Word Wise: 97 books

The short story is often viewed as an inferior relation to the Novel. But it is an art in itself. To take a story and distil its essence into fewer pages while keeping character and plot rounded and driven is not an easy task. Many try and many fail. In this series we look at short stories from many...

Edith Whartons Early Short Fiction is a collection of a number of early short stories written by the American writer and novelist Edith Wharton. Most of these stories were first published in the beginning of the twentieth century in literary magazines and periodicals such as the famous Scribners Magazine....

Harry Sinclair Lewis (7th February, 1885 10th January, 1951) was the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930 "for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humour, new types of characters." Whilst an accurate description of his writing...

Honore De Balzac may only have lived for 51 years but his work lives on through such vital classics as La Vendetta (The Vendetta). This novel is also part of La Comedie Humaine (The Human Comedy) and is the eighth of the Scènes de la vie privée (Scenes of Private Life). The series parodies and depicts French society in the first half of the 19th Century.

Areopagitica is a revolutionary pamphlet written by the renowned seventeenth-century poet John Milton, author of the eternal Paradise Lost. In this work, Milton addresses the English Parliament of the time to complain about censorship and defend freedom of speech and expression. Written amid the English...

Jerome K Jerome had an early life of poverty exacerbated by the death of his parents in his early teens helped to cruelly mould the young Jerome. After early stints on the railways, as an actor, a journalist, a school teacher, a writer and a solicitors clerk he had some minor success with a collection...

William Makepeace Thackeray is a nineteenth-century English novelist born in Calcutta, India. He studied art in London and Paris and worked as a journalist before moving to storytelling. He published many stories in newspapers prior to the release of his satirical masterpiece Vanity Fair in 1847. His...

Samuel Butler (4th December 1835 18th June 1902) had both a father and grandfather in the church and was being groomed by his father to be a priest. However, after a first at Cambridge, he decided he wanted to be an artist. His father could not and would not consider such a thing and by mutual consent...

Published in 1838, Thomas De Quinceys The Avenger is a Gothic story of bloodshed, cruelty and religious authoritarianism. It centers around the character of John Williams, a London serial killer who brutally massacred seven people in the 1810s. By and large, the book represents De Quinceys aesthetic...

To Be Read at Dusk is a very short story by the celebrated Victorian novelist Charles Dickens. Amid the Swiss mountainous region of Saint Bernard, the first-person narrator starts to eavesdrop on a nearby group of men. The sun is setting, giving way to strange thoughts and memories. The group is composed...

In this volume we venture to the East. To met a writer who speaks a common language of love and mysticism which continues to convey valuable insights into universal themes in contemporary society. Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) who was a gifted Bengali Renaissance man, distinguishing himself as a philosopher,...

Washington Irving was born on April 3, 1783. He began to be published in 1802 with a series of observational letters. In 1815 the family business required that he move to England, the business failed but Irving decided to say in England and in 1819 published his first international success The Sketch...

Jerome Klapka Jerome is an English writer of the turn of the century. He is known especially for his humorous novels and travelogues, mainly his Three Men in a Boat which has made his fame and wealth. His work entitled Clocks is a humorous essay that speaks about his personal experience with clocks....

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on October 21st, 1772 in Ottery St Mary, Devon, England. As a young child he was an early and devoted reader having no time for play or sports. After his father died in 1781, 8-year-old Samuel was sent to Christ's Hospital, a charity school founded in the 16th century...