L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) was a prolific author of novels, short stories, poetry and theatre plays who achieved everlasting posthumous fame when this wonderful story about the adventures of Dorothy and her faithful companions (her dog Toto, a scarecrow without brains, a tin woodman without a heart and a cowardly lion) was made into a memorable Hollywood musical film in 1939 starring the young Judy Garland and directed by Victor Fleming that was later classified by the Library of Congress as (…)
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"The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" (1900) by L. Frank Baum
17 février 2021, par L. Frank Baum -
"David Copperfield" (1850) by Charles Dickens
17 février 2021, par Charles DickensThis portrait of a sensitive young boy’s struggles with his school mentors and with his schoolmates is as powerful and humanistic as anything Dickens or anyone else ever wrote, and the hard-hearted but oh-so-smooth uncle Mr. Murdstone is as worthy a villain — always a Dickens strong point — as any in his oeuvre.
One of Dickens’s best-known and most-read works, with wonderfully characteristic and even famous secondary characters such as the creepy Uriah Heep and the eternally optimistic (…) -
"Bleak House" (1853) by Charles Dickens
12 février 2021, par Charles DickensA blockbuster of a book, with what was for Dickens a big theme : the incredibly antiquated and abstruse, bureaucratic procedures involved in property legislation via the time-hallowed Chancery Law courts – that however at the time of its publication had already been essentially abolished.
Today the very lengthy satire about the inefficiencies of that antiquated system has lost much of its sting and one can easily find the subject overworked, although it cannot be denied that as a symbol (…) -
"Hard Times" (1854) by Charles Dickens
5 février 2021, par Charles DickensThe only book in which Dickens ventures into the industrial heartland of the England of his time, the sprawling factory belt in the north around Manchester and Liverpool. Also the shortest of all his novels, slightly above one-third the average length of the others.
The hard-hitting portrayal of the exploitation of workers by unscrupulous factory owners and the poignant description of the near-starvation-level living standards of male and female workers in the burgeoning factory towns of (…) -
"Little Dorrit" (1857) by Charles Dickens
1er février 2021, par Charles DickensIn this very big and wide-ranging opus Dickens follows his eponymous heroine from the Marshalsea Prison for Debtors in south London, where she had lived for the first twenty-plus years of her life and the first half of the book, across France and Switzerland with her newly-rich family on a Grand Tour to Italy, where she spends a couple of years rubbing shoulders with the hordes of semi-expatriate upper-class English that congregated there at the time — the novel is set in the mid-1820s — and (…)
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"A Tale of Two Cities" (1859) by Charles Dickens
20 janvier 2021, par Charles DickensDickens’s second and best-known (and last) historical novel, the one that starts off with the famous opening lines "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, . . .".
This is one of his shortest novels and also his most overtly political one (with Hard Times), centred as it is on the violent injustices of the French revolution and on the despotism of the ancien régime that Dickens sees as having inevitably led to that (…) -
"Make Westing" and other stories by Jack London
16 janvier 2021, par Jack LondonTABLE OF CONTENTS
1. THE MISOGYNIST (1897) A confirmed bachelor wakes up one morning to find that all females have suddenly disappeared and the world is now a purely masculine one ! Things start rapidly going to pot as everyone, including our hero, desperately tries to survive. (8,600 words)
2. THEIR ALCOVE (1900) A man watches all the letters and mementos of the woman he had loved burn in his fireplace as he muses over the impact that their break-up has made on his life, and tries to (…) -
"Great Expectations" (1861) by Charles Dickens
15 janvier 2021, par Charles DickensThis is Dickens at his very best, or rather his greatest. A mature work, his penultimate novel, it gets off to a rousing start – the dramatic encounter of young Pip with an escaped convict takes place on page 2 –, the writing is absolutely sparkling, deeply infused with his profound humanity and his ever-present sense of humour, the characters are finely chiseled and marvelously, even famously full of life – notably the quite unforgettable Joe, and Biddy, and Estella, and Mrs. Haversham, and (…)
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"Our Mutual Friend" (1865), by Charles Dickens
10 janvier 2021, par Charles DickensThis last complete novel of Charles Dickens, his fourteenth, has a very strong theme, one of his best and most timeless : the Thames river that dominates the lives of those who work on and beside and near it and which symbolises the force and power and also violence of the current of life itself, a theme powerfully developed from the dramatic opening scene right through the book.
The novel has the full 800+ page-length that Dickens seems to have felt best at ease with and within which (…) -
"Suicides" and other stories by Guy de Maupassant
7 janvier 2021, par Guy de MaupassantTABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Suicides (1880) A letter is found beside a 57-year-old man who has just shot himself in a depressed state of mind, as dramatically explained in his letter. (1,800 words)
2. Lasting Love (1882) A group of hunters and their wives are debating the question of long-lasting (or otherwise) love after a copious dinner, and a retired Parisian doctor recounts the most intense and long-lasting affair he had ever encountered, involving a respectable pharmacist and a (...)