When war broke out in 1914, Somerset Maugham was dispatched by the British Secret Service to Switzerland under the guise of completing a play. Multilingual, knowledgeable about many European countries and a celebrated writer, Maugham had the perfect cover, and the assignment appealed to his love of romance, and of the ridiculous. The stories collected in Ashenden are rooted in Maugham's own experiences as an agent, reflecting the ruthlessness and brutality of espionage, its intrigue and treachery, as well as its absurdity.

In Theatre, W. Somerset Maugham–the author of the classic novels Of Human Bondage and Up at the Villa–introduces us to Julia Lambert, a woman of breathtaking poise and talent whose looks have stood by her forty-six years. She is one of the greatest actresses England–so good, in fact, that perhaps she never stops acting.

An alcoholic writer is visited by an incarnation of his cancer. Charles is a world-weary middle-aged writer whose sole refuge is to be found in drinks with a high alcohol content. One day, he receives a surprise visit from a stranger who claims to be the cancer that will one day kill him. Being a considerate sort, Charles’s cancer thought it only polite that he should get to know his victim before he sets about destroying him.

Three men voyaging together in a small vessel–an exiled doctor, a disreputable sea captain, and a young man fleeing from justice–are driven to take shelter on a small island in the Malay Archipelago. Their lives are soon shattered by a strange, exotic girl of English parentage, but oriental in her mystery. The story contains humor and wit, exact and incisive observation of character and an ironical philosophy that mark this tale as another Maugham classic.

The story is told by a first-person narrator and well-to-do author, William Ashenden, who, at the beginning of the novel is suddenly and unexpectedly contacted by Alroy Kear, a busy-body literary figure in London who has been asked by the second Mrs. Driffield to write the biography of her deceased husband, Edward Driffield.

When he finds out that it's because he's Jewish that his willy is different, young Benjamin decides to do everything he can to hide his religion and keep his secret…

Although lacking the maturity and stature of other silent films of the period, Paris qui dort is nonetheless one of the most important films in the history of French cinema. It is the first film of the great French film director, René Clair, and also - although it was not seen as such at the time - the first ever science-fiction movie.

A misguided attempt to dramatize the psychological triad formed by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (Erland Josephson), his Jewish friend Paul Rees (Robert Powell), and a Russian girl named Lou Von Salome (Dominique Sanda), this overbearing drama fails mightily. Nietzsche is portrayed as a jealous sociopath who drives Rees to suicide, and director Liliana Cavani cannot resist including a drug-hallucination ballet about Good and Evil which approaches the excesses of her controversial Il Portiere di Notte in its melodramatic sexual hysteria.

An unhappily married, 40-year-old woman, Emmie, finds herself thinking about her high school boyfriend and visits her small hometown in Maine to find out where he is in life. Jason is still there working at the local seafood restaurant and is in an unhappy relationship of his own. Emmie's trip home also sparks her depressed brother to re-examine the choices in his life, while Emmie is left to choose between a past love and a current love.

Reminiscent of Sunset Boulevard, Hustler White transposes the action from the silver screen's old movie backlots to contemporary male prostitution and the erotic industry. Said to be an homage to classic Hollywood cinema.

John Fowles’ The Magus was a literary landmark of the 1960s. Nicholas Urfe goes to a Greek island to teach at a private school and becomes enmeshed in curious happenings at the home of a mysterious Greek recluse, Maurice Conchis. Are these events, involving attractive young English sisters, just psychological games, or an elaborate joke, or more?

Creatures of Circumstance begins with an explanation from the author telling how this collection came about. He states that he "has never pretended to be anything but a story teller. It has amused me to tell stories and I have told a great many. It is a misfortune for me that the telling of a story just for the sake of the story is not an activity that is in favor with the intelligentsia. I endeavor to bear my misfortunes with fortitude."

'The Mixture as Before'' is another short story collection by Somerset Maugham that makes me wonder yet again how he could manage to maintain so high a level of craftsmanship and a quality so close to perfection in his writing for so long a time. This book was published 19 years after Maugham's first mature short story collection - ''Trembling of a Leaf'' (1921) and 25 years after his first true masterpiece - ''Of Human Bondage'' (1915). By 1940 Maugham had stopped writing stories for the English in the Far East and so there are no such in ''The Mixture as Before'' although there are two exotic stories actually but set in at the other end of the world.

In gripping accounts of true cases, surgeon Atul Gawande explores the power and the limits of medicine, offering an unflinching view from the scalpel’s edge. Complications lays bare a science not in its idealized form but as it actually is—uncertain, perplexing, and profoundly human.

Kerstin Gier (* 1966 bei Bergisch Gladbach) ist eine deutsche Autorin, die – auch unter den Pseudonymen Jule Brand und Sophie Bérard – überwiegend Frauenliteratur verfasst.
Kerstin Gier wurde 1966 geboren und studierte zunächst Germanistik, Musikwissenschaften und Anglistik, bevor sie zur Betriebspädagogik und Kommunikationspsychologie wechselte und als Diplompädagogin abschloss. Nach mehreren Jobs begann sie 1995, Frauenromane zu schreiben.