He wears his temper like a badge of honor, would rather step over a homeless beggar than walk around him, and engages in petty warfare with his staff over expense receipts. He's also never been much bothered with monogamy, but when one morning he spontaneously seduces his temp in an office storeroom, he's definitely crossed a line in blatancy. Miller has made few friends and many enemies—not to mention the fact that the storeroom is a notorious trysting place and he and the temp both emerge covered in dust and airmail stickers—so the news doesn’t take long to reach his cold, beautiful wife. Conveniently, it just happens to be their anniversary. Imagine the celebratory dinner, capped by her returning her house keys and consummating her desire to sleep with the neighbor.Not a man to suffer rejection well, Miller heads for a London media hangout, where two employees introduce him to cocaine. By morning, his exploits are public (a photographer captured him snorting the cocaine in public), his career is over (thanks to a damning interview he gave a journalist from a rival paper), he's not only painted the word 'WANKER' on the cuckolding neighbor's car, but misspelled it, and his house is on fire (never leave a goodbye bonfire of wedding photos unattended). . . . Clearly, it’s time to leave town. Miller has an engagement to speak to the boys at his old prep school, but he can't seem to stop pouring gasoline on the fire that his life has become, showing up hungover after a night partying with an old school friend and a gaggle of Spanish flight attendants, and calling the headmaster by his behind-the-back nickname of "Stiffo" to the students, for a start. After the speech, he speaks with his doctor and learns that his father-in-law plans to kill him.Leigh, the old school friend, works for an English language school in Barcelona, and Miller wrangles its address out of him, for he clearly can't go home. He gets the job and adapts surprisingly well to a life of an underpaid teacher, despite the fact that some of his students will clearly never learn the language (there are hilarious scenes of their attempts in this section) and even starts up a romance with a tough-talking English girl who's one of his fellow teachers—but he doesn't tell her who he really is when he has the opportunity, and when she figures it out on her own she is livid and that bridge is burnt. To make matters worse, his father-in-law's goons have tracked him down.Miller flees again, winding up in Florida, in a town populated by ex-circus freaks and presided over by the Half Man, a criminal and sadist with no legs who welcomes Miller to town by shoving a gun barrel in his mouth and breaking his teeth. But ironically, it seems that despite the fleas in his trailer, the one-eyed albino hit man who seems to overhear every compromising conversation between Miller and the Half Man’s beautiful wife the Lizard Woman, and the fact that the Half Man’s stranglehold on the local police mean that Miller isn’t actually free to leave, it seems that Miller somehow belongs among the freaks. These misfits—among them a black dwarf, a gay clown with a penchant for altar boys, a heroin addict who is their unlicensed doctor, a biker hit man named Hollis after Grove’s erstwhile publicist, and the Lizard Woman’s wonderful eight-year-old daughter—unwittingly teach Miller what normal life never could—how to love, and how to stand up for something he truly believes in. When Miller's wife tracks him down and has him sign over the spoils of his old life to her, he gets enough money out of her to hire the albino to hit the Half Man. And though all certainly does not go smoothly with the hit—someone as vicious as the Half Man is unlikely to go quietly—Miller and the Lizard Woman are able to close that chapter and start a new life together.

    And his greatest creation was, of course, Flashman. The novels collected here find our hero in the midst of his usual swashbuckling adventures of derring-do: fleeing adversaries in the First Anglo-Afghan War; meeting and nearly deceiving a young Abraham Lincoln in America; alternately impersonating a native Indian cavalry recruit and wooing women in India; and managing, whatever the circumstances, to keep his hero’s reputation unsullied.A must-have treat for the legions of dedicated Flashman fans, and a delightful introduction for those lucky enough to be encountering him for the first time.

    The stories originally appeared in the American magazines Super Science Stories and Astounding Science Fiction between 1940 and 1950 and were then compiled into a book for stand-alone publication by Gnome Press in 1950, in an initial edition of 5,000 copies. The stories are woven together by a framing narrative in which the fictional Dr. Susan Calvin tells each story to a reporter (who serves as the narrator) in the 21st century. Although the stories can be read separately, they share a theme of the interaction of humans, robots, and morality, and when combined they tell a larger story of Asimov's fictional history of robotics.Foundation was originally a series of eight short stories published in Astounding Magazine between May 1942 and January 1950. According to Asimov, the premise was based on ideas set forth in Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and was invented spontaneously on his way to meet with editor John W. Campbell, with whom he developed the concepts of the collapse of the Galactic Empire, the civilization-preserving Foundations, and psychohistory.[1] Asimov wrote these early stories in his West Philadelphia apartment when he worked at the Philadelphia Naval Yard.

     You may have liked the book, but not be a fan. You may call yourself a fan, but few truly are. Are you? Trivia-on-Books is an independent quiz-formatted trivia on the book for readers, students, and fans alike. Whether you're looking for new materials to the book or would like to take the challenge yourself and share it with your friends and family for a time of fun, Trivia-on-Books provides a unique approach that is both insightful and educational! Features You'll Find Inside: • 30 Multiple choice questions on the book, plots, characters and author • Insightful commentary to answer every question • Complementary quiz material for yourself or your reading group • Results provided with scores to determine "status" Promising quality and value, grab your copy of Trivia-on-Books!

    The story of a young woman's journey to maturity and independence, her high ideals, and a slowly-growing awareness of her passionate nature.

    

    This collection focuses upon the land he knew and loved so well—Normandy. Its people and its countryside are portrayed here in vivid colour and with great warmth. Amusing, saucy, and sometimes even farcical they may be, but they are also capable of great pathos, often branching off to end tragically. It is this skilful and affecting blend of tragedy and comedy, of tears and laughter, which make Maupassant's Normandy Stories the enduring favourites they are today.11 stories:Disc 1. In the country - Pierrot - A Normandy joke - A cock crowed - Old Boniface's crime - The confession - Disc 2. An apparition - The little cask - The castaway - Bombard - Master Belhomme's beast.

    In her fiction, Charlotte Bront

    H. W. Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage.

    Rock Springs is a masterpiece of taut narration, cleanly chiseled prose, and empathy so generous that it feels like a kind of grace.

    Yet all throughout her life, she also wrote short stories: fictions which wrestled with those ideas and preoccupations she couldn't address in essay form. These short fictions are allegories, parables, autobiographical vignettes, each capturing an authentic fragment of life, dramatizing Sontag's private griefs and fears.Stories collects all of Sontag's short fiction for the first time. This astonishingly versatile collection showcases its peerless writer at the height of her powers. For any Sontag fan, it is an unmissable testament to her creative achievements

    Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

    Scott Fitzgerald, the iconic American writer of The Great Gatsby who is more widely read today than ever.I’d Die For You is a collection of the last remaining unpublished and uncollected short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, edited by Anne Margaret Daniel. Fitzgerald did not design the stories in I’d Die For You as a collection. Most were submitted individually to major magazines during the 1930s and accepted for publication during Fitzgerald’s lifetime, but were never printed. Some were written as movie scenarios and sent to studios or producers, but not filmed. Others are stories that could not be sold because their subject matter or style departed from what editors expected of Fitzgerald. They date from the earliest days of Fitzgerald’s career to the last. They come from various sources, from libraries to private collections, including those of Fitzgerald’s family. Readers will experience Fitzgerald writing about controversial topics, depicting young men and women who actually spoke and thought more as young men and women did, without censorship. Rather than permit changes and sanitizing by his contemporary editors, Fitzgerald preferred to let his work remain unpublished, even at a time when he was in great need of money and review attention. “I’d Die For You,” the collection’s title story, is drawn from Fitzgerald’s stays in the mountains of North Carolina when his health, and that of his wife Zelda, was falling apart. With the addition of a Hollywood star and film crew to the Smoky Mountain lakes and pines, Fitzgerald brings in the cinematic world in which he would soon be living. Most of the stories printed here come from this time period, during the middle and late1930s, though the collection spans Fitzgerald’s career from 1920 to the end of his life. The book is subtitled And Other Lost Stories in recognition of an absence until now. Some of the eighteen stories were physically lost, coming to light only in the past few years. All were lost, in one sense or another: lost in the painful shuffle of the difficulties of Fitzgerald’s life in the middle 1930s; lost to readers because contemporary editors did not understand or accept what he was trying to write; lost because archives are like that, and good things can wait patiently in libraries for many centuries sometimes. I’d Die For You And Other Lost Stories echoes as well the nostalgia and elegy in Gertrude Stein’s famous phrase “a lost generation,” that generation for whom Fitzgerald was a leading figure. Written in his characteristically beautiful, sharp, and surprising language, exploring themes both familiar and fresh, these stories provide new insight into the bold and uncompromising arc of Fitzgerald’s career. I’d Die For You is a revealing, intimate look at Fitzgerald’s creative process that shows him to be a writer working at the fore of modern literature—in all its developing complexities.

    The dawning of the herring fisheries brought with it the hope of escape from the Highland Clearances, and this story paints a vivid picture of a community fighting against nature and history, and refusing to be crushed.

     Rather than abandoning his parish in search of the truth, Father Paul’s quest is a simple one: to find the true essence of Christianity. A Modern Day Apostle to the Downtrodden Set against the backdrop of a harsh and cold Russian countryside along the River Volga, with its unyielding poverty and hardships, The Archbishop follows Father Paul as he searches to understand God and the parlous state of the world around him. It is not until he meets the eponymous Archbishop that he finds revelations that do more than just answer his soul-searching questions. More than this, he finds a true shepherd determined to spread a more authentic message of Christ to the people who follow him. But even the divine truth that Father Paul finally finds in this dreary, cold hamlet where religion seems to be fading from relevance is not free from earthly machinations. Although he discovers something that will change his life forever, the realities of the world around him remain unyielding and unchanging. The Archbishop is a book that does not shy away from asking big questions – nor from answering them. Author Hieromonk Tihon’s identity has long since been lost to history and his fate unknown, but the vivid characters and intricately drawn world created in this book have indicated that The Archbishop may be an autobiographical work. Condemned, burned, and banned by iconoclastic Bolsheviks during the earliest years of Soviet Russia as it pushed an agenda of militant atheism, The Archbishop's spiritual guidance was almost lost among countless other Eastern Orthodox works. The Archbishop provides deep spiritual insight and guidance into a world distant from ours, despite the chasms of difference in culture, time, and space. Sometimes funny, often tragic, and other times angering, this hidden Orthodox gem does not shy away from asking big questions – nor from answering them. It remains a work full of spiritual lessons that will resonate profoundly with the modern-day American Orthodox clergy and their laity.