DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Great Stone Face, and Other Tales of the White Mountains" by Nathaniel Hawthorne. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
A couple’s future hangs in the balance as they wait for a train in a Spanish café in this short story by a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize–winning author. At a small café in rural Spain, a man and woman have a conversation while they wait for their train to Madrid. The subtle, casual nature of their talk masks a more complicated situation that could endanger the future of their relationship. First published in the 1927 collection Men Without Women, “Hills Like White Elephants” exemplifies Ernest Hemingway’s style of spare, tight prose that continues to win readers over to this day.
Imagine a large, battered old leather folder stuffed full of sheets of paper of various sizes and thicknesses - on the front, "Stories of the Witches of Old Allbyon" in curly letters, underneath there is a face. The hair and beard are made of leaves. Leaves are growing out of its mouth, and nostrils. Inside the folder, the stories - some written in round loopy handwriting on thick paper with wobbly edges. Some had been typed on a mechanical typewriter. Others were printouts from dot matrix printers, and some from more recent computer printers. All these stories were read to me when I was young. I didn't know it then, but the roots of everything that happened to us are in these stories, as the events in "The Last Wizard", grew out of what happened in "The Last Witch" - Maybe all stories begin in other stories. Who I am - who we are - I will leave for now. For now, we start with some of the tales of Old Allbyon.
The battle of White Horse lasted ten days, with many lives lost. This story concentrates on the first two days of the battle, as recounted by Joe Adams, Jack Callaway, and the rest from the 213th Field Artillery Battalion who were there. These two days coincide with the letters and personal remembrances of these men and this story is based on their real life experiences. The events and people are real, coming from those personal interviews, declassified documents and historical reference. What they went through is real, documented history. This is a story in that their actual minute-by-minute interactions and words have been interpreted, all with the spirit and intent of their every word. Not one of them has ever bragged about what they did or thought of themselves as some great warrior soldier. Everyone simply did what they had to do, and that there was no glory in it. Not just another war story, this is an attempt to put the reader there in the thick it, to be a participant in battle and to feel what it was like to be in the Forgotten War. Exploding artillery shells, bullets striking targets, the eeriness of flares drifting down over a battlefield, breathing the dust of trenches on a hill in the middle of a far off place. Taking the reader out of their seat and putting a rifle in their hands, this story transports you a thousand miles away from your surroundings to an artillery battery receiving incoming mail, trench lines where death is around every corner, and a bunker on a hill where some of the most violent combat takes place. This book lets you feel, taste and smell it like it was, brutal, unforgiving, and above all, a cold hard reality for those that were there.
