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Brideshead Revisited-The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder

haveebook — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 16:38:04 +0000

Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder.

eBook Details

Title:

Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder.

Author:

Waugh, Evelyn (Arthur Evelyn St John)

Published:

1945

Publisher:

Little, Brown and Company

Tags:

fiction, film/TV adaptation, Family Saga

Description:

Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder’s infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them.—Goodreads.

Format:

PDF

Pages:

206

Waugh, Evelyn (Arthur Evelyn St John):

Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh (28 October 1903—10 April 1966) was an English writer of novels, biographies and travel books. He was also a prolific journalist and reviewer of books. His most famous works include the early satires Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934), the novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) and the Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour (1952–61). Waugh is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century.

A Handful of Dust

haveebook — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 16:33:48 +0000

A Handful of Dust

eBook Details

Title:

A Handful of Dust

Author:

Waugh, Evelyn (Arthur Evelyn St John)

Published:

1934

Publisher:

Penguin Books

Tags:

fiction, satire, film/TV adaptation

Description:

Set between the wars in the chic upper-middle classes in and around London, A Handful Of Dust is full of horrible people doing horrible things to each other, but it adds up to a bitter indictment of human behaviour. And it’s not all jokes. There’s despair lurking beneath the brittle laughs, and sadness at the waste of potential. … There’s a plot point about reading Dickens that results in the darkest comedy, and perhaps a scathing statement about literature and civilization.

Waugh is simply a brilliant writer. I don’t think satire requires characters of much depth. But Waugh gives you enough details so you know everyone in this particular vanity fair. Their conversations are tart and suggestive, with people seldom saying what they’re thinking.

What’s remarkable is that beneath the exaggeration, there’s a brutal examination of the horrible things people are capable of doing—to themselves and each other.—Glen Sumi @ Goodreads.com.

Format:

PDF

Pages:

153

Waugh, Evelyn (Arthur Evelyn St John):

Scoop

haveebook — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 16:29:19 +0000

Scoop

eBook Details

Title:

Scoop

Author:

Waugh, Evelyn (Arthur Evelyn St John)

Published:

1938

Publisher:

Chapman & Hall

Tags:

fiction, satire, film/TV adaptation

Description:

William Boot, a young man who lives in genteel poverty, far from the iniquities of London, contributes nature notes to Lord Copper’s Daily Beast, a national daily newspaper. He is dragooned into becoming a foreign correspondent, when the editors mistake him for John Courtney Boot, a fashionable novelist and a remote cousin. He is sent to Ishmaelia, a fictional state in East Africa, to report on the crisis there.

Lord Copper believes it “a very promising little war” and proposes “to give it fullest publicity”. Despite his total ineptitude, Boot accidentally gets the journalistic “scoop” of the title. When he returns, the credit goes to the other Boot and William is left to return to his bucolic pursuits, much to his relief.—Wikipedia.

Format:

PDF

Pages:

142

Waugh, Evelyn (Arthur Evelyn St John):

The Day of the Locust

haveebook — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 16:25:21 +0000

The Day of the Locust

eBook Details

Title:

The Day of the Locust

Author:

West, Nathanael

Published:

1939

Tags:

fiction, film/TV adaptation

Description:

The Day of the Locust is a novel about Hollywood and its corrupting touch, about the American dream turned into a sun-drenched California nightmare. Nathanael West’s Hollywood is not the glamorous “home of the stars” but a seedy world of little people, some hopeful, some despairing, all twisted by their own desires — from the ironically romantic artist narrator, to a macho movie cowboy, a middle-aged innocent from America’s heartland, and the hard-as-nails call girl would-be-star whom they all lust after. An unforgettable portrayal of a world that mocks the real and rewards the sham, turns its back on love to plunge into empty sex, and breeds a savage violence that is its own undoing, this novel stands as a classic indictment of all that is most extravagant and uncontrolled in American life.-

Format: PDF

Pages: 150

Nathanael West:

Born in New York City, The United States, October 17, 1903,December 22, 1940, Nathanael von Wallenstein Weinstein to prosperous Jewish parents, from the first West set about creating his own legend, and anglicising his name was part of that process. At Brown University in Rhode Island, he befriended writer and humourist S. J. Perelman (who later married his sister), and started writing and drawing cartoons. As his cousin Nathan Wallenstein also attended Brown, West took to borrowing his work and presenting it as his own. He almost didn’t graduate at all, on account of failing a crucial course in modern drama. West indulged in a little dramatics of his own and, in tearful contrition, convinced a gullible professor to upgrade his marks.

After spending a couple of years in Paris, where he wrote his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, he returned to New York, where he managed (badly by all accounts) a small hotel, the Sutton, owned by his family. As well as providing free board for struggling friends like Dashiell Hammett, the job also gave West ample opportunity to observe the strange collection of misfits and drifters who congregated in the hotel’s drugstore. Some of these would appear in West’s novel Miss Lonelyhearts.

West spent the rest of his days in Hollywood, writing B-movie screenplays for small studios and immersing himself in the unglamorous underworld of Tinseltown, with its dope dealers, extras, gangsters, whores and has-beens. All would end up in West’s final masterpiece, The Day of the Locust.

West’s life ultimately ended as tragically as his fictions. Recently married, and with better-paid script work coming in, West was happy and successful. Then, returning from a trip to Mexico with his wife Eileen, he crashed his car after ignoring a stop sign and killed them both. This was just one day after the death of his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald.-goodreads.com

The Age of Innocence

haveebook — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 16:19:17 +0000

The Age of Innocence

eBook Details

Title:

The Age of Innocence

Author:

Wharton, Edith

Published:

1920

Publisher:

D. Appleton and Company

Tags:

fiction, Pulitzer Prize, film/TV adaptation

Description:

An upper-class couple’s impending marriage, and the introduction of the bride’s cousin, plagued by scandal, whose presence threatens their happiness. Though the novel questions the assumptions and morals of 1870s New York society, it never develops into an outright condemnation of the institution.The novel is noted for Wharton’s attention to detail and its accurate portrayal of how the 19th-century East Coast American upper class lived, and the social tragedy of its plot. Wharton was 58 years old at publication; she had lived in that world and had seen it change dramatically by the end of World War I. The title is an ironic comment on the polished outward manners of New York society when compared to its inward machinations. It is believed to have been drawn from the popular 1785 painting A Little Girl by Sir Joshua Reynolds that later became known as The Age of Innocence and was widely reproduced as the commercial face of childhood in the later half of the 18th century.

Format:

PDF

Pages:

245

Wharton, Edith:

Edith Wharton (born Edith Newbold Jones; January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and designer. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927, 1928 and 1930. Wharton combined her insider’s view of America’s privileged classes with a brilliant, natural wit to write humorous, incisive novels and short stories of social and psychological insight. She was well acquainted with many of her era’s other literary and public figures, including Theodore Roosevelt.

The Age of Innocence (1920) won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for literature, making Wharton the first woman to win the award. The three fiction judges—literary critic Stuart Pratt Sherman, literature professor Robert Morss Lovett, and novelist Hamlin Garland—voted to give the prize to Sinclair Lewis for his satire Main Street, but Columbia University’s advisory board, led by conservative university president Nicholas Murray Butler, overturned their decision and awarded the prize to The Age of Innocence.

Many of Wharton’s novels are characterized by a subtle use of dramatic irony. Having grown up in upper-class, late-nineteenth-century society, Wharton became one of its most astute critics, in such works as The House of Mirth and The Age of Innocence.

To the Lighthouse

haveebook — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 16:15:09 +0000

To the Lighthouse

eBook Details

Title:

To the Lighthouse

Author:

Woolf, Virginia

Published:

1927

Publisher:

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Tags:

fiction, literature

Description:

To the Lighthouse (1927) is set on two days ten years apart. The plot centres on the Ramsay family’s anticipation of and reflection upon a visit to a lighthouse and the connected familial tensions. One of the primary themes of the novel is the struggle in the creative process that beset painter Lily Briscoe while she struggles to paint in the midst of the family drama. The novel is also a meditation upon the lives of a nation’s inhabitants in the midst of war, and of the people left behind. It also explores the passage of time, and how women are forced by society to allow men to take emotional strength from them. –Wikipedia

Format:

PDF

Pages:

157

Author Bio for Woolf, Virginia

Adeline Virginia Woolf (née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One’s Own (1929), with its famous dictum, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

Woolf suffered from severe bouts of mental illness throughout her life, thought to have been what is now termed bipolar disorder, and committed suicide by drowning in 1941 at the age of 59.

1984 Nineteen Eighty-Four

haveebook — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 16:11:12 +0000

1984 [Nineteen Eighty-Four]

eBook Details

Title:

1984 Nineteen Eighty-Four

Author:

Blair, Eric Arthur

Published:

1949

Publisher:

S. J. Reginald Saunders & Co. Ltd.

Tags:

fiction, dystopia, science fiction, film/TV adaptation

Description:

Nineteen Eighty-Four, often published as 1984, is a dystopian novel by English author George Orwell published in 1949. The novel is set in Airstrip One (formerly known as Great Britain), a province of the superstate Oceania in a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance and public manipulation, dictated by a political system euphemistically named English Socialism (or Ingsoc in the government’s invented language, Newspeak) under the control of a privileged elite of the Inner Party, that persecutes individualism and independent thinking as “thoughtcrime”.–Wikipedia.

Format:

PDF

Pages:

377

Blair, Eric Arthur:

Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), who used the pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism.

Orwell wrote literary criticism, poetry, fiction, and polemical journalism. He is perhaps best known for his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and the allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945). His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working class life in the north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, are widely acclaimed, as are his essays on politics, literature, language, and culture. In 2008, The Times ranked him second on a list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945”.

Orwell’s work continues to influence popular and political culture, and the term Orwellian—descriptive of totalitarian or authoritarian social practices—has entered the language together with many of his neologisms, including, but not limited to, cold war, Big Brother, Thought Police, Room 101, memory hole, doublethink, and thoughtcrime.

Death Comes for the Archbishop

haveebook — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 16:01:49 +0000

Death Comes for the Archbishop

eBook Details

Title:

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Author:

Cather, Willa

Published:

1927

Publisher:

William Heinemann Ltd

Tags:

fiction, religion, Navajo Indians

Description:

Death Comes for the Archbishop is a 1927 novel by American author Willa Cather about the attempts of a Catholic bishop and a priest to establish a diocese in the New Mexico Territory. The story is based on two historical figures, Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Joseph Projectus Machebeuf and rather than any one singular plot, is the stylized re-telling of their lives serving as Roman Catholic clergy in New Mexico.

The novel has been listed in Life Magazine’s list of the 100 outstanding books of 1924-1944; Time’s 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005; Modern Library’s list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century; and Western Writers of America 7th-best “Western Novel” of the 20th century.—Wikipedia

Format:

PDF

Pages:

168

Cather, Willa:

Willa Cather (7 December, 1873—24 April, 1947) born Wilella Sibert Cather was a novelist noted for her portrayals of the settlers and frontier life on the American plains. She received the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 for her novel One of Ours. Cather followed that up with Death Comes for the Archbishop in 1928, included on the Modern Library 100 Best Novels of the twentieth century as well as Time’s one hundred best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.

At age 9 Cather moved with her family from Virginia to frontier Nebraska, where from age 10 she lived in the village of Red Cloud. There she grew up among the immigrants from Europe—Swedes, Bohemians, Russians, and Germans—who were breaking the land on the Great Plains.

At the University of Nebraska, she showed a marked talent for journalism and story writing, and on graduating in 1895 she obtained a position in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on a family magazine. Later she worked as copy editor and music and drama editor of the Pittsburgh Leader. She turned to teaching in 1901 and in 1903 published her first book of verses, April Twilights. In 1905, after the publication of her first collection of short stories, The Troll Garden, she was appointed managing editor of McClure’s magazine, the New York muckraking monthly. After building up its declining circulation, she left in 1912 to devote herself wholly to writing novels.

Cather’s first novel, Alexander’s Bridge (1912), was a factitious story of cosmopolitan life. Under the influence of Sarah Orne Jewett’s regionalism, however, she turned to her familiar Nebraska material. With O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918), which has frequently been adjudged her finest achievement, she found her characteristic themes—the spirit and courage of the frontier she had known in her youth. One of Ours (1922) and A Lost Lady (1923) mourned the passing of the pioneer spirit. In her earlier Song of the Lark (1915), as well as in the tales assembled in Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920), including the much-anthologized “Paul’s Case,” and Lucy Gayheart (1935), Cather reflected the other side of her experience—the struggle of a talent to emerge from the constricting life of the prairies and the stifling effects of small-town life.

A mature statement of both themes can be found in Obscure Destinies (1932). With success and middle age, however, Cather experienced a strong disillusionment, which was reflected in The Professor’s House (1925) and her essays Not Under Forty (1936). Her solution was to write of the pioneer spirit of another age, that of the French Catholic missionaries in the Southwest in Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) and of the French Canadians at Quebec in Shadows on the Rock (1931). For the setting of her last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), she used the Virginia of her ancestors and her childhood.Cather died on April 24, 1947, of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 73 in her home at 570 Park Avenue in Manhattan.

As I Lay Dying

haveebook — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 15:56:16 +0000

As I Lay Dying

eBook Details

Title:

As I Lay Dying

Author:

Faulkner, William

Published:

1935

Publisher:

Chatto & Windus

Tags:

fiction, Mississippi, U.S.A, film/TV adaptation

Description:

As I Lay Dying is Faulkner’s harrowing account of the Bundre family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Told in turns by each of the family members—including Addie herself—the novel ranges in mood from dark comedy to the deepest pathos.

Format:

PDF

Pages:

158

Faulkner, William:

William Cuthbert Faulkner (September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays, and screenplays. He is primarily known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life.

Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers in American literature generally and Southern literature specifically. Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, for which he became the only Mississippi-born Nobel laureate. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century; also on the list were As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932). Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is often included on similar lists.

Last Term at Malory Towers

haveebook — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 15:43:53 +0000

Last Term at Malory Towers

eBook Details

Title:

Last Term at Malory Towers (Malory Towers 6)

Author:

Blyton, Enid

Illustrator:

Lloyd, Stanley

Published:

1951

Publisher:

Granada

Tags:

fiction, juvenile, school stories

Description:

Darrell’s last term at her beloved Malory Towers, and happily she is made head girl of the school, an honour she takes very seriously and is immensely proud of. But the term has its ups and downs with Gwendoline constantly grumbling about her father, and then suddenly finds herself faced with a tremendous shock which has her leaving before the term ends. And new girl, Amanda, who constantly boasts about her old school, Trenigan Towers, which sadly burned to the ground, and so finds it difficult to settle at a school she sees as second best.—Julie Heginbotham.

Format:

PDF

Pages:

129

Blyton, Enid:

Enid Blyton (1897-1968) was a prolific English author of children’s books. Born in London, she began writing while still in school. Her first attempts at writing were rejected by publishers which just made her more determined to succeed. She trained as a teacher and in her spare time continued to write. Her first book, a collection of poems, was published in 1922. Her first series of books, “Old Thatch”, began in 1934 and eventually encompassed 28 books. In the 1940’s she began to churn out books sometimes three or four per year. By the 1950’s she was publishing upwards of 50 books per year. In all, she wrote over 750 books which sold over 600 million copies. While critics called her writing unimaginative and lacking literary merit, this did not stop her adoring fans from scooping her books off the shelf. Even after her death, her endearing stories continue to draw the rapt attention of children everywhere. (Enid Blyton Society)

Most of Blyton’s books were illustrated. Unfortunately, many of the illustrators are not yet in the public domain here in Canada. Each edition of her books frequently brought a different set of illustrations by a different illustrator. When possible, we include the illustrations from any edition where the artist is in the public domain. We have a few of her early nature books which we have chosen not to publish, as the art is integral to the book. However, most of her stories appear to be quite standalone without the art, and we bring them to you un-illustrated.