Aldous Huxley is best known as a philosopher and novelist – notably as the author of Brave New World. He also wrote poetry, short stories and critical essays. Most of his work is somewhat dark and mildly sardonic, partly because he came of age just after World War I, when all of Europe was in a state of cultural, political and social confusion. His novel, Crome Yellow, is a prime example. Mortal Coils includes four short stories and a play, including one of the author’s most famous short works: "The Gioconda Smile." - Summary by Kirsten Wever

An impossibly imperturbable old sea captain, with two hundred Chinese labourers aboard his steamship, faces a terrifying typhoon for the first time in his life. When emigré Austrian peasant Yanko is washed up on an English beach, he encounters widespread hostility from the local people on account of his foreign ways, and only in time earns a meagre measure of grudging respect. Captain Falk — seemingly half man, half tug boat - desperately loves a shapely young woman, but standing in the way of any possible match is a most delicate question indeed...

Ms. Pinckney says in her "Forward" to this book the following: "It is against this background of the world need that Mrs. Alice Dunbar-Nelson's book is seen to have peculiar significance to the colored race in America. Hers is the first attempt I have known of directly on the part of any Negro to frame a speaker composed entirely of literature produced by black men and women, and about black men and women, and embodying the finest spiritual ideals of the Negro race." And in addition, Alice Dunbar-Nelson includes some very meaningful support from some Caucasian writers.

Set in the stifling world of turn of the century Dutch aristocracy, the second volume of the 'Books of the Small Souls' quartet, begins where the first volume ended. Constance Van der Welcke has returned to The Hague after her twenty-year exile for a scandalous affair in Rome. Hoping for acceptance by her family and the society of her former 'set', Constance and her husband Henri are now estranged from the family and have given up all ambitions of acceptance in society. Determined to live quietly, they form new friendships - Henri with Constance's niece, Marianne, and Constance with Henri's eccentric old friend, Max Brauws - that lead each of them on a journey of self-discovery...

E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India is widely acclaimed as one of the hundred best literary works of 20th century. Time magazine rates it among the top 100 English-language novels of all time. A Passage to India is set at the moment when the lasting supremacy of the British Raj could no longer be taken for granted. Imperial power had been effectively supported by old and deep-seated religious and cultural conflicts between India’s Hindu and Muslim populations, which divided and sapped the local powers ultimately needed to overthrew imperial rule in 1947...

Prince D.S. Mirsky was a prominent Russian literary historian who spent several years in emigration, teaching at the University of London. This book, published in 1925, presents a brief and incisive overview of Russian literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was written in English and meant to be accessible to the general reading public in the West. - Summary by Kazbek

“The Chouans” was the first novel published under Balzac’s own name . It became the first book in the great work of his lifetime — the novel series titled “The Human Comedy.” Balzac was impressed by the writings of Sir Walter Scott. Scott made Scottish history come alive by creating fictions that used real history as backdrop. Balzac’s novel is set in 1799 — the year that Napoleon became First Consul of France. In the far west of France , anti-revolutionary sentiment still simmered...

The third book in Louis Couperus' Books of the Small Souls quartet. The Twilight of the Souls begins some months after the conclusion of The Later Life. Constance Van der Welcke and her husband Henri have settled down to a quieter life in the Hague, sister Bertha and her daughter Marianne have moved to the country, and Mama Van Lowe's Sunday evenings are no longer the gatherings of the whole family they once were. But the family's troubles are far from over. The story shifts to the trials and tribulations of Constance's brothers, Gerrit and Ernst, and Bertha's son and daughter, Henri and Emilie, who have fled together to Paris. - Summary by Phil Benson

'A Man Could Stand Up' is the third, and culminating, part of Ford Madox Ford's 'Parade's End' tetralogy of novels, which begins with 'Some Do Not', followed by 'No More Parades', and whose coda would be 'Last Post'. While 'A Man Could Stand Up' can be appreciated on its own, it will make far better sense to a listener or reader already familiar with its predecessors. It's at once a war story , a story of immense upheaval in social mores, and a passionate, if extraordinarily restrained, love story. Just like, say, Virginia Woofe's 'Mrs Dalloway', published the previous year, Ford's novel is pitched at readers who are assumed to be highly literate and well-educated.

When a few men decide to go for looking for gold in the outback of Australia, days of extreme heat with no water and no rain in sight, make them turn back and give up the trip; all but two of them that is, Smith and Mandeville, aka the "Baker. Smith and Baker decide to tough it out and go after their dreams, chancing their lives to find "their luck". Little do they realize, they will put their lives in grave danger, and this quest for gold will turn into a nightmare. Life threatening food and water deprivation is a constant issue, and they had no idea they would stumble upon an unknown tribe of prehistoric white men that are head hunters and cannibals...

JOKES FOR ALL OCCASIONSPREFACEThe ways of telling a story are as many as the tellers themselves. It is impossible to lay down precise rules by which any one may perfect himself in the art, but it is possible to offer suggestions by which to guide practise in narration toward a gratifying success. Broadly distinguished, there are two methods of telling a story. One uses the extreme of brevity, and makes its chief reliance on the point. The other devotes itself in great part to preliminary elaboration in the narrative, making this as amusing as possible, so that the point itself serves to cap a climax...

Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales.PREFACE.This volume presents the first publication of the famous lectures of Governor Robert L. Taylor. His great popularity as an orator and entertainer, and his wide reputation as a humorist, have caused repeated inquiries from all sections of the country for his lectures in book form; and this has given rise to an earlier publication than was expected. The lectures are given without the slightest abridgment, just as delivered from the platform throughout the country. The consecutive chain of each is left undisturbed; and the idea of paragraphing, and giving headlines to the various subjects treated, was conceived merely for the convenience of the reader...

ENGLISH LITERATUREBY WILLIAM J. LONG, PH.D.PREFACEThis book, which presents the whole splendid history of English literature from Anglo-Saxon times to the close of the Victorian Era, has three specific aims. The first is to create or to encourage in every student the desire to read the best books, and to know literature itself rather than what has been written about literature. The second is to interpret literature both personally and historically, that is, to show how a great book generally reflects not only the author's life and thought but also the spirit of the age and the ideals of the nation's history...

The attractions Roopa experienced and the fantasies she entertained as a teen shaped a male imagery that ensconced her subconscious. Insensibly, confident carriage came to be associated with the image of maleness in her mind-set. Her acute consciousness of masculinity only increased her vulnerability to it, making her womanliness crave for the maleness for its gratification. However, as her father was constrained to help her in becoming a doctor, she opts to marry, hoping that Sathyam might serve her cause though the persona she envisioned as masculine, she found lacking in him...

If passing through youth was like crossing the mirage of life for Chandra and Nithya, it proved to be chasing the mirage of love for Sathya and Prema though for plain Vasavi, Chandra's pitiable sibling, it was the end of the road. As life brings Chandra, who suffers from an inferiority complex for his perceived ugliness, and Nithya, who was bogged down being jilted by Vasu, together, they script their fate of fulfillment. And as poetic justice would have it, Sathya, who caused Prema's heart burn, himself was led down the garden path by Kala, doing a "Sathya on Sathya"...

Glaring Shadow in a stream of consciousness mode is the self-account of the life and times of a man, who liquidates his immense wealth only to consign it to the flames. The agony and ecstasy of his life as he makes it big in our materialistic world and the way he loses his soul in the bargain, only to regain it when tragedy strikes him makes one ponder over the meaning of success in life - He had the soul of our times, and is the namesake of many. He tamed success by the scruff of its neck, only to fuel envy in our neighborhood...

This fascinating saga of life exemplifies the material raise and moral fall of Gautam and Sneha and also the poignant end of the latter and the spiritual rise of the former that is after the fall. Besides, this piquant story depicts the tragic life of their son Suresh Prabhu and his eventual redemption through love for and of Vidya. Book One, Artha and Kama, is about conflict and resolution arising out of ambition and achievement, intrigue and betrayal, compulsion and compromise, sleaze and scandal, trial and sentence and regret and remorse spread over eighteen chapters...

The spiritual ethos and the philosophical outlook that the Bhagvad - Gita postulates paves the way for the liberation of man, who, as Rousseau said, ‘being born free, is everywhere in chains’. But equally it is a mirror of human psychology, which enables man to discern his debilities for appropriate redressal. All the same, the boon of an oral tradition that kept it alive for over two millennia became its bane with the proliferation of interpolations therein. Besides muddying its pristine philosophy, these insertions affect the sequential conformity and structural economy of the grand discourse...

If Mahabharata's Bhagvad-Gita is taken as a philosophical guide, Ramayana's Sundara Kãnda is sought for spiritual solace. What is more, many believe that reading Sundara Kãnda or hearing it recited would remove all hurdles and usher in good tidings! Well miracles apart, it's in the nature of Sundara Kãnda to inculcate fortitude and generate hope in one and all. After all, isn't it a depiction of how Hanuman goes about his errand against all odds! Again, won't it portray how Seetha, on the...

InThis is an essay providing an extended analysis of the works of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen and of Ibsen's critical reception in England. Shaw uses this "exposition of Ibsenism" to illustrate the imperfections of British society, using the idea of an imaginary "community of a thousand persons," divided into three categories: Philistines, Idealists, and the lone Realist. The main discussion revolves around Ibsen's recurring topic of the strong character holding out against social hypocrisy, while stating in his essay's final sentence that the quintessence of Ibsenism is that "there is no formula." ( Michele Eaton)

Victorian Literature by Clement Shorter is a brief work that gives a good introduction to many of the important writers, historians, and critics of the Victorian era. Presented as a "gathering up (of) a few impressions of pleasant reading hours", this little book is sure to delight any one with an interest in this most fascinating of literary periods.

The work was composed between 1790 and 1793, in the period of radical foment and political conflict immediately after the French Revolution. The title is an ironic reference to Emanuel Swedenborg's theological work Heaven and Hell published in Latin 33 years earlier. Swedenborg is directly cited and criticized by Blake several places in the Marriage. Though Blake was influenced by his grand and mystical cosmic conception, Swedenborg's conventional moral structures and his Manichean view of good...

John Wesley, along with his brother Charles, are credited with founding the Methodist denomination. "The following Sermons contain the substance of what I have been preaching for between eight and nine years last past. Every serious man who peruses these, will therefore see, in the clearest manner, what these doctrines are which I embrace and teach as the essentials of true religion." This first series contains sermons concerning the way to heaven.

A mentally unstable genius, Victor Frankenstein, inspired by the dreams of ancient alchemists and empowered by modern science, creates a humanoid but fails to nurture and educate it after it comes to life. It wanders alone into a hostile world, where fear of its size and ugliness subjects it to violence and ostracism, which in time it learns to blame upon its maker. As compensation for its suffering, it demands that he create a companion with whom to share its outcast life. Moved by the creature's account of its sufferings, the scientist agrees, but a long period of procrastination awakens doubts that ultimately cause him to break his promise...

Is a defense attorney bound to defend his client, or with his conscience, when he knows that the man he is defending is guilty of the charges against him after the trial has already commenced? And if friends hold a belief that he may have been aware of it before the trial commenced, yet they are endeared to the man and his family as upstanding and of the highest grade? Might it not become cause for blackmail, and therefore potential retribution? "The House of White Shadows" brings these issues to the forefront, while the reader learns of the background of the advocate, his family history, and the house in question...

Justin Huntly McCarthy (1859 - 1936) was an Irish scholar, author and nationalist politician. In 1889 his prose translations of 466 quatrains of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám was published by David Nutt. An abbreviated edition, containing a shorter introduction and translations of 373 quatrains, was published by David Nutt in 1898, and this has been used for the present recording.

Rich and beautiful American girls heading to England to find themselves noble titles through marriage, and using their New World wealth to prop up the waning strength of the aristocracy, was almost a staple of late Victorian literature. "The Buccaneers," Edith Wharton called them, and their day is not over yet (think of Downton Abbey's Earl of Grantham, and his American heiress countess). In Lady Barbarina, however, Henry James explores the obverse of this old tale: what if the wealth is in the hands...

Best remembered for his poetry, James Elroy Flecker was also a playwright, novelist and prose writer. This collection of his idiosyncratic prose writings includes The Last Generation (a short science fiction story), short sketches, a dialogue, and several critical studies.

Maude is a novella by Christina Rossetti, written in 1850 but published posthumously in 1897. Considered by scholars to be semi-autobiographical, the protagonist is 15-year-old Maude Foster, a quiet and serious girl who writes poetry that explores the tensions between religious devotion and worldly desires. The text includes several of Rossetti's early verses, which were later published as part of her collections of poetry.

Love Among the Artists was published in the United States in 1900 and in England in 1914, but it was written in 1881. In the ambience of chit-chat and frivolity among members of Victorian polite society a youthful Shaw describes his views on the arts, romantic love and the practicalities of matrimony. Dilettantes, he thinks, can love and settle down to marriage, but artists with real genius are too consumed by their work to fit that pattern. The dominant figure in the novel is Owen Jack, a musical genius, somewhat mad and quite bereft of social graces...

John Wesley, along with his brother Charles, are credited with founding the Methodist denomination. "The following Sermons contain the substance of what I have been preaching for between eight and nine years last past. Every serious man who peruses these, will therefore see, in the clearest manner, what these doctrines are which I embrace and teach as the essentials of true religion." This second series contains sermons concerning important Christian doctrines and practices.

A weary survivor of the Great War, Major Rane Smith wanders in a great ennui amidst the mystical beauties of the fjords of Norway after the War, seeking a spiritual renewal. Deep in the forest he stumbles fatefully upon the strange, almost elvish home of Karl Ingman, an iconoclastic old Ibsen scholar. There Major Smith meets Ingman's two beautiful young daughters and his eldritch wife Rosa, entering into long days of profound dialogue with each member of the family. A rare and exquisite gem of...