7 best short stories - Horse Stories

Friendship between man and horse is one of the pillars of civilization. Retired from most of his functions of transport and heavy work, today the horse is an animal companion - and is even used as a therapeutic tool in health treatments - and a classic partner of sports. In this book, the critic August Nemo has selected seven short stories that talk about the intimate relationship between man and horse. This book contains: - Chu Chu by Bret Harte. - The Doctor's Horse by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. - The Rocking-Horse Winner by D. H. Lawrence. - Silver Blaze by Arthur Conan Doyle. - The Maltese Cat by Rudyard Kipling. - A Genuine Mexican Plug by Mark Twain. - The Brogue by Saki.

Francis Brett Hart, known as Bret Harte, was an American short-story writer and poet, best remembered for his short fiction featuring miners, gamblers, and other romantic figures of the California Gold Rush. In a career spanning more than four decades, he wrote poetry, plays, lectures, book reviews, editorials, and magazine sketches in addition to fiction. As he moved from California to the eastern U.S. to Europe, he incorporated new subjects and characters into his stories, but his Gold Rush tales have been the works most often reprinted, adapted, and admired. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was lauded as the 'greatest humorist this country has produced', and William Faulkner called him 'the father of American literature'. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty. Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman was a prominent 19th-century American author. Through her different genres of work including children's stories, poems, and short stories, Mary Wilkins Freeman sought to demonstrate her values as a feminist. During the time which she was writing, she did this in nonconventional ways; for example, she diverged from making her female characters weak and in need of help which was a common trope in literature. David Herbert Lawrence was an English writer and poet. His collected works represent, among other things, an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. Some of the issues Lawrence explores are sexuality, emotional health, vitality, spontaneity, and instinct. Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his 'savage pilgrimage'. Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was a British writer best known for his detective fiction featuring the character Sherlock Holmes. Originally a physician, in 1887 he published A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and more than fifty short stories about Holmes and Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes stories are generally considered milestones in the field of crime fiction. Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist. He was born in India, which inspired much of his work. Kipling in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was among the United Kingdom's most popular writers Henry James said, 'Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known.' Hector Hugh Munro, better known by the pen name Saki, and also frequently as H. H. Munro, was a British writer whose witty, mischievous and sometimes macabre stories satirize Edwardian society and culture. He is considered a master of the short story, and often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker. Influenced by Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling, he himself influenced A. A. Milne, Noël Coward and P. G. Wodehouse.