HEALCAST

"The Garden Party" a short story first published in 1922. The story centers on Laura Sheridan, a young girl from an affluent family, who experiences a range of emotions and revelations when a garden party coincides with the death of a working-class neighbor. Mansfield's narrative explores themes of class consciousness, innocence, and the complexities of human empathy.

Katherine Mansfield was a prominent modernist writer from New Zealand, known for her short stories that often explore complex emotional and psychological states. "The Garden Party," published in 1922, is one of her most famous works. Mansfield's writing is characterized by its vivid imagery, nuanced characterizations, and subtle social critiques. She often drew from her own experiences and observations of life in early 20th-century New Zealand and England.

Mansfield's life was marked by personal and professional challenges, including a tumultuous marriage and struggles with tuberculosis, which ultimately led to her early death at the age of 34. Despite her short life, Mansfield left a significant legacy in literature, influencing writers like Virginia Woolf and shaping the modernist literary movement.

"A Hunger Artist" (German: "Ein Hungerkünstler") is a short story by Franz Kafka first published in Die neue Rundschau in 1922. The story was also included in the collection A Hunger Artist (Ein Hungerkünstler), the last book Kafka prepared for publication, which was printed by Verlag Die Schmiedeshortly after his death. The protagonist, a hunger artist who experiences the decline in appreciation of his craft, is typically Kafkaesque: an individual marginalized and victimized by society at large. "A Hunger Artist" explores themes such as death, art, isolation, asceticism, spiritual poverty, futility, personal failure and the corruption of human relationships. The title of the story has also been translated as "A Fasting Artist" and "A Starvation Artist".

#bedtimestories #shortstories #grownups

• BACKGROUND •
Luigi Pirandello; Agrigento (28 June 1867 – Rome 10 December 1936) was an Italian dramatist, novelist, poet, and short story writer whose greatest contributions were his plays.

He was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature for "his almost magical power to turn psychological analysis into good theatre.

Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written in Sicilian. Pirandello's tragic farces are often seen as forerunners of the Theatre of the Absurd.

• BEDTIME STORIES FOR ADULTS •
Step into the enchanting world of Buddug's literary gatherings, a cozy sanctuary illuminated by the gentle glow of timeless tales and cherished classics in the public domain. Every Friday at 8:00 PM PT, let yourself be embraced by the velvety warmth of stories that resonate through the revered corridors of literary tradition. Imagine finding solace in a softly-lit reading nook, where a flickering candle playfully dances, casting shadows upon well-worn leather-bound books. Join us for an evening of literary magic and the soothing ambiance of shared stories.

[ be the light in the darkness ]

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"Araby" is a short story by James Joyce published in his 1914 collection Dubliners. The story traces a young boy's infatuation with his friend's sister.

Through first-person narration, the reader is immersed at the start of the story in the drab life that people live on North Richmond Street, which seems to be illuminated only by the verve and imagination of the children who, despite the growing darkness that comes during the winter months, insist on playing "until [their] bodies glowed". Even though the conditions of this neighbourhood leave much to be desired, the children's play is infused with their almost magical way of perceiving the world, which the narrator dutifully conveys to the reader:

Our shouts echoed in the silent street. The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness.

But though these boys "career" around the neighbourhood in a very childlike way, they are also aware of and interested in the adult world, as represented by their spying on the narrator's uncle as he comes home from work and, more importantly, on Mangan's sister, whose dress "swung as she moved" and whose "soft rope of hair tossed from side to side". These boys are on the brink of sexual awareness and, awed by the mystery of another sex, are hungry for knowledge.

Luigi Pirandello; Agrigento (28 June 1867 – Rome 10 December 1936) was an Italian dramatist, novelist, poet, and short story writer whose greatest contributions were his plays. 

He was awarded the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature for "his almost magical power to turn psychological analysis into good theatre."

Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written in Sicilian. Pirandello's tragic farces are often seen as forerunners of the Theatre of the Absurd.

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I hope you enjoy this reading. The frequencies in the background contain 10,000Hz for full-body healing, and binaural beats at 40Hz for brain health

The Prussian Officer and Other Stories is a collection of early short stories by D. H. Lawrence. It was published by Duckworth in London on 26 November 1914, and in America by B. W. Huebsch in 1916.

The first narrative in the collection is "The Prussian Officer", which tells of a captain and his orderly. Having wasted his youth gambling, the captain has been left with only his military career, and though he has taken on mistresses throughout his life, he remains single. His young orderly is involved in a relationship with a young woman, and the captain, feeling sexual tension towards the young man, prevents the orderly from engaging in the relationship by taking up his evenings. These evenings lead to the captain abusing his orderly and leaving large, painful bruises on his thighs, making it hard for the orderly to walk. Whilst isolated in a forest during manoeuvres, the orderly takes out murderous revenge on the captain, but finds himself in a daze seemingly due both to the pain of the bruises and thirst. The orderly eventually collapses and dies in the hospital shortly thereafter. The corpses of the two men lay side by side.

"The Road to the Churchyard" (German: Der Weg zum Friedhof) is a short story by Thomas Mann. It initially appeared in 1900 in Simplicissimus and then in 1903 in an anthology of Mann's six short stories, entitled Six Novellen. It was published in 1922 as "The Way to the Churchyard" in Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter's translation of Mann's Stories of Three Decades, and in 1988 in Death in Venice and Other Stories, translated by David Luke. It has also been translated as "The Path to the Cemetery".

This work parodies Naturalism (e.g. the alcoholism) and Mann's own Nietzschean influences. The recurrent protest present here in a comic vein, as well as in many other Mann's works, is against ignorant vitality epitomized here as the young boy on the bicycle.

The Triumph of the Egg (full title: The Triumph of the Egg: A Book of Impressions from American Life in Tales and Poems) is a 1921 short story collection by the American author Sherwood Anderson. It was Anderson's third book to be published by B.W. Huebsch and his second collection after the successful short story cycle Winesburg, Ohio. The book contains 15 stories preceded by photographs of seven clay sculptures by Anderson's wife at the time, sculptor Tennessee Mitchell, that were inspired by characters in the book.

"A Pair of Silk Stockings" is an 1897 short story written by Kate Chopin. The story follows Mrs. Sommers who prefers spending a windfall on herself, rather than on her children.

Mrs. Sommers comes into the small fortune of $15. After a few days of reflection, she decides to use the money to purchase clothing for her children so they may look "fresh and dainty and new for once in their lives." That narrative suggests that Mrs. Sommers had been before her marriage a wealthy woman, but now "needs of the present absorbed her every faculty."

An exhausted Mrs. Sommers rests at a counter where she will begin her shopping adventure. There she finds a pair of silk stockings for sale and is entranced by their smoothness. "Not thinking at all," she disregards her plans to obtain clothes for her children and instead spends her money and her afternoon for herself. She purchases boots to go with her stockings, buys fitted kid gloves, reads expensive magazines while lunching at a high-class restaurant, and ends her day sharing chocolates with a fellow theatre goer.

After the play ends, she boards the cable car to return home with "a poignant wish, a powerful longing that the cable car would never stop anywhere, but go on and on with her forever."

"Bernice Bobs Her Hair" is a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was first published in May 1920 in the Saturday Evening Post. The original publication was illustrated by May Wilson Preston. The work later appeared in the September 1920 short story collection Flappers and Philosophers.

Fitzgerald's story follows the plight of a mixed-race Native American girl named Bernice from rural Eau Claire, Wisconsin, who visits her beautiful and sophisticated white cousin Marjorie in the city. In an attempt to be popular, Bernice announces she will bob her hair, but this announcement leads to unforeseen consequences.

Decades after its publication, literary critic Orville Prescott of The New York Times hailed the work in 1951 as a landmark story "that set social standards for a generation of young Americans, that revealed secrets of popularity and gave wonderful examples of what to say at a dinner table or on the dance floor."