LETTERATURA VIVA

article usage

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/540/01/ (study the rule)

http://esl.about.com/od/grammarintermediate/a/a_articleq1...

http://a4esl.org/q/h/mc001-ck.html

http://a4esl.org/q/h/mc008-ld.html

http://a4esl.org/q/h/vm/fampeople.html

http://www.usingenglish.com/quizzes/50.html

http://www.usingenglish.com/quizzes/218.html

http://www.usingenglish.com/quizzes/548.html

http://esl.about.com/od/grammarintermediate/a/a_articleq2...

http://esl.about.com/od/grammarintermediate/a/a_articleq2...

Katherine Mansfield

New Zealand's most famous writer, who was closely associated with D.H. Lawrence and something of a rival of Virginia Woolf. Mansfield's creative years were burdened with loneliness, illness, jealousy, alienation – all this reflected in her work with the bitter depiction of marital and family relationships of her middle-class characters. Her short stories are also notable for their use of stream of consciousness. Like the Russian writer Anton Chekhov, Mansfield depicted trivial events and subtle changes in human behavior.
The Garden Party

And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer. The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine. As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that impress people at garden-parties; the only flowers that everybody is certain of knowing. Hundreds, yes, literally hundreds, had come out in a single night; the green bushes bowed down as though they had been visited by archangels.
Breakfast was not yet over before the men came to put up the marquee.
"Where do you want the marquee put, mother?"
"My dear child, it's no use asking me. I'm determined to leave everything to you children this year. Forget I am your mother. Treat me as an honoured guest."
But Meg could not possibly go and supervise the men. She had washed her hair before breakfast, and she sat drinking her coffee in a green turban, with a dark wet curl stamped on each cheek. Jose, the butterfly, always came down in a silk petticoat and a kimono jacket.

...continue the reading

• devastating critique of the hypocrisy of bourgeois society.
• list of short stories by Katherine Mansfield
• read The Singing Lesson
• Il canarino (audio prima parte, Italiano)
• read The Canary
  
• Miss Brill (the trailer)