The Curious Case of Benjamin Button & Other Stories
Level 3
by F. Scott Fitzgerald - Text adaptation by Clare WestWhat happens when a man lives his life backwards, or a family owns a diamond as big as the Ritz Hotel?
How can a boring girl become more popular, a careless young woman become more sensible, or a cut-glass bowl destroy a married woman's life?
What does a young man do to save the girl that he likes from an evil ghost, or to forget old feelings for a woman when she marries another man?
Read this collection of short stories by one of America's finest storytellers to find out.
CRIME STORY COLLECTIONS
This collection contains eight murder stories written by some of the finest British and American mystery writers of the twentieth century. Many, like Colin Dexter and Patricia Highsmith, are best known for their full-length works while others, like Jack Ritchie, specialize in the short story.
In some of these stories, like Sara Paretsky’s ‘At the Old Swimming Hole’, we follow the action through the eyes of the person who is trying to solve the crime. Other stories are told from the point of view of the criminal; as readers of Patricia Highsmith’s ‘Woodrow Wilson’s Tie’, we share the murderer’s thoughts as well as his actions.
English mystery writer Margery Allingham (1904-66) was born in London. She followed other members of her family into a life of writing, producing her first mystery story in 1927. She also wrote about social history. In ‘Three Is a Lucky Number’ we meet Ronald Torbay, who is making careful preparations for his third murder. But will he succeed?
Born in Kentucky in 1940, Sue Grafton, who now lives in California, has won many prizes for her crime stories. Kinsey Millhone, a strong, intelligent female private detective with a good sense of humour, is the main character in her books and short stories. ‘Full Circle’ takes place in the imaginary town of Santa Teresa in California. It seems that there has been a terrible car accident. But was it really an accident?
British crime writer Simon Brett was born in 1945. After studying at Oxford University, he worked as a producer for BBC radio and London Weekend Television. He haswritten a number of radio and TV plays in addition to his books and short stories. Humphrey Partridge, the main character in ‘How’s Your Mother?’ lives alone with his sick mother. But nobody ever sees her, and when the house burns down she cannot be found. Where has she gone?
Sara Paretsky, born in Iowa in 1947, did a variety of jobs after leaving university before becoming a full-time writer. She has won many prizes for her crime writing and is particularly well known for her stories about V. I. Warshawski, a female private detective. In ‘At the Old Swimming Hole’, a woman is shot. V. I. follows the clues, but who is actually following who?
Patricia Highsmith (1921-95), who also wrote under the name Claire Morgan, was from Texas, although she lived in Europe for much of her later life. Her first book, Strangers on a Train (1950), was very successful and was made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock. She too won many writing prizes and two of her stories are included in this collection. ‘Slowly, Slowly in the Wind’ tells the story of an argument between neighbours that gets out of control. In ‘Woodrow Wilson’s Tie’ a young delivery boy visits the waxworks and has a strange idea, but who will believe him?
American short story writer John George Reitci (1922-83) wrote under the name of Jack Ritchie. He was educated in Wisconsin, served in the United States Army, and wrote his best stories in the 1960s and 1970s. These stories have been reprinted many times in collections. A number of unusual detectives appear in his mystery stories; often they are not very good at detective work, and find the right solution by accident. In The Absence of Emily’, Jack and Emily live next door to Emily’s sister, Millicent. When Emily goes away without telling her, Millicent starts to worry. Is it possible that Jack has killed her?
Colin Dexter, born in 1930 in Lincolnshire, England, became a schoolteacher after leaving Cambridge University. He later moved to Oxford where many of his stories, including the Inspector Morse mysteries, take place. Morse works closely with Sergeant Lewis, and the relationship between these two very different men develops with each story. In ‘The Inside Story’, a woman has been murdered. Clues include picture postcards and a crime story written by the dead woman. So who killed her? And why?
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Level 4
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Level 5
By Charles and Mary Lamb
Three Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Level 4More about the author
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Three Great Plays of Shakeaspeare
Level 4
Retold by Karen Holmes
'And so,' the prince said, 'this dark and cloudy morning has brought a sad peace. There will never be a sadder story than the story of Romeo and Juliet.'
Romeo and Juliet tells the story of two important families in Verona, in Italy. The families hate each other. Romeo, the son of Lord Montague, falls in love with Juliet, the daughter of Lord Capulet. But when people hate each other, everybody around them is affected. The story does not end happily because Romeo and Juliet cannot escape from the war between their families and live happily together. In this play, hate has more power over people's lives than love.
All three stories in this book have sad endings. In each story, the main characters die. They die because they, or others, are weak, greedy or very foolish.
Lord and Lady Macbeth (Macbeth) are greedy, and as a result a lot of people die. Macbeth is also weak. Lady Macbeth says, 'Macbeth is too kind, too gentle. There are things that he must do but he is afraid to do them. I must speak to him, and make him brave.' He becomes a murderer and a cruel king because his wife tells him that he must perform evil acts. By the end of the play, Macbeth does not care about anybody. When his wife dies, he says,' It would be better if she died at another time.'
In the third story, King Lear, the king is an a very old man. His great age makes him weak and foolish. He does not understand the characters of his three daughters, and he believes Goneril and Regan when they say that they love him. He thinks that his youngest daughter, Cordelia, does not love him because she
refuses to use such fine words. But Goneril and Regan are greedy for power and they do not care about their father.
Many of the characters in these stories have a lot of faults but, like real people, they have good qualities and moments of greatness too. Macbeth is a fine army commander. He wins an important war and King Duncan admires him. Lear is a great king. The King of France thinks that he is a good man, and the Earl of Gloucester loves him. Even the Montagues and the Capulets end their quarrel — but too late.
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Level 5
By Charles and Mary Lamb
In 1807 Charles Lamb and his sister Mary Lamb were asked by their good friend, William Godwin, to write the stories from the best-known of Shakespeare's plays in a form that children could easily understand. The stories were intended as an introduction to Shakespeare for readers who were too young to read the plays themselves, and not as a replacement. It was suggested that girls in particular, who would not in those days be able to use libraries as freely as their brothers, would profit from them. The result was Tales from Shakespeare. ' I think it wil l be popular among the people,' Charles wrote to a friend at the time. And he was right: the stories succeeded beyond expectation, enjoying popularity (with people of all sizes!) until the present day.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century the moral tale was an important form of literature for children; stories were used mainly to teach children the difference between right and wrong. This affected the way the Lambs wrote the stories: the characters are shown as either good or bad in a way that is not so obvious in the plays, and the moral at the end of each story is very clear. The Tales attempt, wherever possible, to use Shakespeare's own words to retell the stories, but the language is made easier for the young reader. Some of the stories have also been made less complicated, with fewer characters than the original.
For the Lambs, whose lives until this point had not been at all easy, the Tales were their first success in the world of literature. Charles was born in 1775, nine years after Mary Ann. Their father was a poorly paid lawyer's clerk in London. Charles was sent to the well-known Christ's Hospital School, but Mary, as a girl, did not have the opportunity for such a good education as her brother. For most of his life, Charles worked as a clerk at East India House, while writing in his free time. His work was not well paid, and even though Mary earned a little money from needlework, the family was poor. Mary gradually became mentally unbalanced, and then a terrible event took place that changed the brother's and sister's lives for ever. In 1796 their mother tried to stop a fight between Mary and another girl. The fight ended when Mary killed her mother with a knife. At the court case that followed, Mary was judged to be mentally ill and was sent to a mental home. But Charles managed to persuade the courts to let him take responsibility for looking after her, and she was allowed to return home after three years. Charles spent the rest of his life caring for her, and never married. Because she was known to have murdered her mother and to have been in a mental home, the pair had to move house several times. But on the whole they led a calm and happy life together and brought up a child called Emma Isola, who had no parents, as their daughter. Charles died in 1834 and Mary 13 years later.
Charles was a friend of many famous figures of his time, such as the poets Wordsworth and Coleridge. He was a respected and original judge of literature who also wrote poems, plays and stories. With Mary, he wrote several books for children: they retold the story of the Odyssey in The Adventures of Ulysses (1808); Mrs Leicester's School (1809) and Poetry for Children (1809) followed.
Taste and other Tales
By Roald Dhal
These strange and unusual stories were written by a man who is one of the most popular storytellers of our time. All the stories in this book have wonderfully inventive story lines with a twist in the tail. The characters are ordinary and respectable on the surface, but many of them have an unexpectedly dark and cruel side to their personality. Tension is built up around the relationships between the various characters.
Often a husband and wife are involved in mind games in which their hatred for each other is rarely mentioned or acted on until it has built up to an unbearable level. A harmless guessing game between two lovers of good wine suddenly becomes deadly serious, while a competition on board a ship has an even more serious result for one of the competitors.
Mrs Bixby is faced with a difficult problem when her lover gives her an expensive gift, and Mrs Foster's terrible fear of being late is cruelly used by her husband. And what are the frightening sounds that Klausner can hear on the strange machine he has built? These situations, and more, develop in unexpected ways in this excellent collection of Dahl's finest stories.
Tales of Mystery and Imagination
The short stories of Edgar Allan Poe are often strange, wild and highly imaginative. Many of them examine in an extremely detailed way the dark side of human existence. In his time, Poe was a very original writer. His stories communicate a world of terror that comes straight from the depths of his own troubled mind.
'William Wilson' (1839) is set in England, where Poe also went to school. It is a disturbing story about the struggle between the good and bad sides of a young man's character.
'The Gold-Bug' (1843) is one of Poe's most popular stories, selling over 300,000 copies in its first year. The story shows how clear thinking can make sense of things we do not at first understand. In this case, the clear thinking leads to the discovery of immense treasures.
Another strange and very frightening story is 'The Fall of the House of Usher' (1839).The character Roderick Usher has often been compared with Poe himself; both lived in continual fear of death and kept apart from human company.
Two more shocking stories in which death claims victory are 'The Red Death' (1842) and 'The Barrel of Amontillado' (1846).
'The Whirlpool' (1841) is an adventure story set on the Norwegian coast, in which the main character experiences terrible fear and lives to tell the tale.
'The Pit and the Pendulum' (1843) describes in horrible detail the cruelty of human beings to each other, and examines fear and hopelessness at the point of death.
'Metzengerstein' is one of Poe's early tales. Set in Hungary, it is a story about the power of evil.
'The Stolen Letter' and 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' (1841) are mystery stories featuring C .Auguste Dupin, on whom other great fictional characters such as Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes were later modelled.