The House That Swam and Other Stories ... PDF Download

Author: Estelle Craig
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781524684846
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 34

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Book Description
This book contains short stories intended for children.

Author: Penelope Lively
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735222053
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
A glimmering collection of new short fiction from the Booker Prize winner. “Lively writes with an astringent blend of sympathy and detachment, emotional wisdom and satiric wit.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times In such acclaimed novels as The Photograph, Family Album, and How It All Began, Penelope Lively has captivated readers with her singular blend of wisdom, elegance, and humor. Now, in her first story collection in decades, Lively takes up themes of history, family, and relationships across varied and vividly rendered settings. In the title story, a Mediterranean purple swamp hen chronicles the secrets and scandals of Quintus Pompeius’s villa, culminating with his narrow escape from the lava and ash of Vesuvius. “Abroad” captures the low point of an artist couple’s tumultuous European road trip, trapped in a remote Spanish farmhouse and forced to paint a family mural and pitch in with chores to pay for repairs to their broken-down car. Other stories reveal friends and lovers in fateful moments of indiscretion, discovery, and even retribution—as in “The Third Wife,” when a woman learns her husband is a serial con artist and turns a house-hunting trip into an elaborately staged revenge trap. Each of these delightful stories is elevated by Lively’s signature graceful prose and eye for the subtle yet powerfully evocative detail. Wry, charming, and keenly insightful, The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories is a masterful achievement from one of our most beloved writers.

Author: Elizabeth Musser
Publisher: Bethany House
ISBN: 1441207163
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
Mary Swan Middleton has always taken for granted the advantages of her family's wealth. But a tragedy that touches all of Atlanta sends her reeling in grief. When the family maid challenges her to reach out to the less fortunate as a way to ease her own pain, Mary Swan meets Carl--and everything changes. For although Carl is her opposite in nearly every way, he has something her privileged life could not give her. And when she seeks his help to uncover a mystery, she learns far more than she ever could have imagined.

Author: Anton Pavlovich Chekhov
Publisher: DigiCat
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 165

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Book Description
This book is a collection of short stories written by Anton Chekov, a Russian playwright and short-story writer who is considered to be one of the greatest writers of all time. One of the stories featured include The House with the Mezzanine, which is a story about Lydia Volchaninova, a good-looking, but very stern and opinionated young teacher with somewhat dictatorial inclinations who is deeply engaged in the affairs of the local zemstvo. Devoted to the cause of helping peasants, she is interested in doing and speaking of nothing but practical work, mostly in the fields of medicine and education. Lydia dislikes the protagonist, a landscape painter, who frequently visits their house. From time to time the two clash over problems of both the rural community and Russia as a whole.

Author: Desmond Hogan
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
ISBN: 1564789802
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
There is no doubt that Desmond Hogan is one of most remarkable literary talents to have come out of Ireland in the past half-century, and perhaps the best introduction to his work is through his magnificent short stories, widely anthologized and praised throughout the world. Focusing as always on the downtrodden and the eccentric, the misplaced and the dispossessed, Hogan's stories merge past with present, landscape with mindscape—distinctly Irish and burdened by history, while exhilaratingly and wholly universal and modern.

Author: Антон Чехов
Publisher: Litres
ISBN: 5040462735
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Author: Michael Cunningham
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374712603
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
Fairy tales for our times from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours A poisoned apple and a monkey's paw with the power to change fate; a girl whose extraordinarily long hair causes catastrophe; a man with one human arm and one swan's wing; and a house deep in the forest, constructed of gumdrops and gingerbread, vanilla frosting and boiled sugar. In A Wild Swan and Other Tales, the people and the talismans of lands far, far away—the mythic figures of our childhoods and the source of so much of our wonder—are transformed by Michael Cunningham into stories of sublime revelation. Here are the moments that our fairy tales forgot or deliberately concealed: the years after a spell is broken, the rapturous instant of a miracle unexpectedly realized, or the fate of a prince only half cured of a curse. The Beast stands ahead of you in line at the convenience store, buying smokes and a Slim Jim, his devouring smile aimed at the cashier. A malformed little man with a knack for minor acts of wizardry goes to disastrous lengths to procure a child. A loutish and lazy Jack prefers living in his mother's basement to getting a job, until the day he trades a cow for a handful of magic beans. Reimagined by one of the most gifted storytellers of his generation, and exquisitely illustrated by Yuko Shimizu, rarely have our bedtime stories been this dark, this perverse, or this true.

Author: Gregory Maguire
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062980807
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
After brilliantly reimagining the worlds of Oz, Wonderland, Dickensian London, and the Nutcracker, the New York Times bestselling author of Wicked turns his unconventional genius to Hans Christian Andersen's "The Wild Swans," transforming this classic tale into an Italian-American girl's poignant coming-of-age story, set amid the magic of Christmas in 1960s New York. Following her brother's death and her mother's emotional breakdown, Laura now lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in a lonely townhouse she shares with her old-world, strict, often querulous grandparents. But the arrangement may be temporary. The quiet, awkward teenager has been getting into trouble at home and has been expelled from her high school for throwing a record album at a popular girl who bullied her. When Christmas is over and the new year begins, Laura may find herself at boarding school in Montreal. Nearly unmoored from reality through her panic and submerged grief, Laura is startled when a handsome swan boy with only one wing lands on her roof. Hiding him from her ever-bickering grandparents, Laura tries to build the swan boy a wing so he can fly home. But the task is too difficult to accomplish herself. Little does Laura know that her struggle to find help for her new friend parallels that of her grandparents, who are desperate for a distant relative’s financial aid to save the family store. As he explores themes of class, isolation, family, and the dangerous yearning to be saved by a power greater than ourselves, Gregory Maguire conjures a haunting, beautiful tale of magical realism that illuminates one young woman’s heartbreak and hope as she begins the inevitable journey to adulthood.

Author: Roald Dahl
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101652950
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Seven superb short stories from the bestselling author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The BFG! The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is coming soon to Netflix! Meet the boy who can talk to animals and the man who can see with his eyes closed. And find out about the treasure buried deep underground. A clever mix of fact and fiction, this collection also includes how master storyteller Roald Dahl became a writer. With Roald Dahl, you can never be sure where reality ends and fantasy begins. "All the tales are entrancing inventions." —Publishers Weekly

Author: Elle Rambo
Publisher: BookLocker.com, Inc.
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
Harry the Swan and Other Stories is a journey to a simpler place, where summer days are long and cool breezes off the lake are nature’s air conditioning. This is small-town Americana at its heart-warming best, presented in short stories through the eyes of its midwestern residents, as they embrace daily joys and challenges with an equal dose of humor. The pie is cooling on the windowsill, the porch swing is waiting, and it’s time to curl up with a good book and watch the geese flying south. These are 34 short stories of life in the Great Lakes during the second half of the twentieth century, when the ebb and flow of the seasons paced life. The stories introduce us to a regal but lonely swan, a prankster crow, and a hard-bitten maintenance man with the demeanor of a bull and a soul of honey. So, find a comfortable chair and get your favorite cup of tea. It’s time to enjoy a trip back to a calmer, kinder, and more generous time.