Современная зарубежная литература онлайн бесплатно - Страница 64
Description
In 1910 famous explorer Robert Falcon Scott led the Terra Nova Expedition to the South Pole. The expedition was part scientific and part adventure: Scott wanted to be the first to reach the pole.
The expedition was beset by hardship from the beginning, and after realizing that they had been beaten to the pole by Roald Amundsen’s Norwegian Expedition, the party suffered a final tragedy: the loss of Scott and his companions to the Antarctic cold on their return journey to base camp.
The Worst Journey in the World is an autobiographical account of one of the survivors of the expedition, Apsley Cherry-Garrard. It’s a unique combination of fascinating scientific documentary, adventure novel, and with the inclusion of Scott’s final journal entries, horror story. Journey is peppered throughout with journal entries, illustrations, and pictures from Cherry-Garrard’s companions, making it a fascinating window into the majesty and danger of the Antarctic.
Description
W. W. Jacobs was a prolific writer of short stories. His topics were typically humorous and nautical in nature, but they weren’t exclusively so. This anthology includes some of his most famous short stories, including “The Monkey’s Paw,” a story of the supernatural in which a monkey’s hand grants three wishes to its owner, but at huge cost.
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The Importance of Being Earnest is Oscar Wilde’s most popular play today, enduring thanks to its easy humor, witty dialog, and clever satire. It was also one of his more successful plays, despite its first run being prematurely ended after only 86 performances. The main characters pretend to be other people in order to escape social obligations, with the resulting confusion of identities driving the plot and the humor behind it.
Earnest also holds the sad distinction of being Wilde’s last published play. A feud with an aristocrat whose son was Wilde’s lover led to a court case revealing Wilde as a homosexual—a crime in those days, and punishable by imprisonment with hard labor.
Description
The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published as a serial in Lippencott’s Monthly Magazine, and the publishers thought it would so offend readers that they removed nearly 500 words without Wilde’s approval. Wilde soon expanded it and republished it as a novel, including a short preface justifying his art. Even though his contemporaries considered it so offensive that some argued for his prosecution, Dorian Gray today survives as a classic philosophical novel that explores themes of aestheticism and double lives. Couched in Wilde’s trademark cutting wit, Dorian Gray is still being adapted today, with Dorian and his moldering portrait remaining cultural touchstones.
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In A Princess of Mars, John Carter is transported to a Mars inhabited by strange civilizations and embarks on various adventures on his quest home. Often held up as a seminal example of pulp science fiction, A Princess of Mars is the first entry in Burroughs’ epic Martian series, and the first to feature the character of John Carter.
Though often categorized as just a pulp adventure tale, A Princess of Mars was hugely influential on many budding science fiction writers, professional scientists, and explorers of the day. The novel remains a light, fast-paced, and enjoyable read, and continues to inspire adaptations nearly a hundred years after its publication.
Description
Lyrical Ballads is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and his friend and contemporary Samuel Taylor Coleridge. A hugely influential work, Lyrical Ballads is generally acknowledged to have started the Romantic movement in English literature—a period marked by a departure from the stiff and unapproachable poetry of earlier times, and by a focus on readable, relatable verse written in everyday language. Many of Wordsworth’s poems focus on the natural world and the down-to-earth people of the country, another far departure from the rational and dry literature of old. Romanticism was one of the largest sea changes in modern English literature, and Lyrical Ballads was its catalyst.
This ebook edition is based on the 1805 edition of Lyrical Ballads, and features the famous poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, “Tintern Abbey,” “Expostulation and Reply,” “Lucy Gray,” and many others.
Description
Omar Khayyám was a medieval Iranian mathematician, philosopher, scholar, and poet. He was thought to have composed over 1,000 rubáiyát, or quatrains, in his lifetime. Many different scholars have translated selections of Khayyám’s quatrains, but Edward FitzGerald’s translation remains the most beloved.
FitzGerald’s translation is interesting in that it isn’t a literal translation—rather, FitzGerald took significant artistic license in his interpretation. Thus it’s tough to say if we should call this a translation of the Rubáiyát, or poems by FitzGerald based on or inspired by Khayyám’s quatrains.
Whatever we call it, this translation is a bright and lyrical celebration of the joys and beauties of everyday life. FitzGerald’s work has remained popular for hundreds of years precisely because of its uplifting and wondrous quality.
This ebook is based on the fifth edition, which is very similar to the fourth edition, the last edition to be published in FitzGerald’s lifetime. The fifth edition was published posthumously based on FitzGerald’s notes.
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North of Boston is Robert Frost’s second collection of poetry. It includes some of his more famous poems, like “Mending Wall,” “Home Burial,” and “After Apple-Picking.”
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Treasure Island isn’t just one of the most famous coming-of-age tales in modern storytelling, it’s also the book that invented everything you know about pirates: Peg legs, parrots, treasure chests, tropical islands, Long John Silver, maps marked with an “X,” swashbuckling adventure, and “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.”
Its brisk pace and easy tone have stood the test of the time—Treasure Island is as readable, enjoyable, and memorable today as it ever was.
Description
Stanley Weinbaum was an influential science fiction writer who died at an early age. His short story “A Martian Odyssey,” included in this collection, was praised by science fiction luminaries like Isaac Asimov, who said the story “had the effect on the field of an exploding grenade. With this single story, Weinbaum was instantly recognized as the world’s best living science fiction writer, and at once almost every writer in the field tried to imitate him.”
This collection includes all of Weinbaum’s short stories that are believed to be in the public domain.