Name: Dreads and Drolls
SKU: 56502570
Price: 1053.00 TWD
Availability: InStock
Author: Arthur Machen
ISBN: 9781469928388

Type

Physical Book

Author

Arthur Machen

Publisher

Createspace

Language

English

Pages

168

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

22.9x15.2x0.9 cm

Weight

0.23 kg.

ISBN13

9781469928388

Synopsis "Dreads and Drolls"

Thank you for checking out this book by Theophania Publishing. We appreciate your business and look forward to serving you soon. We have thousands of titles available, and we invite you to search for us by name, contact us via our website, or download our most recent catalogues. All these Dreads and Drolls appeared in The Graphic . They were gathered from all sorts of sources. Most of them are strictly veridical, but it may be confessed that here and there imagination plays a small part. My favourite in the collection is, decidedly, the story of Grimaldi the Clown and his long-lost brother. It is an enigma of a tale. On the one hand, there is nothing improbable in the bare plot. Many lads, I have no doubt, went to sea in the adventurous times of the Napoleonic Wars, and were unheard of by their families for long years, often enough they were never heard of again. They were killed in one fight or another, they perished in African swamps, they became Archimandrites in Russia, or confidential advisers to the Dey of Algiers or to Prester John. And again there is nothing improbable in the adventurer's return with a heavy bag of gold, nothing improbable in the final disappearance of a young man who flourishes this bag of gold in the purlieus of Drury Lane as the chimes are ringing midnight. That is the bare plot of the tale, and as I say, it is all probable enough; and yet I defy anybody to read Grimaldi's story without lifting an incredulous eyebrow. And I have come to the conclusion that this impression is due to Grimaldi's unconscious art, I have no doubt that the Clown spoke the truth; but he had within him that love of mystery and wonder which (as I have said till people are sick of hearing me say it) is the sure foundation, the only foundation of Art. Again and again in his odd book this note of mysteriousness occurs. Take, for example, the incident, of the man with the silver staff. Grimaldi always declared that he never knew who this personage was. He didn't want to know. If he had made enquiries, I suppose he would have found that the mysterious stranger was Chief Bow Street Runner, or, as we should say, something big at Scotland Yard. And so, I daresay that the affair of Mr. Mackintosh and his twelve friends - a tale absolutely Arabian, as Grimaldi tells it - would have seemed tiresome enough to a man without his admirable capacity for mystery and capacity of creating it. And thus in the business of the long-lost brother. It all happened, and there is nothing very remarkable in it - save for the wonderful though unconscious art which has made a plain tale of plain facts read like a subtle study in mysterious suggestion, a ghost story of the rarest kind. This is a great gift: to be able so to tell the bare truth that it seems a magnificent lie. To many of us, it is rather given to invent elaborate fictions which are plainer (and duller) than the plainest facts.

Arthur Machen

(Author)

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Arthur Machen es el seudónimo de Arthur Llewelyn Jones (1863-1947) un escritor y periodista galés que tiene el incuestionable honor de ser el padre de la novela decadente de terror. Después de una juventud un tanto errática, en la que compagina la escritura con trabajos eventuales, en 1890 Machen se dedica plenamente a la escritura gracias a una herencia familiar. De esos años de trabajo pleno surgirán sus mejores obras, las que le convertirán en un escritor tremendamente popular.Influenciado por las nuevas tendencias espirituales de su época, como el paganismo, el ocultismo o el espiritismo, Machen participa en distintos grupos hasta ingresar en la Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, una secta cristiana que preconizaba la recuperación de los antiguos rituales de la iglesia.Prolífico, Machen publicó 13 novelas que gozaron de una extraordinaria acogida popular, y resultó tremendamente influyente para todos aquellos autores que, después de él, decidieron explorar los aspectos más oscuros de la ficción.

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