Short Stories Books - Page 5

The Thirty-Nine Steps (Penguin Classics)

John Buchan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Brisk espionage adventure 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

John Buchan's novel The Thirty-Nine Steps is the prototype of the modern thriller novel, what he called a "shocker." In it, Buchan introduced Richard Hannay, the prototype of the resourceful, intelligent, and tenacious hero of the modern thriller. And while the story may not be as intricate or exciting as its descendents', The Thirty-Nine Steps still succeeds at what Buchan set out to do--entertain.

The novel's story is very straightforward--Hannay, recently returned to "the Old Country" of England from a life spent in Africa, finds himself thoroughly bored with his new life in London. After an American spy is murdered in his apartment, Hannay finds himself on the run not only from the police, who believe him to be the murderer, but from a mysterious and malevolent organization called "The Black Stone." The Black Stone has a secret it wants to keep hidden, and eliminating Hannay would help them keep their cover.

From London into the Scottish countryside, pursued by detectives, sinister Germans in touring cars, and newfangled "aeroplanes," The Thirty-Nine Steps never stops moving, and even at its conclusion one barely has a chance to catch their breath. The story is so gripping I can easily see how it caught Alfred Hitchcock's attention as film material.

The novel is fast-moving and short--barely 100 pages. I read this book in a few hours at a slow deskjob. If I have to find fault with any one part of the book, it's that the conclusion--indeed, the very last half-page or so--didn't make perfect sense. I had to read it twice. But that's only a small problem for this otherwise fun and exciting book.

Almost a century of imitators and innovators in the spy and espionage genres--from Ian Fleming to Tom Clancy--owe Buchan a great debt. Buchan paved the way for these later authors with shockers like The Thirty-Nine Steps and its hero, Richard Hannay.

Recommended rainy-day reading.

Editorial Review:

Famous as the basis for several films, including the brilliant 1935 version directed by Alfred Hitchcock, The Thirty-Nine Steps is a classic of early twentieth-century popular literature.

Richard Hannay has just returned to England after years in South Africa and is thoroughly bored with his life in London. But then a murder is committed in his flat, just days after a chance encounter with an American who had told him about an assassination plot that could have dire international consequences. An obvious suspect for the police and an easy target for the killers, Hannay goes on the run in his native Scotland where he will need all his courage and ingenuity to stay one step ahead of his pursuers.

The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two (The History of Middle-Earth, Vol. 2)

J.R.R. Tolkien

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 28 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Book of Lost Tales was the first major work of imagination by J.R.R. Tolkien, begun in 1916, when he was twenty-five years old, and left incomplete several years later. It stands at the beginning of the entire conception of Middle-earth and Valinor, for the Lost Tales were the first form of the myths and legends that came to be called The Silmarillion. Embedded in English legend and association, they are set in the narrative frame of the great westward voyage of a mariner named Eriel (or AElfwine). His destination is Tol Eressea, the Lonely Isle where Elves dwell; from them he learns their true history, the Lost Tales of Elfinesse. The Tales include the earliest accounts of Gods and Elves, Dwarves, Balrogs, and Orcs; of the Silmarils and the Two Trees of Valinor; of Nargothrond and Gondolin; of the geography and cosmography of their invented world. The Book of Lost Tales is published in two volumes. The first contains the Tales of Valinor; and this second past includes Beren and Luthien, Turin and the Dragon, and the only full narratives of the Necklace of the Dwarves and the Fall of Gondolin. Each tale is followed by a commentary, together with associated poems, and each volume contains extensive information on names and vocabulary of the earliest Elvish languages. Additional books in this series will extend the history of Middle-earth as it was refined and enlarged in later years and will include the long Lays of Beleriand, the Ambarkanta or Shape of the World, the Lhammas or Account of Tongues, annals, maps, and many other previously unpublished writings of J.R.R. Tolkien.

The Labors of Hercules (Hercule Poirot)

Agatha Christie

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Charming, Witty, and Extremely Entertaining 4 out of 5 stars.
8 of 9 people found this review helpful.

Published in 1947, THE LABORS OF HERCULES finds Agatha Christie writing in a bright, slightly relaxed manner. The result is a mixture of mystery, adventure, and an unexpected literary conceit: she transforms the ancient Greek mythology of the twelve labors of Hercules into a modern mythology of the twelve labors of Hercules--Poirot, that is. And the resulting work is quite charming.

The book will be best appreciated by those who have actually read a bit of Ancient Greek mythology. Much of its charm comes from the clever manner in which Christie juxtaposes the physical strength of the ancient Hercules with the mental power of the modern Hercules and the witty way in which she transforms the ancient stories into a 20th Century setting. The Learnean Hydra becomes malicious gossip; The Augean Stables concerns a dirty political scandal; and so on. It is exceptionally well thought out and written with tremendous humor.

The book consists of a short preface and twelve stories, two of which have been widely anthologized: The Nemean Lion, which finds a wily lapdog at the center of a dognapping gang; and The Girdle of Hyppolita, which concerns a missing art treasure. And from a "mystery" point of view, these are very likely the best of the twelve stories, for on this occasion Christie is much less concerned with creating a head-spinning plot than she is in having fun. But each of the stories has its own charms, with the concluding The Capture of Cerebus among my favorites.

Many writers consider the short story the single most difficult narrative form, and many a famous novelist has run aground on the genre--including quite a few mystery novelists, Dorothy Parker among them. But at her best, Christie was as comfortable with the short story as with the novel. While this particular collection doesn't quite top her own Miss Marple's TUESDAY CLUB MURDERS short story collection, it is extremely well done nonetheless. Recommended.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

Editorial Review:

What do a lost Pekinese, a reputation poisoned by gossip, a man spiraling into madness, and a Russian countess in love have in common? Hercule Poirot.

An Infamous Army: A Novel of Wellington, Waterloo, Love and War

Georgette Heyer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

On the eve of battle, passions are running high...

"A brilliant achievement...vivid, accurate, dramatic...the description of Waterloo is magnificent."-DAILY MAIL

"My favorite historical novelist."-MARGARET DRABBLE

IN THE SUMMER OF 1815, with Napolean Bonaparte marching down from the north, Brussels is a whirlwind of parties, balls and soirees. In the swirling social scene surrounding the Duke of Wellington and his noble aides de camp, no one attracts more attention than the beautiful, outrageous young widow Lady Barbara Childe. On their first meeting, dashing Colonel Charles Audley proposes to her, but even their betrothal doesn't calm her wild behavior. Finally, with the Battle of Waterloo raging just miles away, civilians fleeing and the wounded pouring back into the town, Lady Barbara discovers where her heart really lies, and like a true noblewoman, she rises to the occasion, and to the demands of love, life and war...

"Wonderful characters, elegant, witty writing, perfect
period detail, and rapturously romantic. Georgette Heyer
achieves what the rest of us only aspire to."
-KATIE FFORDE

The Man Who Would Be King: and Other Stories (Dover Thrift Editions)

Rudyard Kipling

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Kipling's Masonic parable of the dangers of colonisation 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

"The Man Who Would Be King" has not unreasonably been used to title many a compendium of Kipling's short stories, since it not only ranks as one of his best, but is also so well known because of the John Huston movie marvellously interpreted by Michael Caine, Sean Connery and Christopher Plummer.

The short novel first appeared in the "Phantom Rickshaw" in 1888 but was again collected in "Wee Willie Winkie and other stories" in 1895. Kipling for this work was inspired by the travels of Josiah Harlan, an American adventurer who claimed the title of Prince of Ghor in 1840 thanks to the military force he lead into Afghanistan (Read the instructive "The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan" by Ben McIntyre).

The story is built with a technique often utilized by Kipling of the picture and frame and is in itself a parable with many possible interpretations, as parables often are. A journalist of a local Indian paper meats a loafer on a train. The man, an ex-military asks him to contact a friend of his in a later date to tell him that he can't meet him presently. After a short time the two friends visit the journalist and tell him they intend to conquer an empire for themselves. Again after two years only one gets back and narrates the adventures the two have been through, that have ended with the death of one of them.

The frame of the story is Kipling's present day India with an established administrative empire and the journalist is evidently Kipling, the picture is Dravot and Carnehan's adventure in Kafiristan, the remote Afghan province they conquer for a brief period. The picture represents the early ages of the making of the British Empire that had relied on adventurers, dreamers and military men possessing superior technologies (arms) compared to the natives. The most evident moral of the parable is that once the English neglect their moral duty towards the native populations there is no sense in the permanence of the Empire and it is destined to fail, but many others can be hypothesized. Many critics have identified this story as a form of disillusionment of Kipling with the society he was living in at that time, while instead in his later life he was known to sustain British Imperialism.

One aspect that often goes unnoticed in this short story is the importance Kipling (a mason himself) gives to the underground tentacles of the secret Masonic network that consented the British influence in India and in European politics. If you happen to watch the John Huston film this is made very clear.

The novella is full of allusions, recalls, citations of different realities and it would take to long to analyse it in depth even though this effort will surely reward the reader. The "Man Who Would Be King" remains one of the milestones of the collective imaginary of our modern world where colonisation is far from forgotten.

Editorial Review:

Winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Kipling drew upon his experiences in Anglo-Indian society for much of his fiction. This volume includes five of the author’s best early stories: "The Phantom Rickshaw," "Wee Willie Winkie," "Without Benefit of Clergy," "The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes" and the title selection.

On Liberty and Other Essays (Oxford World's Classics)

John Stuart Mill

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Triumph of the individual 4 out of 5 stars.
10 of 10 people found this review helpful.

This Oxford collection of four definitive essays by John Stuart Mill, arguably the most famous Victorian writer who could be called a philosopher, gives an excellent profile of a rigorous social reformer and political thinker. The subjects of these essays--liberty, utilitarianism, government, and women's rights--are interrelated to the extent that they reveal a man with a sharp sense of history and its impact on the methods and mores of contemporary society. Mill, after all, was of Charles Dickens's generation and therefore witnessed an era in which the British crown was inclined to manifest its power through tyranny in its efforts to maintain a costly worldwide empire.

Mill's basic concern is liberty, both social and civil. He identifies a difference between freedom and liberty--freedom is the state of being free, while liberty is the freedom that a government or governing body grants its people. Briefly a member of Parliament (the workings of which are described in great detail in "Representative Government") and heavily informed and influenced by Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," Mill recognized that the most important (and perhaps the only proper) function of a government is to protect the liberties of its citizens. However, people generally get the form of government they deserve; if laws they allow to go unchecked become the tools of despotic powers, they have only their own ignorance or indolence to blame.

An enumeration of Mill's finer points may suffice as a summary of his ideas:

1. Freedom of the press and freedom of expression are essential rights of man. You don't have to accept as true what other people say, but let them say it because there's always the chance that they're right and you're wrong. Mill points out that even the Roman Catholic Church, most intolerant of religions (his words, not mine), allows a "devil's advocate" to offer repudiative evidence before it canonizes a new saint. He notes instances in which religious intolerance still rears its ugly head in the British Empire of his day.

2. Christianity does not have a monopoly on moral authority; literary history gives evidence of this.

3. Individuality should be fostered so that new ideas may flourish, but society, specifically the middle class, establishes the normative values that unfortunately tend to stifle individuality. You have an unlimited right to your opinion, but you are free to act only so far as you do not harm or molest others. Long before Orwell, Mill had the insight that institutional deprivation of liberty is effectively suppression of thought, for how can someone train himself to think independently when doing so could lead to persecution for heresy or treason?

4. State-sponsored education should restrict itself to teaching scientifically provable or reliably documented facts rather than push religious or political agenda. When or if polemical issues are raised, arguments for and against are to be presented as opinions so that students may draw their own conclusions.

5. The utilitarian principle states that actions that promote happiness (in its most obvious form, pleasure) are "right" and those that reduce happiness are "wrong"--in other words, utilitarianism is the opposite of puritanism. Consider how much better it is to be a dissatisfied human being than a satisfied pig, because the human has the potential for so much more happiness than the pig, whose breadth of experience is contained entirely between the trough and the slaughterhouse, could ever know.

6. Women deserve the same rights as men because the social and mental limitations attributed to women are for the most part a male-conceived artifice. Chivalry is a fallacy.

And so on. I'm not sure if it's correct to call Mill a libertarian in modern terms, but he was certainly concerned with the issues with which modern libertarians are concerned. Much of his discourse is relevant to today's world, even though he often draws upon the past for contrast in order to make his conclusions, the implication being that improvement comes with increased knowledge and experience. Anyone who is interested in nineteenth-century thought on democracy and individualism will find much to ponder in Mill's eloquence.

Editorial Review:

This edition contains four essays--"On Liberty," "Utilitarianism," "Considerations on Representative Government," and "The Subjection of Women"--never before presented in one volume. Contrary to the muddled eclectic of traditional interpretations, Mill emerges as a consistent and strikingly modern thinker, no less ambitious than Marx.

The Enchanted April (New York Review Books Classics)

Elizabeth Von Arnim

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Enchanting 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

Having loved both filmed versions of this story, I came to the book not anticipating any surprises, and in that respect I was correct. What I did get, however, was a more fully-formed understanding of each of the four women who come to San Salvatore. Each has her own quest, and each is surprised in the way that her quest is resolved.

Elizabeth von Arnim can harness language in ways that few other authors are able. She is, for instance, able to display what a walking joke Mr. Wilkins is, while letting him think that he's the very model of an educated man.

I started off loathing both Mrs. Fisher and Lady Caroline Dester in a way that wasn't true when watching the films. This made their transformations that much more satisfying, in the end.

I'm now interested in reading other books from Elizabeth von Arnim and, even more importantly, visiting the castello where the story is based. She wrote The Enchanted April after her own visit, and it has continued to "enchant" travelers in the many years since the publication of her novel. I can't wait to see the "tub of love" and be surrounded by wistaria myself.

Editorial Review:

A recipe for happiness: four women, one medieval Italian castle, plenty of wisteria, and solitude as needed.

The women at the center of The Enchanted April are alike only in their dissatisfaction with their everyday lives. They find each other—and the castle of their dreams—through a classified ad in a London newspaper one rainy February afternoon. The ladies expect a pleasant holiday, but they don’t anticipate that the month they spend in Portofino will reintroduce them to their true natures and reacquaint them with joy. Now, if the same transformation can be worked on their husbands and lovers, the enchantment will be complete.

The Enchanted April was a best-seller in both England and the United States, where it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and set off a craze for tourism to Portofino. More recently, the novel has been the inspiration for a major film and a Broadway play.

Italian Short Stories 1: Parallel Text Edition (Parallel Text, Penguin) (Italian Edition) (v. 1)

Various

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

an excellent, representative sample of Italian short stories 5 out of 5 stars.
30 of 32 people found this review helpful.

The eight stories in this collection by Moravia, Pavese, Pratolini and other modern writers, have been selected as representative of contemporary Italian writing. The book presents the original Italian text and, on the opposite page, an English translation in a literal style, serving as an aid to reading the Italian more than as something to be read for its own sake. there are notes & biographies of the writers to help the student of Italian. The volume can also be used by Italians to improve their English skills.

Editorial Review:

The eight stories in this collection, by Moravian, Pavese, Pratolina, and other modern writers, have been selected as being representative of contemporary Italian writing. The English translations provided are literal rather than literary, and there are notes and biographies to help the student of Italian. However, the volume can also be helpful to Italians, who can improve their English by studying a strict rendering of stories with which thet may already be familiar.

Switch Bitch

Roald Dahl

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A wonderful collection of my favorite Dahl stories 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 8 people found this review helpful.

..
This is easily Dahl's most sfnal work, and is mostly erotic humor, a micro-genre that is in woefully short supply.

Here's a sample from "Bitch", my favorite. The protag has been dosed with the world's most potent aphrodosiac:

[quote] ...the two of us were millions of miles up in outer space, flying through the universe in a shower of meteorites all red and gold. I was riding her bareback... "Faster!" I shouted, jabbing long spurs into her flanks. "Go faster!" Faster and still faster she flew, spurting and spinning around the rim of the sky, her mane streaming with sun, and snow waving out of her tail. The sense of power I had was overwhelming. I was unassailable, supreme. I was the Lord of the Universe, scattering the planets and catching the stars in the palm of my hand...

Oh, ecstasy and ravishment! Oh, Jericho and Tyre and Sidon! The walls came tumbling down and the firmament disintegrated, and out of the smoke and fire of the of the explosion, the sitting-room in the Waldorf Towers came swimming slowly back into my consciousness like a rainy day..."

What a pity that Roald Dahl didn't write more adult fiction. Anyway, if you haven't read Switch Bitch, some wonderfully sly, bawdy and remarkably well-written entertainment awaits you. Bon appetit!

Happy reading--
Peter D. Tillman

Editorial Review:

These four stories are, by turns, funny, bawdy, touching, and outrageous. They are for lovers of tales that combine the macabre and the erotic with intriguing twists of plot.

The Acid House

Irvine Welsh

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 44 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

what were you thinking? 3 out of 5 stars.
7 of 11 people found this review helpful.

I just wanted to say to the woman who bought this for her son...what were you thinking? the book is called the acid house...that should have been your first clue..

anyway...i found it delightful, yeah delightfunl, in a twisted sort of way. I enjoy Welsh's writting, though yes, it is a bit hard for us Americans to understand...i love the psychological twists

Tear on through it. 4 out of 5 stars.
6 of 7 people found this review helpful.

For just the end story, "A Smart C***", The Acid House is worthwhile. Welsh is often super morbid and seriously wickedly wacky in these short stories, most of which play out a lot more like bad dreams than pristine vignettes. The closing aforementioned novella, however, is diferent. It's a surprisingly moving character study of a guy who seems to completely lack character. The guy is so totally caught up with analyzing everything surrounding him that he forgets to live. This seems to be subject matter close to Welsh's heart, and he gives it a surprisingly sympathetic treatment. The other stories range all over the place, but have enough energy to make up for a lack of direction. Gotta love Irv. You just gotta.

Editorial Review:

Using a range of approaches from bitter realism to demented fantasy, Irvine Welsh is able to evoke the essential humanity, well hidden as it is, of his generally depraved, lazy, manipulative and vicious characters. He specializes especially in cosmic reversals--God turns a hapless footballer into a fly--always displaying a corrosive wit.