Showing results by narrator "Walter Zimmerman" in All Categories

First published in 1888 in France, this novel is usually considered Maupassant's best. It is a piercing study of jealousy and suspicion. Pierre and Jean are the sons of a retired Parisian jeweler, M. Roland, living at Le Havre. Pierre is a doctor, whose temperament is somewhat nervous and unsteady. Jean, the younger, has a placid nature and is a lawyer. Both love the widowed young Mme. Rosemilly, who seems to prefer Jean. When Jean inherits a fortune from M. Marechal...

In the story, a land owner named Vasili Andreevich Brekhunov takes along one of his peasants, Nikita, for a short journey to the house of the owner of a forest. He is impatient and wishes to get to the town more quickly to purchase the forest before other contenders can get there. They find themselves in the middle of a blizzard, but the master in his avarice wishes to press on. They eventually get lost off the road and they try to camp. The master's peasant soon finds himself suffering from hypothermia.

Emile Zola, along with fellow novelists Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert, was an early realist in French literature. In novels such as Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Zola's Nana, sex and violence were examined with vivid clarity. These realists soon adopted the word naturalism to describe their writings.

This is the story of the celebrated Pickwick Club. The members are to report to the club on their journeys, adventures, and observations of characters and manners. Dickens creates a vivid picture of England in taking his characters along the nostalgic highways and byways of this majestic isle. This remarkable first novel made Dickens famous and has remained one of the world's best-known works.

Two colonial officers extol the benefits they are bringing to an African village in the form of "quays and warehouses, and barracks-and billiard-rooms". A French republican who has fathered three idiot sons makes his peace with the Church: only to have an idiot daughter. A woman chooses not to leave her husband...but he leaves her. Such are the ironies of Conrad's earliest short stories.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was one of the major figures of 19th-century supernaturalism. He helped move supernaturalist fiction away from the gothic's emphasis on external sources of terror and toward a focus on the effects of terror, thus helping to create the psychological basis for supernaturalist and horror literature that continues today. "The Familiar" is one of his most terrifying tales.

Charles Dickens, like many Victorian writers, loved to write supernatural stories during the Christmas season. The most famous, of course, is A Christmas Carol, but there were many other such stories including, Number One Branch Line: The Signalman, The Trial for Murder, and The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton. This particular story has many parallels to A Christmas Carol but also has many unique feathers.

A young man gives a present of "a work of art", or so he thinks, with very interesting consequences. This is one of Chekov's most humorous stories.

Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 near Dorchester in that part of England he called Wessex. With stories sometimes from his own imagination and sometimes from local tradition, Hardy's work, like Dickens and Trollope, creates a strong sense of mood and location. Hardy hoped to be remembered for his poetry, but ours is not a poetic age. Thus his claim to a new generation of readers rests on his prose. There are great similarities between his era, a time of challenge, and our own.

Dostoevsky is primarily known for his monumental works like Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. However, he also wrote many excellent shorter works that embody the same exploration of human psychology on a smaller scale. The Dream of a Ridiculous Man is one of his best short pieces. No less a writer than Virginia Woolf says of Dostoevsky, "Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading."

In this story, an old witch takes pity on a poor soldier and gives him a box with remarkable powers. As a result, he has many astounding adventures.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky is considered one of the greatest Russian writers. His works have had a profound and lasting effect on 20th-century literature. His psychological penetration into the human soul had, in novels like Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, a profound influence on the 20th century novel. He also wrote a number of brilliant short stories along these same lines. "The Wedding" is one of his best.

Nathaniel Hawthorne has taken some of the most striking and exciting Greek legends and adapted them for young readers. In this retelling, Hawthorne maintains the conceptions held by the original authors. This collection includes "The Minotaur", "The Pygmies", "The Dragon's Teeth", "Circe's Palace", "The Pomegranate Seeds", and "The Golden Fleece".

Leo Tolstoy is widely regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists for such works as War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He also wrote a number of outstanding short stories. This is one of his best.

"The Adventure of the Speckled Band" is the 8th of 12 stories collected in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It was originally published in Strand Magazine in 1892. Doyle thought that this was his best Holmes story. In fact, he thought so much of it that he wrote and produced a play based on the story. The play, originally called "The Stonor Case," differed from the story in several details but was essentially the same.

Although best known for such long novels as Our Mutual Friend and The Old Curiosity Shop, Charles Dickens also wrote many wonderful short stories with both a supernatural and a humorous twist. This is one of his best.

Guy de Maupassant is considered one of the fathers of the modern short story as well as one of the form's finest writers. His stories are characterized by their economy of style and efficient, seemingly effortless dénouements

A rather unattractive itinerant flute-player and music copyist is sent away on Christmas Eve - causing a family to feel uncomfortably guilty. Lagerlof was a Swedish novelist, who in 1909 became the first woman writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Her work is deeply rooted in Nordic legends and history.

A Christmas Carol is undoubtedly the most famous supernatural story in English. However, it was not the only supernatural story of the season that Charles Dickens wrote. In Victorian England, Christmas was the time to explore the supernatural in stories, and Charles Dickens was one of the best at it. Included in this volume are a full-cast dramatization of A Christmas Carol, plus three more of Dickens' best stories of the season.

Pushkin was one of the giants of 19th century Russian literature but, unlike Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, he was most famous for his short stories. The Shot, one of his most anthologized, tells the story of a terrible revenge.