The compelling works of John William Polidori (1795-1821) such as "The Vampyre" and "Ernestus Berchtold", exerted a powerful hold over literature and popular culture. This is a collection of Polidori's works, along with his lesser-known works such as his medical thesis on nightmares, his pamphlet on the death penalty, his poetry and diary.
Concerns the governess of two small children who thinks that her charges are being haunted by ghosts. This book illustrates the author's theory of the horror story: to suggest rather than state horror.
Its theme is simple: a tale of Miss Susan Brady, a woman with ideas above her station, who is spurned, and whose jealousy corrodes her life and drives her to try and sabotage the happiness of John Iredale, the prosperous South Australian grazier who has broken her heart...
San Quentin is a prison inmate Darrell Standing, a former university professor who is serving a life sentence for murdering a colleague. To escape the tortures of his confinement, he withdraws into dreams of past lives in which he experiences what he calls his "eternal recurrence on earth."
By the time Eça wrote The City and the Mountains he was consul in Paris.
Jacinto, an absentee noble from Portugal, revels in joyous extreme in the latest of French sophistications.
Circumstances compel his return to his family estates where he redsicovers the values and pleasures of Portuguese traditional life. However, the mature Eça never à ......
An unspoken anxiety about money permeates the home of an unlucky middle-class family. When the youngest son discovers he has the gift of clairvoyance, he begins predicting the winners of the horse races. Before long, he has turned his pocket money into thousands of pounds; yet the family's misfortunes are fated to continue...
Mathilde aspires to high society, despite being married to a low-paid clerk who tries his best to please her. When he manages to cadge an invitation to a grand ball at the Ministry of Education, Mathilde refuses to attend unless she can look the part. She obtains a splendid gown, but then demands a necklace to go with it.
In his last years, Mark Twain had become a respected literary figure whose opinions were widely sought by the press. He had also suffered a series of painful physical, economic, and emotional losses. This book denies the existence of a benign Providence, a soul, an afterlife, and even reality itself.
In this 1907 novel about the extravagant life of New York Citys high society, the author of The Jungle, presents a richly detailed portrait of the wealthy elite of The Metropolis.
