What if you were involved in the theft of one of the legendary jewels of all time – and you didn’t even know it? That’s exactly what happens to the innocent damsel at the center of Robert W. Chambers’ The Dark Star. She prays for a strong, silent savior to extract her from the mess she’s in – but will she recognize and call upon her own wit and spunk before it’s too late?

From The Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org) eBook archive (#25829).Produced by David Edwards, Alicia Williams, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.netFictionBook (FB2.1) variant: DeKson Publishing.

From The Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org) eBook archive (#25829).Produced by David Edwards, Alicia Williams, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.netFictionBook (FB2.1) variant: DeKson Publishing.

The Darling is a short story by Russian author Anton Chekhov, first published in 1899 in London, it follows the life of a woman who is referred to as darling. Olenka Plemyannikova, the daughter of a retired collegiate assessor, falls in love with the theater owner, Kukin. Olenka’s father dies and she marries Kukin, the two of them live a happy married life…until Kukin travels to Moscow and dies.

Предлагаем вниманию читателей сборник рассказов великого русского писателя А. П. Чехова (1860–1904). Перевод Констанс Гарнетт дополнен комментарием.

Novel by Nathanael West about the savagery lurking beneath the Hollywood dream. Published in 1939, it is one of the most striking examples of the " Hollywood novel" in American fiction. Tod Hackett, a set designer, becomes involved in the lives of several individuals who have been warped by their proximity to the artificial world of Hollywood. Hackett's completion of his painting "The Burning of Los Angeles" coincides with the explosion of the other characters' unfulfilled dreams in a conflagration of riot and murder.

Weedon Grossmith's 1892 book presents the details of English suburban life through the anxious and accident-prone character of Charles Porter. Porter's diary chronicles his daily routine, which includes small parties, minor embarrassments, home improvements, and his relationship with a troublesome son. The small minded but essentially decent suburban world he inhabits is both hilarious and painfully familiar. This edition features Weedon Grossmith's illustrations and an introduction which discusses the story's social context.

Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s irresistible and infamous novel The Dirty Dust is consistently ranked as the most important prose work in modern Irish, yet no translation for English-language readers has ever before been published. Alan Titley’s vigorous new translation, full of the brio and guts of Ó Cadhain’s original, at last brings the pleasures of this great satiric novel to the far wider audience it deserves.In The Dirty Dust all characters lie dead in their graves. This, however, does not impair their banter or their appetite for news of aboveground happenings from the recently arrived. Told entirely in dialogue, Ó Cadhain’s daring novel listens in on the gossip, rumors, backbiting, complaining, and obsessing of the local community. In the afterlife, it seems, the same old life goes on beneath the sod. Only nothing can be done about it — apart from talk. In this merciless yet comical portrayal of a closely bound community, Ó Cadhain remains keenly attuned to the absurdity of human behavior, the lilt of Irish gab, and the nasty, deceptive magic of human connection.

Рассказ был впервые опубликован в журнале Гильдии сценаристов Америки "Written By" (writtenby.com), в летнем номере 2010-го года.

The Double, written in Dostoevsky’s youth, was a sharp turn away from the realism of his first novel,Poor Folk.The first real expression of his genius,The Doubleis a surprisingly modern hallucinatory nightmare in which a minor official named Goliadkin becomes aware of a mysterious doppelgänger–a man who has his name and his face and who gradually and relentlessly begins to displace him with his friends and colleagues. In the dilemma of this increasingly paranoid hero, Dostoevsky makes vividly concrete the inner disintegration of consciousness that would become a major theme of his work.

Рассказ вошёл в сборники:A Medicine For Melancholy (Лекарство от меланхолии)R Is For Rocket (Р — значит ракета)Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (Сборник ста лучших рассказов)

Six selections from the famed Russian showcase his natural aptitude for detail, dialogue, humor, and compassion. Includes The Darling, a poignant piece supporting the claim that life has no meaning without love; as well as The Kiss, Anna on the Neck, The Man in a Case, The Malefactor, and the title story. Chekhov’s unerring insight into the turbulent emotions that stir men and women, in The Chemist’s Wife and the others to be found within The Duel and Other Stories, instills his gemlike fiction with a still-undiminished power.