Americanliterature. Vladimir Nabokov, the Russian novelist best known for Lolita, published in English in 1955, also made considerable contributions as an expert chess strategist and lepidopterist, studying moths and butterflies. His finest novels include Pale Fire (1962) and Speak, Memory (1951), an autobiographical account of being raised in nobility in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg, Russia and later, as part of a community of Russian emigres in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris. Signs and Symbols, first published by The New Yorker in 1948, was later published in his collection of short stories, Nabokov's Dozen in 1958. Raised in Russian nobility, Nabokov's father was assassinated by mistake in 1922 trying to shield the real target, Pavel Milyukov from his assassin, the monarchist Piotr Shabelsky-Bork, who would later become second-in-command of the Russian Emigre group.
Nabokov's family fled to New York in 1940 in the face of crushing anti-semitism in Europe and the onslaught of German troops. An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge. By Ambrose Bierce Set during the American Civil War, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek" is Bierce's most famous short story. It was first published in the San Francisco Examiner in 1890. It then appeared in Bierce's 1891 collection "Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. " A man stood upon a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The man's hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord. A rope closely encircled his neck. The man who was engaged in being hanged was apparently about thirty-five years of age. The preparations being complete, the two private soldiers stepped aside and each drew away the plank upon which he had been standing.
He closed his eyes in order to fix his last thoughts upon his wife and children. He unclosed his eyes and saw again the water below him. As these thoughts, which have here to be set down in words, were flashed into the doomed man's brain rather than evolved from it the captain nodded to the sergeant. King Grisly-Beard by Brothers Grimm. King Grisly-Beard A great king of a land far away in the East had a daughter who was very beautiful, but so proud and haughty and conceited, that none of the princes who came to ask for her hand in marriage was good enough for her. All she ever did was make fun of them. Once upon a time the king held a great feast and invited all her suitors. They all sat in a row, ranged according to their rank -- kings and princes and dukes and earls and counts and barons and knights. When the princess came in, as she passed by them, she had something spiteful to say to each one.
The first was too fat: 'He's as round as a tub,' she said. The next was too tall: 'What a maypole! ' The next was too short: 'What a dumpling! ' The fourth was too pale, and she called him 'Wallface.' The fifth was too red, so she called him 'Coxcomb.' The sixth was not straight enough; so she said he was like a green stick that had been laid to dry over a baker's oven.
Two days later a travelling fiddler came by the castle. 'Ah! Harrison Bergeron. French Translation from Avice Robitaille. Hindi Translation by Ashwin.Urdu Translation by RealMSRussian translation THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Harvey’s Dream. Janet turns from the sink and, boom, all at once her husband of nearly thirty years is sitting at the kitchen table in a white T-shirt and a pair of Big Dog boxers, watching her.
More and more often she has found this weekday commodore of Wall Street in just this place and dressed in just this fashion come Saturday morning: slumped at the shoulder and blank in the eye, a white scruff showing on his cheeks, man-tits sagging out the front of his T, hair standing up in back like Alfalfa of the Little Rascals grown old and stupid. Janet and her friend Hannah have frightened each other lately (like little girls telling ghost stories during a sleepover) by swapping Alzheimer’s tales: who can no longer recognize his wife, who can no longer remember the names of her children.
No, she thinks, this is merely practicing to be old, and she hates it. But the answer is easy. Because you didn’t know. She turns back to the sink and sneezes delicately, once, twice, a third time. She’s startled. “No.”