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  The Gull

  F. Anstey

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  Thomas Anstey Guthrie (1856-1934) was an English novelist and journalist who wrote his comic novels under the pseudonym F. Anstey."The Gull" is a strange tale about a man whose sweetheart, on setting sail for Guernsey one evening, romantically promises him that if she should die, she will return to him as a white dove.Next morning he awakes to find a large grey gull has flown into his bedroom overnight. When news comes in that his darling's ship has struck rocks and sunk, he suddenly realises that the gull must be the spirit of his drowned lover. He takes the gull with him to London and dotes on her, as her status deserves.But things become complicated when he meets another young lady...and the relationship with the gull seems less fulfilling than he had hoped....

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  The Scarlet Letter

  Nathaniel Hawthorne

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  The scene is 17th century Boston. Beautiful, darkhaired Hester Prynne, the heroine, gives birth to an illegitimate child. Persecuted by the church and the puritanical townspeople she is placed on trial for adultery. Proud, strong, intensely loyal, she defiantly refuses to name the father of the child. Her infuriated persecutors condemn her to a lifetime of public ridicule by forcing her to sew a scarlet letter "A" on the bosom of all her clothes. The father is eventually found out and the townspeople are surprised  as you will be.

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  A May Night

  Nikolai Gogol

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  "May Night, or the Drowned Maiden", 1831 is the third tale in the collection Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka by Nikolai Gogol. It was made into the opera May Night by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1878–79 and also a Ukrainian setting by Mykola Lysenko.
  This story comes from the unnamed story-teller (who was previously responsible for "The Fair at Sorochyntsi").
  In this tale, a young Cossack named Levko, the son of the mayor, is in love with Hanna. He comes to her house to talk about marriage and mentions that his father is not pleased with the idea, though he doesn't say anything directly and merely ignores him. As they are walking on the outskirts of the village, Hanna asks about an old hut with a moss-covered roof and overgrown apple trees surrounding it. He tells her the story of a beautiful young girl whose father took care of her after her mother died and loved her dearly. Eventually, he married another woman who she discovered was a witch when she cut the paw of a cat that tried to kill her and her stepmother appeared soon after with her hand bandaged. The witch had power over her father, however, and eventually she is thrown out of the house and throws herself into the nearby pond in despair. She reigns over a group of maidens who also drowned in the pond, but once, when she got a hold of the witch as she was near the pond, she turned into a maiden and the ghost of the young girl has been unable to pick her out of the group ever since, asking any young man she comes upon to guess for her...

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  Daddy-Long-Legs

  Jean Webster

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  First published in 1912, Daddy-Long-Legs is an epistolary novel that follows orphan Jerusha "Judy" Abbott through her college years through a series of letters written to her anonymous benefactor, whom she nicknames "Daddy-Long-Legs." As Judy learns to navigate the complex world of studies, social life, and romance, her letters convey her growth and address the increasingly complex questions that preoccupy her. A classic coming-of-age story featuring a clever, engaging, and altogether realistic heroine, Daddy-Long-Legs has been a beloved tale since its publication and continues to delight its audiences.

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  Physics

  Aristotle

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  Physics discusses concepts including: substance, accident, the infinite, causation, motion, time and the Prime Mover. (Summary by Geoffrey Edwards)

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  Piazza Tales The (Unabridged)

  Herman Melville

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  The Piazza Tales is a collection of six short stories by American writer Herman Melville, published by Dix & Edwards in the United States in May 1856 and in Britain in June. Except for the newly written title story, "The Piazza," all of the stories had appeared in Putnam's Monthly between 1853 and 1855. The collection includes what has long been regarded as three of Melville's most important achievements in the genre of short fiction, "Bartleby, the Scrivener", "Benito Cereno", and "The Encantadas", his sketches of the Galápagos Islands. (Billy Budd, arguably his greatest piece of short fiction, would remain unpublished in his lifetime.)
  Melville had originally intended to entitle the volume Benito Cereno and Other Sketches, but settled on the definitive title after he had written the introductory story. The book received largely favorable reviews, with reviewers especially praising "The Encantadas" but did not sell well enough to get Melville out of his financial straits, probably because short fiction for magazines had little appeal to bookbuyers. From after Melville's rediscovery to the end of the twentieth century, the short works that attracted the most critical attention were "Bartleby," "Benito Cereno" and "The Encantadas," with "The Piazza" a little behind those.

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