The third and best-known novel (with Lady Chatterly’s Lover) of the brilliant English novelist, poet, short-story writer, travel writer, literary critic, globe-trotter, iconoclast and eternal exile D. H. Lawrence, this is an intense and sensitive family drama set in the coal-mining area of Nottingham in central England at the turn of the 20th century.
A finely-drawn psychological drama centered on the life of the youngest son of the family, Paul Morel, his conflictual relations with his (…)
Articles les plus récents
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"Sons and Lovers" by D. H. Lawrence (1913)
4 septembre 2023, par D. H. Lawtence -
"Kim" by Rudyard Kipling (1901)
28 août 2023, par Rudyard KiplingKim is a street urchin speaking Hindi/Urdu with a smattering of English in the northern part of India who meets a travelling Tibetan monk and follows him on his search for the fabled river created where Buddha’s fabulous arrow fell. Kim too is on a search for a Red Bull that his scarcely-remembered father told him to look for in a document that he preciously carries in an amulet around his neck. Both of them successfully achieve their goals while wandering all over northern India as well as (…)
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"The Way of All Flesh" by Samuel Butler (1903)
21 août 2023, par Samuel ButlerThe narrator recounts the harsh upbringing of his godson Ernest Pontifex, son of a Church of England minister, the oppressive everyday religiosity of his family life, his difficult schooling, his career at Cambridge, his ordination, his floundering attempts to live in a working-class neighbourhood to better be able to bring them the good word, his fall into the depths and then his struggle to start a new life and to conciliate his new set of beliefs to the world around him.
Although (…) -
"Just So Stories" by Rudyard Kipling (1902)
9 août 2023, par Rudyard KiplingRudyard Kipling’s delightful collection of little stories for young children – first written as bedtime stories for his little daughter – explaining how whales, camels, elephants and other creatures first got to become the way they are, and also just how numbers, letters and the alphabet were first invented.
A treat for young and old alike.
(29,000 words) An e-book is available for downloading below. TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. HOW THE WHALE GOT HIS THROAT 2. HOW THE CAMEL GOT HIS HUMP 3. (…) -
"Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad (1899)
5 août 2023, par Joseph ConradThis famous story manages in a mysterious way to create an intriguing atmosphere of significance, even if the narrator’s mysticism and his unbounded admiration of the long-sought-after figure of Kurtz, a European trader of ivory in the upper reaches of what is clearly the Congo River who only appears towards the end of the story, is not to everyone’s taste in these more down-to-earth days.
And the rather complacent description of the ugliness and violence and racism of colonialism in what (…) -
"The Red Badge of Courage" by Steven Crane (1895)
2 août 2023, par Steven CraneThe celebrated story of fear, anguish, cowardice and heroism in the American Civil War [1] by the young twenty-four-year-old author Steven Crane (1871-1899) [2] that has long since taken its rightful place as one of the finest American works of its time.
(46,000 words)
An e-book is available for downloading below. TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I. CHAPTER II. CHAPTER III. CHAPTER IV. CHAPTER V. CHAPTER VI. CHAPTER VII. CHAPTER VIII. CHAPTER IX. CHAPTER X. CHAPTER XI. CHAPTER XII. CHAPTER (…) -
"Jude the Obscure" by Thomas Hardy (1895)
30 juillet 2023, par Thomas HardyHardy’s masterful last novel, a forceful, wide-ranging and subtly-erudite overview of the social foibles of the late Victorian society (we are in the 1880s in the south of England and in Oxford) as Hardy saw them, notably : a) the class barriers preventing labouring-class young people from being admitted into institutions of higher learning ; b) the rigidity of the marriage institution, whereby people are forced by law and by intense social pressures to live out the rest of the days with (…)
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"Nils Holgersson’s Wonderful Adventures" by Selma Lagerlöf (1906)
9 juillet 2023, par Selma LagerlöfThe wonderful account of the voyage of a young farm boy who’s been transformed by an elf into a minuscule elf-size figure and who has a series of exciting adventures flying all around Sweden with a flock of wild geese at the turn of the 20th Century.
A timeless modern classic justly famous throughout Scandinavia and elsewhere, celebrating the call of the far-off and the love of the land – and not without many very good lessons for young boys and others on how to behave to animals and (…) -
"Tess of the D’Urbervilles" by Thomas Hardy (1891)
6 juillet 2023, par Thomas HardyHardy’s penultimate and probably his best-known work, first published four years before his final and equally scandalous novel Jude the Obscure.
Here the angle that grated the most with his contemporary public and critics (Victorian morals and rules were then at the peak of their sway over the English-speaking world’s mindset) was the wanton way whereby the female heroine Jude gets herself into trouble by foolishly falling to the spiel of a local socially and physically desirable sportsman, (…) -
"Kidnapped" by Robert Louis Stevenson (1893)
3 juillet 2023, par Robert Louis StevensonThe young hero of this very interesting adventure story does get kidnapped early on as one expects from the title, but rapidly escapes from the ship which has absconded him off the west coast of Scotland, and spends the rest of the book wandering around the Highlands a) trying to find someone who can understand a word of English ; (b) getting very seriously mixed up in the Jacobite rebellion raging at the time ; c) hiding from the Crown troops who are actively hunting him as a murder suspect (…)