The most striking scene in this novel is right at its beginning, where the then-20-year-old central character and future mayor gets drunk in a tavern and - get this - sells his wife and baby daughter to a passing sailor ! We then follow his ups and downs, especially the latter, twenty years later when his past starts catching up with him after he has become mayor and one of the town’s leading merchants. Set in the south-east region of "Wessex" (a fictionalised transposition of Hardy’s native (…)
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"The Mayor of Casterbridge" by Thomas Hardy (1886)
30 juin 2023, par Thomas Hardy -
"Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes" by Robert Louis Stevenson (1879)
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"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (1884)
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The scenes of everyday nightmarish violence in the frontier towns of the South are as striking to us today as they must have appeared to be to the East Coast readers of (…) -
"The Portrait of a Lady" by Henry James (1881)
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"Abdication" by A. E. van Vogt and E. M. Hull (1943)
17 juin 2023, par A. E. van VogtTwo very rich and very adventurous adventurers get mixed up in a violent intrigue involving huge mining rights on a faraway planet, and try to survive the complications that ensue with the aid of a new-fangled invisibility suit.
A golden-age space-opera kind of story with good pace and a neat twist at the end, that was initially published under the name of van Vogt’s wife E. Mayne Hull in the April 1943 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction , but that was credited to both A. E. van Vogt and (…) -
"The Jungle Book and other stories" by Rudyard Kipling (1894)
12 juin 2023, par Rudyard KiplingRudyard Kipling’s celebrated stories about life in the jungles of India, featuring notably the story of the abandoned boy Mowgli who has been adopted by a wolf pack, recounting his adventures with many other animals, notably the tiger Shere Khan, Baloo the bear and Kaa the python.
The other tales – all most charming and even instructive, and all with a distinctive poetical touch – involve the struggle of seals to survive the menace of mankind, the mongoose Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and his epic (…) -
"Maid Marian" by Thomas Love Peacock (1822) – the original Robin Hood story
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A famous tale elegantly recounted by the distinguished man of (…) -
"Washington Square" by Henry James (1880)
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"The Return of the Native" by Thomas Hardy (1878)
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"The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" by Mark Twain (1876)
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An American classic (although first published in England !) it was really intended for young people by its structure (anecdotes loosely linked together), its content matter (youthful escapades and high-jinks) and its style (…)