英语小说网

美国作家马克·吐温创作的短篇小说，描写的是湖滨镇萨拉丁·福斯特一家意外得知远房族叔留下三万元遗产之后的故事。一场巧妙构思的疯狂梦境展示了人性在金钱面前的脆弱。通过一场一夜暴富的发财梦，展现了美国“镀金时代”经济的缩影，也生动展现了美国民众对于金钱的狂热追求，故事中对人性中虚伪、贪婪的无情揭露更是犀利而富有内涵。内容简介：湖滨镇萨拉丁·福斯特一家意外得到远方族叔的三万元遗产。在这之前，一家人相处和睦，省吃俭用，过着不算富裕但很充实的生活。但到了得到遗产之后，一家人总想着这笔钱。他们想着该怎么花，怎么用这笔钱去赚钱。经过一系列的折腾，最终他们被这笔钱所累，精神都有些失常，家庭关系不再和睦。就像萨利在最后时刻说的那样：“飞来的不义之财是圈套，对我们没有好处啊！”

I fell in love with the stories of James Schmitz when I was a teenager, especially the characters of Telzey Amberdon and Trigger Argee. Now, many years later, I can appreciate Schmitz' going against the grain of his time and writing about strong female characters who aren't sexualized or trivialized as arm-candy. There's also Heslet Quillan, a charming rogue who appreciates competent women as well. I had read Legacy many years ago, and it's always a pleasure to revisit it. Though I do own it in paperback, I bought the Kindle edition as well. The book was translated well to the Kindle, including front and back cover graphics, but the scanning included the page numbers which interrupted the flow of the text. (I expect to see page numbers in a paper book, but they're visually separated from the text.) I have frequently given Schmitz books as gifts to younger readers - there's never anything that would be inappropriate for even a young teen, and even in Schmitz' "juvenile" books (most famously, The Witches of Karres), he never talks down to his audience and just tells a cracking-good story with intriguing characters. Highly recommended.

First published pseudonymously in 1764, The Castle of Otranto purported to be a translation of an Italian story of the time of the crusades. In it Walpole attempted, as he declared in the Preface to the Second Edition, "to blend the two kinds of romance: the ancient and the modern." Crammed with invention, entertainment, terror, and pathos, the novel was an immediate success and Walpole's own favorite among his numerous works. The novel is reprinted here from a text of 1798, the last that Walpole himself prepared for the press.

"Star Hunter" tells the story of a man who thinks with another's brain as he is pursued in a dangerous game of hide and seek. This adventure story captures the reader's attention from the very first sentences. "Nahuatl's larger moon pursued the smaller, greenish globe of its companion across a cloudless sky in which the stars made a speckled pattern like the scales of a huge serpent coiled around a black bowl. Ras Hume paused at the border of scented spike-flowers on the top terrace of the Pleasure House to wonder why he thought of serpents. He understood. Mankind's age-old hatred, brought from his native planet to the distant stars, was evil symbolized by a coil in a twisted, belly-path across the ground. And on Nahuatl, as well as a dozen other worlds, Wass was the serpent."

Whether the ensuing pages were really the dream or vision of some very pious and holy person; or whether they were really written in the other world, and sent back to this, which is the opinion of many (though I think too much inclining to superstition); or lastly, whether, as infinitely the greatest part imagine, they were really the production of some choice inhabitant of New Bethlehem, is not necessary nor easy to determine.

在英国维多利亚时代，资本主义经济的迅速发展使田园牧歌式的封建宗法制社会急剧瓦解，恬静的乡村生活已不那么平静了。勤劳朴实的加布里埃尔在趋于赤贫的情况下爱上了女农场主芭思希芭并做了她的羊倌。可是轻佻的芭思希芭却醉心于乡村中一个唐璜式的浪荡不羁人物特洛伊。特罗伊曾引诱过一位天真无邪的姑娘范妮，后来又抛弃她与芭思希芭结了婚。另一个农场主波德伍德像疯了似的爱着曾“引诱”过他的芭思希芭，后来他杀死了特洛伊，陷入精神错乱，被判终身监禁。最后芭思希芭与对她忠心耿耿的加布里埃尔结了婚。

According to Aristotle in On the Heavens, the heavenly bodies are the most perfect realities, (or "substances"), whose motions are ruled by principles other than those of bodies in the sublunary sphere. The latter are composed of one or all of the four classical elements (earth, water, air, fire) and are perishable; but the matter of which the heavens are made is imperishable aether, so they are not subject to generation and corruption. Hence their motions are eternal and perfect, and the perfect motion is the circular one, which, unlike the earthly up-and down-ward locomotions, can last eternally selfsame. As substances, celestial bodies have matter (aether) and form (a given period of uniform rotation). Sometimes Aristotle seems to regard them as living beings with a rational soul as their form[1] (see also Metaphysics, bk. XII) This work is significant as one of the defining pillars of the Aristotelian worldview, a school of philosophy that dominated intellectual thinking for almost two millennia. Similarly, this work and others by Aristotle were important seminal works by which much of scholasticism was derived.

Crime and Punishment (Russian: Преступление и наказание Pryestupleniye i nakazaniye) is a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It was first published in the SWiss literary journal The Russian Messenger in twelve monthly installments during 1866. It was later published in a single volume. This is the second of Dostoevsky's full-length novels following his return from five years of exile in Siberia, where he was serving his sentence in Katorga camps, the Tsarist forced-labor system and predecessor to the Soviet Gulag. Crime and Punishment is the first great novel of his "mature period" of writing. Crime and Punishment focuses on the mental anguish and moral dilemmas of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, an impoverished ex-student in St. Petersburg who formulates and executes a plan to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker for her money. Raskolnikov argues that with the pawnbroker's money he can perform good deeds to counterbalance the crime, while ridding the world of a worthless parasite. He also commits this murder to test his own hypothesis that some people are naturally capable of, and even have the right to, do such things. Several times throughout the novel, Raskolnikov justifies his actions by connecting himself mentally with Napoleon Bonaparte, believing that murder is permissible in pursuit of a higher purpose, only to find out he "... is not a Napoleon."

THE house in the hollow was “a mile from anywhere”—so Maywood people said. It was situated in a grassy little dale, looking as if it had never been built like other houses but had grown up there like a big, brown mushroom. It was reached by a long, green lane and almost hidden from view by an encircling growth of young birches. No other house could be seen from it although the village was just over the hill. Ellen Greene said it was the lonesomest place in the world and vowed that she wouldn’t stay there a day if it wasn’t that she pitied the child.