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Orientations by William Somerset Maugham, author of Liza of Lambeth, The Making of a Saint. Table of Content: The Punctiliousness of Don Sebastian A bad example De Amicitia Faith The choice of amyntas Daisy

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish author, playwright and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his plays, as well as the circumstances of...

I was advised on all hands not to write this book, and some English friends who have read it urge me not to publish it.  "You will be accused of selecting the subject," they say, "because sexual viciousness appeals to you, and your method of treatment lays you open to attack. "You criticise and condemn the English conception of justice, and English legal methods: you even question the...

Our Mutual Friend (written in the years 1864–65) is the last novel completed by Charles Dickens and is one of his most sophisticated works, combining psychological insight with social analysis. It centres on, in the words of critic J. Hillis Miller, "money, money, money, and what money can make of life", but is also about human values. In the opening chapters a body is found in theThames...

Overruled (1912) is a comic one-act play written during by George Bernard Shaw. In Shaw's words, it is about "how polygamy occurs among quite ordinary people innocent of all unconventional views concerning it." The play concerns two couples who desire to switch partners, but are prevented from doing so by various considerations and end up negotiating an ambiguous set of...

To and fro, like a wild creature in its cage, paced that handsome woman, with bent head, locked hands, and restless steps. Some mental storm, swift and sudden as a tempest of the tropics, had swept over her and left its marks behind. As if in anger at the beauty now proved powerless, all ornaments had been flung away, yet still it shone undimmed, and filled her with a passionate regret. A jewel...

Pericles, Prince of Tyre is a Jacobean play written at least in part by William Shakespeare and included in modern editions of his collected works despite questions over its authorship, as it was not included in the First Folio. Whilst various arguments support that Shakespeare is the sole author of the play (notably DelVecchio and Hammond's Cambridge edition of the...

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte is an 1896 novel by Mark Twain about Joan of Arc. It was Twain's last completed novel. The novel is presented as a translation (by "Jean Francois Alden") of memoirs by Louis de Conte. The novel describes itself as Freely Translated out of the Ancient French into Modern English from the Original Unpublished Manuscript in the...

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte is an 1896 novel by Mark Twain about Joan of Arc. It was Twain's last completed novel. The novel is presented as a translation (by "Jean Francois Alden") of memoirs by Louis de Conte. The novel describes itself as Freely Translated out of the Ancient French into Modern English from the Original Unpublished Manuscript in...

Persuasion is Jane Austen's last completed novel. She began it soon after she had finished Emma and completed it in August 1816. She died, at age 41, in 1817; Persuasion was published in December of that year (but dated 1818).  Persuasion is linked to Northanger Abbey not only by the fact that the two books were originally bound up in one volume...

Man's inclination to decorate his belongings has always been one of the earliest signs of civilisation. Art had its beginning in the lines indented in clay, perhaps, or hollowed in the wood of family utensils; after that came crude colouring and drawing. Among the first serious efforts to draw were the Egyptian square and pointed things, animals and men. The most that artists of that day...

Pictures from Italy is a travelogue by Charles Dickens, written in 1846. The book reveals the concerns of its author as he presents, according to Kate Flint, the country "like a chaotic magic-lantern show, fascinated both by the spectacle it offers, and by himself as spectator." In 1844, Dickens took a respite from writing novels and for several months traveled through France and Italy with his...

Plain Tales from the Hills (published 1888) is the first collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling. Out of its 40 stories, "eight-and-twenty", according to Kipling's Preface, were initially published in the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, Punjab, British India, between November 1886 and June 1887. "The remaining tales are, more or less, new." (Kipling had worked as a journalist for the...

Is this another collection of stupid poems that children cannot use? Will they look hopelessly through this volume for poems that suit them? Will they say despairingly, "This is too long," and "That is too hard," and "I don't like that because it is not interesting"? Are there three or four pleasing poems and are all the rest put in to fill up the book? Nay, verily! The poems in this collection...

On a beautiful day in spring as I was running as hard as I could run pursued by the New York police and a number of excited citizens, my mind, which becomes brilliantly active under physical exhilaration, began to work busily. I thought about all sorts of things: I thought about hard times and financial depression and about our great President who is in a class all alone with himself and soon to...

Poor Folk (Russian: Бедные люди, Bednye Lyudi), sometimes translated as Poor People, is the first novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, written over the span of nine months between 1844 and 1845. Dostoyevsky was in financial difficulty because of his extravagant living and his developing gambling addiction; although he had produced some translations of...

Nowadays the bookbinder does not bind only those books given to him for this purpose as was the case in former years, for present conditions necessitate his undertaking many kinds of work which have little or nothing to do with the binding of books, particularly such as are connected with the making or finishing of printed matter and paper goods, or where pasting, gumming, and glueing are...

The forenoon of the first of April, 1911. General Mitchener is at his writing table in the War Office, opening letters. On his left is the fireplace, with a fire burning. On his right, against the opposite wall is a standing desk with an office stool. The door is in the wall behind him, half way between the table and the desk. The table is not quite in the middle of the room: it is nearer to the...

Prester John is a 1910 adventure novel by John Buchan. It tells the story of a young Scotsman named David Crawfurd and his adventures in South Africa, where a Zulu uprising is tied to the medieval legend of Prester John. Crawfurd is similar in many ways to Buchan's later character, Richard Hannay. It contains the notable line: "Perfect love casteth out fear, the Bible says; but, to speak it...

In compiling the following History from the Archives of Pantouflia, the Editor has incurred several obligations to the Learned. The Return of Benson (chapter xii.) is the fruit of the research of the late Mr. Allen Quatermain, while the final wish of Prince Prigio was suggested by the invention or erudition of a Lady. A study of the Firedrake in South Africa, where he is called the...