The Common Reader First Series (Virginia Woolf)
Virginia Woolf is well known as one of the most prominent fiction writers of the twentieth century, what may be less well known is her astounding collection of letters and essays. Here is the collection first published in 1925, aimed at 'the Common reader', Woolf produced an eccentric and personal literary and social history of European thought in her own unique style, this collection helped cement Woolf as one of the most popular writers of her time.
The Common Reader, The Pastons and Chaucer, On Not Knowing Greek, The Elizabethan Lumber Room, Notes On an Elizabethan Play, Montaigne, The Duchess of Newcastle, Rambling Round Evelyn, Defoe, Addison, The Lives of the Obscure, Jane Austen, Modern Fiction, “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights”, George Eliot, The Russian Point of View, Outlines, The Patron and the Crocus, The Modern Essay, Joseph Conrad, How It Strikes a Contemporary
Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English.
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The Civilisation of The Renaissance In Italy (Jacob Burckhardt)
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy is an 1860 work on the Italian Renaissance by Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt. Together with his History of the Renaissance in Italy it is counted among the classics of Renaissance historiography.
“Burkhardt sought to capture and define the spirit of the age in all its main manifestations. For him ‘’Kultur’’ was the whole picture: politics, manners, religion...the character that animated the particular activities of a people in a given epoch, and of which pictures, buildings, social and political habits, literature, are the concrete expressions. Its scholarly judgements are considered to have been largely justified by subsequent research according to historians including Desmond Seward and art historians such as Kenneth Clark.” (Denys Hay) The Civilization of the
Renaissance in Italy is divided into six parts:
Part One: The State as a Work of Art
Part Two: The Development of the Individual
Part Three: The Revival of Antiquity
Part Four: The Discovery of the World and of Man
Part Five: Society and Festivals
Part Six: Morality and Religion
Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English.
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The Chimes A Goblin Story (Charles Dickens)
The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In, commonly referred to as The Chimes, is a novella written by Charles Dickens and first published in 1844, one year after A Christmas Carol. It is the second in his series of "Christmas books," five novellas with strong social and moral messages that he published during the 1840s.
In addition to A Christmas Carol and The Chimes, the Christmas books include The Cricket on the Hearth (1845), The Battle of Life (1846), and The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848).
Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English.
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The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
- A Scandal in Bohemia
- The Red-Headed League
- A Case of Identity
- The Boscombe Valley Mystery
- The Five Orange Pips
- The Man with The Twisted Lip
- The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle
- The Adventure of the Speckled Band
- The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb
- The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor
- The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet
- The Adventure of the Copper Beeches
Some Short Christmas Stories (Charles Dickens)
Soldiers Three -The Story of the Gadsbys in Black and White (Rudyard Kipling)
Soldiers Three is a collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling. The three soldiers of the title are Learoyd, Mulvaney and Ortheris, who had also appeared previously in the collection Plain Tales from the Hills. The current version, dating from 1899 and more fully titled Soldiers Three and other stories, consists of three sections which each had previously received separate publication in 1888; Learoyd, Mulvaney and Ortheris appear only in the first section, which is also titled Soldiers Three. The books reveal a side of the British Tommy in Afghanistan rarely seen
in the Twilight of the British Empire. The soldiers comment on their betters, act the fool, but cut straight to the rawness of war in the mid-east as the British began to loosen their Imperial hold.
Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English.
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Sketches by Boz (Charles Dickens)
Sketches by Boz is a collection of short pieces Charles Dickens originally published in various newspapers and other periodicals between 1833 and 1836. They were re-issued in book form, under their current title, in February and August 1836, with illustrations by George Cruikshank. The first complete one volume edition appeared in 1839. The 56 sketches concern London scenes and people, and the whole work is divided into four sections: “Our Parish”,“Scenes”, “Characters” and “Tales”. The material in the first three sections consists of non-narrative pen-portraits,
but the last section comprises fictional stories.
Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English.
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Plains Tales from the Hills (Rudyard Kipling)
Plain Tales from the Hills 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 (CMG) 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 CMG -his first job- since 1882, when he was not quite 17.)
The title refers, by way of a pun on “Plain” as the reverse of “Hills”, to the deceptively simple narrative style; and to the fact that many of the stories are set in the Hill Station of Simla-the “summer capital of the British Raj” during the hot weather. Not all of the stories are, in fact, about life in “the Hills”: Kipling gives sketches of many aspects of life in British India.
The tales include the first appearances, in book form, of Mrs. Hauksbee, the policeman Strickland, and the Soldiers Three (Privates Mulvaney, Ortheris and Learoyd).
In the preface to his short stories collection “Dr. Brodie’s Report”, Jorge Luis Borges wrote he was inspired by the quality and conciseness of Plain Tales from the Hills.
Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English.
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Pictures From Italy (Charles Dickens)
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 family. They visited the most famous sights: Genoa, Rome, Naples (with Vesuvius still smouldering), Florence and Venice. In his travelogue the author portrays a nation of great contrasts: grandiose buildings and urban desolation, and everyday life beside ancient monuments. But it is his encounters with Italy’s colorful street life that capture the imagination. Dickens is particularly drawn to the costumes, cross-dressing, and sheer exuberance of the Roman carnival. From the book we learn that Dickens was an early riser and walker, and that he enjoyed touring the major attractions on foot.
Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English.
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Phantasmagoria and Other Poems (Lewis Caroll)
“Phantasmagoria” is a poem written by Lewis Carroll and first published in 1869 as the opening poem of a collection of verse by Carroll entitled Phantasmagoria and Other Poems.
It is Lewis Carroll’s longest poem. “Phantasmagoria” is a narrative discussion written in seven cantos between a ghost (a Phantom) and a man named Tibbets. Carroll portrays the ghost as not so different from human beings:although ghosts may jibber and jangle their chains, they, like us, simply have a job to do and that job is to haunt. Just as in our society, in ghost society there is a hierarchy, and ghosts are answerable to the King (who must be addressed as “Your Royal Whiteness”) if they disregard the “Maxims of Behaviour”.
Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English.
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Our Mutual Friend (Charles Dickens)
Our Mutual Friend, written in 1864–1865, is the last novel completed by Charles Dickens and is one of his most sophisticated works, combining savage satire with social analysis. It centres on, in the words of critic J. Hillis Miller, quoting from the character Bella Wilfer in the book, “money, money, money, and what money can make of life”.
Most reviewers in the 1860s continued to praise Dickens’ skill as a writer in general, but did not review this novel in detail. Some found the plot both too complex and not well laid out. The Times of London found the first few chapters did not draw the reader into the characters. In the 20th century, however, reviewers began to find much to approve in the later novels of Dickens, including Our Mutual Friend. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, some reviewers suggested that Dickens was, in fact, experimenting with structure, and that the characters considered somewhat flat and not recognized by the contemporary reviewers were meant rather to be true representations of the Victorian working class and the key to understanding the structure of the society depicted by Dickens in the novel.
Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English.
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Orlando: A Biography (Virginia Woolf)
Orlando A Biography is a novel by Virginia Woolf, first published on October 11,1928. Inspired by the tumultuous family history of the aristocratic poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West, Woolf's lover and close friend, it is arguably one of her most popular novels; Orlando is a history of English literature in satiric form. The book describes the adventures of a poet who changes sex from man to woman and lives for centuries, meeting the key figures of English literary history. Considered a feminist classic, the book has been written about extensively by scholars of women's writing and gender and transgender studies.
The eponymous hero is born as a male nobleman in England during the reign of Elizabeth I. He undergoes a mysterious change of sex at the age of about 30 and lives on for more than 300 years into modern times without ageing perceptibly. As a teenage boy, the handsome Orlando serves as a page at the Elizabethan court and becomes "favourite" of the elderly queen. After her death he falls deeply in love with Sasha, an elusive and somewhat feral princess in the entourage of the Russian embassy.
Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English.
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Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens)
Oliver Twist; or, the Parish Boy’s Progress, Charles Dickens’s second novel, was published as a serial from 1837 to1839, and as a three-volume book in 1838. Born in a workhouse, the orphan Oliver Twist is sold into apprenticeship with an undertaker. After escaping, Oliver travels to London, where he meets the “Artful Dodger”, a member of a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the elderly criminal Fagin.
Oliver Twist unromantically portrays the sordid lives of criminals, and exposes the cruel treatment of the many orphans in London in the mid-19th century. The alternative title, The Parish Boy’s Progress, alludes to Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, as well as the 18th-century caricature series by painter William Hogarth, A Rake’s Progress and A Harlot’s Progress.
In an early example of the social novel, Dickens satirises child labour, domestic violence, the recruitment of children as criminals, and the presence of street children.
Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English.
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Night and Day (Virginia Woolf)
Night and Day is a novel by Virginia Woolf first published on October 20, 1919. Set in Edwardian London, Night and Day contrasts the daily lives and romantic attachments of two acquaintances, Katharine Hilbery and Mary Datchet. The novel examines the relationships between love, marriage, happiness, and success.
The novel has four major characters: Katharine Hilbery, Mary Datchet, Ralph Denham, and William Rodney. Night and Day deals with questions concerning women’s suffrage, and asks whether love and marriage can coexist and whether marriage is necessary for happiness. Motifs throughout the book include the stars and sky, the River Thames, and walks. Woolf makes many references to the works of William Shakespeare, especially As You Like It.
Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English.
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Master Humphrey’s Clock (Charles Dickens)
Master Humphrey’s Clock was a weekly periodical edited and written entirely by Charles Dickens and published from April 4, 1840 to December 4, 1841. It began with a frame story in which Master Humphrey tells about himself and his small circle of friends (which includes Mr. Pickwick), and their penchant for telling stories.
Master Humphrey appears as the first-person narrator in the first three chapters of The Old Curiosity Shop but then disappears, stating, “And now that I have carried this history so far in my own character and introduced these personages to the reader, I shall for the convenience of the narrative detach myself from its further course, and leave those who have prominent and necessary parts in it to speak and act for themselves.”
Master Humphrey is a lonely man who lives in London. He keeps old manuscripts in an antique longcase clock by the chimney-corner. One day, he decides that he would start a little club, called Master Humphrey’s Clock, where the members would read out their manuscripts to the others. The members include Master Humphrey; a deaf gentleman; Jack Redburn; retired merchant Owen Miles; and Mr. Pickwick from The Pickwick Papers. A mirror club in the kitchen, Mr. Weller’s Watch, run by Mr. Weller, has members including Humphrey’s maid, the barber and Sam Weller.
Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English.
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Many Inventions (Rudyard Kipling)
Many Inventions is a collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling. Twelve of the 14 stories appeared previously in various publications, including The Atlantic Monthly and the Strand Magazine.
The title refers to a verse from Ecclesiastes, which is quoted on the title page: “Lo, this only have I found, that God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.” (Ecclesiastes 7:29) The fourteen stories are preceded by a poem, “To the True Romance”, and followed by another poem, “Anchor Song”.
The Disturber of Traffic, A Conference of the Powers, My Lord the Elephant, One View of the Question, ‘The Finest Story in the World’, His Private Honour, A Matter of Fact, The Lost Legion, In the Rukh, ‘Brugglesmith’, ‘Love-o’-Women’, The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot, Judson and the Empire, The Children of the Zodiac
Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English.
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Kim (Rudyard Kipling)
Kim is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning English author Rudyard Kipling. It was first published serially in McClure’s Magazine from December 1900 to October 1901 as well as in Cassell’s Magazine from January to November 1901, and first published in book form by Macmillan & Co. Ltd in October 1901.
The story unfolds against the backdrop of the Great Game, the political conflict between Russia and Britain in Central Asia. The novel popularized the phrase and idea of the Great Game. It is set after the Second Afghan War which ended in 1881, but before the Third fought in 1919, probably in the period 1893 to 1898. The novel is notable for its detailed portrait of the people, culture, and varied religions of India.
The book presents a vivid picture of India, its teeming populations, religions, and superstitions, and the life of the bazaars and the road.
Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English.
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Little Dorrit (Charles Dickens)
Little Dorrit is a novel by Charles Dickens, originally published in serial form between 1855 and 1857. The story features Amy Dorrit, youngest child of her family, born and raised in the Marshalsea prison for debtors in London. Arthur Clennam encounters her after returning home from a 20-year absence, ready to begin his life anew.
The novel satirises some shortcomings of both government and society, including the institution of debtors’ prisons, where debtors were imprisoned, unable to work and yet incarcerated until they had repaid their debts. The prison in this case is the Marshalsea, where Dickens’ own father had been imprisoned. Dickens is also critical of the impotent bureaucracy of the British government, in this novel in the form of the fictional “Circumlocution Office”. Dickens also satirises the stratification of society that results from the British class system.
Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English.
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Keep the Aspidistra Flying (George Orwell)
Gordon Comstock has ‘declared war’ on what he sees as an ‘overarching dependence’ on money by leaving a promising job as a copywriter for an advertising company called ‘New Albion’—at which he shows great dexterity—and taking a low-paying job instead, ostensibly so he can write poetry. Coming from a respectable family background in which the inherited wealth has now become dissipated, Gordon resents having to work for a living. The ‘war’ (and the poetry), however, aren’t going particularly well and, under the stress of his ‘self-imposed exile’
from affluence, Gordon has become absurd, petty and deeply neurotic.
Comstock lives without luxuries in a bedsit in London, which he affords by working in a small bookshop owned by a Scot, McKechnie. He works intermittently at a magnum opus he plans to call ‘London Pleasures’, describing a day in London; meanwhile, his only published work, a slim volume of poetry entitled Mice, collects dust on the remainder shelf. He is simultaneously content with his meagre existence and also disdainful of it. He lives without financial ambition and the need for a ‘good job,’ but his living conditions are uncomfortable and his job is boring.
Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English.
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Jacob’s Room (Virginia Woolf)
Jacob's Room is the third novel by Virginia Woolf, first published on October 26, 1922.
The novel centres, in a very ambiguous way, around the life story of the protagonist Jacob Flanders and is presented almost entirely through the impressions other characters have of Jacob. Thus, although it could be said that the book is primarily a character study and has little in the way of plot or background, the narrative is constructed with a void in place of the central character if, indeed, the novel can be said to have a ‘protagonist’ in conventional terms.
Motifs of emptiness and absence haunt the novel and establish its elegiac feel. Jacob is described to us, but in such indirect terms that it would seem better to view him as an amalgam of the different perceptions of the characters and narrator. He does not exist as a concrete reality, but rather as a collection of memories and sensations.
Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English.
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I Am a Cat (Natsume Sōseki)
I Am a Cat is a satirical novel written in 1905–1906 by Natsume Sōseki about Japanese society during the Meiji period (1868–1912); particularly, the uneasy mix of Western culture and Japanese traditions.
Sōseki's title, Wagahai wa Neko de Aru, uses a very high-register phrasing more appropriate to a nobleman, conveying grandiloquence and self-importance. This is somewhat ironic, since the speaker, an anthropomorphized domestic cat, is a regular house cat of a teacher, and not of a high-ranking noble as the manner of speech suggests.
The book was first published in ten installments in the literary journal Hototogisu. At first, Sōseki intended only to write the short story that constitutes the first chapter of I Am a Cat. However, Takahama Kyoshi, one of the editors of Hototogisu, persuaded Sōseki to serialize the work, which evolved stylistically as the installments progressed. Nearly all the chapters can stand alone as discrete works.
Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English.
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Homage to Catalonia (George Orwell)
Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell’s personal account of his experiences and observations fighting in the Spanish Civil War for the POUM militia of the Republican army.
Covering the period between December 1936 and June 1937, Orwell recounts Catalonia’s revolutionary fervor during his training in Barcelona, his boredom on the front lines in Aragon, his involvement in the interfactional May Days conflict back in Barcelona on leave, his getting shot in the throat back on the front lines, and his escape to France after the POUM was declared an illegal organization.
The war was one of the defining events of his political outlook and a significant part of what led him to write in 1946, “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”
Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English.
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Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
Great Expectations is the thirteenth novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. It depicts the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip (the book is a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story). It is Dickens’s second novel, after David Copperfield, to be fully narrated in the first person. The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens’s weekly periodical All the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October 1861, Chapman and Hall published the novel in three volumes. The novel is set in Kent and London in the early to mid-19th century and contains some of Dickens’s most celebrated scenes, starting in a graveyard, where the young Pip is accosted by the escaped convict Abel Magwitch. Great Expectations is full of extreme imagery – poverty, prison ships and chains, and fights to the death – and has a colourful cast of characters who have entered popular culture. These include the eccentric Miss Havisham, the beautiful but cold Estella, and Joe, the unsophisticated and kind blacksmith. Dickens’s themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil. Great Expectations, which is popular both with readers and literary critics, has been translated into many languages and adapted numerous times into various media.
Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English.
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From Sea to Sea Letters of Travel (Rudyard Kipling)
I want to go Home! I want to go back to India! I am misera-ble. The steamship Nawab at this time of the year ought to have been empty, instead of which we have one hundred first-class passengers and sixty-six second. All the pretty girls are in the latter class. Something must have happened at Colombo—two steamers must have clashed. We have the results of the collision, and we are a menagerie. The captain says that there ought to have been only ten or twelve passengers by rights, and had the rush been anticipated, a larger steamer would have been provided. Per-sonally, I consider that half our shipmates ought to be thrown overboard. They are only travelling round the world for pleasure, and that sort of dissipation leads to the forming of hasty and in-temperate opinions. Anyhow, give me freedom and the cock-roaches of the British India, where we dined on deck, altered the hours of the meals by plebiscite, and were lords of all we saw. You know the chain-gang regulations of the P. and O.: how you must approach the captain standing on your head with your feet waving reverently; how you must crawl into the presence of the chief steward on your belly and call him Thrice-Puissant Bottle-washer; how you must not smoke abaft the sheep-pens; must not stand in the companion; must put on a clean coat when the ship's library is opened; and crowning injustice, must order your drinks for tiffin and dinner one meal in advance?
Warning: Unlike most of the books in our store, this book is in English.
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