The Lock and Key Library: The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations: American

Project GutenbergProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.9
Word count
723K words
Chapters
73

Tags

English Originals Mystery and SuspenseForeign Literature Suspense ThrillerCrime StoryPlot TwistDetective FictionSelected CollectionShort Story CollectionAccessible ReadingWorld TalesExotic CultureAmerican Literature

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.The Lock and Key Library: The most interesting stories of all nations: AmericanAuthor: ,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Jan 1, 2000

Editor's review

This book is an early public-domain anthology of American short stories released by Project Gutenberg, the American volume in The Lock and Key Library series. Its value lies not in exclusive access to individual famous works but in its editorial angle of "the most interesting stories of all nations," which brings together the side of the American narrative tradition that leans toward suspense, twists, and everyday wonder. For Chinese readers, it is both a freely accessible reader of English source texts and a window into the tastes of American popular fiction from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The electronic edition preserves the original public-domain arrangement and language style, making it suitable as practice material for reading English short stories and for casual browsing by readers interested in early American genre fiction and magazine narrative. There is no need to read every piece closely; skip around according to interest and treat it as a story collection you can open and set down at any time.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Start with the table of contents, pick two or three titles that appeal most and sample them before deciding whether to read the whole book.
  2. After each story, note the turning point in one sentence to train your sensitivity to short-story structure.
  3. When you encounter unfamiliar words, first guess their meaning from context and look them up after finishing the whole piece to maintain reading rhythm.
  4. You can read aloud or listen along to feel the rhythm and tone of early English narrative sentences.

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
  53. 53
  54. 54
  55. 55
  56. 56
  57. 57
  58. 58
  59. 59
  60. 60
  61. 61
  62. 62
  63. 63
  64. 64
  65. 65
  66. 66
  67. 67
  68. 68
  69. 69
  70. 70
  71. 71
  72. 72
  73. 73

FAQ

Is this book in Chinese or English? The main text is in English; it is a public-domain e-book released by Project Gutenberg. Chinese readers can use it as English source reading material, advancing gradually with a dictionary or bilingual comparison, and need not understand every detail at once.
Which American authors' works are included? The materials only state that this is the American volume of the series and do not list specific pieces or authors. It is advisable to open the e-book's table of contents to confirm the actual contents, then decide what to read closely or skip.
Why recommend reading a public-domain short-story collection? Public-domain texts can be freely accessed, copied, and quoted, making them suitable for study and teaching; short stories are brief and complete, making it easy to experience a full narrative twist within limited time, and they also suit daily English reading practice.
Do I need to read from beginning to end in order? No. The pieces in a short-story collection are relatively independent, so you can skip around according to interest. If you want to get a sense of the editor's overall taste, read the first and last few pieces first, then go back to the middle ones.

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

Project Gutenberg Author

Project Gutenberg is not a single author but a nonprofit digital library founded by Michael Hart in 1971 and one of the world's earliest free ebook platforms. It relies on volunteers to digitize, proofread, and freely distribute public-domain works and is now operated by the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Its collection contains 2,692 works, mainly religious texts, epics, and story collections, including the King James Bible and the Douay-Rheims volumes, the epic Mahabharata, a literal translation of the Arabian Nights, and Danish editions of the Old and New Testaments. Public information is limited, and its nature is closer to a public-interest compiling and dissemination body; these texts are open to the public, easy to consult and circulate, and have had a profound influence on the spread of ebooks and the preservation of public-domain resources.