Linda Grant, beset by medical bills and other pressing obligations, tells her children that they will not be celebrating Christmas this year. Older Keith takes the news in stride, while younger Teddy angrily insists he will have his Christmas turkey one way or another. When the neighborhood schoolteacher drops by to extend an invitation to
[...]Lazarus is 1906 short story by Leonid Andreyev. The story is a speculation about the life of the Biblical Lazarus after Jesus brings him out of the tomb. And when the scarlet, flattened globe would lower, Lazarus would set out for the desert and walk straight toward the sun, as though striving to reach it. He always walked straight toward the sun
[...]“The Reluctant Dragon” is an 1898 children’s story by Kenneth Grahame, originally published as a chapter in his book Dream Days. It is Grahame’s most famous short story, arguably better known than Dream Days itself or the related The Golden Age. It can be seen as a prototype to most modern stories in which the dragon is a
[...]The Awakening is a novel by Kate Chopin, first published in 1899. Set in New Orleans and on the Louisiana Gulf coast at the end of the 19th century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle between her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century American
[...]In «A Letter to a Hindu» Tolstoy argued that only through the principle of love could the Indian people free themselves from colonial British rule. These ideas ultimately proved to be successful in 1947 in the culmination of the Indian Independence Movement. In 1908, Indian revolutionary Taraknath was wrote to Leo Tolstoy, by then one of the
[...]The Death of Ivan Ilyich – first published in 1886, is a novella by Leo Tolstoy, considered one of the masterpieces of his late fiction, written shortly after his religious conversion of the late 1870s. “Usually classed among the best examples of the novella”, The Death of Ivan Ilyich tells the story of a high-court judge in
[...]The Wind in the Willows is a children’s novel by Scottish novelist Kenneth Grahame, first published in 1908. Alternately slow-moving and fast-paced, it focuses on four anthropomorphised animals (Mole, Rat (a European water vole), Toad, and Badger) in a pastoral version of Edwardian England. The novel is notable for its mixture of mysticism,
[...]A Russian Christmas Party by Leo Tolstoy is about a generous family on the brink of ruin whose mother pins their hopes for restoring their fortune on their son, Nicolas’ marriage to a wealthy bride. Nicolas isn’t cooperating, for he loves a poor girl named Sonia. Alas! How will they see it through? The Christmas stories of the famous
[...]The Tao Te Ching is a Taoist philosophical treatise. Lao Tzu, a great Ancient Chinese philosopher and teacher, is considered to be the author of this book. We owe this book to an unnamed guardian who kept safe the far western borders of a country, Zhou in the fifth century BC. The legend says that exhausted from misunderstanding Teacher with a
[...]“God Sees the Truth, But Waits” is a short story by Russian author Leo Tolstoy first published in 1872. The story, about a man sent to prison for a murder he didn’t commit, takes the form of a parable of forgiveness. English translations were also published under titles «The Confessed Crime» and «Exiled to Siberia». The
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