Read Forward Llc: 12 books

This time Read Forward brings you a great great text by Mark Twain. You know him for the timeless adventures of Tom & Huck, but Mark Twain also wrote some wonderfully witty essays. One of them is particularly powerful, it’s called: What is man? It’s a dialogue between an Old Man...

Russians! You just can’t get around them when it comes to great literature. This new ebook is a classic: The Cloak, by Gogol. Sometimes translated by The Overcoat. The story seems pretty straight forward: a clerk (see, we seem to come around clerks lately…) called Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin,...

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest---                yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!" Ahoy, ahoy, mates, shall we play a game today? It's simple and fun and it involves a…quest. Ready? Great! So, take the words:...

Now here’s a writer that need no presentation. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, the great Russian dramatist, was also a very top-level short story writer.  We will let Chekov speak for himself about the perils of marriage and other dramas… My wife, Natalya Gavrilovna, lived on the lower...

Picture this: ”An American, an Englishman and a French walk into a bar and…” This could be the beginning of: 1. a joke 2. a humorous story 3. a beautiful friendship 4. all of the above Or maybe, after reading Mark Twain’s ”How to Tell a Story and Other...

I don’t think it is much of an exaggeration to say that had Bible been written by men, Tolstoy could have been one of the writers. Just think about the torments of Ivan Ilyich. Or the chain of events in Resurrection or the intricate view on history in War and Peace. Apart from all these well-known...

One might argue that not much has changed, when it comes to expressing one’s opinions, since 1841 (when Emerson’s Essays: First series has been published): those who have something to say will be heard, the world is still split between authors and readers, authors teach, readers listen and so...

“If you like, I will hot it” April is the cruelest month, they say, and yet, we find it to be the funniest too. For what other month starts with the Fool’s Day and keeps getting warmer and warmer as we laugh winter away? To celebrate this, we decided to publish today the perfect companion...

Everybody likes to shake up things a little. Inside most creators (book author, poet, film-maker, painter) lies a spirit that would risk the fate of their own works (and lives) just to be able to “rattle the cages” that we, most of the time, use instead of our heads. This is how comes that books...

Here’s Emerson’s second volume of Essays, published 1844, further establishes Emerson’s role as leader of the Transcendentalist movement. Contents: The Poet Experience Character Manners Gifts Nature Politics Nominalist and Realist. New England Reformers

Harold Bloom, the famous (and controversial) literary critic, once asserted that what seems to bind together all great literary works is their strangeness. They may now be part of the western canon, but at the time of their writing, they have often been rejected, neglected, considered strange and...

This is what we become experts of: rather obscure but wonderful writings by great writers. Robert Louis Stevenson, you all know him for Treasure Island or the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. However he wrote some very good short stories. Of these The Story of a Lie (the next in our series)....