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

Most recent articles

"The Sufferings of Young Werther" by Goethe (1774)
15 September 2025, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Goethe’s famous first novel about the plight of the intense and dreamy Werther, the artisically-minded lover of nature and Homer and Ossian who’s passionately in love with Charlotte, the sparkling bride-to-be and then wife of another.
Werther’s drama and sufferings form the framework for this book whose sensitive, soulful hero was a founding figure for the Romantic movement throughout Europe.
A selection of characteristic citations from this seminal work can be seen below. 42,600 words. (…)
"The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" (1785-86) by Rudolf Erich Raspe and Gottfried Burger
8 September 2025, by Rudolf Erich Raspe

An extravagant series of adventures purportedly recounted by the authentic Baron Karl Friedrich Hieronymus Freiherr von Münchhausen to the scholar and sometime author Rudolf Eric Raspe on returning to Germany after ten years of serving in the Russian army.
This lively and hard-to-believe but hard-to-leave account first published in English by Rudolf Erich Raspe (1736-1794) in London in 1785 almost instantly became famous all over Europe of the time.
It was translated (and somewhat (…)
"The Marquise of O..." by Heinrich von Kleist (1808)
6 September 2025, by Heinrich von Kleist

In this stark investigation of the feminine condition in a rigid society ruled by pitiless moral strictures, the young widow Marquise of O... finds herself in an unexpected condition with no idea of how or why this situation came to be, and courageously puts an ad in the local paper proposing marriage to the person responsible for this state of affairs. We then flash back, in rapid succession, to a violent military assault on the fortified town of which her father was the governor, to an (…)
"Sense and Sensibility" by Jane Austen (1811)
1 September 2025, by Jane Austin

The first of the four novels published during Jane Austin’s lifetime, this classic explores in depth the central theme of all her oeuvre: the anxieties of genteel, well-educated, well-mannered — and totally dependant — young women (and their mothers) embarked upon the search for a suitable mate who will enable them to maintain their desirable social status with as few moral compromises as possible. And it is hard if not quite impossible not to feel empathy for Marianne Dashwood, the clever, (…)
"Pride and Prejudice" by Jane Austen (1813)
18 August 2025, by Jane Austin

Jane Austen’s second and most famous novel, centered like its predecessor Sense and Sensibility on the subject of match-making in a landed-gentry milieu and on the mindsets of its female protagonists who are absolutely concentrated on this eternal theme.
A very well-told story with excellent rhythm, lively dialogues and nicely-delineated personages, one of the most celebrated English novels of the 19th century.
(122,000 words)
An e-book is available for downloading below. CHAPTER I (…)
"Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley (1818)
2 August 2025, by Mary Shelley

The original Frankenstein story about a Swiss chemist [1] in a German [2] university finally succeeding in understanding the secret of life and of actually developing a living human being – rather oversize and not what you would call a good-looker, but in fact most intelligent and capable of extraordinary physical and even intellectual feats. The scientist lives to bitterly regret his innovation and comes to a bad end trying to stop the monster from committing yet more evil deeds…
Written (…)
German "nuance words" (Abtönungspartikeln)
12 February 2025, by Ray

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 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 usefulness in the spoken language to signify (…)
A comparative analysis of the vocabulary richness (the no. of different words) in 50 of the world’s greatest novels
12 August 2024, by Ray

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 (…)
19 May 2024, by Ray
"The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes" by Arthur Conan Doyle (1892)
14 May 2024, by Arthur Conan Doyle

The first book of Sherlock Holmes stories, regrouping stories that had previously been published by Arthur Conan Doyle in diverse British and American newspapers and magazines.
A splendid set of 12 excellent tales recounted by Sherlock’s faithful friend Dr. Watson with brio and colour, always concentrating on the superb reasoning and deductive skills of the first and most famous scientific detective in literary history, the one and only Sherlock Holmes.
An e-book is available for (…)