Prospero’s Isle

Latest articles

• Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) by George Orwell

  6 May by George Orwell

  George Orwell (1903-1950) was a passionate defender all his life of the underdogs in the society of his time, and in spite of his background as a member of the upper middle class — he was well educated and spoke with a „posh“ accent — spent several years in his late twenties working as a dishwasher (...)

• Great music

  23 April by Ray

  A selection of musical texts and interpretaions of the very highest level of artistic inspiration. Date Composer Work/Movement_______ Artist(s) Label time Comments________________________ 1 1708 Bach Cantate BWV 106 "Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit"/ Chœur Süddeutscher Madrigalchor & (...)

• "The Five Sisters" and "The Baron of Grogzwig" — tales by Charles Dickens

  22 April by Charles Dickens

  These charming stories quite imbued with the author’s sensitivity and sense of humour are narrrated by travellers in Dickens’s early novel "Nicolas Nickelby" (1939) — written when he was only 27 years old — and well deserve to be read and enjoyed on their own by all admirers of the great master of (...)

• "The Mind Cage" (1957) by A. E. van Vogt

  13 April by A. E. van Vogt

  A brilliant scientist has been condemned to death for suggesting that the collectivist social system of the government that’s on the verge of taking over control of the entire world needs to be seriously called into question, and when his close friend comes to deliver the verdict to him he (...)

• "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" (1869) - the last work of Charles Dickens

  26 March by Charles Dickens

  Dickens’s last work, tragically interrupted by his sudden death from a stroke at the age of 58. It was a mystery novel, written to rise to the challenge of showing that he too could write in that new genre after the considerable success of his good friend Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (...)

• "Dombey and Son" (1846) by Charles Dickens

  26 March by Charles Dickens

  After the huge popular successes of his first four novels and the lukewarm reception by the mass public of the next two, but encouraged by the huge success of his Christmas Carol stories published in 1843, Dickens raised his sights and clearly aimed at impressing the arbiters of literary good (...)

• "Bleak House" (1853) by Charles Dickens

  21 March by Charles Dickens

  A blockbuster of a book [1], with what was for Dickens a big theme — the incredibly antiquated and abstruse, bureaucratic procedures involved in property legislation via the time-hallowed Chancery Law courts.
  Today the very lengthy satire about the inefficiencies of that antiquated system has (...)

• "Martin Chuzzlewit" (1844) - where Charles Dickens goes to America

  16 March by Charles Dickens

  The most interesting aspect of this middle-period Dickens novel is that most of it takes places in the United States, whereto Martin flees to escape from disgrace in London and to make his fortune. However, everyone in New York is a hustler scrambling after the almighty dollar, and things get (...)

• "Hard Times" (1854) by Charles Dickens

  15 March by Charles Dickens

  The only book in which Dickens ventures into the industrial heartland of the England of his time, the sprawling factory belt in the north around Manchester and Liverpool. Also the shortest of all his novels, slightly above one-third the average length of the others.
  The hard-hitting portrayal (...)

• "A Tale of Two Cities" (1859) by Charles Dickens

  6 March by Charles Dickens

  Dickens’s second and best-known (and last) historical novel, the one that starts off with the famous opening lines "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, . . .".
  This is one of his shortest novels and also his most overtly (...)

• "Barnaby Rudge" (1841) by Charles Dickens

  1 March by Charles Dickens

  Dickens’s first historical novel, set in the period of the ultra-violent anti-catholic Gordon Riots in the London of 1780 that saw angry mobs storm into the Parliament buildings, destroy the central Newgate prison and other buildings and shake the state to its very foundations.
  The historical (...)

• Three of A. E. van Vogt’s best late-period stories: "Itself" (1963), "Lost: Fifty Suns" (1972) and "The Timed Clock" (1972)

  25 February by A. E. van Vogt

  1. ITSELF! (1963) A militarised surveillance robot in the depths of the Pacific discovers an alien warship lurking in its vicinity and reacts violently to their presence. (1,000 words)
  2. LOST: FIFTY SUNS (1972) A gigantic Earth battleship has appeared in the Greater Magellanic Cloud galaxy to (...)

• "The Old Curiosity Shop" (1841) by Charles Dickens

  22 February by Charles Dickens

  Dickens’s fourth novel, another huge best-seller, a «road novel» about the adorable Little Nell and her grandfather on the run all around England from a cruel, grasping creditor, no doubt the most villainous villain in all of his works.
  The young heroine shines like a beacon through the gloomy (...)

• "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" (1900) by L. Frank Baum

  17 February by L. Frank Baum

  L. Frank Baum (1856-1919) was a prolific author of novels, short stories, poetry and theatre plays who achieved everlasting posthumous fame when this wonderful story about the adventures of Dorothy and her faithful companions (her dog Toto, a scarecrow without brains, a tin woodman without a (...)

• "Nicholas Nickleby" (1839) by Charles Dickens

  15 February by Charles Dickens

  Where the penniless young Nicholas goes up to the wilds of Yorkshire to begin a teaching career and finds himself with am schoolmaster who’s extravagantly and exploiting and mistreating his pupils there, then flees down south after a dramatic show-down to join a roving band of actors and to get (...)

• "Our Mutual Friend" (1865), by Charles Dickens

  15 February by Charles Dickens

  This last complete novel of Charles Dickens, his fourteenth, has a very strong theme, one of his best and most timeless: the Thames river that dominates the lives of those who work on and beside and near it and which symbolises the force and power and also violence of the current of life (...)

• "The Pickwick Papers" (1837) by Charles Dickens

  1 February by Charles Dickens

  Dickens’s first and funniest novel, published when he was only 25, was a huge worldwide hit that had people lining up on the wharfs in Sydney and New York when the boats came in with the latest instalment.
  With a hundred English and American editions before 1900, it was probably the (...)

• "The Mixed Men" novel (1952) by A. E. van Vogt

  27 January by A. E. van Vogt

  The inhabitants of the 70 inhabited planets of the Fifty Suns civilisation in the Greater Magellanic Cloud galaxy are up against a gigantic invading warship from Earth bent on finding them out and integrating them into their empire that rules the Milky Way galaxy.
  Based on somewhat modified (...)

• "Oliver Twist" (1838), by Charles Dickens

  23 January by Charles Dickens

  This was the second consecutive worldwide success for Dickens at the age of 26(!), and it was a shock to his vast public, who were looking for another Cockney comedy in the vein of The Pickwick Papers, but got instead a hard-hitting description of some of the most shocking aspects of the social (...)

• "Make Westing" and other stories by Jack London

  16 January by Jack London

  TABLE OF CONTENTS
  1. The Misogynist (1897) A confirmed bachelor wakes up one morning to find that all females have suddenly disappeared and the world is now a purely masculine one! Things start rapidly going to pot as everyone, including our hero, desperately tries to survive. (8,600 words) (...)

• "Great Expectations" (1861) by Charles Dickens

  9 January by Charles Dickens

  This is Dickens at his very best, or rather his greatest. A mature work, his penultimate novel, it gets off to a rousing start – the dramatic encounter of young Pip with an escaped convict takes place on page 2 –, the writing is absolutely sparkling, deeply infused with his profound humanity and (...)

• "Suicides" and other stories by Guy de Maupassant

  7 January by Guy de Maupassant

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  1. Suicides (1880) A letter is found beside a 57-year-old man who has just shot himself in a depressed state of mind, as dramatically explained in his letter. (1,800 words)

  2. Lasting Love (1882) A group of hunters and their wives are debating the question of long-lasting (or otherwise) love after a copious dinner, and a retired Parisian doctor recounts the most intense and long-lasting affair he had ever encountered, involving a respectable pharmacist and a (...)

• "David Copperfield" (1850) by Charles Dickens

  5 January by Charles Dickens

  This portrait of a sensitive young boy’s struggles with his school mentors and with his schoolmates is as powerful and humanistic as anything Dickens or anyone else ever wrote, and the hard-hearted but oh-so-smooth uncle Mr. Murdstone is as worthy a villain — always a Dickens strong point — as (...)

• "An Enigmatic Nature" and other stories by Anton Chekhov

  1 January by Anton Chekhov

  TABLE OF CONTENTS
  1. An Enigmatic Nature (1883) A very pretty young lady in a first-class railway car is baring her soul to a budding author who is all too anxious to proffer his psychological expertise on problems of the heart, but the explanation by the lovely lady of her current romantic (...)

• "Twas the night before Christmas" (1823) by Clement Moore

  12 December 2020 by Clement Moore

  This charming poem, generally attributed to the New York theologian Clement Moore (1779-1863), was first published (anonymously) in an upstate New York newspaper, the Troy Sentinel, on December 23, 1823, with the title "A Visit from St. Nicolas".
  It rapidly gained acclaim and widespread (...)

• "The Expendables" (1963) - a space-exploration saga by A. E. van Vogt

  9 December 2020 by A. E. van Vogt

  The cover story in the September 1963 issue of IF Science Fiction, this space-adventure novelette (11,400 words) was the first science-fiction story that A. E. van Vogt wrote when he resumed his writing career after having devoted almost fifteen years to "making a study of human behaviour", as (...)

• "The Pearls of Parlay" and other stories by Jack London

  8 December 2020 by Jack London

  TABLE OF CONTENTS
  1. Pluck and Pertinacity (1899) In the words of the author: “The true story of a man who practically achieved the impossible in his hazardous ice-journey in the dead of the Arctic winter. Happily, success crowned the effort.” (1,450 words).
  2. The Scorn of Women (1901) Floyd (...)

• "The Burning Log" and other stories by Guy de Maupassant

  6 December 2020 by Guy de Maupassant

  TABLE OF CONTENTS
  1. THE BURNING LOG (1882) The narrator is having tea with a close friend when a log burning in the fireplace rolls onto the carpet. That reminds him of a similar but more dramatic incident when he’d been dining with very close and newly-married friends, a story that the lady (...)

• "The Black Monk" and other stories by Anton Chekhov

  4 December 2020 by Anton Chekhov

  TABLE OF CONTENTS
  1. CHORISTERS (1884) The sacristan of a village church has been intensely rehearsing a complex choral with the school’s choir in preparation for the forthcoming visit of a Petersburg dignitary, in spite of the vocal inadequacies of the singers and the hostility of the church (...)

• German prefixes and suffixes - an overview

  15 November 2020 by Ray

  The German language has a large number of prefixes and suffixes whose function is to enable the formation of an open-ended number of new words by adding new nuances, aspects and dimensions to other words.
  These powerful tools can be added in front of or behind just about anything to create (...)