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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10 August
"Monsieur Seguin’s Goat" by Alphonse Daudet (1866)
10 August, by Alphonse Daudet

This timeless tale of a little she-goat’s dream of finding true liberty in the high mountains by the author of Tartarin de Tarascan is probably the best-known short story in all of French literature, familiar to every Gallic citizen young and old.
(2,200 words)
Translated specially for this site
The original text can be consulted in the annex here. MONSIEUR SEGUIN’S GOAT
To M. Pierre Gringoire, lyrical poet in Paris.
You’ll never change, my poor Gringoire!
What? You’ve been (…)
"A Confession" and other early Chekhov stories with a humorous touch
5 August, by Anton Chekhov

TEN EARLY WORKS WITH A HUMOROUS TOUCH, AND OFTEN MORE
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. A CONFESSION, OR OLYA, ZHENYA, ZOYA (Исповедь, или Оля, Женя, Зоя) (1882) A thirty-nine year-old man writes to a lady friend who had asked him why he had never yet married, and explains with three examples of cases (there were many other occasions, these were just examples) when he had been on the verge of proposing to a woman he was in love with when something unexpected happened to ruin the event and the whole (…)
"The Magic Mountain" by Thomas Mann (1924)
28 July, by Thomas Mann

Reading this extraordinary book is an unforgettable experience.
No one who has read this masterpiece can ever forget the young Hans Castorp’s visit to a sanatorium nestled high in the Swiss mountains where he meets and becomes so intensely involved with its cosmopolitan patients from all over Europe, especially the tantalizingly mysterious Clawdia Chauchat, her explosive protector Mynheer Peeperkorn and the impetuous philosopher Settembrini. Their encounters and discussions and intense (…)
"The Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig)" by Thomas Mann (1912)
13 July, by Thomas Mann

We follow the quite famous author Gustav von Aschenbach and his elevated thoughts (at the beginning: they tend to go steadily downhill as the narrative unfolds) from his native Munich to the Adriatic coast and to Venice, where he is plunged into the thralls of physical desire for a very handsome fourteen-year-old boy whose family is staying at the same hotel on the Lido, and who quite innocently (?) sets our man off on dithyrambic meditations on the lessons of Plato’s The Banquet and (…)
"Buddenbrooks" by Thomas Mann (1900)
7 July, by Thomas Mann

The saga of the rise and fall of a family in the Hanseatic (Baltic) town of Lübeck, written when Mann was only 25, an enormous best-seller at the time and afterwards. Splendidly recounting in many memorable chapters and passages – notably an unforgettable chapter about a catastrophic day at school of the young Hanno Buddenbreooks – the ups and especially downs of a once-distinguished and wealthy family, this masterwork was cited by the jury as the main reason for awarding the distinguished (…)
"Hunger" by Knut Hamsun (1890)
30 June, by Knut Hamsun

This was the great Norwegian writer’s first novel published under his own name – and what a novel! No doubt somewhat autobiographical, it describes the fight against hunger of a penniless young journalist-writer in the poverty-stricken northern Norwegian town of Christiana who is slowly starving to death for want of food. His fight against the pangs of hunger and his whole relationship with life via the need for nourishment is described in a most effective factual and laconic way that (…)
"The Brothers Karamazov" by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880)
24 June, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Is this Dostoevsky’s greatest book? Hard to say in view of the competition but it very well could be. In any case it constantly sends shivers of aesthetic emotion down the spine of the reader with the power of its writing and the scope of its themes and the grandeur of so many of its scenes – the memoirs of Alyosha Karamazov’s mentor Father Zossima, the transformational experience of Alyosha on leaving his mentor for the last time, the extraordinary conversation of Ivan Karamazov with the (…)
"Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy (1877)
18 June, by Leo Tolstoy

Anna Karenina and her extra-marital affair with the elegant aristocrat Vronsky, the soul-searching outsider Konstantin Levin’s protracted suit of the young beauty Kitty of the distinguished Shtcherbatsky clan, Anna’s flighty and ever-so-charming brother Prince Stepan Oblonsky and his relations with his wife Dolly, Kitty’s sister – these are characters that literature is made of, personalities that rise up out of these marvellous pages to become as real and as full of life and passion and the (…)
"The Possessed", aka "Demons/The Devils" by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1872)
12 June, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The central theme of this drama-filled novel about life in a provincial town in Russia in the early 1870s is the growing influence on the local notables of a group of radical revolutionaries led by aristocratic and very articulate intellectuals who under the cover of promoting modern ideas and ideals dream of overthrowing the Czarist regime and imposing an authoritarian system of their own.
A highly actual theme at the time in a rapidly-changing Russian – that had abolished serfdom in 1861 (…)