Prospero’s Isle

Most recent articles

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  "Colonel Chabert" by Honoré de Balzac (1832)

  25 September, by Honoré de Balzac

  The Colonel Chabert had played a heroic role in Napoleon’s victory at the battle of Eylau but had been left for dead on the battlefield under his horse, his body thrown into a collective burial pit, and he’d been declared legally deceased. However, he managed to revive and to survive although a great many months had passed before he’d sufficiently recovered to be able to consider returning to the post-Napoleonic Paris and recover his estate and his belongings. But as he’d been declared (...)

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  "The Unknown Masterpiece" by Honoré de Balzac (1831)

  18 September, by Honoré de Balzac

  A young painter – who we soon discover to be the future world-famous Nicolas Poussin [1] – pays a visit to the studio of a celebrated master, Porbus, where he is admitted behind a rather strange old man who has also come to visit the master, whose works he proceeds to ruthlessly criticize for their lack of life and truthfulness. This visitor turns out to be an unknown master painter himself, who passionately describes the magnificent masterpiece that he has almost but not quite finished (...)

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  "Mountain Cristal (Bergkristall)" by Adalbert Stifter (1853)

  11 September, by Adalbert Stifter

  Two children go over into the neighbouring valley high up in the Austrian Alps to visit their grandmother on the day before Christmas and get lost on their way back when a terrible snowstorm unexpectedly hits the whole region and covers up not only their tracks but all the recognizable landmarks that usually guide them on their way.
  A story about life in the mountains, a story about the diverse and ever-changing environment in the mountains, a story about Christmas in the mountains and (...)

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  "Ivanhoe’ by Walter Scott (1819)

  6 September, by Walter Scott

  Walter Scott’s best-known work, a historical novel that established him as the most celebrated European novelist for a good long time, recounting the complex struggles in 12th-century England between the Norman rulers – Richard Coeur-de-Lion and his ambitious brother John – and their numerous enemies and opponents, notably the Saxon nobility that still dreamed of reestablishing their authority and also highly-organized bands of outlaws in parts of the realm such as the forests of (...)

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  "Sons and Lovers" by D. H. Lawrence (1913)

  4 September, by D. H. Lawtence

  The third and best-known novel (with Lady Chatterly’s Lover) of the brilliant English novelist, poet, short-story writer, travel writer, literary critic, globe-trotter, iconoclast and eternal exile D. H. Lawrence, this is an intense and sensitive family drama set in the coal-mining area of Nottingham in central England at the turn of the 20th century.
  A finely-drawn psychological drama centered on the life of the youngest son of the family, Paul Morel, his conflictual relations with his (...)

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  "Kim" by Rudyard Kipling (1901)

  28 August, by Rudyard Kipling

  Kim is a street urchin speaking Hindi/Urdu with a smattering of English in the northern part of India who meets a travelling Tibetan monk and follows him on his search for the fabled river created where Buddha’s fabulous arrow fell. Kim too is on a search for a Red Bull that his scarcely-remembered father told him to look for in a document that he preciously carries in an amulet around his neck. Both of them successfully achieve their goals while wandering all over northern India as well (...)

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  "The Way of All Flesh" by Samuel Butler (1903)

  21 August, by Samuel Butler

  The narrator recounts the harsh upbringing of his godson Ernest Pontifex, son of a Church of England minister, the oppressive everyday religiosity of his family life, his difficult schooling, his career at Cambridge, his ordination, his floundering attempts to live in a working-class neighbourhood to better be able to bring them the good word, his fall into the depths and then his struggle to start a new life and to conciliate his new set of beliefs to the world around him.
  Although (...)

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  "Just So Stories" by Rudyard Kipling (1902)

  9 August, by Rudyard Kipling

  Rudyard Kipling’s delightful collection of little stories for young children – first written as bedtime stories for his little daughter – explaining how whales, camels, elephants and other creatures first got to become the way they are, and also just how numbers, letters and the alphabet were first invented.
  A treat for young and old alike.
  (29,000 words) An e-book is available for downloading below. TABLE OF CONTENTS
  1. HOW THE WHALE GOT HIS THROAT 2. HOW THE CAMEL GOT HIS HUMP 3. (...)

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  "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad (1899)

  5 August, by Joseph Conrad

  This famous story (with its 38,000 words Heart of Darkness is a novella, not a novel) manages in a mysterious way to create an intriguing atmosphere of significance, even if the narrator’s mysticism and his unbounded admiration of the long-sought-after figure of Kurtz, a European trader of ivory in the upper reaches of what is clearly the Congo River who only appears towards the end of the story, is not to everyone’s taste in these more down-to-earth days.
  And the rather complacent (...)

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  "The Red Badge of Courage" by Steven Crane (1895)

  2 August, by Steven Crane

  The celebrated story of fear, anguish, cowardice and heroism in the American Civil War by the young twenty-four-year-old author Steven Crane (1871-1899] that has long since taken its rightful place as one of the finest American works of its time.
  (46,000 words) An e-book is available for downloading below. TABLE OF CONTENTS
  CHAPTER I. CHAPTER II. CHAPTER III. CHAPTER IV. CHAPTER V. CHAPTER VI. CHAPTER VII. CHAPTER VIII. CHAPTER IX. CHAPTER X. CHAPTER XI. CHAPTER XII. CHAPTER XIII. (...)