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'The Lady of Shalott' is a lyrical ballad by the 19th-century English poet Alfred Tennyson. Inspired by the short prose text 'La Damigella di Scalot' from the 13th-century, it tells the tragic story of Elaine of Astolat, a young noblewoman stranded in a tower up the river from Camelot. It is one of Tennyson's most famous and memorable works, with its lucid medieval romanticism, as well as enigmatic symbolism. Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892), invariably known as Alfred Lord Tennyson, was born in Somersby, UK. At the age of 18, he published his first book, 'Poems by Two Brothers' with his brother, later followed by 'Poems Chiefly Lyrical' (1830). In 1850, Tennyson was appointed Poet Laureate and married his childhood friend, Emily Sellwood. In 1884, as a great favorite of both Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, he was given the title of Baron Tennyson of Aldworth, the first Englishman to be granted such a high rank solely for his literary faculty. (Sources: Goodreads/Amazon) Read more from this author in my new book: 🚀 250 Quotes That Will Make You A Better Person 📕 Hardback – Large Print | Available now at Amazon 🏷️ https://www.amazon.com/Quotes-That-Will-Better-Person/dp/B0DNZFB9HS/

An inspiring work that offers direction and wise counsel for increasing awareness of self, one's motivations, and the importance of each person's unique contribution to society. First published in 1926 as The Science of Living, Alfred Adler's Understanding Life provides a straightforward and common-sense system for learning more about ourselves, the reasons for our behavior, and ways to change for the better. Adler provides guidelines for discovering how our beliefs--our "private logic"--hold us back, as well as useful tools for breaking free of this negative thinking. Stressing individual uniqueness and creative ability as well as the importance of common sense, Adler shows us how to work toward our goals without worrying about the outcome. (Sources: Goodreads/Amazon) Read more from this author in my new book: 🚀 250 Quotes That Will Make You A Better Person 📕 Hardback – Large Print | Available now at Amazon 🏷️ https://www.amazon.com/Quotes-That-Will-Better-Person/dp/B0DNZFB9HS/

Drawing on his own incarceration and exile, as well as on evidence from more than 200 fellow prisoners and Soviet archives, Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn reveals the entire apparatus of Soviet repression—the state within the state that ruled all-powerfully. Through truly Shakespearean portraits of its victims—men, women, and children—we encounter secret police operations, labor camps and prisons; the uprooting or extermination of whole populations, the welcome that awaited Russian soldiers who had been German prisoners of war. Yet we also witness the astounding moral courage of the incorruptible, who, defenseless, endured great brutality and degradation. The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956—a grisly indictment of a regime, fashioned here into a veritable literary miracle—has now been updated with a new introduction that includes the fall of the Soviet Union and Solzhenitsyn's move back to Russia. (Sources: Goodreads/Amazon) Read more from this author in my new book: 🚀 250 Quotes That Will Make You A Better Person 📕 Hardback – Large Print | Available now at Amazon 🏷️ https://www.amazon.com/Quotes-That-Will-Better-Person/dp/B0DNZFB9HS/

In his monumental narrative of the outbreak of the First World War and the ill-fated Russian offensive into East Prussia, Solzhenitsyn has written what Nina Krushcheva, in The Nation , calls "a dramatically new interpretation of Russian history." The assassination of tsarist prime minister Pyotr Stolypin, a crucial event in the years leading up to the Revolution of 1917, is reconstructed from the alienating viewpoints of historical witnesses. The sole voice of reason among the advisers to Tsar Nikolai II, Stolypin died at the hands of the anarchist Mordko Bogrov, and with him perished Russia's last hope for reform. Translated by H.T. Willetts. (Sources: Goodreads/Amazon) Read more from this author in my new book: 🚀 250 Quotes That Will Make You A Better Person 📕 Hardback – Large Print | Available now at Amazon 🏷️ https://www.amazon.com/Quotes-That-Will-Better-Person/dp/B0DNZFB9HS/

Set in Moscow during a three-day period in December 1949, 'The First Circle' is the story of the prisoner Gleb Nerzhin, a brilliant mathematician. At the age of thirty-one, Nerzhin has survived the war years on the German front and the postwar years in a succession of Russian prisons and labor camps. His story is interwoven with the stories of a dozen fellow prisoners - each an unforgettable human being - from the prison janitor to the tormented Marxist intellectual who designed the Dnieper dam; of the reigning elite and their conflicted subordinates; and of the women, wretched or privileged, bound to these men. A landmark of Soviet literature, 'The First Circle' is as powerful today as it was when it was first published, nearly thirty years ago. (Sources: Goodreads/Amazon) Read more from this author in my new book: 🚀 250 Quotes That Will Make You A Better Person 📕 Hardback – Large Print | Available now at Amazon 🏷️ https://www.amazon.com/Quotes-That-Will-Better-Person/dp/B0DNZFB9HS/

Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn One of the great allegorical masterpieces of world literature, Cancer Ward is both a deeply compassionate study of people facing terminal illness and a brilliant dissection of the “cancerous” Soviet police state. (Sources: Goodreads/Amazon) Read more from this author in my new book: 🚀 250 Quotes That Will Make You A Better Person 📕 Hardback – Large Print | Available now at Amazon 🏷️ https://www.amazon.com/Quotes-That-Will-Better-Person/dp/B0DNZFB9HS/ *

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn First published in the Soviet journal Novy Mir in 1962, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich stands as a classic of contemporary literature. The story of labor-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich Shukhov, it graphically describes his struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of communist oppression. An unforgettable portrait of the entire world of Stalin's forced work camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is one of the most extraordinary literary documents to have emerged from the Soviet Union and confirms Solzhenitsyn's stature as "a literary genius whose talent matches that of Dosotevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy"-Harrison Salisbury (Sources: Goodreads/Amazon) Read more from this author in my new book: 🚀 250 Quotes That Will Make You A Better Person 📕 Hardback – Large Print | Available now at Amazon 🏷️ https://www.amazon.com/Quotes-That-Will-Better-Person/dp/B0DNZFB9HS/

In Island, his last novel, Huxley transports us to a Pacific island where, for 120 years, an ideal society has flourished. Inevitably, this island of bliss attracts the envy and enmity of the surrounding world. A conspiracy is underway to take over Pala, and events begin to move when an agent of the conspirators, a newspaperman named Faranby, is shipwrecked there. What Faranby doesn't expect is how his time with the people of Pala will revolutionize all his values and—to his amazement—give him hope. (Sources: Goodreads/Amazon) Read more from this author in my new book: 🚀 250 Quotes That Will Make You A Better Person 📕 Hardback – Large Print | Available now at Amazon 🏷️ https://www.amazon.com/Quotes-That-Will-Better-Person/dp/B0DNZFB9HS/

The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley As only he can, Aldous Huxley explores the mind's remote frontiers and the unmapped areas of human consciousness. These two astounding essays are among the most profound studies of the effects of mind-expanding drugs written in this century. Contains the complete texts of The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell , both of which became essential for the counterculture during the 1960s and influenced a generation's perception of life. (Sources: Goodreads/Amazon) Read more from this author in my new book: 🚀 250 Quotes That Will Make You A Better Person 📕 Hardback – Large Print | Available now at Amazon 🏷️ https://www.amazon.com/Quotes-That-Will-Better-Person/dp/B0DNZFB9HS/

Aldous Huxley's profoundly important classic of world literature, Brave New World is a searching vision of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order–all at the cost of our freedom, full humanity, and perhaps also our souls. “A genius [who] who spent his life decrying the onward march of the Machine” (The New Yorker), Huxley was a man of incomparable talents: equally an artist, a spiritual seeker, and one of history's keenest observers of human nature and civilization. Brave New World, his masterpiece, has enthralled and terrified millions of readers, and retains its urgent relevance to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as thought-provoking, satisfying work of literature. Written in the shadow of the rise of fascism during the 1930s, Brave New World likewise speaks to a 21st-century world dominated by mass-entertainment, technology, medicine and pharmaceuticals, the arts of persuasion, and the hidden influence of elites. (Sources: Goodreads/Amazon) Read more from this author in my new book: 🚀 250 Quotes That Will Make You A Better Person 📕 Hardback – Large Print | Available now at Amazon 🏷️ https://www.amazon.com/Quotes-That-Will-Better-Person/dp/B0DNZFB9HS/