In this urbane collection of short stories by Maurice Baring, characters ranging from legendary figures to schoolboys find themselves in step or out of sorts, where they are meant to be or warned not to go, out of luck or, more often than not, in it. – Summary by A. Gramour [chương_files]
A collection of tales written by J.E. Muddock. All these stories are dark in atmosphere and subject matter. [chương_files]
The Stoneground Ghost Tales is a collection of nine short stories set in and around a church and parish on the edge of England’s fen country. The protagonist, the Rector of Stoneground, the Reverend Roland Batchel, is a kindly, humane bachelor and amateur antiquarian, very much like Swain himself. (adapted from wikipedia by Ann Boulais) [chương_files]
A collection of fourteen short stories, grouped under the headings of “Blackmailing Stories”, “Spook Stories”, “Cat Stories”, “Crank Stories”, and “General Stories”. From the preface: “[S]uch readers as are in search merely of the lighter…aspects of life, will be able to avoid like poison so innocent-looking a title as “The Countess of Lowndes Square,” for surely they would not find therein the fashionable descriptions of high life which they might reasonably anticipate, but would merely cast the book from them in disgust, when they discovered that one who had been the wife of an Earl, and ought therefore to have known ever so much better, belonged to the most contemptible of the criminal classes.” – Summary by Devorah Allen [chương_files]
Novelist and short story writer Alexandr Ivanovich Kuprin (1870-1938) was one of the most widely read authors of his time. Nabokov called him the Russian Kipling for his stories about people who are often “neurotic and vulnerable”. Many films and radio programs based on his works have been produced. These 15 short stories, typically “artful studies of abnormal states of mind”, were selected from various sources. The collection includes “Easter Day” (a chance meeting); “The Picture” (intense envy); “Hamlet” (a fading actor); “The Last Word” (a psychotic confession); “Dogs’ Happiness” (strays in jeopardy); “A Clump of Lilacs” (a wife’s ingenuity); “Anathema” (a curse); and “Tempting Providence” (homeward bound). “The White Poodle” and “The Elephant”, appropriate for all readers, were intended by the author to be read aloud to children. ( Lee Smalley) [chương_files]
A compilation of 80 short stories by the author of “Anne of Green Gables” that were not previously published in a book or in one of Project Gutenberg’s short stories collections for this author. The subjects range from children’s stories, to romance, humor, and ghost stories. These short stories were published in various magazines from the years 1896 to 1924. Some of these stories were adapted by L.M. Montgomery into chapters of her later novels. The story “Una of the Garden” was transformed into the novel “Kilmeny of the Orchard”. (Summary by Maria Therese) [chương_files]
“No less wonderful and varied are the inhabitants and the phenomena of the Philippines, and a new author, showing rare knowledge of the country and its strange peoples, now gives us a collection of simple yet wonderful stories which bring them before us with dramatic vividness… Strangest, perhaps, of all these possibilities for fiction is the ‘anting-anting’, at once a mysterious power to protect its possessor and the outward symbol of the protection…” – Summary from the Foreword [chương_files]
The Doves’ Nest and Other Stories is a collection of complete stories and fragments by the writer Katherine Mansfield. The book was published several months after the Kiwi author’s death. – Summary by Rob Marland [chương_files]
THE HEPTAMERON, first published posthumously in 1558, is divided into seven complete days containing 10 stories each, and an eighth day containing only 2 stories. The stories, many of which deal with love and infidelity, resulted in “accusations of looseness” by critics of the day. The author, Margaret of Navarre (also known as Margaret of Angoulême) became an influential woman in the intellectual and cultural circles of the French Renaissance. From an 1892 essay by the translator George Saintsbury: “In so large a number of stories with so great a variety of subjects, it naturally cannot but be the case that there is a considerable diversity of tone. But that peculiarity at which we have glanced more than once, the combination of voluptuous passion with passionate regret and a mystical devotion, is seldom absent for long together…The question, What is the special virtue of the Heptameron? I have myself little hesitation in answering. There is no book, in prose and of so early a date, which shows to me the characteristic of the time as it influenced the two great literary nations of Europe so distinctly as this book of Margaret of Angoulême… – Summary adapted from Wikipedia and excerpted from the text by lubee930 [chương_files]
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