When a preacher failed to stir the emotions of his congregants he resorts to the time tested tradition of embellishment.

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Twenty years after heading west to find his fortunes a man returns to meet a long lost friend.

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I have always loved the work of Lewis Carroll. In fact, Litreading began with my rendition of Carroll’s nonsense poem Jabberwocky. His only foray into shorter works came in the form of poetry, much of which found its way into his Alice books.

This piece was written a bit differently earlier and changed when added to the book, “Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass.”

This nonsense verse is said to be a parody of a poem by Wordsworth, Resolution and Independence.

Lewis Carroll was the pen name and alter ego of Charles Dodgeson, a well off Englishman in the mid 19th Century. Although not a particularly prolific author – he had myriad passions – Carroll remains of the most popular writers of all time.

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Grief part of the human condition and we cope with it varies from person to person. When two old men discuss the loss of family members several years after World War I, it is a fly that help illustrate both life’s constant struggles and fragility.

The Fly is considered one of Catherine Mansfield’s greatest works because it is personal. Mansfield lost her brother in a training demonstration during World War I.
One of the great modernist writers of the early 20th century, Mansfield was both a contemporary and a friend of two other great authors of that period, D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Wolff. Her works are less well known as her career was cut short by terminal tuberculosis at the age of 34.

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Loneliness is painful enough under normal circumstances, but social rejection in the face of a personal crisis can be devastating.

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This is more a satirical essay than an actual short story, but it makes me smile.

The first telephone was demonstrated at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. By 1880, many wealthier families were using the new communication device regularly and one of the 19th century’s best known authors and satirists observed some anecdotal differences in the way men and women communicate.

Samuel Clemens better known as Mark Twain is one of the most famous American authors of all time. This story was penned 4 years after his success with Tom Sawyer and about 5 years before he completed Huckleberry Finn. In 1884 he formed his own publishing company which went on to posthumously publish the best-selling memoirs of President Ulysses S. Grant.

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We are complex creatures and grow more so with time. Every relationship adds or subtracts from who we are. No relationship is more life changing than marriage and for a woman thrice married in pre-suffrage America the stigma of mutual divorce seems insurmountable until her third husband’s comes to a startling revelation.

Best known for her novels, Edith Wharton was a prolific writer of short stories. Growing up among New York’s upper class, she created realistic portrayals of America’s Gilded Age pseudo aristocracy. In 1921, she became the the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Literature for her book, The Age of Innocence.

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In the 19th Century particularly, good boys are supposed to enjoy the fruits of the righteousness, and bad boys were destined for eternal damnation, at least according to Sunday School books, but according to Mark Twain, life often contradicted expectation.

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Pride does seem to go before a fall… In this very short story a young man’s life unravels thanks to a small vanity-induced dissimulation.

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This special short, short story centers on a different kind of haunting, not from without, but from within. The darkness that comes from a profound loneliness that quietly haunts the souls of many.

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