Prospero’s IsleThe 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 (...)
Most recent articles
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"Nils Holgersson’s Wonderful Adventures" by Selma Lagerlöf (1906)
9 July, by Selma Lagerlöf -
"Tess of the D’Urbervilles" by Thomas Hardy (1891)
6 July, by 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 (...) -
"Kidnapped" by Robert Louis Stevenson (1893)
3 July, by Robert Louis StevensonThe young hero of this great 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; and d) (...)
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"The Mayor of Casterbridge" by Thomas Hardy (1886)
30 June, by Thomas HardyThe 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 (...)
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"Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes" by Robert Louis Stevenson (1879)
27 June, by Robert Louis StevensonRobert Louis Stevenson’s charming account of a twelve-day hike he made on foot in 1878, accompanied by his stubborn and self-willed donkey Modestine, across the wild country of the Cévennes in south-central France, stopping for four days at a secluded Trappist monastery where the monks were sworn to silence – except to talk with visitors when they were very voluble indeed – and continuing, almost always sleeping in the wild, through the mountainous area of the Cévennes that had been a (...)
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"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (1884)
24 June, by Mark TwainMark Twain’s sequel to the ever-so-charming Tom Sawyer, this time written more for an adult public, where Huck recounts at first hand his harrowing river-trip down the Mississippi River after escaping from the clutches of his ultra-violent, brutish father into the heartland of the Deep South with an escaped black slave.
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)
20 June, by Henry JamesA well-rounded, in-depth exploration of the inner psyche of Isabel Archer, a liberated and very independent-minded young American woman, discovering England and Italy and the complexities of life in the eighteen-eighties. The author’s somewhat verbose style, his inherent difficulty in summing things up in a nutshell, and the quasi-absence of much of a story line – other than the tribulations of the heroine’s sentimental adventures - make this a rather hard read at times, but perseverance (...)
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"Abdication" by A. E. van Vogt and E. M. Hull (1943)
17 June, by 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 (...) -
"The Jungle Book and other stories" by Rudyard Kipling (1894)
12 June, by 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
31 May, by Thomas Love PeacockThe first full account of the adventures of Robin Hood [1], Maid Marian, Friar Tuck and their merry band of outlaw-foresters, their various encounters with the hapless Sheriff of Nottingham and their struggles against the redoubtable King John who’s seeking to usurp the kingdom from his brother Richard Coeur-de-Lion – to whom Robin and his followers have sworn allegiance – while he is absent campaingning in the Holy Lands.
A famous tale elegantly recounted by the distinguished man of (...)