...|'Stolen Friendship' by Alice Maxwell | |Stolen Friendship | |By Alice Maxwell | | | |Mark Tyler was grateful for the shelter of his nephew's home and he tried to show his gratitude. He liked to be outdoors, and so | |he kept the flower beds in meticulous order, even though kneeling was difficult and getting up was even more so. And when Lucy, | |his nephew's wife, stayed late at her clubs or charity committee meetings, Mark would have the table set and dinner half going. | |At such times Lucy would rush in breathlessly and say, "Uncle Mark, you're a darling!" All evening the glow of her words would | |warm his heart. | |He was old and his hair was silver-gray, but his eyes were still an unfaded blue in his sun-bronzed face, and his understanding | |was keen and intuitive. He respected Lucy's wish to have every chair and vase just so, every flower and shrub tended properly. | |John and Lucy had no children, but they were constantly...
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...Introduction The familiarity with the love tradition makes it easily mistakable for a natural and universal phenomenon and even brings a laxity of enquiring into its origins. However, it is difficult of not impossible to show love to be anything more than an artistic phenomenon or construct- a literary per formative innovation of Middle Ages. Courtly love was a medieval European formation of nobly, and politely expressing love and admiration. Courtly love was secret and between members of the nobility. (Simpson). The term "courtly love" was first popularized by Gaston Paris in 1883. It has since come under a wide variety of definitions and uses, even being brushed off as nineteenth-century romantic fiction. Its understanding, beginning, and weight persist as an issue of significant question. Origin of the term ‘courtly love’ The term courtly love was given its original definition by Gaston Paris in 1883 in the journal Romania in the article "Études sur les romans de la Table Ronde: Lancelot du Lac, II: Le conte de la charrette" a treatise inspecting Chretien de Troyes's Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart (1177). The term courtly was derived from the term ‘amour courtis’ which according to Paris was an admiration and an ennobling discipline. The lover accepts the autonomy of his mistress and tries to make himself worthy of her attention by trying to act bravely and doing whatever deed she desires. In order to prove to her his passion and his unwavering commitment and, he...
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...N A R R AT I V E M AG A Z I N E .C O M A Father’s Story A S T O R Y by Andre Dubus Andre Dubus, novelist, essayist, and short story writer, was born into a Cajun-Irish Catholic family in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1936. A Marine Corps captain, he left the military to pursue an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and subsequently lived as a writer and teacher of writing. Dubus was best appreciated for short fiction, receiving the PEN/Malamud Award, the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Rea Award. “A Father’s Story” is reprinted from Selected Stories (Vintage, 1989). Dubus died at home in Massachusetts in 1999. M Y N A M E I S Luke Ripley, and here is what I call my life: I own a stable of thirty horses, and I have young people who teach riding, and we board some horses too. This is in northeastern Massachusetts. I have a barn with an indoor ring, and outside I’ve got two fenced-in rings and a pasture that ends at a woods with trails. I call it my life because it looks like it is, and people I know call it that, but it’s a life I can get away from when I hunt and fish, and some nights after dinner when I sit in the dark in the front room and listen to opera. The room faces the lawn and the road, a two-lane country road. When cars come around the curve northwest of the house, they light up the lawn for an instant, the leaves of the maple out by the road and the hemlock closer to the window. Then I’m alone again, or I’d appear to be...
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...In Cold Blood Truman Capote I. The Last to See Them Alive The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there." Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them. Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances. Not that there's much to see simply an aimless congregation of buildings divided in the center by the main-line tracks of the Santa Fe Rail-road, a haphazard hamlet bounded on the south by a brown stretch of the Arkansas (pronounced "Ar-kan-sas") River, on the north by a highway, Route 50, and on the east and west by prairie lands and wheat fields. After rain, or when snowfalls thaw, the streets, unnamed, unshaded, unpaved, turn from the thickest dust into the direst mud. At one end of the town stands a stark old stucco structure, the roof of which supports an electric sign - dance - but the dancing has ceased and the advertisement has been dark for several years. Nearby is another building...
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...In Cold Blood Truman Capote I. The Last to See Them Alive The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there." Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them. Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances. Not that there's much to see simply an aimless congregation of buildings divided in the center by the main-line tracks of the Santa Fe Rail-road, a haphazard hamlet bounded on the south by a brown stretch of the Arkansas (pronounced "Ar-kan-sas") River, on the north by a highway, Route 50, and on the east and west by prairie lands and wheat fields. After rain, or when snowfalls thaw, the streets, unnamed, unshaded, unpaved, turn from the thickest dust into the direst mud. At one end of the town stands a stark old stucco structure, the roof of which supports an electric sign - dance - but the dancing has ceased and the advertisement has been dark for several years. Nearby is another building...
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...Chapter 18 PART 3 – THE ENEMY Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 PART I “THE SPARK” I clasp the flask between my hands even though the warmth from the tea has long since leached into the frozen air. My muscles are clenched tight against the cold. If a pack of wild dogs were to appear at this moment, the odds of scaling a tree before they attacked are not in my favor. I should get up, move around, and work the stiffness from my limbs. But instead I sit, as motionless as the rock beneath me, while the dawn begins to lighten the woods. I can't fight the sun. I can only watch helplessly as it drags me into a day that I've been dreading for months. By noon they will all be at my new house in the Victor's Village. The reporters, the camera crews, even Effie Trinket, my old escort, will have made their way to District 12 from the Capitol. I wonder if Effie will still be wearing that silly pink wig, or if she'll be sporting some other unnatural color especially for the Victory Tour. There will be others waiting, too. A staff to cater to my every need on the long train trip. A prep team to beautify me for public appearances. My stylist and friend, Cinna, who designed the gorgeous outfits that first made the audience take notice of me in the Hunger Games. If it were up to me, I would try to forget the Hunger Games entirely. Never speak of them. Pretend they were nothing but a bad dream. But the Victory Tour makes that...
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...17 Chapter 18 PART 3 – THE ENEMY Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 PART I “THE SPARK” I clasp the flask between my hands even though the warmth from the tea has long since leached into the frozen air. My muscles are clenched tight against the cold. If a pack of wild dogs were to appear at this moment, the odds of scaling a tree before they attacked are not in my favor. I should get up, move around, and work the stiffness from my limbs. But instead I sit, as motionless as the rock beneath me, while the dawn begins to lighten the woods. I can't fight the sun. I can only watch helplessly as it drags me into a day that I've been dreading for months. By noon they will all be at my new house in the Victor's Village. The reporters, the camera crews, even Effie Trinket, my old escort, will have made their way to District 12 from the Capitol. I wonder if Effie will still be wearing that silly pink wig, or if she'll be sporting some other unnatural color especially for the Victory Tour. There will be others waiting, too. A staff to cater to my every need on the long train trip. A prep team to beautify me for public appearances. My stylist and friend, Cinna, who designed the gorgeous outfits that first made the audience take notice of me in the Hunger Games. If it were up to me, I would try to forget the Hunger Games entirely. Never speak of them. Pretend they were nothing but a bad dream. But the Victory Tour makes that...
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...a United States Army general, best known for his flamboyant character and his command of the Seventh United States Army, and later the Third United States Army, in the European Theater of World War II. Born in 1885 to a privileged family with an extensive military background, Patton attended the Virginia Military Institute, and later the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He participated in the 1912 Olympic Modern Pentathlon, and was instrumental in designing the M1913 "Patton Saber". Patton first saw combat during the Pancho Villa Expedition in 1916, taking part in America's first military action using motor vehicles. He later joined the newly formed United States Tank Corps of the American Expeditionary Forces and saw action in World War I, first commanding the U.S. tank school in France before being wounded near the end of the war. In the interwar period, Patton remained a central figure in the development of armored warfare doctrine in the U.S. Army, serving in numerous staff positions throughout the country. Rising through the ranks, he commanded the U.S. 2nd Armored Division at the time of the U.S. entry into World War II. Patton led U.S. troops into the Mediterranean theater with an invasion of Casablanca during Operation Torch in 1942, where he later established himself as an effective commander through his rapid rehabilitation of the demoralized U.S. II Corps. He commanded the Seventh Army during the Invasion of Sicily, where he was the first allied commander to reach Messina...
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...COLLAPSE HOW S O C I E T I E S CHOOSE TO FAIL OR S U C C E E D JARED DIAMOND VIK ING VIKING Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England First published in 2005 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 13579 10 8642 Copyright © Jared Diamond, 2005 All rights reserved Maps by Jeffrey L. Ward LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Diamond, Jared M. Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed/Jared Diamond. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-670-03337-5 1. Social history—Case studies. 2. Social change—Case studies. 3. Environmental policy— Case studies. I. Title. HN13. D5 2005 304.2'8—dc22...
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... among which I take to be Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, the Ancient Mariner, Moby Dick and Pincher Martin, it's a tale of disaster at sea coupled with miraculous survival—a boys' adventure for grownups." —Margaret Atwood, The Sunday Times (London) "A fabulous romp through an imagination by turns ecstatic, cunning, despairing and resilient, this novel is an impressive achievement. . . . Martel displays the clever voice and tremendous storytelling skills of an emerging master." —Publisher's Weekly (starred review) "[Life of Pi] has a buoyant, exotic, insistence reminiscent of Edgar Allen Poe's most Gothic fiction. . . . Oddities abound and the storytelling is first-rate. Yann Martel has written a novel full of grisly reality, outlandish plot, inventive setting and thought-provoking questions about the value and purpose of fiction." —The Edmonton journal "Martel's ceaselessly clever writing . . . [and] artful, occasionally hilarious, internal dialogue . . . make a fine argument for the divinity of good art." —The Gazette "Astounding and beautiful. . . . The book is a pleasure not only for the subtleties of its philosophy but also for its ingenious and surprising story. Martel is a confident, heartfelt artist, and his imagination is cared for in a writing style that is both unmistakable and marvelously reserved. The ending of Life of Pi... is a show of such sophisticated genius that I could scarcely keep my eyes in my head as I read it." —The Vancouver Sun "I guarantee that...
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...1 EFFI BRIEST Theodor Fontane 1895 TRANSLATED AND ABRIDGED BY WILLIAM A. COOPER, A.M. Associate Professor of German, Leland Stanford Jr. University CHAPTER I 2 CHAPTER I In front of the old manor house occupied by the von Briest family since the days of Elector George William, the bright sunshine was pouring down upon the village road, at the quiet hour of noon. The wing of the mansion looking toward the garden and park cast its broad shadow over a white and green checkered tile walk and extended out over a large round bed, with a sundial in its centre and a border of Indian shot and rhubarb. Some twenty paces further, and parallel to the wing of the house, there ran a churchyard wall, entirely covered with a small-leaved ivy, except at the place where an opening had been made for a little white iron gate. Behind this arose the shingled tower of Hohen-Cremmen, whose weather vane glistened in the sunshine, having only recently been regilded. The front of the house, the wing, and the churchyard wall formed, so to speak, a horseshoe, inclosing a small ornamental garden, at the open side of which was seen a pond, with a small footbridge and a tied-up boat. Close by was a swing, with its crossboard hanging from two ropes at either end, and its frame posts beginning to lean to one side. Between the pond and the circular bed stood a clump of giant plane trees, half hiding the swing. The terrace in front of the manor house, with its tubbed aloe plants and a few garden chairs...
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...Juliet and Rosamond, remembering the road to Stratford-on-Avon Note Nuthanger Farm is a real place, like all the other places in the book. But Mr. and Mrs. Cane, their little girl Lucy and their farmhands are fictitious and bear no intentional resemblance to any persons known to me, living or dead. Acknowledgements I acknowledge with gratitude the help I have received not only from my family but also from my friends Reg Sones and Hal Summers, who read the book before publication and made valuable suggestions. I also wish to thank warmly Mrs. Margaret Apps and Miss Miriam Hobbs, who took pains with the typing and helped me very much. I am indebted, for a knowledge of rabbits and their ways, to Mr. R. M. Lockley's remarkable book, The Private Life of the Rabbit. Anyone who wishes to know more about the migrations of yearlings, about pressing chin glands, chewing pellets, the effects of over-crowding in warrens, the phenomenon of re-absorption of fertilized embryos, the capacity of buck rabbits to fight stoats, or any other features of Lapine life, should refer to that definitive work. PART I The Journey 1. The Notice Board CHORUS: Why do you cry out thus, unless at some vision of horror? CASSANDRA: The house reeks of death and dripping blood. CHORUS: How so? 'Tis but the odor of the altar sacrifice. CASSANDRA: The stench is like a breath from the tomb. Aeschylus, Agamemnon The primroses...
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...A FAREWELL TO ARMS BOOK ONE 1 In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves. The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees and beyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare. There was fighting in the mountains and at night we could see the flashes from the artillery. In the dark it was like summer lightning, but the nights were cool and there was not the feeling of a storm coming. Sometimes in the dark we heard the troops marching under the window and guns going past pulled by motortractors. There was much traffic at night and many mules on the roads with boxes of ammunition on each side of their packsaddles and gray motor trucks that carried men, and other trucks with loads covered with canvas that moved slower in the traffic. There were big guns too that passed in the day drawn by tractors, the long barrels of the guns covered with...
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...Yann Martel: Life of Pi life of pi A NOVEL author's note This book was born as I was hungry. Let me explain. In the spring of 1996, my second book, a novel, came out in Canada. It didn't fare well. Reviewers were puzzled, or damned it with faint praise. Then readers ignored it. Despite my best efforts at playing the clown or the trapeze artist, the media circus made no difference. The book did not move. Books lined the shelves of bookstores like kids standing in a row to play baseball or soccer, and mine was the gangly, unathletic kid that no one wanted on their team. It vanished quickly and quietly. The fiasco did not affect me too much. I had already moved on to another story, a novel set in Portugal in 1939. Only I was feeling restless. And I had a little money. So I flew to Bombay. This is not so illogical if you realize three things: that a stint in India will beat the restlessness out of any living creature; that a little money can go a long way there; and that a novel set in Portugal in 1939 may have very little to do with Portugal in 1939. I had been to India before, in the north, for five months. On that first trip I had come to the subcontinent completely unprepared. Actually, I had a preparation of one word. When I told a friend who knew the country well of my travel plans, he said casually, "They speak a funny English in India. They like words like bamboozle." I remembered his words as my plane started its descent towards Delhi, so the word bamboozle ...
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...A Company of Swans Chapter One There was no lovelier view in England, Harriet knew this. To her right, the soaring towers of King's College Chapel and the immaculate lawns sloping down to the river's edge; to her left, the blue and gold of the scillas and daffodils splashed in rich abundance between the trees of the Fellows' Gardens. Yet as she leaned over the stone parapet of the bridge on which she stood, her face was pensive and her feet— and this was unusual in the daughter of a professor of classics in the year 1912— were folded in the fifth position. She was a thin girl, brown-haired and brown-eyed, whose gravity and gentleness could not always conceal her questing spirit and eagerness for life. Sensibly dressed in a blue caped coat and tarn o'shanter bought to last, a leather music case propped against the wall beside her, she was a familiar figure to the passers-by: to ancient Dr. Ferguson, tottering across the willow-fringed bridge in inner pursuit of an errant Indo-Germanic verb; to a gardener trimming the edges of the grass, who raised his cap to her. Professor Morton's clever daughter; Miss Morton's biddable niece. To grow up in Cambridge was to be fortunate indeed. To be able to look at this marvelous city each day was a blessing of which one should never tire. Harriet, crumbling bread into the water for the world's most blase ducks, had told herself this again and again. But it is not cities which make the destinies of eighteen-year-old girls, it is people— and...
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