I arrived in Dublin on the evening of the fifth of August, and drove to the residence of my uncle, the Cardinal Archbishop. He is like most of my family, deficient in feeling, and consequently averse to me personally. He lives in a dingy house, with a side-long view of the portico of his cathedral from the front windows, and of a monster national school from the back. My uncle maintains no...

This novel was written in the year 1880, only a few years after I had exported myself from Dublin to London in a condition of extreme rawness and inexperience concerning the specifically English side of the life with which the book pretends to deal. Everybody wrote novels then. It was my second attempt; and it shared the fate of my first. That is to say, nobody would publish it, though I tried...

The Man of Destiny is an 1897 play by George Bernard Shaw, set in Italy during the early career of Napoleon. It was published as a part of Plays Pleasant, which also included Arms and the Man, Candida and You Never Can Tell. Shaw titled the volume Plays Pleasant in order to contrast it with his first book of plays, Plays...

Augustus Does His Bit, A True to Life Farce (1916) is a comic one-act play by George Bernard Shaw about a dim-witted aristocrat who is outwitted by a female spy during World War I.  In the small town of Little Pifflington, Lord Augustus Highcastle tells his secretary Horatio Beamish that the war is a very serious matter, especially as he has three German brothers-in-law....

Great Catherine: Whom Glory Still Adores is a 1913 one-act play by Irish dramatist George Bernard Shaw. It was written between two of his other 1913 plays, Pygmalion and The Music Cure. It tells the story of a prim British visitor to the court of the sexually uninhibited Catherine the Great of Russia. The plot focuses on Captain Charles Edstaston, a...

Fanny's First Play is a 1911 play by George Bernard Shaw. It was first performed as an anonymous piece, the authorship of which was to be kept secret. However, critics soon recognised it as the work of Shaw. It opened at the Adelphi Theatre at Westminster in London on 19 April 1911 and ran for 622 performances. The mystery over the authorship helped to publicise it....

The play is set in a seaside town and tells the story of Mrs Clandon and her three children, Dolly, Phillip and Gloria, who have just returned to England after an eighteen-year stay in Madeira.  The children have no idea who their father is and, through a comedy of errors, end up inviting him to a family lunch. At the same time a dentist named Valentine has fallen in love with the...

Getting Married is a play by George Bernard Shaw. First performed in 1908, it features a cast of family members who gather together for a marriage. The play analyses and satirises the status of marriage in Shaw's day, with a particular focus on the necessity of liberalising divorce laws.  1908: Edith, youngest daughter of Bishop Bridgenorth, is about to be married. Her...

Candida, a comedy by playwright George Bernard Shaw, was written in 1894 and first published in 1898, as part of his Plays Pleasant. The central characters are clergyman James Morell, his wife Candida and a youthful poet, Eugene Marchbanks, who tries to win Candida's affections. The play questions Victorian notions of love and marriage, asking what a woman really...

The eponymous dilemma of the play is that of the newly honoured doctor Sir Colenso Ridgeon, who has developed a revolutionary new cure for tuberculosis. However, his private medical practice, with limited staff and resources, can only treat ten patients at a time. From a selection of fifty patients he has selected ten he believes he can cure and who, he believes, are most worthy of being saved....

The play has a prologue and an "Alternative to the Prologue". The prologue consists of the Egyptian god Ra addressing the audience directly, as if he could see them in the theater (i.e., breaking the fourth wall). He says that Pompey represents the old Rome and Caesar represents the new Rome. The gods favored Caesar, according to Ra, because he "lived the life they had...

Arms and the Man is a comedy by George Bernard Shaw, whose title comes from the opening words of Virgil's Aeneid in Latin:Arma virumque cano ("Arms and the man I sing"). The play was first produced on April 21, 1894 at the Avenue Theatre, and published in 1898 as part of Shaw's Plays Pleasantvolume, which also included Candida, You...

Pygmalion is a play by George Bernard Shaw, named after a Greek mythological character. It was first presented on stage to the public in 1913.  Professor of phonetics Henry Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden party by teaching her to assume a...

Ellie Dunn, her father, and her fiancé are invited to one of Hesione Hushabye’s infamous dinner parties, to be held at the house of her father, the eccentric Captain Shotover, an inventor in his late 80s who is trying to create a "psychic ray" that will destroy dynamite. The house is built in the shape of the stern of a ship. Lady Utterword, Shotover's other daughter, arrives from...

War and Peace (Pre-reform Russian: Война и миръ, Voyna i mir) is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, first published in 1869. The work is epic in scale and is regarded as one of the most important works of world literature. It is considered as Tolstoy's finest literary achievement, along with his other major prose work, Anna...

Một ngày cuối tuần đầu đông, đêm khuya xuống làm cả thành phố biến mất cái vẻ ồn ào náo nhiệt của cái buổi ban ngày. Thế ngay vào lúc đó là một bầu không khí lành lạnh. Trên đường đôi lúc mới gặp được vài...

Truyện cổ tích, một thể loại văn học truyền miệng độc đáo và có lẽ ra đời sớm hơn cả so với nhiều thể loại khác, vẫn tồn tại và tiếp tục được lưu giữ bằng sức sống mạnh mẽ và sự phổ biến rộng rãi của bản thân các câu chuyện. Người lớn...

Tập truyện ngắn mới nhất của nữ tác giả Dili cho thấy sức viết dồi dào và khả năng sáng tạo của chị. Các truyện ngắn trong tập sách mới này của Di Li tập hợp nhiều thể loại truyện, như: kinh dị (Khách lạ và người lái taxi, Chiếc gương đồng), truyện chiến...

Luật sư và bị cáo xoay quanh một vụ giết người man rợ như thời trung cổ. Hành trình phá án của các thám tử, sự bí ẩn của kẻ sát nhân và một cái kết hiển nhiên là bất ngờ theo phong cách James Patterson. Câu chuyện bắt đầu bằng...

Truyện cổ tích, một thể loại văn học truyền miệng độc đáo và có lẽ ra đời sớm hơn cả so với nhiều thể loại khác, vẫn tồn tại và tiếp tục được lưu giữ bằng sức sống mạnh mẽ và sự phổ biến rộng rãi của bản thân các câu chuyện. Người lớn...