Five Tales cover

Five Tales

Rating 3.7
Word count
520K words
Chapters
52

Tags

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Five Tales by John GalsworthyAuthor: Galsworthy, John, 1867-1933,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Jun 14, 2006

Editor's review

John Galsworthy's Five Tales collects five short stories and novellas, concise in length yet complete in structure, offering within a single volume a concentrated sense of the author's enduring attention to human nature, social class, and moral dilemma. Compared with his full-length novels, these stories suit fragmented reading: each stands alone, yet they also reflect one another and reveal the author's consistent narrative interests and cool tone. The language is English, with careful but not overly difficult diction, making the book a convenient window into modern British fiction. Readers can finish one tale on a commute or read the whole book in a quiet afternoon, experiencing the sense of closure and lingering resonance peculiar to the short-story form.

Who it's for

A good fit for

  • English-language readers who want to grasp Galsworthy's narrative style in a shorter format
  • Readers of modern British short stories and novellas who prefer story-driven reading
  • English learners who wish to build literary vocabulary by reading the original text
  • Readers with commutes or fragmented time who need self-contained pieces

Not a good fit for

  • Readers who read only Chinese translations and are not used to English originals
  • Readers expecting a long continuous plot and a complex cast of characters
  • Readers who need modern fast pacing or strongly stimulating plots

Reading tips

  1. Read one tale first to feel the rhythm of the language, then decide whether to read the whole book straight through
  2. After each tale, note the central conflict and outcome in two or three sentences for easy review
  3. When encountering unfamiliar words, first guess from context, then look them up together after finishing the tale

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52

FAQ

Does this book require a very high level of English?
It does not demand a particularly high level of English. The stories consist mainly of narration and dialogue, with regular sentence structures and literary but not obscure vocabulary. Readers with a college English foundation or a long habit of English reading can read it smoothly and only need to look up words occasionally.
Are the five stories connected?
The stories are relatively independent, with no direct links in characters or plot, so they can be read in any order. They echo one another more in theme and tone, and each is best savored as a complete work on its own.
Which edition is this, and what reading device suits it?
This is the free eBook edition provided by Project Gutenberg, easy to open on a phone, tablet, or e-reader. It suits electronic reading and searching, and makes it convenient to read tale by tale.

Comments

Find this book

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

John Galsworthy (1867–1933) was a British novelist and playwright known for his detailed portrayal of English social life from the late Victorian period to the early twentieth century. The library holds fifty-six of his works, including novels, serial fiction, and plays. Representative titles include The Forsyte Saga in its complete form and in Volumes I and II, To Let, Strife: A Drama in Three Acts, and Justice. His fiction often centers on family relationships, attitudes toward property, and shifts in social class, written in a restrained and observant style that attends to the interplay between individual psychology and social environment. His plays frequently explore tensions between law, morality, and personal circumstance. Overall, his work combines realistic depth with readability and has had a lasting influence on English literature. Public information is limited, so biographical details are omitted here; this introduction is based mainly on the works held in the library.

More by the same author

Top rated in the same category