
[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, […]
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←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, […]
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 […]
[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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Herman Melville [1819 – 1891]
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Fancy reading this sad Tale of Wall Street? → ⇒
Bartleby, an enigmatic man who calmly refuses to carry out his duties…
←Listen
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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 […]
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 […]
(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 […]
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 [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 […]
∞ 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»
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∞ […]
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 […]
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 […]
[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, […]
♦ Man From The South ⇐ 1916 – 1990
The narrator of this famous story is never named, but I always presumed him to be an […]
[1904-1991]
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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 […]
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