Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (October 16, 1854 - November 30, 1900) was an Irish playwright, novelist, essayist and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. He is remembered for his epigrams, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his plays as well As the circumstances of his imprisonment and premature death.

A young mariner takes charge of a ship in the far east (Bangkok) when the previous captain dies. The crew are sickly and unfriendly, the ship has no provisions, and there are delays in getting under way. He befriends Hermann, the captain of the Diana, a German ship which is moored nearby. Hermann lives on board with his wife, his four children, and his niece - who is a simple but physically attractive young woman. Also passing time with this family is Falk, the captain of a tug with a monopoly of navigation on the river leading out to the coast.

Gaspar Ruiz was a Chilean peasant who without his consent was recruited as a soldier by the independence army. The realists capture him during a combat and incorporate him to his troops. At the beginning of the story Ruiz had been taken prisoner by the patriot army and was near Valparaiso. There was a shooting by a traitor and Santierra, who in that type with the rank of lieutenant, tries to save his life to reincorporate the army but failed to improve his conditions of confinement while waiting for the sentence to be fulfilled.

Aboard the Nellie, anchored in the River Thames near Gravesend, England, Charles Marlow tells his fellow sailors about the events that led to his appointment as captain of a river steamboat for an ivory trading company. As a child, Marlow had been fascinated by "the blank spaces" on maps, particularly by the biggest, which by the time he had grown up was no longer blank but turned into "a place of darkness." Yet there remained a big river, "resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the...

Joseph Conrad (Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski; 3 December 1857 - 3 August 1924) was a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. He joined the British merchant marine in 1878, and was granted British nationality in 1886. Though he did not speak English fluently until he was in his twenties, he was a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote stories and novels, many with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an impassive, inscrutable universe."

Joachim-Napoleon Murat was the brother-in-law of Napoleon Boneparte, and held many titles in his life including Marshal of France, Grand Admiral of France, Grand Duke of Berg, and King of Naples. The story was first published as part of Dumas's eight-volume series "Celebrated Crimes" (1839--40), and recounts Murat's fall from favour and fascinating death - subsequent to Napoleon's own demise.

Justin est domestique chez les Boriquet. Il pratique l'hypnose. Cela lui permet de faire realiser par son maitre de nombreuses corvees et taches menageres dont il se passerait volontiers. Il va aller jusqu'a empecher son mariage. Probleme: le future beau-pere de Boriquet s'avere etre "medecin specialiste en hypnose et magnetisme." Les ambitions de Justin vont etre quelque peu freinees...

John Marcher, the protagonist, is reacquainted with May Bartram, a woman he knew ten years earlier, who remembers his odd secret: Marcher is seized with the belief that his life is to be defined by some catastrophic or spectacular event, lying in wait for him like a -beast in the jungle.- May decides to buy a house in London with the money she inherited from a great aunt, and to spend her days with Marcher, curiously awaiting what fate has in store for him. Marcher is a hopeless egoist, who believes that he is precluded from marrying so that he does not subject his wife to his -spectacular...