Magzter Books

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde written by Robert Louis Stevenson was published in 1886 and became an instant classic. The novel is about a London lawyer named Gabriel John Utterson who investigates strange occurrences between his old friend, Dr. Henry Jekyll and the evil Mr. Edward Hyde. This new edition of Stevenson’s most famous work includes three additional short stories, two short essays, and extracts from contemporary writing on psychological disorders. This science fiction thriller has permeated the English language as the term “Jekyll and Hyde” became synonymous with dual personality. Though the book had initially been published as a “shilling shocker’, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde brought an immediate success and became one of Stevenson’s best-selling works.

“Published posthumously in 1924 by Kafka’s friend, Max Trod, after his death, The Trial is a criticism of a totalitarian form of government, which traps an individual into systems of oppression and inhibits them from any means of escape. The protagonist of the story, Josef K, is accused of a crime that he didn’t commit. The absurdity of the entire ordeal, however, is that the nature of the crime is never revealed to him or to us, the readers. The more Josef K ventures into systems of authority and ‘justice’, to prove his innocence, the more he becomes entangled in the procedural complexities of the court and the justice system. His attempt to prove his innocence only implicates him further and the increasing uncertainty of his fate propels him towards making misguided choices.
Kafka’s works, more often than not, portray a bleak, hopeless world where a just society and governance is more a matter of imagination than reality. He compels his readers to question the monotony of the systems around them as well as structures of authority. Kafka’s The Trial represents a solemn yet surreal world where an individual is isolated; his freedom and his rights stifled; and any ‘trial’ that occurs is simply a farce wherein different structures of authority push an individual into an inescapable maze.
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The War of the Worlds is a novel that describes the Martian invasion on London in the nineteenth century. The story begins one evening after a cylinder is found on Horsell Common in London. The people approach the object and are instantly killed by a heat-ray. A frightening invader emerges from the cylinder. When the powerful Martians build extremely large killing machines that destroy everything with gas burning rays, mankind is on the brink of extinction. They gorge on the blood of humans kept alive inside their machines. The War of the Worlds is described by a protagonist from Surrey who lives through the invasion of southern England. The container which drops from the sky suddenly and lands near the narrator’s home has an alien with grey skin and large eyes and tentacles. As more containers drop, a human delegation forms and approaches the Martians with white flags of peace, but the Martians kill them immediately. As the British military arrives, the humans of southern England engage into a war and stop the Martians from assembling their unknown machinery. The military cannot face the Martians and their technology.

The strangest news stories ever! If you thought the news was all doom and gloom think again. Taken from the pages of Fortean Times magazine and collected together within this MagBook are some of the strangest, most captivating stories ever to make the headlines. Featuring stories about weird sex, unusual animal antics, crazy criminal behavior to name a few, this MagBook is your ultimate reference to the world’s most bizarre, real news stories to date!

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