Washington Irving Bücher

Die Alhambra ist das berühmteste Bauwerk Südspaniens und die einstige Stadtburg der letzten maurischen Herrscher in Al-Andalus. Vier Monate lang lebte dort 1829 der amerikanische Schriftsteller Washington Irving und beschrieb in berauschenden Farben das Land, die Stadt und den Palast, erzählte vom Leben seiner Bewohner, von ihren Geheimnissen und den Legenden vergangener Zeiten. Er schuf ein reiches und bezauberndes Porträt, das zur Wiederentdeckung und Restaurierung der damals schon verfallenden Burg und heute attraktivsten Sehenswürdigkeit Andalusiens wesentlich beitrug.

Die amerikanische Kurzgeschichte entwickelte sich im 19. Jahrhundert zu einer eigenständigen literarischen Form, deren Einfluss und Faszination bis heute ungebrochen sind. Mit fesselnden Erzählungen von über 20 bedeutenden Autoren, darunter Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, O. Henry und Stephen Crane, lädt dieser Band dazu ein, sich von der Lebensnähe und dem Einfallsreichtum der Geschichten unterhalten und bezaubern zu lassen. Kurze Porträts der Autoren sind den Erzählungen jeweils vorangestellt und geben Anregung für weiteres Lesevergnügen.

In the first of these stories from the Catskill Mountains, a superstitious schoolmaster encounters a headless horseman; in the second, a man sleeps for twenty years, waking to a much-changed world.

This collection features renowned American short stories from Washington Irving to Ann Beattie. While the selection may not represent the best works of each author, it forms an impressive anthology. Potential buyers should check the book's condition, as some copies are over 20 years old.

America's first internationally acclaimed author, Washington Irving, was also one of the first to write about its then far-western frontier. After seventeen years in Europe, the famous author of ?The Legend of Sleepy Hollow? returned to America and undertook an extensive three-month journey through present-day Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Describing scenery and inhabitants with an eye to romantic sublimity and celebrating the frontiersman's ?secret of personal freedom, ? Irving published his account of that journey in 1835 as "A Tour on the Prairies," an early and distinctly American depiction of the young nation's borderland and its native inhabitants. Irving followed up this eyewitness account with two works that chart the dramatic and tumultuous history of the early American fur trade, very much in the spirit of James Fenimore Cooper's "Leatherstocking Tales." "Astoria" (1836) recounts John Jacob Astor's attempt to establish a commercial empire in the Pacific Northwest. "The Adventures of Captain Bonneville" (1837) is a lively saga of exploration among the mountains, rivers, and deserts of the Far West. While working closely from original documents, Irving wrote also as a mythologist of the vast spaces traversed by ?Sindbads of the wilderness.? In these three compelling narratives he opened up a crucial region of the American literary imagination influencing such authors as Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville.

The Fires and the Shadows is a collection of some of the finest tales of supernatural fiction from all over the world, and from some of literature's most darkly glittering imaginations. Including works from Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling, this is a volume that will unsettle and delight in equal measure.

Da Washington Irving a Nikolaj Gogol’, da Louisa May Alcott a Luigi Pirandello, fino a Irène Némirovsky: questo volume riunisce le voci di alcuni tra gli autori più amati in un’antologia di cinque storie straordinarie, tutte dedicate al Natale. In un viaggio intorno al mondo fatto di luci, meravigliosi addobbi e paesaggi innevati, questi racconti senza tempo sorprendono, divertono e commuovono. Perché a Natale, si sa, può accadere qualsiasi cosa: che qualcuno salga fino in cielo e rubi la luna, lasciando la terra nel buio più pesto; che due cuori generosi, con una slitta ricolma di doni e una tavola imbandita, facciano la gioia di tanti bambini; che un senso di pace e di incontenibile gioia si diffonda nell’animo di ciascuno, riportando per un attimo l’armonia tra gli uomini.