Uruguayan playwright, poet, and short story writer Horacio Quiroga was born #OTD in 1878.
He wrote stories which, in their jungle settings, used the supernatural and the bizarre to show the struggle of man and animal to survive. He also excelled in portraying mental illness and hallucinatory states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horacio_Quiroga
Books by Horacio Quiroga at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/5094
Wrath of the Sky, the second volume of Sky Children, is available for purchase in both Ebook and in print!
You can learn more at my website:
https://owentyme.us/books/sky-children/wrath-of-the-sky.html
Or go straight to the store links:
https://books2read.com/WrathOfTheSky
#author #indieauthor #books #writing #fantasy #scifi #sciencefiction #actionadventure #fiction
The Long History of a Short Form.
The aphorism, from Hippocrates to Maggie Nelson.
By Ryan Ruby via @laphamsquart
For a word that literally means definition, the aphorism is a rather indefinite genre. It bears a family resemblance to the fragment, the proverb, the maxim, the hypomnema, the epigram, the mantra, the parable, and the prose poem.
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/long-history-short-form
#OTD in 1854.
Wilkie Collins's "The Lawyer's Story of a Stolen Letter", published as "The Fourth Poor Traveller" in The Seven Poor Travellers – the Household Words special Christmas number – is the first non-police detective fiction published in Britain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilkie_Collins
The Lawyer's Story of a Stolen Letter at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1626
#OTD in 1847.
Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey are published in a three-volume set under the pen names of Ellis and Acton Bell respectively, in London by T. C. Newby. Wuthering Heights will be Emily's only published novel, as she dies a year later, aged 30.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuthering_Heights
Wuthering Heights at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/768
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_Grey
Agnes Grey at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/767
"The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face."
In January 1847.
Vanity Fair: Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society begins serial publication in Punch magazine (London) in yellow covers, with illustrations by the author, William Makepeace Thackeray, writing for the first time in his own name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanity_Fair_(novel)
Vanity Fair at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/599
#OTD in 1922.
Façade – An Entertainment, poems by Edith Sitwell recited over an instrumental accompaniment by William Walton, are first performed, privately in London.
Sitwell began to publish some of the Façade poems in 1918, in the literary magazine Wheels. In 1922 many of them were given an orchestral accompaniment by Walton, Sitwell's protégé.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fa%C3%A7ade_(entertainment)
Edith Sitwell at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=+Edith+Sitwell&submit_search=Search
"Man is not truly one, but truly two."
#OTD (and January 9) in 1886.
Robert Louis Stevenson's horror novella Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde appears in New York and London. Almost 40,000 copies are sold in the first six months. By 1901, it was estimated to have sold over 250,000 copies in the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_Case_of_Dr_Jekyll_and_Mr_Hyde
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/43
"Ah! the death of the poor, the empty entrails, howling hunger, the animal appetite that leads one with chattering teeth to fill one’s stomach with beastly refuse in this great Paris, so bright and golden! "
Chapter XII
#OTD in 1877.
Émile Zola's L'Assommoir, 7th in his novel sequence Les Rougon-Macquart, is first published in book format a few weeks after its serialisation ends in Le Bien public (Paris).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Assommoir
L´Assommoir at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/search/?query=L%27Assommoir&submit_search=Go%21
#OTD in 1835.
Abolitionist Susan Paul officiates at a meeting of the New England Anti-Slavery Society (NEASS) in Boston. Later in the year, her Memoir of James Jackson becomes the earliest-known published narrative by an African-American woman and the first account documenting the life of a free black child in the United States.
"In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires."
Ethan Frome (1911)
American writer and designer Edith Wharton was born #OTD in 1862.
In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel The Age of Innocence. Her other well-known works are The House of Mirth, the novella Ethan Frome, and several notable ghost stories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Wharton
Edith Wharton at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/104
#OTD in 1911.
The U.K. Copyright Act consolidates copyright law in the British Empire and confirms the six libraries to which a copy of every book published in the U.K. must be deposited by the publisher: the British Museum Library (London); the Bodleian Library (Oxford); the Advocates Library (Edinburgh); the National Library of Wales (Aberystwyth); Trinity College Dublin; and Cambridge University Library.
#OTD in 1893.
Establishment, in Yorkshire (England), of the Brontë Society, possibly the oldest literary society of this nature, dedicated to establishing what will become the Brontë Parsonage Museum. The museum is in the former Brontë family home, the parsonage in Haworth, West Yorkshire, England, where the sisters spent most of their lives and wrote their famous novels.
Harvard and Google to release 1 million public-domain books as AI training dataset
By Paul Sawers
English novelist Jane Austen was born #OTD in 1775.
Austen is known primarily for her six novels, which implicitly interpret, critique, and comment upon the English landed gentry at the end of the 18th century: Sense and Sensibility (1811); Pride and Prejudice (1813); Mansfield Park (1814); Emma (1815); Northanger Abbey and Persuasion (published posthumously, 1818).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Austen
Books by Jane Austen at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/68
Leonardo da Vinci’s Surreptitious Scents
A new catalog invites us into the artist’s interest in smell and the role of perfumes during the Renaissance, with bonus recipes for those with a nose for fragrance.
By Maya Pontone
https://hyperallergic.com/971468/leonardo-da-vinci-surreptitious-scents/
Books by Leonardo da Vinci at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/1629
Replicating Shakespearean-era printing brings its own dramas and comedy
This video from the London Review of Books (LRB) celebrates the Folio’s 400th anniversary by documenting an audacious attempt to replicate the methods used to print the book at the time of its original release.
https://aeon.co/videos/replicating-shakespearean-era-printing-brings-its-own-dramas-and-comedy
"It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humor."
Annotations: A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Scrooge became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.
By: Liz Tracey
https://daily.jstor.org/annotations-a-christmas-carol-by-charles-dickens/
" I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking."
Have His Carcase
English author, poet, and playwright Dorothy L. Sayers died #OTD in 1957. Sayers is most famous for her detective novels featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, an aristocratic amateur sleuth. She wrote several plays, including The Zeal of Thy House and The Man Born to Be King. Sayers also translated major works, notably Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Dorothy L. Sayers at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/45867
#OTD in 1824.
The first issue of a radical quarterly founded by Jeremy Bentham, The Westminster Review, is published in London.
It was published from 1824 to 1914. James Mill was one of the driving forces behind the liberal journal until 1828. Some notable contributors: George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, John Stuart Mill, Mary Shelley, Herbert Spencer, John Tyndall, Caroline Cornwallis, Julia Wedgwood, Elizabeth Clarke Wolstenholme Elmy.
The Tempest: Shakespeare’s Tale of Magic, Power, and Forgiveness
The Tempest is one of William Shakespeare's most mature plays. Read on to find out more about its magical plotline and various themes.
By Agnes Theresa Oberauer
https://www.thecollector.com/tempest-shakespeare-tale-magic-power-forgiveness/
The Tempest at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/1540
HAPPY PUBLIC DOMAIN DAY!
Books which will enter the US public domain:
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon (as serialized in Black Mask magazine)
John Steinbeck, Cup of Gold (Steinbeck's first novel)
Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica
Oliver La Farge, Laughing Boy: A Navajo Love Story
Patrick Hamilton, Rope
"It is to be remarked that a good many people are born curiously unfitted for the fate awaiting them on this earth."
#OTD in 1912.
Joseph Conrad achieves his first popular success as the New York Herald begins serializing his novel Chance. He broke off with it in 1906, but sold the rights to the unfinished work in June 1911.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chance_(Conrad_novel)
Chance at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/1476
#OTD in 1818.
Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus first appears anonymously in London.
Shelley started writing the story when she was 18, and the first edition was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was 20. Her name first appeared in the second edition, which was published in Paris in 1821.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein
1818 edition at PG:
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/41445
1831 edition
https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/42324
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