Prospero’s Isle

Latest articles

• "Investigations of a Dog" (1922) by Franz Kafka

  27 June by Franz Kafka

  A solitary dog recalls the investigations he had undertaken in his youth to understand the whys and the wherefores of such questions as food, hunger, language and communication with other members of his community. In the course of his investigations he had encountered strange and quasi-mystical (...)

• "The Debt Paid Late (1941)" – one of Stefan Zweig’s best stories now available on-line in English

  17 June by Stefan Zweig

  A middle-aged woman writes to an old friend to recount how during a brief holiday in the Tyrolean mountains she’d encountered an actor that they both had utterly worshipped in their adolescence and who’d since fallen on hard times. She reveals to her old friend how the actor had played a key role (...)

• "On a Spring Evening" and other stories by Guy de Maupassant

  10 June by Guy de Maupassant

  More of the master’s best stories, all with a distinctive and distinctively Gallic touch, vous comprenez?
  All of these stories have been translated specially for this site. TABLE OF CONTENTS
  1. ON A SPRING EVENING (1881) Jeanne and Jacques have grown up together, have fallen in love and are (...)

• "Peter Pan" by J. M. Barrie (1911)

  6 June by J. M. Barrie

  One of the most charming stories ever written with young people in mind, the account of how Wendy and her brothers meet up with a little boy who refuses to grow up, Peter Pan, who teaches them how to fly so that they can escape with him and his fairy companion Tinker Bell to Neverland, the land (...)

• "Nothing To Be Done!" and other previously-untranslated Chekhov stories

  31 May by Anton Chekhov

  Twelve tales with a distinctive mix of humour and cynicism that have been translated into English here for the first time ever.
  1. THE CONFESSION (1883) Grigory Kuzmich is delighted to have been appointed treasurer and is pleasantly surprised to find that everyone’s suddenly very amiable with (...)

• "Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman" by Stefan Zweig (1925)

  26 May by Stefan Zweig

  In this story within a story a woman recounts a decisive moment in her life when she had tried to help a young nobleman whose passion for the roulette table had lead him to the brink of self-destruction.
  Soberly recounted with sensitivity and in-depth psychological penetration: one of the most (...)

• "Literary Lapses" by Stephen Leacock (1910)

  18 May by Steven Leacock

  A collection of stories by the Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock (1869-1944), a distinguished Professor of Economics and Political Science at Montreal’s McGill University and author of the best-selling masterworks Sunshine Stories of a Little Town and Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich. (...)

• "The Ice Palace" by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1922)

  13 May by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Sally Carrol leaves her sleepy southern town where she had declared: “I want to go places and see people. I want my mind to grow. I want to live where things happen on a big scale…” to visit her fiancé up north shortly before their planned marriage. It’s January and it’s very cold up there where a (...)

• "Green Scythe" and other stories by Anton Chekhov

  9 May by Anton Chekhov

  More outstanding stories by the most prolific short-story writer in the history of world literature. CONTENTS
  1. GREEN SCYTHE (1882) The narrator and his friends love to spend their summers on the Black Sea with with the vivacious Olya. Life is gay there but there’s a problem: Olga had promised (...)

• "Fear (Angst)" (1922) by Stefan Zweig

  29 April by Stefan Zweig

  A well-to-do married woman who has faulted with a seductive young pianist is aggressively blackmailed by a coarse young woman who threatens to denounce her to her husband. The blackmail is increasingly successful, the lady is overcome with fear and anguish and finally she sees only one fatal (...)

• "Lost Business" and other previously-untranslated Chekhov stories

  20 April by Anton Chekhov

  A further selection of the best stories of the great Russian writer that have so far remained untranslated into English. CONTENTS
  1. LOST BUSINESS (1882) The narrator recounts how on a lovely spring day he’d gone to see his beloved Varya to empty his heart and soul to her. He’d mumbled a few (...)

• "The Winged Man" (1966), a novel by A. E. van Vogt and E. Mayne Hull

  12 April by A. E. van Vogt

  The crew of a modern U.S. submarine finds itself suddenly transported 24,999 years into the future where they have been time-transported by one group of engineered mutants (winged men) to blast the stronghold of another group of mutants (fish-men) to smithereens with their torpedoes as a (...)

• Fourteen previously-untranslated Chekhov stories

  5 April by Anton Chekhov

  We have selected here fourteen of the best stories in the body of to-date-untranslated stories of the great Russian short-story writer, playwright and doctor that have been overviewed elsewhere on this site.
  Most – but not all – of them are written in the light, humorous tone that characterised (...)

• The 204 untranslated Chekhov stories to date: overviews, comments and ratings

  29 March by Ray

  Research in the extensive Russian-language documentation of the works of Chekhov has enabled us to collate that information with our own detailed inventory of the master’s works in English to identify the large body of Chekhov stories that has remained untranslated into English to date.
  We have (...)

• "Anabasis, or The Retreat of the Ten Thousand", by Xenophon

  21 March by Xenophon

  The dramatic account by Xenophon (430-355 BC), an Athenian philosopher, author, soldier and student of Socrates, of the expedition – that he participated in and eventually led – of an elite force of Greek soldiers into the heart of Persia on behalf of one of the contestants to the throne there, (...)

• "Casanova’s Homecoming" (1918) by Arthur Schnitzler

  14 March by Arthur Schnitzler

  The celebrated seducer, adventurer, diplomat and author Casanove is in his fifties, is practically penniless and has only one dream – to be allowed to return to his beloved Venice from which he had escaped over the rooftops of its central prison some twenty years previously.
  We follow his (...)

• "Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich" (1914) by Stephen Leacock

  11 March by Steven Leacock

  A charming set of sometimes-scathing and always-smile-raising satirical sketches of life in the wealthy sectors of a typical American town ca. 1914 [1], by Canada’s foremost humorist [2], author of the immortal Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. (60,000 words)
  e-books are available for (...)

• "White Nights" (1848) by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  7 March by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  A very lonely and very penniless young man wanders around the streets of Saint Petersburg dreaming about life in general and the people he sees around him in particular. One eventful evening he rescues a damsel in distress and strikes up the most significant relationship of his life – that does (...)

• "A Klondike Wooing" and other stories of the Far North by Jack London

  4 March by Jack London

  More tales of adventure, drama, skulduggery and comedy during the great Klondike Gold Rush in 1897-98 around Dawson City in Canada’s Northwest Territories. e-books are available for downloading below. TABLE OF CONTENTS
  1. THE TEST: A KLONDIKE WOOING (1898) Lucky Jack has struck it rich in the (...)

• "Lieutenant Gustl" (1900) by Arthur Schnitzler

  28 February by Arthur Schnitzler

  A long, intense and dramatic "stream-of-consciousness" mental monologue of of an officer in pre-WW1 Vienna before, during and after a dramatic incident in an opera house that neither he nor the reader can ever forget.
  A brilliant portrayal of the military mindset in the country that started (...)

• "Saintly Simplicity" (1885) by Anton Chekhov

  25 February by Anton Chekhov

  Savya, the aged priest of a little town, is delighted to by the visit of his son Alexander, a celebrated Moscow lawyer whom he hadn’t seen for fifteen years since he had sent him off to university in Moscow. The father can’t relate to the big-city life that the son has been leading: he thinks (...)

• "The Cremona Violin (Rat Krespel)" by E. T. A. Hoffmann (1818)

  21 February by E. T. A. Hoffmann

  Councillor Krespel (“Rat Krespel” – the original title of this original story) is an eccentric and somewhat mysterious fellow who plays the violin marvelously, specialises in repairing ancient instruments and who lives with (!) a particularly talented young singer Angelina whose voice – for those (...)

• "The District Doctor" (1848) by Ivan Turgenev

  18 February by Ivan Turgenev

  A country doctor recounts a particularly moving experience – for him and for the reader – when he had been called out to visit in difficult conditions a peasant family whose young daughter had been taken seriously ill.
  One of the most memorable stories in Turgenev’s collection of hunting tales A (...)

• "Commentaries on the Gallic War" by Julius Caesar

  14 February by Julius Caesar

  Julius Caesar’s account of his military campaign from 58-52 B.C. that integrated Gaul – and Britain – into the Roman Empire. A remarkably vivid, dramatic and on the whole accurate account of a particularly important episode in European history, written with the clarity, style and forcefulness that (...)

• "The Queen of Spades" (1834) by Alexander Pushkin

  11 February by Alexander Pushkin

  A cautious young man who has never gambled sees large sums of money being won and lost around him in the social whirl of Saint Petersburg and becomes fascinated by a fabulous story about an aged countess who had learned a secret method of winning at cards in her youth. He devotes all his (...)

• "Counterparts" (1914) by James Joyce

  8 February by James Joyce

  One of the central stories in James Joyce’s first published work of fiction, Dubliners (1914), this account of a day in the life of a very mediocre but very believable office worker is one of the harsher but nevertheless most outstanding stories in that collection of variegated vignettes of life (...)

• "The Sandman" (1816) by E. T. A. Hoffmann

  5 February by E. T. A. Hoffmann

  Nathaniel has vivid memories of being terrified in his childhood of the Sandman, an evil being who punished children who didn’t want to go to bed by sprinkling sand over their eyes and then taking their eyes out to feed to his own monstrous brood (!). And of the fearsome advocate Coppelius who (...)

• "Treasure Island" (1883) by Robert Louis Stevenson

  2 February by Robert Louis Stevenson

  One of the best books for younger readers ever written - anyone who has not read this book around the age of 12 years or so has missed something important in the growing-up experience!
  The writing is splendidly taut, the story moves along steadily at a nice pace, the bad guys are really well (...)

• "The Burrow (Der Bau)" (1922) by Franz Kafka

  29 January by Robert Louis Stevenson

  A fascinating account of an undefined creature’s psychosis as it wanders around its enormous underground complex worrying about how to protect the domain from being discovered and invaded by enemies and, towards the end, constantly hearing strange sounds and worrying about what menacing creature (...)

• "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1886), by Robert Louis Stevenson

  21 January by Robert Louis Stevenson

  A brilliant and far-sighted description of an amazing but perfectly credible case of extreme schizophrenia [1] that rolls along at a rapid pace in a clear, elegant style, a masterful tale that was an immense success at the time, a sophisticated mélange of science, horror and mystery by the (...)