Everest Media LLC
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Lavengro, the Scholar, the Gypsy, the Priest, published in 1851, is a heavily fictionalized account of George Borrow's early years. Borrow, born in 1803, was a writer and selftaught polyglot, fluent in many European languages, and a lover of literature.
The Romany Rye, published six years later in 1857, is sometimes described as the "sequel" to Lavengro, but in fact it begins with a straight continuation of the action of the first book, which breaks off rather suddenly. The two books therefore are best considered as a whole and read together, and this Standard Ebooks edition combines the two into one volume.
In the novel Borrow tells of his upbringing as the son of an army recruiting officer, moving with the regiment to different locations in Britain, including Scotland and Ireland. It is in Ireland that he first encounters a strange new language which he is keen to learn, leading to a lifelong passion for acquiring new tongues. A couple of years later in England, he comes across a camp of gypsies and meets the gypsy Jasper Petulengro, who becomes a lifelong friend. Borrow is delighted to discover that the Romany have their own language, which of course he immediately sets out to learn.
Borrow's subsequent life, up to his midtwenties, is that of a wanderer, traveling from place to place in Britain, encountering many interesting individuals and having a variety of entertaining adventures. He constantly comes in contact with the gypsies and with Petulengro, and becomes familiar with their language and culture.
The book also includes a considerable amount of criticism of the Catholic Church and its priests. Several chapters are devoted to Borrow's discussions with "the man in black," depicted as a cynical Catholic priest who has no real belief in the religious teachings of the Church but who is devoted to seeing it reinstated in England in order for its revenues to increase.
Lavengro was not an immediate critical success on its release, but after Borrow died in 1881, it began to grow in popularity and critical acclaim. It is now considered a classic of English Literature. This Standard Ebooks edition of Lavengro and The Romany Rye is based on the editions published by John Murray and edited by W. I. Knapp, with many clarifying notes.
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Such Is Life is an Australian novel written by Joseph Furphy under a pseudonym of "Tom Collins" and published in 1903. It purports to be a series of diary entries by the author, selected at approximately onemonth intervals during late 1883 and early 1884. "Tom Collins" travels rural New South Wales and Victoria, interacting and talking at length with a variety of characters including the drivers of bullockteams, itinerant swagmen, boundary riders, and squatters (the owners of large rural properties). The novel is full of entertaining and sometimes melancholy incidents mixed with the philosophical ramblings of the author and his frequent quotations from Shakespeare and poetry. Its depictions of the Australian bush, the rural lifestyle, and the depredations of drought are vivid.
Furphy is sometimes called the "Father of the Australian Novel," and Such Is Life is considered a classic of Australian literature. -
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Caroline Meeber, known as Sister Carrie to her family, moves to Chicago at the tender age of eighteen to try to make something of herself. Living with her sister and brotherinlaw, she quickly finds that life, and work, are hard in the big city. She soon takes up with a traveling salesman she met on the train into town. Months later her eye is turned by one of the salesman's acquaintances, George Hurstwood, and viceversa. A series of events lead Carrie and Hurstwood to New York City, where both struggle to live out the aspirations that brought them there.
Theodore Dreiser was one of the earliest naturalist writers, but he wrote Sister Carrie while the United States was still very Victorian in its morals. The book therefore caused a stir from the beginning: Carrie Meeber was clearly, even in the disguised language of the time, a sexually active, unmarried female, who wasn't made to suffer for her indiscretion to the extent considered necessary at the time. Dreiser's depiction of rough language merely added to the controversy. The first printing sold only 456 copies in two years; it was to be another five years before Dreiser could convince another publisher to carry the book. Today it's considered a classic and one of the "greatest of all American urban novels."
The text of Sister Carrie was unchanged until 1981, when the University of Pennsylvania Press published a new version with 36,000 words restored. The edition was not without controversy: the cuts were originally made before the first printing at the suggestion of Dreiser's wife, or his friend Arthur Henry, and Dreiser had approved all of them. Although the new Pennsylvania Edition, as it is called, made a good case for restoring the changes, it is the 1907 text that remains the most widely available today, and it is that text in this edition. -
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In The Golden Bowl, an impoverished Italian aristocrat comes to London to marry a wealthy American, but meets an old mistress before the wedding and spends time with her, helping her pick out a wedding gift. After their marriage, his wife maintains a close relationship with her father, while their own relationship becomes strained.
Completed in 1904, Henry James himself considered The Golden Bowl one of his best novels, and it remains one of critics' favorites. Along with The Wings of the Dove and The Ambassadors, the novel represents James' "major phase," where he returned to the study of Americans abroad, which dominated his earlier career. The novel focuses almost entirely on four central characters, and explores themes of marriage and adultery in an intricate psychological study, which some critics have even suggested anticipates the style of streamofconsciousness writing. -
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Jeeves Stories is a collection of humorous short stories by P. G. Wodehouse that feature the adventures of his most famous characters, Jeeves and Wooster. Wooster is a wealthy and idle young English gentleman of the interwar era. Jeeves is his extraordinarily competent valet whose name has since become synonymous with perfect service. The stories follow Wooster in his wanderings about London, around England, and across the Atlantic to New York, with Jeeves following in his wake and striving to keep his employer wellgroomed and properly presented. Along the way Jeeves must somehow also manage to extricate Wooster and his friends from the various scrapes and follies they get themselves into.
First published as early as 1915, the stories first appeared on both sides of the Atlantic in publications like The Saturday Evening Post and The Strand Magazine. They were later collected into books or reworked into novels. Though only less than 50 of Wodehouse's over 300 short stories feature Jeeves and Wooster, they remain his most enduring characters. They've been copied, imitated, and featured in countless interpretations and adaptations. A century later, these stories still are as amusing and entertaining as they were when they were first published. -
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In Scarhaven Keep, the playwright Richard Copplestone is pulled into a search for a missing actor which leads him to the town of Scarhaven on the northern English sea coast. As he slowly uncovers the secrets of the residents of Scarhaven, the mystery deepens and reveals much more than a simple missing person. -
Thus Spake Zarathustra (Unabridged)
Friedrich Nietzsche
- Everest media llc
- 6 Avril 2022
- 9781669370475
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Thus Spake Zarathustra was Friedrich Nietzsche's favorite of the books he wrote, and has been his most popular amongst general readers. Yet some scholars dislike it because of its unphilosophical nature: it eschews jargon and the scaffolding of arguments, which engage only the intellect, in favor of an artistic approach that engages the whole mind.
After ten years of solitude in a cave high in the mountains, Zarathustra wishes to share with humanity the wisdom he has accumulated during this time. He reaches the nearest town and addresses the crowd on the marketplace. He tells them of the Overman: the next step in human evolution, a being who creates their own values, freed from the weight of tradition and morality, and who takes responsibility for their own successes and failures. But the crowd doesn't understand him; his discourse is met only with rude ignorance. Zarathustra then decides to gather a small group of disciples and share his wisdom with them.
The bulk of the book is Zarathustra's speeches on topics such as morality, society, individualism, religion, and how suffering and its overcoming are what give meaning to our existence. While already wiser than most, Zarathustra still learns from those he talks to, reevaluating his thoughts as he deals with disappointment (such as when his disciples prove to be mere followers), and confronting his own doubts. His greatest challenge, though, comes when he faces the existential test of the eternal recurrence of the same: the thought that our lives could repeat indefinitely without the minutest of change.
The inspiration for Zarathustra came to Nietzsche during one of the long hikes he often indulged in despite his failing health. It was a decade of solitude: his physical condition had worsened to the point of forcing him to retire from his position at the University of Basel, and each change of season prompted him to relocate to kinder climes in Switzerland, France, or Italy. The book took two years to write. Each of its four parts was written in a tenday period of creative effervescence followed by months of gloom, plagued by terrible, debilitating migraines.
Zarathustra was initially received with indifference at best and frustration at worst. It's a work of philosophy as much as aesthetics: the language is modeled after the Luther Bible and contains numerous references to Homer, Heraclitus, Plato, Goethe, Emerson, and Wagner, to name a few. Later Nietzsche attempted to address the book's lack of popularity by framing the same concepts in a more traditional, approachable manner in his following book, Beyond Good and Evil, but that book also struggled to find an audience.
With his health steadily deteriorating, Nietzsche's mind broke down in 1889 and never recovered. His body would live on for 11 more years, and he ended up in the care of his sister, Elisabeth. A stalwart nationalist and antiSemite, she saw in her brother's illness the opportunity to turn him into a German hero. Despite her brother's firm opposition to nationalism, antiSemitism, and power politics, she perverted his work by promoting it for her own ends. Scores of commentators partook in her lie and enthusiastically used Nietzsche's work to buttress their own contrary views. Doing so requires one to selectively ignore half the content of the book: Zarathustra's discourses regularly touch on a priori dark and violent themes, but they also clearly state that these are to be directed towards oneself. Reaching the Overman requires us to know ourselves, and such introspection, given the darker side of human nature, leads to contempt. This contempt for ourselves, says Nietzsche, should be embraced as the first step towards awareness of what we could be. Cruelty, likewise, stems from that knowledge as a necessity to hammer ourselves into the proper shape. Such commentators also conveniently ignored Zarathustra's many remarks about love: love for ourselves, he says, is what can prevent us from spreading resentment around us during this difficult process of change.
The first English translation of Zarathustra was by Alexander Tille, a German scholar who had emigrated to Scotland. English wasn't his first language and his work suffered from it. Thomas Common, a Scottish scholar, used Tille's work as the base for his own translation. Bringing Zarathustra to the Englishspeaking world was no easy task given Nietzsche's stylistic idiosyncrasies. Just like Nietzsche, Common took risks: because the book is written in the style of the Luther Bible, Common decided to emulate the style of the King James Bible; he also tried to reproduce the musicality of the language and the new words coined by Nietzsche, some of which have been updated over time-e.g. Common's "Superman" is nowadays known as "Overman." While his choices have been controversial, he produced a landmark translation that faithfully tried to convert the unique flavor of Zarathustra into English. Published in 1909, it would take four decades until the next translation by Walter Kaufman in 1954.
But Zarathustra didn't find its scholarly fame limited to Europe: soon after its publication, it reached Asia, where it was received with enthusiasm, particularly in China and Japan where it influenced the famous Kyoto School. Zarathustra has also received special attention from the music world. Nietzsche loved music and poetry, and it was his wish that this book be taken as music. No fewer than 87 pieces have been inspired by the book, in part or as a whole. The best known are Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra, the fourth movement of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 3, and Frederick Delius' A Mass of Life. -
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The Moon and Sixpence tells the story of English stockbroker Charles Strickland, who abandons his wife and child to travel to Paris to become a painter. First published in 1919 in the United Kingdom by Heinemann, the story is inspired by the life of the French artist Paul Gauguin. It's told in episodic form from a firstperson perspective. The narrator, who came to know Strickland through his wife's literary parties, begins the story as Strickland leaves for Paris. Strickland's new life becomes a stark contrast to his life in London. While he was once a welloff banker living a comfortable life, he must now sleep in cheap hotels while suffering both illness and hunger.
Maugham spent a year in Paris in 1904, which is when he first heard the story of Gauguin, the banker who left his family and profession to pursue his passion for art. He heard the story from others who had known and worked with Gauguin. Ten years later Maugham travelled to Tahiti where he met others who had known Gauguin during the artist's time there. Inspired by the stories he heard, Maugham wrote The Moon and Sixpence. Although based on the life of Paul Gauguin, the story is a work of fiction. -
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Daisy Ashford was just nine years old when she penned (or rather, penciled) The Young Visiters in her notebook. As an adult, she found the manuscript along with other childhood writings and showed them to her literary friends for a laugh. They were so delighted that they passed them around their circle. The unexpected result was a publishing deal, with J. M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, writing the preface. So clever was the book that some assumed Barrie himself had written the entire thing as an elaborate hoax.
The story's "hero" is Alfred Salteena, a polite but bumbling man who hopes to learn the ways of the elite. He is in love with a younger woman, Ethel, but a love triangle with his friend Bernard soon emerges. The characters attend "sumshious" balls, stay in lavish "compartments," and wear elaborate "get ups," all of it rendered in Ashford's original childish spelling. The story reads like a pastiche of high society and even a parody of the Victorian novel.
The Young Visiters was published in 1919 and was reprinted eighteen times in that year alone. It has been adapted into a play, a musical, and multiple film versions. Ashford's other juvenile writings were later published, including The Hangman's Daughter, a short novel she considered her finest work. As an adult, she did not continue to write. -
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An ancient Roman hilltop fort proves an irresistible draw to Lucian Taylor, but what awaits at the top isn't just a view of the surrounding Welsh landscape but a bacchal experience his young soul isn't ready for. This experience sets his path as he attempts to transcribe his increasingly elaborate visions into the perfect book; the book that will actually mean something more than the banal novels he sees the publishing houses push out.
The Hill of Dreams is a semiautobiographical work, with Arthur Machen following a similar physical journey to the novel: a childhood in rural Wales followed by attempts to become an author in London. Machen was inspired by a review of Tristram Shandy that described it as "a picaresque of the mind," and determined to write "a Robinson Crusoe of the soul." The protagonist's isolation from the rest of society certainly resonates with that description.
Machen wrote this ten years earlier than its original 1907 publication, it having been turned down by the publishers of the time. While it was mostly ignored on its initial release, it has picked up admirers over the years and is now viewed as one of Machen's most important works. -
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Inasmuch as the scene of this story is that historic pile, Belpher Castle, in the county of Hampshire, it would be an agreeable task to open it with a leisurely description of the place, followed by some notes on the history of the Earls of Marshmoreton, who have owned it since the fifteenth century. Unfortunately, in these days of rush and hurry, a novelist works at a disadvantage. He must leap into the middle of his tale with as little delay as he would employ in boarding a moving tramcar. He must get off the mark with the smooth swiftness of a jackrabbit surprised while lunching. Otherwise, people throw him aside and go out to picture palaces. -
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Sample Book Insights:
#1 The questions of influence, response, and impact are the core of climate science. They are similar to the questions parents try to guide their children's development through example and reward good behavior, and punish bad.
#2 The science we learn in school is a collection of certainties about the natural world. However, each of these facts was hard won through a succession of logical inferences based on many observations or experiments.
#3 The IPCC has established a second set of calibrated terms to indicate confidence in a given finding. Confidence is a qualitative judgment that depends on the number, quality, and agreement of different lines of evidence. The five levels of confidence are Very high, High, Medium, Low, and Very low.
#4 The most prominent series of assessment reports is produced under the auspices of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was established in 1988. The IPCC issued its first assessment in 1990, and the Sixth Assessment Report is expected in the summer of 2021. -
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In 1917 John Reed, a journalist and socialist, witnessed firsthand the 1917 Russian October Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks seized power and began forming the Soviet Union. Ten Days that Shook the World is his account of the revolution, including ontheground descriptions of the days up to those portentious events.
The book received a mixed reception. Some reviewers found it a powerful account of the events, one of the few available in English. Others noted Reed's bias as an established Socialist writer. In any case, the book was hugely influential: this edition boasts a preface by Lenin, John Reed was buried in Moscow in a site reserved for Soviet leadership, and some Soviet couples even went so far as to name their children "Johnreed." In 1999 New York University placed Ten Days that Shook the World 7th in their "Top 100 Works of Journalism" list. -
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This sequel to The Stars Are Ours! was first published in 1957 by the World Publishing Company. It continues the tale of the humans who escaped an antiintellectual Earth and founded a colony on Astra, a planet across the galaxy. Astra has a vibrant, intelligent species, as well as the ruins of a much older civilization.
Norton weaves two stories together by alternating points of view with each chapter. We follow a 4th generation colonist, as well as a mechanicpilot newly arrived on Astra as a member of a research mission from a recently revived Earth.
Each is on a journey of discovery, and they find themselves allied with opposing sides of an ongoing war between two intelligent, indigenous species. -
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Two decades after Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, the Baltimore Gun Club returns with its sights on the North Pole's rich coal deposits. Access to the area would be facilitated under a more temperate climate, which, the team believes, can be achieved by slightly altering the Earth's axis of rotation. This climate change would affect every region of the globe to various degrees, thus creating anxiety and opposition worldwide.
Sans Dessus Dessous, number 34 in the Voyages Extraordinaires collection, appeared in French in 1889 and was published in English the following year by J. G. Ogilvie as TopsyTurvy. -
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An Antarctic Mystery follows Mr. Jeorling, a wealthy American naturalist whose research has led him to the remote Kerguelen Islands, located in the southern Indian Ocean. Jeorling begins his adventure on the Halbrane after being admitted aboard by the reluctant captain Len Guy, who believes the events in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym to be true. In that novel, Pym persuades Len Guy's brother, William Guy, to lead a voyage to the Antarctic. But the expedition ends in failure when William Guy, his crew, and his ship, the Jane, disappear under mysterious circumstances. Captain Len Guy convinces Jeorling to aid in the search for his brother, and the two embark on an expedition south to the Antarctic in search of the previous voyage's survivors.
Despite the fact that Jules Verne's work was published over fifty years after Pym, the events in the novel take place only one year after the disappearance of the Jane. -
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Kate Chopin's most famous work nowadays is the novel The Awakening, but at the turn of the last century she was more famous for her short fiction, published in American magazines like the St. Louis PostDispatch, Youth's Companion, and Vogue. A prolific writer, over the course of fourteen years she penned nearly a hundred stories, although many didn't see publication until a new collection was released in 1963. The stories focus on life in 1890s Louisiana, a setting that she was living in as a resident of New Orleans and Natchitoches. They're told from many different points of view, but always with empathy for the struggles, both big and small, of the protagonists.
This collection contains the fortynine short stories of Kate Chopin verified to be in the U.S. public domain, including "Désirée's Baby" and "The Dream of an Hour." They're presented in the order they were originally written. -
Summary of John E. Douglas & Mark Olshaker's When a Killer Calls
Everest Media
- Everest media llc
- 6 Avril 2022
- 9781669381303
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 I received a call from Ron Walker, a member of my team, who told me that we had been assigned a kidnapping case from Columbia, South Carolina. The police had no leads or evidence, and they wanted our help.
#2 The family was eventually contacted by a phone caller who demanded a ransom, but the sheriff's office was convinced it was a hoax. There was only one call over the weekend demanding a ransom, but the sheriff's office was convinced it was a hoax.
#3 The FBI had never lost a ransom package. The outcome is usually much darker when dealing with a sexually motivated kidnapping. In those cases, the offender's sadistic drive for power and complete control over his victim is the reason for the crime.
#4 I had been the Bureau's first full-time profiler, and for several years I was the only one. The workload became overwhelming, and I pleaded with the assistant FBI director in charge of the Academy to provide me with more full-time help. -
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Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy is considered one of the greatest works in world literature, and it established the standardized Italian language that is used today. Writing between 1308 and 1320, Dante draws from countless subjects including Roman Catholic theology and philosophy, the struggle between the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, Greek mythology, and geocentric cosmology to answer the ageold question: what does the afterlife look like? Dante's vision of the answer, this threevolume epic poem, describes in great detail the systematic levels in Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven.
The poem opens with Dante's death-not his actual death that would come shortly after his work's completion, but his fictional death-where the author is found wandering in a dark forest. Blocked from climbing towards the bright light by a shewolf, a leopard, and a lion, he is forced to walk further into the darkened valley and towards the gates of Hell. Dante and his guides must then travel through the nine circles of Hell, seven terraces of Purgatory, and nine spheres of Heaven to experience divine justice for earthly sins so that he may reach the Empyrean and receive God's love. On his journey, he will learn that one must be consciously devoted to the path of morality and righteousness, else one find oneself on a path towards sin.
This production is based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's blank verse translation. Longfellow succeeds in capturing the original brilliance of Dante's internal rhymes and hypnotic patterns while also retaining accuracy. It is said that the death of his young wife brought him closer to the melancholy spirit of Dante's writing, which itself was shaped by his wounding exile from his beloved Florence in 1302. -
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While watching a film, Véronique d'Hergemont spots her childhood signature mysteriously written on the side of a hut in the background of a scene. Her visit to the location of the film shoot deepens the mystery, but also provides further clues that point her towards longlost relations and a great secret from ancient history: a secret that will require the services of a particular man to unravel.
The Secret of Sarek was published in the original French in 1919, and in this English translation in 1920. It was Maurice Leblanc's first Arsène Lupin novel written after the Great War, and its impact on Leblanc is palpable: the novel has a much darker tone than earlier works, and even the famous cheery charm of Lupin is diluted. The result is a classic horror story, bringing a new dimension to the series. -
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Surprisingly timeless and under the guise of "Christian Mysticism," Underhill describes in 1914 what could rightly be called "secular mindfulness" today. Evelyn Underhill doesn't use much Christian terminology, instead preferring to use words that may be considered "new age." If one can get past the terminology, the "Practical Mysticism" allows anyone to explore the mystical aspects of their own worldview without necessarily betraying their prior deeplyheld beliefs.
Practical Mysticism is not a guidebook for mystical practice, though it does provide some tips along the way. What it does give is an introduction and apology for the sufficiently motivated; those that see (or want to see) the world in a different way. -
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Booker Taliaferro Washington began life as a slave in Virginia shortly before emancipation, but rose to become one of the most celebrated leaders the African American community has ever had. His principal occupation was as president of the Tuskegee Institute, which he founded in 1881, but he earned national renown as an orator, writer and political advisor. His address at the Atlanta Exposition was a pivotal moment in race relations in America.
Washington believed deeply in the dignity of physical labor, and that merit and talent are eventually rewarded regardless of race or class. The Tuskegee Institution was primarily a technical college, and aimed to teach industrial skills in addition to academic training. Students built many of the buildings on the campus, grew the food that was eaten there, and even made the furniture, tools and vehicles used by the school.
Up from Slavery was originally published as a serialized work in The Outlook, a Christian magazine based in New York, before being collected in a single volume in 1901. This edition includes an introduction by Walter H. Page, a future U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom. -
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Fyodor Sologub was a Russian poet, novelist and playwright, working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His work generally has a downcast outlook with recurring mystical elements, and often uses anthropomorphic objects or fantastical situations to comment on human behaviour. As well as novels (including the critically acclaimed The Little Demon), Sologub wrote over five hundred short stories, ranging in length from halfpage fables to nearly novellalength tales.
While most of his short stories were not contemporaneously translated, both John Cournos and Stephen Graham produced English compilations and contributed individual stories to publications such as The Russian Review and The Egoist. This collection comprises the best individual English translations in the public domain of Sologub's short stories, presented in chronological order of the publication of their translation. -
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The American Crisis is a collection of articles by Thomas Paine, originally published from December 1776 to December 1783, that focus on rallying Americans during the worst years of the Revolutionary War. Paine used his deistic beliefs to galvanize the revolutionaries, for example by claiming that the British are trying to assume the powers of God and that God would support the American colonists. These articles were so influential that others began to adopt some of their more stirring phrases, catapulting them into the cultural consciousness; for example, the opening line of the first Crisis, which reads "These are the times that try men's souls."
