Four Pigeons
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers who enjoy humorous British short stories
- Office workers who want to read public-domain English classics in spare moments
- English majors or upper-intermediate learners training their feel for the language
- Readers interested in late nineteenth-century English everyday life
Not a good fit for
- Readers who prefer long, complex plots and grand narratives
- Beginners who need a Chinese translation or a bilingual edition
- Readers expecting modern suspense or strong dramatic conflict
Reading tips
- Read through once to grasp the plot, then revisit the dialogue to catch the humorous foreshadowing.
- Read the characters' lines aloud to feel the rhythm and tone of colloquial British English.
- After reading, try retelling the plot in two or three sentences to check comprehension and build vocabulary.
About the publisher
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
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About the author
William Wymark Jacobs (1863–1943) was a British short-story writer, born in London in 1863 and died there in 1943. In his early years he lived around the Thames docks and was familiar with the lives of sailors and dockworkers, which led him to write a great many humorous sea stories, often in a light and witty tone. His best-known work, The Monkey's Paw, is a classic horror short story included in The Lady of the Barge (1902); noted for its tight suspense and sudden twists, it is still widely anthologized in horror collections. The library holds 109 of his works, including The Lady of the Barge and Others, Ship's Company, A Tiger's Skin, Captains All, and Night Watches; his common category is inspirational growth. Public information is limited and details of his life are largely unavailable, yet his fiction is distinctive in subject, blending humor with horror, and has had a lasting influence on later short-story writing.
