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

Project GutenbergProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.4
Word count
35K words
Chapters
4

Tags

English Originals Foreign Literature Detective MysterySuspense ThrillerPortrait GalleryVengeance and GratitudeCriminal PsychologyWorld TalesShort StoriesBeautiful EssaysPopular NarrativeEclectic Reading

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: NorthAuthor: ,Language: English, Class: PN: Language and Literatures: Literature: General, Criticism, Collections, Release Date: Dec 1, 1998

Editor's review

This volume is a short-story anthology in the “Lock and Key Library” series devoted to the nations of the North, a typical public-domain compilation of stories from many countries. Its value lies not in the stylistic unity of a single author but in the juxtaposition of different national narrative traditions: within one volume, readers can compare how folk tales, ghost stories, and plot-driven stories are told in different places, and sense the popular fiction tastes of the nineteenth century and thereabouts. As a Project Gutenberg electronic text, it preserves an earlier editorial format and selection criteria, and is of some reference value for studying the history of short-story circulation and of anthology compilation. There is no need to read it straight through; it suits bedside or travel reading, a story or two at a time, with attention to how stories open, how suspense is built, and how they end. If you are used to the tight pacing of modern fiction, some pieces may feel slow to set up, but it is precisely this unhurried manner of telling that gives it its period texture.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Read one or two pieces at a time, by country or in table-of-contents order, and note similarities and differences in narrative technique
  2. For pieces with an unfamiliar cultural background, read the first two paragraphs to gauge the voice before deciding to read closely or skim
  3. Use a map or country notes to treat the selections as a paper tour of stories from many nations

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

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  3. 3
  4. 4

FAQ

Is this book the work of a single author? No. It is a multi-national story anthology in the “Lock and Key Library” series, collecting short stories from different countries and regions, so style and subject matter are not uniform; read it as a collection, not a novel.
How difficult is the English, and is it suitable for learning English? The text is public-domain English from an earlier period, with some old-fashioned sentence patterns and vocabulary. Readers with intermediate or better English can read it with a dictionary, but it is not recommended as a beginner’s textbook; it is better as supplementary material for extensive reading and language sense training.
Do I need to read it in order from beginning to end? Not necessarily. The pieces in an anthology are relatively independent, so you can skip around by interest or read by country. Reading in order helps you appreciate the editor’s arrangement, but it does not affect your understanding of individual pieces.

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.