A Study Guide for Agatha Christie's "Wasp's Nest"


Book Description

A Study Guide for Agatha Christie's "Wasp's Nest," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.




Wasps' Nest


Book Description

The famous Belgian detective visits an old friend in a remote area. John Harrison asks the reason for this surprise visit and Poirot confesses that he is investigating a murder that has not yet been committed. A series of clues will put Poirot on alert and he will do everything possible to prevent the planned crime from taking place.




Poirot's Early Cases


Book Description

Captain Hastings recounts 18 of Poirot's early cases from the days before he was famous! Hercule Poirot delighted in telling people that he was probably the best detective in the world. So turning back the clock to trace eighteen of the cases which helped establish his professional reputation was always going to be a fascinating experience. With his career still in its formative years, the panache with which Hercule Poirot could solve even the most puzzling mystery is obvious. Chronicled by his friend Captain Hastings, these eighteen early cases - from theft and robbery to kidnapping and murder - were all guaranteed to test Poirot's soon-to-be-famous 'little grey cells' to their absolute limit.




Exploring Japanese University English Teachers' Professional Identity


Book Description

This book contributes to the growing field of EFL teacher identity, which is now recognized to influence numerous aspects of classroom teaching and of student learning. It focuses on an under-researched, and yet highly influential group of teachers that shape English language education in Japan: Japanese university English teachers. In three interrelated narrative studies, it examines how four relatively new teachers develop professional identity as they become members of the community of practice of university English teachers; how gender impacts the professional identity of seven female professors ranging in age from their early 30s to their 60s; and how one teacher’s teaching practices and beliefs reflect her personal and professional identity.




Mr. Lincoln's Camera Man, Mathew B. Brady


Book Description

This book tells of Mathew B. Brady, a Civil War photographer, with over 300 reproductions of his work.




A Deadly Affair


Book Description

“[We] can’t get enough of Christie’s plush and murderous thrills.” —Entertainment Weekly From the Queen of Mystery—this all-new collection of stories about love gone horribly wrong will get your heart racing. Love can propel us to our greatest heights . . . and darkest depths. In this new compendium of Agatha Christie short stories, witness the dark side of love—crimes of passion, games of the heart, and deadly deceits. This pulse-pounding compendium features beloved detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, master of charades Parker Pyne, the enigmatic Harley Quin, and the adventurous Tommy and Tuppence, all at the ready to solve tantalizing mysteries. In “The Face of Helen,” a night at the Royal Opera could reach a fatal crescendo for a woman caught in a dicey love triangle; “Finessing the King” delivers a curious ad in the personals that could mask sinister intentions; who’s in danger of getting stung in “Wasps’ Nest” depends on rounding up suspects and solving a murder—before it even happens. These are just a few of the tales in this collection featuring essential reading that Christie fans old and new will simply love to death.




Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express


Book Description

Just after midnight, a snowdrift stops the Orient Express in its tracks. The luxurious train is surprisingly full for the time of the year, but by the morning it is one passenger fewer. An American tycoon lies dead in his compartment, stabbed a dozen times, his door locked from the inside. Isolated and with a killer in their midst, detective Hercule Poirot must identify the murderer – in case he or she decides to strike again.




The Double Clue


Book Description

Marcus Hardman, an antiques collector, hires Poirot to investigate the theft of some valuable jewels that disappeared from his safe while he was offering a little tea party. Only his close friends attended the meeting and Hardman doesn ́t want to involve the police to avoid a scandal. Will the Belgian detective manage to recover the jewels and discover the thief?




The Cases of Blue Ploermell


Book Description

In 1923, the young reporter James Thurber was given a half a page in the Sunday Evening Dispatch of Columbus, Ohio, every week to fill with anything he wanted. For most of that year, he turned out book reviews, humorous commentary, jokes, stories, and even literary criticism.He also wrote a series of 13 short Sherlockian parodies - 10,000 words in all - starring Blue Ploermell, a "psychosocial" detective with a fondness for animal crackers. Aided (and occasionally impeded) by his Chinese manservant, Gong Low, Ploermell investigates cases marked by his cock-eyed deductions, loopy logic, and knack for leaping to the wrong conclusion.These juvenilia represents Thurber's first attempts at learning the craft of humor writing. Looking back at this work years later, he even considered publishing the Ploermell stores. The Cases of Blue Ploermell, for the first time in a century, collects the 13 stories. Edited and annotated by Bill Peschel, they show Thurber trying his hand at characterization, story structure, ethnic humor, and serial writing in a style rarely seen at any newspaper. In addition to the annotations, Peschel wrote essays on Thurber's years in Columbus, Ohio; journalism in the 1920s; the state of Sherlockian parodies; and depictions of Chinese men and women in American popular culture. Note: The 13 stories are very short, and take up 40 pages of this 200-page book. The rest of the book consists of these essays: "Becoming James Thurber" (39 pages); "Journalism in Thurber's Time" (4 pages); "Sherlockian Parodies in the 1920s" (8 pages); "The Ancestors of Gong Low" (13 pages); "The Chinese in Popular Culture" (35 pages); movie reviews (19 pages); chronology (9 pages); lists (7 pages).




Summertime Reading List: 180 Books You Need to Read (Vol.I)


Book Description

This summer, during these strange strange times, immerse yourself in words that have touched all of us and will always get to the core of all of us, of every single person. Books that have made us think, change, relate, cry and laugh:_x000D_ Leaves of Grass (Walt Whitman)_x000D_ Siddhartha (Herman Hesse)_x000D_ Middlemarch (George Eliot)_x000D_ The Madman (Kahlil Gibran)_x000D_ Ward No. 6 (Anton Chekhov)_x000D_ Moby-Dick (Herman Melville)_x000D_ The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)_x000D_ Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky)_x000D_ The Overcoat (Gogol)_x000D_ Ulysses (James Joyce)_x000D_ Walden (Henry David Thoreau)_x000D_ Hamlet (Shakespeare)_x000D_ Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)_x000D_ Macbeth (Shakespeare)_x000D_ The Waste Land (T. S. Eliot)_x000D_ Odes (John Keats)_x000D_ The Flowers of Evil (Charles Baudelaire)_x000D_ Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)_x000D_ Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)_x000D_ Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë)_x000D_ Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)_x000D_ Vanity Fair (Thackeray)_x000D_ Swann's Way (Marcel Proust)_x000D_ Sons and Lovers (D. H. Lawrence)_x000D_ Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)_x000D_ Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)_x000D_ Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy)_x000D_ Two Years in the Forbidden City (Princess Der Ling)_x000D_ Les Misérables (Victor Hugo)_x000D_ The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)_x000D_ Pepita Jimenez (Juan Valera)_x000D_ The Red Badge of Courage (Stephen Crane)_x000D_ A Room with a View (E. M. Forster)_x000D_ Sister Carrie (Theodore Dreiser)_x000D_ The Jungle (Upton Sinclair)_x000D_ The Republic (Plato)_x000D_ Meditations (Marcus Aurelius)_x000D_ Art of War (Sun Tzu)_x000D_ Candide (Voltaire)_x000D_ Don Quixote (Cervantes)_x000D_ Decameron (Boccaccio)_x000D_ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass_x000D_ Dream Psychology (Sigmund Freud)_x000D_ The Einstein Theory of Relativity_x000D_ The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Agatha Christie)_x000D_ A Study in Scarlet (Arthur Conan Doyle)_x000D_ Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)_x000D_ The Call of Cthulhu (H. P. Lovecraft)_x000D_ Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)_x000D_ The War of the Worlds (H. G. Wells)_x000D_ The Raven (Edgar Allan Poe)_x000D_ The Wonderful Wizard of Oz_x000D_ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_x000D_ The Call of the Wild_x000D_ Alice in Wonderland_x000D_ The Fairytales of Brothers Grimm_x000D_ The Fairytales of Hans Christian Andersen