Three Men in a Boat

Three Men in a Boat

Jerome K. Jerome

Humor

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), published in 1889, is a humorous account by English writer Jerome K. Jerome of a boating holiday on the Thames between Kingston and Oxford. The book was initially intended to be a serious travel guide, with accounts of local history along the route, but the humorous elements took over to the point where the serious and somewhat sentimental passages seem a distraction to the comic novel. One of the most praised things about Three Men in a Boat is how undated it appears to modern readers – the jokes seem fresh and witty even today. The three men are based on Jerome himself and two real-life friends, George Wingrave (who would become a senior manager at Barclays Bank) and Carl Hentschel (the founder of a London printing business, called Harris in the book), with whom J. often took boating trips. The dog, Montmorency, is entirely fictional but, "as Jerome admits, developed out of that area of inner consciousness which, in all Englishmen, contains an element of the dog." The trip is a typical boating holiday of the time in a Thames camping skiff. This was just after commercial boat traffic on the Upper Thames had died out, replaced by the 1880s craze for boating as a leisure activity.
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After-Supper Ghost Stories

After-Supper Ghost Stories

Jerome K. Jerome

Humor

As they relax after dinner on Christmas Eve, the members of a family and their guests turn to telling ghost stories. These ghoulish accounts range from the melancholy to the macabre, and get increasingly bizarre as the ghosts leap out of the tales and make an appearance in the family's home. Fact and fiction, the real and unreal collide, until the reader is not sure who is haunting whom.A masterful work of comic horror, Jerome K. Jerome's After-Supper Ghost Stories is a witty look at why Christmas Eve is so perfect for ghost stories and why ghosts love the Yuletide season.
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Three Men in the Dark

Three Men in the Dark

Jerome K. Jerome

Humor

A collection of rare horror stories that will thrill fans of classic writers such as M. R. James, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe and E. F. Benson. Jerome K. Jerome's reputation as a humorist, renowned for his comic novel Three Men in a Boat, has thrown into undeserved obscurity his fine efforts in the ghost story genre. Three Men in the Dark collects Jerome's major horror stories, together with a selection from two of his friends with whom he founded the magazines The Idler and Today – the journalist Robert Barr and the humorist Barry Pain. Like Jerome, their stories of terror and the supernatural have been overlooked for many years. Edited and introduced by veteran anthologist Hugh Lamb, this new edition includes as an extra bonus the long-lost novelette, 'The Mystery of Black Rock Creek'. Written in five parts by Jerome K. Jerome, Barry Pain, Eden Phillpotts, E. F. Benson and Bram Stoker's brother-in-law Frank Frankfort Moore, it rounds off one of the most unusual and entertaining...
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After-Supper Ghost Stories

After-Supper Ghost Stories

Jerome K. Jerome

Humor

As they relax after dinner on Christmas Eve, the members of a family and their guests turn to telling ghost stories. These ghoulish accounts range from the melancholy to the macabre, and get increasingly bizarre as the ghosts leap out of the tales and make an appearance in the family's home. Fact and fiction, the real and unreal collide, until the reader is not sure who is haunting whom.A masterful work of comic horror, Jerome K. Jerome's After-Supper Ghost Stories is a witty look at why Christmas Eve is so perfect for ghost stories and why ghosts love the Yuletide season.
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