As a young man in the summer of 1897, Jack London joined the Klondike gold rush. From that seminal experience emerged these gripping, inimitable wilderness tales, which have endured as some of London’s best and most defining work. With remarkable insight and unflinching realism, London describes the punishing adversity that awaited men in the brutal, frozen expanses of the Yukon, and the extreme tactics these adventurers and travelers adopted to survive. As Van Wyck Brooks observed, “One felt that the stories had been somehow lived–that they were not merely observed–that the author was not telling tales but telling his life.”
Added by: Kahena | Karma: 11526.37 | Fiction literature | 10 November 2010
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The Son of the Wolf - Tales of the North
Although Jack London (1876-1916) wrote on a great variety of subjects, he gained his first and most lasting fame as the author of tales of the Klondike gold rush. At the age of twenty-one London himself had trekked to the Yukon in hope of easy riches. What he found instead was a wealth of extraordinary experience, which he turned to account in his first collection of stories, The Son of the Wolf: Tales of the Far North (1900). The book centres on the exploits of Malemute Kid, who dispenses crude but unerring justice through his canny understanding of the minds and hearts of the people of this raw frontier territory.
Added by: Kahena | Karma: 11526.37 | Fiction literature | 6 November 2010
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Twice-Told Tales
Twice-Told Tales is a short story collection in two volumes by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The first was published in the spring of 1837, and the second in 1842. The stories had all been previously published in magazines and annuals, hence the name.
The human mind is a dark, bottomless pit, and sometimes it works in strange and frightening ways. That sound in the night . . . is it a door banging in the wind, or a murdered man knocking inside his coffin? The face in the mirror . . . is it yours, or the face of someone standing behind you, who is never there when you turn round?
