Soon Tommy’s parents, who had recently separated, would arrive for a conference on his failing schoolwork and disruptive behavior. Neither parent knew that I had summoned the other.Tommy, an only child, had always been happy, cooperative, and an excellent student. How could I convince his father and mother that his recent failing grades represented…
I can still remember the first day when I met my best friend. She had just moved into the neighborhood and her grandmother who also lived in the neighborhood brought her down to meet me. I hid behind my mother and she hid behind her grandmother, scared to look at each other. Soon, we lost…
Once there was an emperor in the Far East who was growing old and knew it was coming time to choose his successor. Instead of choosing one of his assistants or one of his own children, he decided to do something different.He called all the young people in the kingdom together one day. He said,…
Two men were traveling together, when a bear suddenly met them on their path. One of them climbed up quickly into a tree and concealed himself in the branches. The other, seeing that he must be attacked, fell flat on the ground, and when the bear came up and felt him with his snout,…
Once upon a time there was a little boy who was raised in an orphanage. The little boy had always wished that he could fly like a bird. It was very difficult for him to understand why he could not fly. There were birds at the zoo that were much bigger than he,…
Paradise Lost is John Milton’s elaboration of Genesis into an epic poem. The poem begins with Milton’s invocation to a muse for help. The action switches to hell, where Satan and his followers have been banished from heaven after trying to rebel against God. Bitter, they try to make the best of things by…
The life of the Morel family is unhappy, tense, and uneasy. The Morels live in a mining town in the countryside. Walter Morel is a miner, and he and his wife, Gertrude, have two children, William and Annie, and are expecting their third child. When their third child, Paul, is born, Mrs. Morel does…
The narrator opens with an elaborate hyperbole of a subtitle for the book, explaining that he is a veteran living in easy circumstances, who witnessed the bombing of Dresden, Germany as a prisoner of war and survived to tell the tale in the manner of the planet of Tralfamadore where the flying saucers come…
One summer night, a few months after my marriage, I was seated by my own hearth smoking a last pipe and nodding over a novel, for my day’s work had been an exhausting one. My wife had already gone upstairs, and the sound of the locking of the hall door some time before told…
There was a castle in somewhere. It was a cursed and there were ghosts. A woman and her assistant tried to go into the castle but they couldn’t. Because they saw a ghost. Then they called the man. He was a search for the ghosts. He came here with her daughter Kate. After that…
