Washington Irving Knihy

Tales of the Alhambra is a collection of essays, verbal sketches, and stories by Washington Irving. Shortly after completing a biography of Christopher Columbus in 1828, Washington Irving traveled from Madrid, where he had been staying, to Granada, Spain. At first sight, he described it as "a most picturesque and beautiful city, situated in one of the loveliest landscapes that I have ever seen." Irving was preparing a book called A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada, a history of the years 1478–1492, and was continuing his research on the topic. He immediately asked the then-governor of the historic Alhambra Palace as well as the archbishop of Granada for access to the palace, which was granted because of Irving's celebrity status. Aided by a 17-year old guide named Mateo Ximenes, Irving was inspired by his experience to write Tales of the Alhambra. Throughout his trip, he filled his notebooks and journals with descriptions and observations though he did not believe his writing would ever do it justice. He wrote, "How unworthy is my scribbling of the place." Irving continued to travel through Spain until he was appointed as secretary of legation at the United States Embassy in London, serving under the incoming minister Louis McLane. He arrived in London by late September 1829. -- from Wikipedia

In the first of these stories from the Catskill Mountains, a superstitious schoolmaster encounters a headless horseman; in the second, a man sleeps for twenty years, waking to a much-changed world.

America's first internationally acclaimed author, Washington Irving, was also one of the first to write about its then far-western frontier. After seventeen years in Europe, the famous author of ?The Legend of Sleepy Hollow? returned to America and undertook an extensive three-month journey through present-day Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Describing scenery and inhabitants with an eye to romantic sublimity and celebrating the frontiersman's ?secret of personal freedom, ? Irving published his account of that journey in 1835 as "A Tour on the Prairies," an early and distinctly American depiction of the young nation's borderland and its native inhabitants. Irving followed up this eyewitness account with two works that chart the dramatic and tumultuous history of the early American fur trade, very much in the spirit of James Fenimore Cooper's "Leatherstocking Tales." "Astoria" (1836) recounts John Jacob Astor's attempt to establish a commercial empire in the Pacific Northwest. "The Adventures of Captain Bonneville" (1837) is a lively saga of exploration among the mountains, rivers, and deserts of the Far West. While working closely from original documents, Irving wrote also as a mythologist of the vast spaces traversed by ?Sindbads of the wilderness.? In these three compelling narratives he opened up a crucial region of the American literary imagination influencing such authors as Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville.

The Fires and the Shadows is a collection of some of the finest tales of supernatural fiction from all over the world, and from some of literature's most darkly glittering imaginations. Including works from Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling, this is a volume that will unsettle and delight in equal measure.