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Description
In Scarhaven Keep, the playwright Richard Copplestone is pulled into a search for a missing actor which leads him to the town of Scarhaven on the northern English sea coast. As he slowly uncovers the secrets of the residents of Scarhaven, the mystery deepens and reveals much more than a simple missing person.
Description
Such Is Life is an Australian novel written by Joseph Furphy under a pseudonym of “Tom Collins” and published in 1903. It purports to be a series of diary entries by the author, selected at approximately one-month intervals during late 1883 and early 1884. “Tom Collins” travels rural New South Wales and Victoria, interacting and talking at length with a variety of characters including the drivers of bullock-teams, itinerant swagmen, boundary riders, and squatters (the owners of large rural properties). The novel is full of entertaining and sometimes melancholy incidents mixed with the philosophical ramblings of the author and his frequent quotations from Shakespeare and poetry. Its depictions of the Australian bush, the rural lifestyle, and the depredations of drought are vivid.
Furphy is sometimes called the “Father of the Australian Novel,” and Such Is Life is considered a classic of Australian literature.
Description
Roswitha, also known as Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, was a tenth century German canoness, dramatist, and poet. A remarkable woman, she has been called the first Western playwright since antiquity as well as the first known woman playwright. She was inspired by the Roman comic playwright Terence, who wrote six farces filled with disguises, misunderstandings, and pagan debauchery. Upset by Terence’s immoral subject matter but also inspired by his well-crafted plays, Roswitha sought to “Christianize” his work by writing six plays of her own.
Roswitha wrote six dramas in Latin. Two are concerned with the conversation of nonbelievers (Gallicanus and Callimachus), two are concerned with the repentance of sinners (Abraham and Paphnutius), and two are concerned with the martyrdom of virgins (Dulcitus and Sapientia).
This edition, originally published in 1923, includes an introduction by Cardinal Francis Aidan Gasquet (an English Benedictine monk and scholar), a critical preface by the translator (Christopher St. John), and prefaces written by Roswitha herself.
Description
Kate Chopin’s most famous work nowadays is the novel The Awakening, but at the turn of the last century she was more famous for her short fiction, published in American magazines like the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Youth’s Companion, and Vogue. A prolific writer, over the course of fourteen years she penned nearly a hundred stories, although many didn’t see publication until a new collection was released in 1963. The stories focus on life in 1890s Louisiana, a setting that she was living in as a resident of New Orleans and Natchitoches. They’re told from many different points of view, but always with empathy for the struggles, both big and small, of the protagonists.
This collection contains the forty-nine short stories of Kate Chopin verified to be in the U.S. public domain, including “Désirée’s Baby” and “The Dream of an Hour.” They’re presented in the order they were originally written.
Description
The Moon and Sixpence tells the story of English stockbroker Charles Strickland, who abandons his wife and child to travel to Paris to become a painter. First published in 1919 in the United Kingdom by Heinemann, the story is inspired by the life of the French artist Paul Gauguin. It’s told in episodic form from a first-person perspective. The narrator, who came to know Strickland through his wife’s literary parties, begins the story as Strickland leaves for Paris. Strickland’s new life becomes a stark contrast to his life in London. While he was once a well-off banker living a comfortable life, he must now sleep in cheap hotels while suffering both illness and hunger.
Maugham spent a year in Paris in 1904, which is when he first heard the story of Gauguin, the banker who left his family and profession to pursue his passion for art. He heard the story from others who had known and worked with Gauguin. Ten years later Maugham travelled to Tahiti where he met others who had known Gauguin during the artist’s time there. Inspired by the stories he heard, Maugham wrote The Moon and Sixpence. Although based on the life of Paul Gauguin, the story is a work of fiction.
Description
Ethan Frome is a young man whose nascent ambitions were thwarted by illness and privation. Now his daily toils wring only the most meager living from his fading farm, and his marriage is as frigid as the winter that has beset his home in Starkfield, MA. Yet despite the swirling snows, a flame of passion sparked by the recent arrival of his wife’s cousin, Mattie Silver, burns desperately within him. How far will he go to pursue a forbidden love and the prospect of true happiness? What will be the cost?
Description
The Way We Live Now is Anthony Trollope’s longest novel, published in two volumes in 1875 after first appearing in serial form.
After an extended visit to Australia and New Zealand in 1872, Trollope was outraged on his return to England by a number of financial scandals, and was determined to expose the dishonesty, corruption, and greed they embodied. The Way We Live Now centers around a foreign businessman, Augustus Melmotte, who has come to prominence in London despite rumors about his past dealings on the Continent. He is immensely rich, and his daughter Marie is considered to be a desirable catch for several aristocratic young men in search of a fortune. Melmotte gains substantial influence because of his wealth. He rises in society and is even put up as a candidate for Parliament, despite a general feeling that he must be a fraudster and liar. A variety of sub-plots are woven around this central idea.
The Way We Live Now is generally considered to be one of Trollope’s best novels and is often included in lists of the best novels written in English.
Description
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is Stephen Leacock’s humourous and affectionate account of small-town life in the fictional town of Mariposa. Written in 1912, it is drawn from his experiences living in Orillia, Ontario.
The book is a series of funny and satirical anecdotes that illustrate the inner workings of life in Mariposa—from business to politics to steamboat disasters. The town is populated by many archetypal characters including the shrewd businessman Mr. Smith, the lovelorn bank teller Mr. Pupkin, and the mathematically challenged Rev. Mr. Drone.
During his lifetime, Stephen Leacock was very popular in much of the English-speaking world as a writer and humourist. Sunshine Sketches is considered one of his most notable and enduring works. In Canada, the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour is named in his honour. The medal is an annual award for the best Canadian book of literary humour published in the previous year.
Description
Whose Body?, published in 1923, is the first in a long and very popular series of mystery novels written by Dorothy L. Sayers and featuring her aristocratic detective Lord Peter Wimsey.
In this novel we are introduced to Wimsey, his imperturbable and multi-skilled butler Bunter, and his close friend Charles Parker of Scotland Yard as they come together to investigate an extremely mysterious incident: the naked body of a man, wearing a golden pince-nez, has been discovered in the bath of a bewildered tenant of a flat in Battersea. There’s a good deal of humor in the book, carefully balanced against the grim reality of murder.
Whose Body? was well-received on first publication, and provided a basis for Sayer’s successful career as a novelist. In sum, she wrote some eleven Wimsey novels as well as several short stories featuring the characters. Nevertheless, it appears that she herself felt that her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy was her greatest literary work.
Description
Ernest Bramah’s Kai Lung stories are set in a fantastical ancient China and written with an oblique, ornate prose style that serves to mimic that of Chinese folk tales. The titular character is an itinerant storyteller and the books themselves are mostly collections of stories presented as if he were narrating.
Kai Lung’s Golden Hours, published in 1922, is the second of the Kai Lung books, and the first to have an overarching framing narrative and thus be published as a novel. In it we see Kai Lung brought before the court of the Mandarin Shan Tien, having been accused of treason by the Mandarin’s agent Ming-shu. Appealing to Shan Tien’s appreciation for refined narrative, Kai Lung tries to regain his freedom by spinning a series of beguiling tales filled with aphorisms and humorous understatement.