The Last Letter

Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr.Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.6
Word count
24K words
Chapters
3

Tags

English Originals Science Fiction Suspense ThrillerFate and FortuneMystery SuspenseHuman NaturePsychological InsightCriminal PsychologyTense AtmosphereBehavioral InsightFast-Paced NarrativeShort Stories

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 Last Letter by Fritz LeiberAuthor: Leiber, Fritz, 1910-1992,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Mar 22, 2016

Editor's review

The Last Letter is a short work by Fritz Leiber, released as a free eBook by Project Gutenberg. Leiber is known for science fiction and fantasy and is also skilled at suspense and twists in short fiction; this piece is brief and serves as a good entry point to his short-form style. The Gutenberg edition is the English original with no translation or notes, so the main barrier is language. Since the data lists only the literary classification and release date without plot details, readers should not approach it expecting a full-length science fiction novel; it is better treated as a short piece to finish in one or two sittings. For those studying twentieth-century American genre short fiction or collecting public-domain electronic texts, this small volume has value for preservation and browsing; those wanting in-depth commentary or a Chinese parallel text will need to look elsewhere.

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Reading tips

  1. Read it in one sitting; the suspense and twist depend on continuous reading, so avoid breaking it up too much.
  2. After finishing, go back and check where the key details were planted, to appreciate Leiber's pacing of information.
  3. If using it for English study, read through first and look up words afterward, rather than interrupting the reading with word-by-word lookup.

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

FAQ

Is this work a novel or a short story? According to the data, The Last Letter is a short work by Leiber, released separately as an eBook by Project Gutenberg; it is brief and can be finished in one or two sittings.
Does this edition include a Chinese translation or annotations? No. The data shows the edition is in English, classified under American and Canadian literature; it is an English-language eBook produced by Project Gutenberg with no Chinese translation or annotations.
Do I need to know Leiber's other works before reading? Not necessarily. This is a standalone short story that can be read directly. If you find you like the style, expanding to his other short stories or novels afterward will come naturally.

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

Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr. Author · American · 1910–1992

Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) was an American writer of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, born in Chicago to parents who were both Shakespearean actors. His work spans several genres, with representative titles including The Big Time, Yesterday House, A Bad Day for Sales, The Moon Is Green, and A Pail of Air, as well as the Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser sword-and-sorcery series created with Harry Fischer. He excelled at injecting the grotesque and the fearful into everyday settings, combining cool social satire with sharp imagination and a witty, dramatic prose style. Leiber won the Hugo Award six times and the Nebula Award three times, and in 1981 was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, leaving a lasting influence on later genre literature.