Selected Short Stories, Rabinranath Tagore

"Tirana is growing up fast. After a few prepubescent years of fooling around with the wrong friends, and some petty crime in the 1990s and some half-hearted first attempts at using make-up immediately afterwards, the city is now emerging as a young lady getting ready to show the world what she's all about. 

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall challenges the social conventions of the early nineteenth century in a strong defence of women's rights in the face of psychological abuse from their husbands. Anne Brontë's style is bold, naturalistic and passionate, and this novel, which her sister Charlotte considered 'an entire mistake', has earned her a position in English...

Combining these with typically Dickensian elements of burlesque and farce, the novel is eminently suited to dramatic adaptation. So great was the impact as it left Dickens' pen that many pirated versions appeared in print before the original was even finished. 

For Leila, each minute after her death recalls a sensuous memory: spiced goat stew, sacrificed by her father to celebrate the birth of a yearned-for son; bubbling vats of lemon and sugar to wax women's legs while men are at prayer; the cardamom coffee she shares with a handsome student in the brothel where she works.

 Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation.

'Summer was drawing to a close, and I realized that the book was monstrous.'

Four years ago someone got away with murder. Now it's time to uncover the truth . . .

This story features D'Arrast, who can be seen as a positive hero as opposed to Meursault in The Stranger.[4] He actively shapes his life and sacrifices himself in order to help a friend, instead of remaining passive.

Little orphan Heidi is sent to live with her grandfather in his remote house in the Swiss Alps. She soon begins to love her life with her grandfather and makes friends with Peter, the goat-herder and his grandmother. Idyllic as her existence is, her aunt sends Heidi to live in Frankfurt to become a companion to the invalid daughter of a wealthy family...

Disenchanted with her husband and seeking an escape from their dull marriage she is soon tempted into a brief romantic liaison with another man. Although short-lived, she remains desirous of passion and the finer things in life and embarks on another affair, destroying her reputation.

Through wordplay, parody and logical and philosophical puzzles, Carroll engenders a variety of sub-texts, teasing, ominous or melancholy. For all the surface playfulness there is meaning everywhere. The author reveals himself in glimpses.

Although subtitled A Novel without a Hero, Vanity Fair follows the fortunes of two contrasting but inter-linked lives: through the retiring Amelia Sedley and the brilliant Becky Sharp, Thackeray examines the position of women in an intensely exploitative male world.

The lights of Hollywood do little to distract Cecelia as she watches Monroe Stahr, wunderkind studio executive and object of her desire, descend into a reckless and ardent love affair with an auspicious starlet – an affair that threatens to destroy his reign as the Silver Screen’s golden boy. 

'Strangely enough, I mistook it for a gentleman at first. Fortunately I had my spectacles with me so I could see it was really a nose.'

Poignant and unforgettable, J. M. Barrie’s classic tale is one of the greatest works of children’s literature of the last century.

'Oh the cruelty of time, that destroys all things!'