Prospero's Isle - inspired by Shakespeare’s "The Tempest", where the magician Prospero reigns supreme on an isle where many wonderful things are to be seen

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1er juin
"The Travelling Frog" and other nature stories by Vsevolod Garshin (1880-1887)
1er juin, par Vsevolod Garshin

Vsevolod Garshin (1855-1888) was a Petersburg writer highly regarded by the critics, the public and the intellectuals of his time such as Ilya Repin, a celebrated painter who knew him well and who painted the sensitive portrait of him shown below, and Anton Chekhov, who contributed an original story [1] to a commemorative anthology in his honour published a year after his untimely death by suicide ? accident ? at the age of 33.
Although he’s best known for his dramatic war and post-war (…)
"Walden" by Henry Thoreau – an ecological manifesto (1854)
26 mai, par Henry Thoreau

The author recounts how he had quite absented himself from the (mindless, to him) hustle and bustle of life in the thriving New England village of Concord to build a small log cabin deep in the woods nearby the pond (or rather small lake) of the title.
He describes in loving and indeed fascinating detail all the vegetable, animal, mineral, insect, and bird life that he saw around him and his quite extraordinary abode, in which he spent two full years including two particularly icy and (…)
Our selection of the world’s greatest novels
18 mai, par Ray (essays)

There are no doubt some novels missing from this compendium, but there can be no doubt that these 100 masterpieces from 24 countries have all scaled the very highest heights of literary achievement in the novel form.
Recently updated [1]. TABLE OF CONTENTS YEAR____ TITLE [2]_____________________________________________ AUTHOR______________________________________ COUNTRY 1605 Don Quixote* Miguel de Cervantes Spain 1668 Simplicissimus Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen Germany (…)
More of the world’s greatest novels
18 mai, par Ray (essays)

None of these 93 novels were included in Our selection of the world’s greatest novels, although they are all worthy candidates for the distinction of appearing there in the august company of Don Quixote, Les Misérables, War and Peace, The Magic Mountain and In Search of Lost Time.
Recently updated [1]. TABLE OF CONTENTS YEAR TITLE__________________________________________________ AUTHOR____________________________ COUNTRY___ 1809 The Elective Affinities Goethe Germany 1811 Sense and (…)
Masterworks of German literature translated specially for this site
23 avril, par Ray (German Studies)

All of these outstanding texts (61 stories, 80 poems, a letter and an essay) – many of which are litle-known outside of the German-speaking cultural sphere – have been translated specially for this site, either because available English translations of them are not free of copyright or because they’ve never been previously translated into English.
All of the translations done for this site are copyright-free.
see also => INDEX OF ALL THE GERMAN-LANGUAGE LITERATURE ON THIS SITE, BY (…)
German "nuance words" (Abtönungspartikeln)
12 février, par Ray (German Studies)

In the spoken German language there are a remarkable number of “tone words” (Abtönungspartikeln) that are regularly not to say constantly injected into sentences by speakers of all ages, particularly of the younger generations, to add colouring and nuances to what’s being said.
Most of these special words, as can be seen in the comprehensive table below, are words that have an entirely different function in the standard (written) language and that have acquired over time their special (…)
A comparative analysis of the vocabulary richness (the no. of different words) in 50 of the world’s greatest novels
12 août 2024, par Ray (essays)

Using a special in-house tool we have analysed the vocabulary of 50 of the world’s most famous Russian, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish novels – in their original language – to determine which of these works have : the greatest number of different words and the highest “vocabulary-richness ratio”, the ratio of the number of different words to the overall word-count of the work in question.
For the purpose of this analysis all punctuation marks (other than apostrophes and (…)
"The Secret Garden" by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911)
8 juin 2024, par Frances Hodgson Burnett

A young, awkward and very self-centered English girl leading a sheltered life with her family in India is suddenly orphaned when her parents and many others are killed during an outbreak of cholera. She’s sent back to England to stay with an eccentric uncle who leads an isolated existence in a very large manor in Yorkshire, where she learns a great deal about life, about relating with other people, about the beauties of the resplendent countryside there — and where she discovers a wonderful (…)
A chronological overview of the 62 Sherlock Holmes stories and novels
19 mai 2024, par Ray

1. OVERVIEWS OF THE 58 SHERLOCK HOLMES STORIES, in chronological order
2. OVERVIEWS OF THE 4 SHERLOCK HOLMES NOVELS, in chronological order
3. THE INDEX OF THE 62 STORIES AND NOVELS, in alphabetical order
The complete text of each of these works can be seen by clicking on the titles.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930)
1. THE 58 SHERLOCK HOLMES STORIES DATE TITLE____________________________ SYNOPSIS___________________________________________________________________________ (…)