KtoCzyta.pl Literatura - książki, ebooki i audiobooki

„The Good Soldier” (1915) by Ford Madox Ford is a modernist classic, an intricately worked novel. It tells the stories of two outwardly happy couples who meet at a health spa in Germany just before the start of the First World War, and whose loveless, adultery-ridden relationships are strained and gradually disintegrate, with tragic consequences. The story is narrated by the character John Dowell, half of one of the couples whose dissolving relationships form the subject of t...

„The Great Gatsby”, Fitzgerald’s third book, stands as the supreme achievement of his career. The story follows the enigmatic and mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby as he chases the object of his hopeless desire, the beautiful Daisy Buchanan. The result is a chronicle of the drama and deceit that swirl around the lives of the wealthy, which cemented Fitzgerals’s reputation as the voice of his generation. The novel delves into the dark corners of the Jazz Age to tell a tragic tal...

Divided into three separate parts, according to subject matter, „Tales of the Jazz Age” includes two of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s better-known short stories, „The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and „The Diamond as Big as the Ritz”. Set in the Jazz Age, Fitzgerald’s own term for the Roaring Twenties of newly confident, post-war America, this collection of early 11 short stories shows a comic genius at work, fashioning every genre from low farce to shrewd social insight, along wi...

„Taps at Reveille” (1935) is a collection of 18 short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, published in 1935 and dedicated to Fitzgerald’s agent Harold Ober. It was the fourth and final collection of short stories Fitzgerald published in his lifetime. It brings together several of his best stories from the late 1920s and early 1930s, including „Crazy Sunday”, and „Babylon Revisited”, a story considered by many to be his masterpiece in the genre.

Set in the South of France in the decade after World War I, „Tender Is the Night” is the story of a brilliant and magnetic psychiatrist named Dick Diver who marries one of his patients, a wealthy schizophrenic, Nicole Warren; as she slowly recovers, she exhausts his vitality until he is, in Fitzgerald’s words, un homme épuisé („a used-up man”). The novel explores how love can be won, lost, and perverted by the myriad forces that shape our lives, including money, illness, and ...

„Some Do Not...”, the first volume of Ford Madox Ford’s highly regarded tetralogy „Parade’s End”. Set during the First World War, the novel follows the conflicted relationship between conservative English aristocrat Christopher Tietjens, his beautiful but headstrong wife, Sylvia, and fearless young suffragette Valentine Wannop. An unforgettable exploration of the tensions of a society confronting catastrophe, sexuality, power, madness, and violence, this narrative examines ti...

In the Twelfth Century an intrigue at the court of the great Sultan Saladin brings forth the Sphinx Emerald to play its strange magic role. A miniature image of the sphinx hypnotizes its owners and inspires them to make history-changing decisions. Ninth story in the series about the Sphinx Emerald from the master story tell H. Bedford-Jones!

The Sphinx Emerald passed into other hands – to reappear centuries later when conquering Cambyses came storming into Egypt with his Persian legions... Readers are treated to authentic historical dramas, all centering on the mysterious jewel that seems to contain a miniature image of the sphinx. A great pulp extravaganza!

„Richelieu Raids a Tomb” is the fourteenth installment about the Sphinx Emerald from a Canadian-American historical, adventure fantasy, science fiction, crime and Western writer H. Bedford-Jones. Here the malign magic of the Sphinx Emerald works its spell anew in one of the famous dramas of history. And again the strange Sphinx Emerald came to the scene to play its part in the unrolling drama.

The definite collection of Fitzgerald’s short stories; edited and with a preface by the foremost Fitzgerald scholar Matthew J. Bruccoli. The forty-three masterpieces range from early stories that capture the fashion of the times to later ones written after the author’s fabled crack-up, which are sober reflections on his own youthful excesses. This essential collection is ample testament to that statement, and a monument to the genius of one of the great voices in the history ...

Ford Madox Ford was a prolific English novelist and poet in the early 20th century. Ford wrote the best-selling novel „The Good Soldier”, as well as the „Parade’s End” series. „Privy Seal” is the second novel in the well-known „Fifth Queen” trilogy that recreates Tudor England in a masterful story of court intrigue, romance, and betrayal. Here Ford focuses on the figure of Thomas Cromwell, a powerful advisor to the King who comes to see Katharine as a rival whose good nature ...

„Lucia’s Progress”, previously published in the U.S. as „The Worshipful Lucia” is the fifth of E. F. Benson’s famous series, opening about a year after the previous story ended. In this volume both Lucia and Mapp stand for election to the Town Council, and Lucia speculates in gold shares. While re-decorating Miss Mapp’s house, Lucia discovers and hide the remains of a Roman Villa. Excitements ensue!

Perhaps the most light-hearted of all Chesterton’s works, „Manalive” follows the fun loving Innocent Smith who, after bringing joy to a boarding house, is charged with a series of crimes. Later accused even of murder and denounced for philandering everywhere he goes, Smith prompts his newfound acquaintances to recognize an important idea in most unexpected ways. In this delightfully strange mystery, Chesterton demonstrates why life is worth living, and that sometimes we need ...

The fourth installment of the popular series-a hilarious study of 1930s manner and pecking order-begins when Lucia Lucas rents a summer place-the home of Elizabeth Mapp-in the English village of Tilling. So begins a battle of one-upmanship, peppered with queenly airs, ghastly tea parties, and unnerving bridge evenings as the two combatants attempt to out-do each other to win social supremacy. The pompous Lucia and malignant Mapp are characters you will love to hate, wonderful...

The fourth part in the series, „Master of the World” continues adventures of strange and mysterious gem named the Sphinx Emerald that leaves its trail through history. Alexander of Macedon had conquered most of the world, and his legions were rolling toward Carthage when a wily little priest strangely presented to him the Sphinx Emerald...

E. F. Benson’s subject is always the petty concerns of petty people, but his talent is to make those concerns nearly as important to us as they are to his characters. For us, what happens to Benson’s people is also much funnier than it is to them. This is another of Benson’s social comedies with women battling it out for social supremacy in the village. „Mrs. Ames”, first published in 1912, has been described as a forerunner to the author’s Mapp and Lucia novels

Despite his intellectual brilliance, successful career, and sizeable inheritance, Christopher Tietjens is a largely unhappy man. Tortured by his wife’s open infidelity, caught up in his own heated affair, Tietjens attempts to put his past behind him by volunteering to fight for his country. Tragic and emotionally piercing, „No More Parade’s” by Ford Madox Ford, is a story of romance, war and betrayal that proves a brilliant sequel to „Some Do Not”.

„Paul Clifford” is a novel published in 1830 by Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton (1803-1873) who was an English novelist, playwright, and politician. It tells the life of Paul Clifford, a man who leads a dual life as both a criminal and an upscale gentleman. Paul Clifford tells the story of a chivalrous highwayman in the time of the French Revolution. This is the novel that first used the opening line ’’It was a dark and stormy night...’’

The story is set around the Wentworth mention, a small boarding house in Bolton Spa and its owners and lodgers. They are quite unlikable, mainly upper-middle-class English people who came to the Spa to cure their body illnesses, but also to fill the time and escape boredom despite having no passions, interests and work. A delightful book for anybody familiar with Benson’s work, full of all the usual light, wit and satirical caricatures that Benson does so well.

The third novel in the series, „Lucia in London” continues the adventures of Benson’s famously irrepressible characters, and bring them into hilarious conflict. Using her best social-climbing instincts and refusing to be embarrassed, Lucia sets out to conquer London and mingle with the beau monde. Soon a secret group of ’Luciaphiles’ springs up; the social climbers who make up its rank never tire of watching her get into and out of all kinds of trouble.

A novel series by G.K. Chesterton of four intertwined novellas whose central characters appear to be involved in murder, fraud, theft and treason. Are these friends involved in crimes? Are these individuals faultless as the book’s title suggests? A good book for people who love suspenseful novels that features mind-blowing twists, awesome plots, and events that will keep you engaged page by page.

An old secret and a lovely woman and three men: Barr Radison, an American adventurer, searching for the mysterious source of black and silver fox pelts, Macferris Montenay, a ruthless giant of a man, trying to carve out his own kingdom in the wilderness, and Jean Nichemus, a halfbreed and Montenay’s henchman, harboring his own sinister plans. „Ghost Hills” is one of the adventure stories of a prolific H. Bedford-Jones who is rightly called the „King of Pulps”.

Again the strange Sphinx Emerald came to the scene to play its part in the unrolling historic drama. This series about the Sphinx Emerald constitutes, as has been said, a veritable Outline of History – or perhaps „Highlights of History” would be more accurate. For this reason the greatest event in all history could not be left out.

Don Lorenzo and Arnold Neville lead separate expeditions to the South American interior whereupon they encounter the exiled king of the underground world. But can Neville help him reclaim his throne when the arch-priestess, Alloyah, raises an army of the dead? The sequel to „The Devil-Tree of El Dorado” and „A Queen of Atlantis”, „King of the Dead” is a novel among the most famous „lost race” novels written by the British author Frank Aubrey.