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Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) was a novelist, short story writer and poet. The novel Little Women (1868) remains a beloved classic of children’s literature today. Loosely based on the lives of the author and her three sisters, the narrative follows the lives of the four March sisters, chronicling their passage from childhood to womanhood. "Cousin Tribulation's Story" is a short story about a family who wake up on Christmas morning to a sumptuous breakfast. Then they hear of an immigrant family with a sick mother who have nothing to eat.

Washington Irving (1783-1859) was a short-story writer, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat. The short story "The Devil and Tom Walker" is about a miserly man who makes a deal with the devil. Irving’s fictional character Diedrich Knickerbocker is a Dutch-American historian and narrator of "The Conspiracy of the Cocked Hats" and the “golden age” of Wouter van Twiller, the Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam.

Khalil Gibran (1883-1931) was a Lebanese-American writer, poet and visual artist. He is best known as the author of The Prophet, which was first published in 1923 and has become one of the best-selling books of all time, with translations into more than 100 languages. The Prophet consists of 26 prose poetry fables about the prophet, Al Mustafa, who has lived in the city of Orphalese for 12 years.

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810-1865) was a writer, a minister’s wife, and mother of four daughters who worked among the poor and traveled widely. In the novel The Moorland Cottage, Maggie Browne, the daughter of a deceased clergyman, gives up her own life to devote herself to her brother, Edward. The nonfiction work An Accused Race is Gaskell’s reformist treatise on the oppression of the Cagots in Europe.

William Wymark Jacobs (1863-1943) was an English author of short stories and novels, well known for his comedies involving rural Essex characters. His most famous story, "The Monkey's Paw" (1902) is a tale of intense psychological horror. "The Old Man of the Sea" is a farcical comedy about a young man, George Wright, who tries to win a lady’s hand by pretending to be the only heir of a rich uncle.

Kate Chopin (1850-1904) was a Louisiana-based author of short stories and novels, and is considered a forerunner of 20th-century feminist authors from the South. In "The Storm", a man seeks shelter at the home of his former lover, a visit which reignites their passion, while "Her Letters" is a story about the husband of a woman who dies before she is able to destroy the letters written to her by a lover. In "Unexpected", Randall and Dorothea fall in and out of love; "The Locket" tells the tale of two young lovers during the American Civil War; and "Kiss" has a humorous twist.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) was a prominent sociologist, novelist, and writer of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. In the short story "If I Were a Man", a married woman named Mollie Mathewson yearns with all her heart to be a man and is suddenly transported into the body and mind of her husband, Gerald. Through the character of Mollie, Gilman illustrates the roles and attitudes of women in early 19th-century society. The utopian novel Herland describes an isolated society composed entirely of women, with an ideal social order free of war, conflict, and domination.

Daniel Defoe (c. 1660-1731) was an English trader, author, and journalist. Defoe was a prolific writer, publishing more than 300 works on a range of topics including economics, politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology, and the supernatural. He is most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe (1719).

Many hybrid forms of the mystery-crime-thriller genre exists. All of them are narratives that keep one in suspense about what is about to happen. The thriller also shares a literary lineage with ancient epic and myth populated by monsters, terror and danger. Alexandre Dumas, Alfred Hitchcock, and Robert Ludlum are some of the masters of the genre.

Dystopian literature is a genre of fictional writing used to explore social and political structures in a nightmarish world. The term dystopia refers to a society characterized by misery, squalor, or oppression, and the theme is most commonly used in science-fiction and speculative-fiction genres.

Robert William Dale (1829-1895) was an English Congregational church leader based in Birmingham. In "Christian Worldliness" he explores the endless conflict between Christianity and worldliness. He warns of "the bitter melancholy, this profound discontent with all things in Heaven above and on the earth beneath". Rejecting the idea of "the sanctity of misery" he criticizes the Book of Ecclesiastes and the image of the traditional "Romish Saint", and concludes by stating that for the miseries which we cannot avoid, Divine love offers infinite consolation.