Night Watches
Tags
Summary
Night Watches by W. W. Jacobs
Author: Jacobs, W. W. (William Wymark), 1863-1943,Language: English, Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature, Release Date: Apr 1, 2004
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers who like English short stories and can read them easily in spare moments
- Readers interested in English humorous literature, who can feel Jacobs's satirical tone
- English learners who want a low-threshold introduction to public-domain English originals
- Literature enthusiasts studying late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century English short stories
Not a good fit for
- English beginners who need detailed notes or introductions; this book has no modern supporting materials
- Readers who prefer long, continuous narrative; a short-story collection cannot satisfy a need for deep immersion
- Readers expecting profound social critique or philosophical discussion; this book is mainly light humor
Reading tips
- Read one or two stories a day, and briefly note the characters' situations and the jokes, keeping a relaxed pace.
- When you meet unfamiliar period expressions, guess from context first; do not look up words too often, or you will break the reading flow.
- Read alongside other Jacobs short stories to appreciate the common features of his humorous, satirical technique.
- After reading, try summarizing each story's unexpected twist in one or two sentences to train English summarizing skills.
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
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
FAQ
Is this book the English original?
Will it be hard to read without notes?
Is it suitable for learning English?
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
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.
