Best of
Literature

1926

A Clean Well Lighted Place


Ernest Hemingway - 1926
    Have you read 'A Clean Well-Lighted Place'?... It is masterly. Indeed, it is one of the best short stories ever written..."

One, No One and One Hundred Thousand


Luigi Pirandello - 1926
    Thus he is simultaneously without a self--``no one''--and the theater for myriad selves--``one hundred thousand.'' In a crazed search for an identity independent of others' preconceptions, Moscarda careens from one disaster to the next and finds his freedom even as he is declared insane.It is Pirandello's genius that a discussion of the fundamental human inability to communicate, of our essential solitariness, and of the inescapable restriction of our free will elicits such thoroughly sustained and earthy laughter.

The Death Ship


B. Traven - 1926
    Traven's politically charged novels about life among the downtrodden, which have sold more than thirty million copies in thirty-six languages. Next to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, it is his most celebrated work

Morphine


Mikhail Bulgakov - 1926
    Bromgard has come to a small country town to assume a new practice. No sooner has he arrived than he receives word that a colleague, Dr. Polyakov, has fallen gravely ill. Before Bromgard can go to his friend's aid, Polyakov is brought to his practice in the middle of the night with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and, barely conscious, gives Bromgard his journal before dying. What Bromgard uncovers in the entries is Polyakov's uncontrollable and merciless descent into morphine addiction -- his first injection to ease his back pain, the thrill of the drug as it overtakes him, the looming signs of addiction, and the feverish final entries before his death.

Red Cavalry


Isaac Babel - 1926
    Using his own experiences as a journalist and propagandist with the Red Army during the war against Poland, Babel brings to life an astonishing cast of characters from the exuberant, violent era of early Soviet history: commissars and colonels, Cossacks and peasants, and among them the bespectacled, Jewish writer/intellectual, observing it all and trying to establish his role in the new Russia.Drawn from the acclaimed, award-winning Complete Works of Isaac Babel, this volume includes all of the Red Cavalry cycle; Babel's 1920 diary, from which the material for the fiction was drawn; and his preliminary sketches for the stories—the whole constituting a fascinating picture of a great writer turning life into art.

Конармия. Одесские Рассказы.


Isaac Babel - 1926
    Published individually in magazines throughout 1923 and 1924 and collected into a book in 1931, they deal primarily with a group of Jewish thugs that live in the Moldavanka, a ghetto of Odessa.

How Should One Read a Book?


Virginia Woolf - 1926
    In revised form it appears to have been first published in The Yale Review, October, 1926. Along with other essays, it first appeared in book form in Woolf's The Common Reader: Second Series in 1932.

The Castle


Franz Kafka - 1926
    Scrupulously following the fluidity and breathlessness of the sparsely punctuated original manuscript, Mark Harman’s new translation reveals levels of comedy, energy, and visual power, previously unknown to English language readers.

Letters: Summer 1926


Boris PasternakYelena Pasternak - 1926
    AzadovskyThe summer of 1926 was a time of trouble and uncertainty for each of the three poets whose correspondence is collected in this moving volume. Marina Tsvetayeva was living in exile in France and struggling to get by. Boris Pasternak was in Moscow, trying to come to terms with the new Bolshevik regime. Rainer Maria Rilke, in Switzerland, was dying. Though hardly known to each other, they began to correspond, exchanging a series of searching letters in which every aspect of life and work is discussed with extraordinary intensity and passion. Letters: Summer 1926 takes the reader into the hearts and minds of three of the twentieth century's greatest poets at a moment of maximum emotional and creative pressure.

Night Games and Other Stories and Novellas


Arthur Schnitzler - 1926
    The psychologically complex and morally ambiguous tales of love and adultery, dream and reality, desire and death in Night Games prove Schnitzler to be fully the equal of his great contemporaries Kafka, Rilke, and Musil, and justify Freud's praise of his knowledge of depth psychology. The collection includes powerful early works such as "The Dead Are Silent" and "Geronimo and His Brother" as well as late masterpieces such as "Night Games" and "Dream Story." Schnitzler creates memorable characters and makes original and masterful use of inner monologue, "stream of consciousness," and unrealiable narrator-techniques that he was among the first, if not the first, to use-to explore the complexities of their inner lives, even as he delineates their social world with elegance and wit. The results are comic, tragic, powerful, and psychologically compelling tales of love, sex, and death, that often surprise. They are as fresh and as relevant to us today, a century later, as when they were first written."

Diaries of a Young Poet (Tagebücher aus der Frühzeit)


Rainer Maria Rilke - 1926
    It was to record, in the form of an imaginary dialogue with his mentor and then-lover, Lou Andreas-Salome, his firsthand experiences of early Renaissance art. The project quickly expanded to include not only thoughts on life, history, and artistic genius, but also unguarded moments of revulsion, self-doubt, and manic expectation. The result is an intimate glimpse into the young Rilke, already experimenting brilliantly with language and metaphor. "For the lover of Rilke, this superb translation of the poet's early diaries will be a watershed. Through Edward Snow's and Michael Winkler's brilliantly supple and faithful translation . . . a new and more balanced picture of Rilke will emerge."—Ralph Freedman

Diary of a Madman and Other Stories


Lu Xun - 1926
    This short story is considered to be one of the first and most influential modern works written in vernacular Chinese. "A Madman's Diary" is an attempt by Lu Xun to describe the effects of feudal values upon the Chinese people. He uses an analogy of cannibalism to describe the way such outdated values eat away at the individual. In addition to "A Madman's Diary", the collection also includes the following: Remembrances of the past Kong yiji Medicine Tomorrow An unimportant affair The story of hair A passing storm Hometown Ah Q: the real story Dragonboat festival The white light Some rabbits and a cat A comedy of ducks Village opera New Year's sacrifice Upstairs in a wineshop A happy family Soap The eternal lamp A warning to the people The venerable schoolmaster Gao The loner Mourning the dead Brothers Divorce

The Lost Books of the Bible and the Forgotten Books of Eden


Rutherford Hayes Platt - 1926
    To be found in this volume are the Apostles' Creed, the Psalms and Odes of Solomon, and other Apocryphal writings that have become part of our religious heritage. The story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife, of Adam and Eve, of the girlhood and betrothal of Mary, of the childhood of Jesus, are here in all the warmth, intimacy, and humanity of their first telling.

Alberta and Jacob


Cora Sandel - 1926
    Imaginative and intelligent, Alberta is a misfit trapped in a stiflingly provincial town in the far north of Norway whose only affinity is for her extrovert brother Jacob.

A Novel Without Lies


Anatoly Mariengof - 1926
    With its lively style and psychological insight, this memoir about Sergei Esenin has abiding value for scholar and general reader alike.

All the Sad Young Men (Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald)


F. Scott Fitzgerald - 1926
    This edition is based on extensive surviving manuscripts and typescripts. The volume contains a scholarly introduction, historical notes, a textual apparatus, illustrations, and appendices. The complex history of composition for 'The Rich Boy' is untangled, and Fitzgerald's thorough revision of 'Winter Dreams' is described. Important passages of sexual innuendo and tabloid-style scandal in 'Jacob's Ladder', 'The Love Boat', and 'Magnetism' - removed by editors at the Saturday Evening Post - are restored to the Cambridge texts.

Red Cavalry and Other Stories


Isaac Babel - 1926
    This duality of vision infuses his work with a powerful energy from the earliest tales including 'Old Shloyme' and 'Childhood', which affirm his Russian-Jewish childhood, to the relatively non-Jewish world of his collection of stories entitled 'Red Cavalry'. Babel's masterpiece, 'Red Cavalry' is the most dramatic expression of his dualism and in his simultaneous acceptance and rejection of his heritage heralds the great American-Jewish writers from Henry Roth to Saul Bellow to Philip Roth.

Third Factory


Victor Shklovsky - 1926
    In part it is a memoir of the three "Factories" that influenced his development as a human being and as a writer, yet the events depicted within the book are fictionalized and conveyed with the poetic verve and playfulness of form that have made Shklovsky a major figure in twentieth-century world literature. In addition to its fictional and biographical elements, Third Factory includes anecdotes, rants, social satire, literary theory, and anything else that Shklovsky, with an artist's unerring confidence, chooses to include.

Cheri and The Last of Cheri


Colette - 1926
    The amour between Fred Peloux, the beautiful gigolo known as Chéri, and the courtesan Léa de Lonval tenderly depicts the devotion that stems from desire, and is an honest account of the most human preoccupations of youth and middle age. With compassionate insight Colette paints a full-length double portrait using an impressionistic style all her own."A wonderful subject [treated with] intelligence, mastery, and understanding of the least-admitted secrets of the flesh." ― André Gide

The Tattooed Man


Howard Pease - 1926
    A tale of strange adventures, befalling Tod Moran, mess boy of the tramp steamer "Araby," upon his first voyage from San Francisco to Genoa, via the Panama Canal.

Flower Phantoms


Ronald Fraser - 1926
    He cannot do other than write beautifully." - Humbert Wolfe"The book abounds in glowing experiences of a world of colour and sensation, minutely imagined. . . . The description of dawn at Kew Gardens is so lovely that the reader will be tempted to endanger his respectability by emulating Judy and climbing the wall." - Times Literary Supplement"Among the few highly important and significant novelists of the day." - The Observer"There is poetry beneath Mr. Fraser's fantastic humour as there is a cunning grace in his prose." - The Times"The erotic awakening of a young woman . . . Judy, a student at Kew Gardens . . . is engaged to a personable young man who does not have the ability to arouse her, though she likes him, and she is disturbed by the utilitarian, materialistic life-philosophy of her businessman brother. She becomes more and more sensitive to the hidden life of the plants at Kew, and comes to see them as personalities, with the giant orchid in the role of passionate lover. . . . Told with delicate imagery and fine perceptions, a minor rococoism of art deco literature." - E.F. Bleiler, The Guide to Supernatural Fiction (1983)

English Poems of John Milton


John Milton - 1926
    His early poems, collected and published in 1645, include the much loved pair 'L'Allegro' and 'Il Penseroso' ('the cheerful man and the thoughtful man'), 'Lycidas' (his great elegy on a fellow poet) and 'Comus' (the one masque which is still read today). When the Civil War began Milton abandoned poetry for politics and wrote a series of pamphlets in defence of the Parliamentary party, then in defence of the execution of Charles I: these include his great defence of the freedom of the press, 'Areopagitica'. In the course of this work he lost his sight, and was blind for the last twenty years of his life.During this time he wrote his two great epics, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, and his retelling of the story of Samson as a Greek tragedy.

The Epic of Mount Everest: The Historic Account of Mallory's Expeditions


Francis Younghusband - 1926
    This is his account of the three separate expeditions to Mount Everest in 1921, 1922 and 1924—the expedition in which Mallory and Irving lost their lives.

A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900


D.S. Mirsky - 1926
    D. S. Mirsky constantly keeps in mind the ever-colorful and ever-changing aspects of the one in discussing the other. Sound in judgment, luminescent, and exquisitely written, Mirsky's book is essential reading for anyone interested in one of the world's great literatures. A History of Russian Literature covers the beginning of Russian fiction, the Age of Classicism, the Age of Gogol, and the poets, journalists, novelists, and playwrights of the Age of Realism.

Memoirs of Halide Edib


Halide Edib Adıvar - 1926
    Memoirs is the first book in her two volume English-language autobiography, published in 1926, whilst she and her second husband Dr. Adnan were in exile in London and Paris having fallen out of favor with Mustafa Kemal's one-party regime. �n it Edib describes her childhood, her confrontation with her first husband's polygyny, her divorce, and her entry into political and literary writing. Providing an account of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, the Balkan and First World Wars, and ending with the demise of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, Edib explains her philosophy of pacifist nationalism, and her ideas on Islam and Islamic civilisation. Her retrospective account of Young Turk and nationalist politics, emphasizing the agency of Ottoman women in their fight for emancipation, aimed to redress the Kemalist account of Republican historiography, which undermined the activities of the Young Turks in order to praise the reforms of the Republican period. Edib's account of her private life provides a unique example of a woman's individual and personal struggle for emancipation and gender equality. H�lya Adak is Assistant Professor in the Cultural Studies Program, Sabancı University, Istanbul, Turkey. Cultures in Dialogue returns to print sources by women writers from the East and West. Series One considers the exchanges between Ottoman, British, and American women from the 1880s to the 1940s. Their varied responses to dilemmas such as nationalism, female emancipation, race relations and modernization in the context of the stereotypes characteristic of Western harem literature reframe the historical tensions between Eastern and Western cultures, offering a nuanced understanding of their current manifestations.

Palimpsest


H.D. - 1926
    Hipparchia: War Rome (circa 75 B. C.)2. Murex: War and Postwar London (circa A. D. 1916-1926)3. Secret Name: Excavator ´s Egypt (circa A. D. 1925)The force and beauty of H. D.´s prose brings the stories in Palimpsest brightly to life, particularly in her sense of place: Rome about 75 B.C., post-World War I London and Egypt at the time of the Tutankhamon tomb excavations. The use of the palimpsest motif gives the reader the impression that one story has been superimposed on the other ad that the protagonist is always the same woman -in essence H. D. herself.This edition includes the following appendices:- Forewarned as regards H.D.´s prose (Robert McAlmon)-A note on the text (Mathew J. Bruccoli)Library of Congress Catalog Number 68-25566

Flemish Legends


Charles de Coster - 1926
    Written in the curious vernacular of the 16th century and included in this charmingly illustrated volume are The Church of Haeckendover, The Little Stone Boy, The Man in White, Sir Halewyn in the Wood, The Song of the Head, Smetse Caught by the Two Branches, In Smetse's Garden, The Devil-King and the Sack. CHARLES THEODORE HENRI DE COSTER (1827-1879) a Belgian writer born of an official of the papal Nuntius in Munich, studied law and literature in Brussels, and eventually taught literature there as well. By 1855, he was established as a leading journalist and freelance writer, and his popular narrations enjoyed large success throughout Belgium. Curiously, De Coster became famous only after his death in 1879."

The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry: The Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1926, and the Turnbull Lectures at the Johns Hopkins University, 1933


T.S. Eliot - 1926
    Eliot have been able to read anything but summaries or extracts from the eight unpublished lectures on metaphysical poetry that he gave at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1926, or the revised sequence delivered in Baltimore in 1933.

Works of Robert Louis Stevenson


Robert Louis Stevenson - 1926
    It is indexed alphabetically, chronologically and by category, making it easier to access individual books, stories and poems. This collection offers lower price, the convenience of a one-time download, and it reduces the clutter in your digital library. All books included in this collection feature a hyperlinked table of contents and footnotes. The collection is complimented by an author biography. Table of Contents List of Works by Genre and TitleList of Works in Alphabetical Order List of Works in Chronological OrderRobert Louis Stevenson BiographyNovels :: Short story collections :: Short stories :: Travel writing :: Non-Fiction :: Poetry :: Plays NovelsThe Black Arrow David Balfour / Catriona, sequel to KidnappedThe Ebb-TideKidnappedMaster of Ballantrae Prince Otto, a Romance St. Ives, Being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. HydeTreasure Island The Wrecker The Wrong Box Weir of Hermiston Short story collectionsIsland Nights' Entertainments (3 stories) Merry Men (6 stories)New Arabian Nights (6 stories) The Dynamiter (14 stories)Short storiesThe Body-SnatcherA Christmas SermonFablesThe Misadventures of John NicholsonThe Story of A LieThe Waif Woman Travel writingAcross the Plains Essays of Travel An Inland Voyage The Silverado Squatters Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes Non-FictionEdinburgh Picturesque Notes Essays In The Art of WritingOther EssaysFamiliar Studies of Men and Books Father Damien, an Open Letter to the Reverend Dr. Hyde of Honolulu A Footnote to History, Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa In the South Seas Lay Morals and Other PapersMemoir of Fleeming Jenkin Memories and Portraits Records of a Family of Engineers Vailima Letters Virginibus Puerisque and Other PapersPoetryBalladsA Child's Garden of VersesMoral EmblemsNew Poems Vailima Prayers Songs of TravelUnderwoods Plays by W. E. Henley and R. L. StevensonAdmiral GuineaBeau AustinDeacon BrodieRobert Macaire

Adam's Breed


Radclyffe Hall - 1926
    Marguerite Radclyffe Hall was born on 12th August 1880, in Bournemouth, England. Hall's first novel The Unlit Lamp (1924) was a lengthy and grim tale that proved hard to sell. It was only published following the success of the much lighter social comedy The Forge (1924), which made the best-seller list of John O'London's Weekly.