"Anna Karenina", one of the most famous novels of Leo Tolstoy, begins to put the phrase: "All happy families are alike." This is a book about eternal values: about love, about faith, about family, about human dignity. This is an incredibly awesome novel from the greatest writer of the XIX century. As Dostoevsky expressed, “Anna Karenina” already in the times of contemporaries struck the readers with the depth of the human soul displayed in the book. A century ago, the book was translated into many world languages, and nowadays the novel is included in the golden fund of the world's literature....
The Romance of Lust, or Early Experiences is a Victorian erotic novel written anonymously in four volumes during the years 1873–1876 and published by William Lazenby. Henry Spencer Ashbee discusses this novel in one of his bibliographies of erotic literature. In addition the compilers of British Museum General Catalogue of Printed Books list this book...
The state is divided into a republic. Machiavelli has three forms of coming to power: weapon, force or violence, luck or virtue. Machiavelli requires special attention to arms and virtues, it is noted that one complements the other. “Armed preachers are winning,” he writes. Machiavelli emphasizes that sometimes he must be like an animal, from which he distinguishes a fox and a lion. If the state discovers obvious defects or violates the "lifestyle" of the country that rules. Of the virtues of Machiavelli, Aristotle follows a particularly marked generosity (liberality - consistency as the...
The American family was forced to rent out a family estate for the duration of the renovation of their apartment. The main character, John’s wife, didn’t like the yellow wallpapers in their room, which they made into a bedroom. The wallpapers were coarse, their color was repulsive, and the pattern prompted research and observation; it seemed that something was wrong with this wallpaper....
Forrest J. Ackerman, prominent Los Angeles agent and Science Fiction enthusiast, reports on the recent World Convention in New York. Mr. Ackerman, who attended the first World Convention seventeen years ago, has been prominent in SF circles since the early thirties...
Something moving on the ledge attracted my attention: it was a scurrying black ant. If I had thought about it, I might have wondered how it came there. But the next moment a more curious object on the sill caught my eye. I bent over. I couldn't make out what it was at first. A bug, perhaps. Maybe it was too small for a bug. Just a little dancing dust, no doubt. Then I discerned -- and gasped. On the sill, there -- it was a man! A man on the streetcar's window sill -- a little man! He was so tiny I would never have seen him if it hadn't been for his white attire, which made him visible...
Few people realize it today, but famed actor Alan Arkin wrote two science fiction short stories in the 1950s, beginning with "Whiskaboom" in 1955 and "People Soup" in 1958. This volume collects both classic tales!...
Classic Science Fiction! The twins were a rare team indeed. They wanted to build a printing plant on a garbage dump. When Muldoon asked them why, their answer was entirely logical: "Because we live here."...
"Youth" is a science fiction novelette by Isaac Asimov. It first appeared in the May 1952 issue of Space Science Fiction and was reprinted in the 1955 collection The Martian Way and Other Stories. Youth is one of the rare Asimov stories with alien characters. Slim is a boy whose astronomer father is visiting the country estate of an important industrialist. The industrialist's son, Red, has found two strange animals, and he enlists Slim in a plan to turn the animals into a circus act. The astronomer, meanwhile, tells the industrialist that he has been in contact with space aliens who want to...
