Designed for the discriminating reader who expects a good story, good characters, and above all an aesthetic experience. It's in the language, you know? Contact me at R1234J@hotmail.com...

There goes Le Roi de Soliel rolling down the hill. Like Roy always says: the first thing you do when you open one of these gallon jugs is toss the cap away. Now, he’s tumbling down a dirt path in the Presidio with the lights of The City winking behind and the GGB, a waterfront hack’s “golden”, glistening through the light fog and beckoning dead ahead. Michigan Bob gets to Roy first to make sure the wine is intact, both of them laughing and coughing, a couple of lunatics in the darkness. Just like them to howl at a new moon as now here comes Tex plummeting down the hill to meet them, hoping he can arrest his momentum before he bowls them over like a couple of tenpins needed for a spare. ...

THERE GOES LE ROI DE SOLIEL... AN OLD SCORE THE GOOD PROFESSOR A VISIT TO THE LIBRARY WASHINGTON SQUARE CHANCE ENCOUNTER RELAY THE NATURE OF WORLDS THE EDUCATION OF HENRY APPEL, A NOVELLA...

Ledscha, living in ancient Egypt, has lost her betrothed and all hope of love. But the gods see otherwise. She now loves a Greek sculptor, who only wanted her for a model, but even that will not happen. She has been replaced by another woman for the statue of Arachne. Who do the gods see her with? Is it the Greek, or someone else? This work is the last written and published in German by Georg Ebers before he died in 1898. He wrote many novels set it ancient Egypt, which sparked the general interest in and popularity of Egyptology that still thrives today. This book was translated into English also in 1898. (Summary by Ann Boulais)...

This is a collection of short (15 minute or less readings) fiction or non-fiction works in English suitable for a coffee break at work or a short commuter ride. The theme for this collection is HodgePodge: humor, romance, science, long poems, biography, inspirational -- you name it, as long as it's public domain and between 3 and 15 minutes long.(Summary by BellonaTimes)...

Set during WWI in England, The Red Planet is a rich tale about the life in a little English town from the point of view of Major Duncan Meredyth, a disabled veteran of the Boer Wars. As he struggles to keep his life and the lives of those he cares for in harmony, he must also shelter a dark secret regarding one of the village's favorite sons. The Red Planet was the third bestselling novel in the United States for 1917. (Summary by Miss Stav)...

This year is the 200th anniversary of Dickens' birth. This is the fourth volume; the first volume of short works - fiction, essays, poetry and speeches, previously unrecorded for , was catalogued by Dickens' birthday on February 7th 2012. Further volumes will follow during the anniversary year. (Summary by Ruth Golding)...

The Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, is a work of enormous proportions. Setting out with the simple goal of offering American households a mass of good reading, the editors drew from literature of all times and all kinds what they considered the best pieces of human writing, and compiled an ambitious collection of 45 volumes (with a 46th being an index-guide). Besides the selection and translation of a huge number of poems, letters, short stories and sections of books, the collection offers, before each chapter, a short essay about the author or subject in question. In many cases, chapters contemplate not one author, but certain groups of works, organized by nationality, subject or period; there is, thus, a chapter on Accadian-Babylonian literature, one on the Holy Grail, and one on Chansons, for example. The result is a collection that holds the interest, for the variety of subjects and forms, but also as a means of first contact with such famous and important authors that many people have heard of, but never read, such as Abelard, Dante or Lord Byron. According to the editor Charles Dudley Warner, this c...

Ada Cambridge (November 21, 1844 - July 19, 1926), later known as Ada Cross, was an English born Australian writer. While she gained recognition as Australia’s first woman poet of note, her longer term reputation rests on her novels. Overall she wrote more than twenty-five works of fiction, three volumes of poetry and two autobiographical works.[1] Many of her novels were serialised in Australian newspapers, and were never published in book form. The story pans over three - four decades revolving the four Pennycuick sisters....

L'Ingénu is a satirical novella by the French writer Voltaire, published in 1767. It tells the story of a Huron Indian transported to the sophistication of eighteenth century Paris, and satirizes religious doctrine, as well as the folly and injustices of French society(Summary from Wikipedia)....

Selma Lagerlöf was born in Vaermland, Sweden, in 1858 and enjoyed a long and very successful career as a writer, receiving the Nobel-Prize in Literature in 1909. She died in Vaermland in 1940. The Emperor of Portugallia was first Published 1914 in Sweden, and 1916 in English, translated by Velma Swanston Howard. The Story i set in Vaermland around 1860 or 1870. In the centre is Jan of Ruffluck Croft. He loves his daughter more than anything, but when she moves to Stockholm and never sends a word home about her doings, he sinks into a dream-world where she is a noble Empress of Portugallia. And he believes himself to be Emperor too. His whole world and all his thoughts are dominated by the thoughts of her return and what will happen then. In the role of Emperor in the poor forest country where he lives he can question the social hierarchies around him, and dressed in his Royal regalia he sits in the frontbench in the Church, and he takes the place of honour at Parties etc. After 15 years his daughter returns home and is shocked to see what a mad clown her father has become and .... ( Summary by Lars Rolander )...

The hero, Etienne Gerard, is a Hussar in the French Army during the Napoleonic Wars. Gerard's most notable attribute is his vanity - he is utterly convinced that he is the bravest soldier, greatest swordsman, accomplished horseman and gallant lover in all France. Gerard is not entirely wrong since he displays notable bravery on many occasions, but his self-satisfaction undercuts this quite often. Obsessed with honour and glory, he is always ready with a stirring speech or a gallant remark to a lady....

The Fortunes of Philippa is based on the author's mother, Angelica Brazil, who had grown up in Rio de Janeiro and attended an English boarding school at the age of 10, finding the English culture, school life and climate confronting....

Neither the name of Shakespeare nor that of Stratford appears directly in this short piece by James, and yet both are absolutely central to his plot. The story has to do with Mr. and Mrs. Gedge, tempted away from a dreary northern town library, which he runs, to become the wardens – caretakers and tour guides – of the house where the greatest writer of the English language was born, and in which he grew up. Or did he? There is, after all, a paucity of facts about His life (in James's text, that pronoun is always capitalized, as befits a deity) and only the slenderest of historical evidence about the existence of such a man. No matter; what is important is the myth of his life, and the myth needs to be cared for and fostered so that crowds upon crowds of tourists may come, and, with a proper reverence, worship at His Birthplace. And yet it is only myth, and the more he thinks of it, the unhappier poor honest Gedge becomes (to Mrs. Gedge, however, a job is a job, and too much speculation on reality might perhaps lead to dismissal). James himself was high skeptical about the Shakespeare question (who actually did write all those plays?...

Rosalie Vanderpoel, the daughter of an American multimillionaire marries an impoverished English baronet and goes to live in England. She all but loses contact with her family in America. Years later her younger sister Bettina, beautiful, intelligent and extremely rich, goes to England to find what has happened to her sister. She finds Rosalie shabby and dispirited, cowed by her husband's ill treatment. Bettina sets about to rectify matters. She meets Lord Mount Dunstan, an impoverished earl, who lives nearby and they fall in love, but he cannot speak because it would look as if he were after her money... This is a romance but it is also about the rejuvenating effects of Americans and American money on a somewhat decadent English aristocracy. (Summary by Tabithat)...

Fiction

All the excitement, danger, heartbreaks and triumphs of this well known story, but without the big words. Lucy Aikin, an accomplished writer and writing as Mary Godolphin, accomplishes this with apparent ease in this little book. The story of a plucky family ship wrecked on a desolate island, saving what they can from the ship, is well known. The entire family, under the leadership of an intrepid father and mother works together to not only survive in this island, but actually prosper. This work would seem an excellent one for non-English native readers to try their skill at. (Summary by Phil Chenevert )...

Fiction

Levity is not a word often applied to Henry James, but this story has about it an attractively lighthearted quality. It tells of Peter Baron, a poor, young struggling writer of adequate, if not transcendent, talent, who lives in a dreary London boarding house inhabited also by a mysteriously clairvoyant and beautiful young widow, with her small boy. When Baron buys himself a second-hand writing desk to stimulate the creative juices, he finds carefully hidden within it a cache of letters that appear to compromise a recently deceased statesman. The discovery and his struggle to handle the questions they pose ultimately change his life. Along the way he also discovers, as a fringe benefit, a talent for what Americans (though probably not Jamesians) call Tin Pan Alley. (Summary by Nicholas Clifford)...

Fiction

A tragic love triangle between a beautiful English girl, an English gentleman, and a half-English, half-Egyptian plays out among the ruins and under the desert stars of 1920s era Egypt. The saga ends, as all love triangles must, in tragedy upon the desert sands. (Summary by Sibella Denton)...

Fiction

The Metamorphosis (in German, Die Verwandlung, The Transformation) is a novella by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915, and arguably the most famous of his works along with the longer works The Trial and The Castle. The story begins with a traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, waking to find himself transformed into a giant monstrous vermin. (Summary from Wikipedia)...

Fiction

Aphra Behn was the first woman writer in England to make a living by her pen, and her novel Oroonoko was the first work published in English to express sympathy for African slaves. Perhaps based partly on Behn's own experiences living in Surinam, the novel tells the tragic story of a noble slave, Oroonoko, and his love Imoinda. The work was an instant success and was adapted for the stage in 1695 (and more recently by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1999). Behn's work paved the way for women writers who came after her, as Virginia Woolf noted in a Room of One's Own (1928): All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, ... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. (Summary by Elizabeth Klett)...

Fiction

Starting with a summary of the 1922 novel The Head of the House of Coombe, which followed the relationships between a group of pre-WWI English nobles and commoners, this sequel, called Robin, completes the story of Robin, Lord Coombe, Donal and Feather. (Introduction by Linda Andrus)...

Fiction