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The Phantom 'Rickshaw and Other Tales, also known as The Phantom 'Rickshaw & other Eerie Tales, is a collection of short stories by Rudyard Kipling, first published in 1888. Contents: The phantom 'rickshaw -- My own true ghost story -- The strange ride of Morrowbie Jukes -- The man who would be king -- The finest story in the world. The Phantom Rickshaw After an affair with a Mrs. Agnes Keith-Wessington in Simla, the narrator, Jack, repudiates her and eventually becomes engaged to Miss Kitty Mannering. Yet Mrs. Wessington continually reappears in Jack's life, begging him to reconsider, insisting that it was all just a mistake. But Jack wants nothing to do with her and continues to spurn her. Eventually Mrs. Wessington dies, much to Jack's relief. However, some time thereafter he sees her old rickshaw and assumes that someone has bought it. Then, to his astonishment, the rickshaw and the men pulling it pass through a horse, revealing themselves to be phantoms, bearing the departed ghost of Mrs. Wessington. This leads Jack into increasingly erratic behavior which he tries to cover up by concocting increasingly elaborate lies to assuage Kitty's suspicions.

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Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 - 18 January 1936)[1] was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist. He was born in India, which inspired much of his work. Kipling's works of fiction include The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901), and many short stories, including The Man Who Would Be King (1888).[2] His poems include Mandalay (1890), Gunga Din (1890), The Gods of the Copybook Headings (1919), The White Man's Burden (1899), and If- (1910). He is regarded as a major innovator in the art of the short story;[3] his children's books are classics of children's literature, and one critic described his work as exhibiting a versatile and luminous narrative gift. Kipling was one of the most popular writers in the United Kingdom, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.[3]Henry James said: Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known.[3] In 1907, at the age of 41, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize and its youngest recipient to date.[6] He was also sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, both of which he declined.[7] Kipling's subsequent reputation has changed according to the political and social climate of the age[8][9] and the resulting contrasting views about him continued for much of the 20th century.[10][11] George Orwell saw Kipling as a jingo imperialist, who was morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting.[12] Literary critic Douglas Kerr wrote: [Kipling] is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled. But as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognised as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and an increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with. In 2010, the International Astronomical Union approved that a crater on the planet Mercury would be named after Kipling-one of ten newly discovered impact craters observed by the MESSENGER spacecraft in 2008-9.[117] In 2012, an extinct species of crocodile, Goniopholis kiplingi, was named in his honour, in recognition for his enthusiasm for natural sciences. More than 50 unpublished poems by Kipling, discovered by the American scholar Thomas Pinney, were released for the first time in March 2013.[119] Kipling's writing has strongly influenced other writers. Kipling's stories for adults remain in print and have garnered high praise from writers as different as Poul Anderson, Jorge Luis Borges, and Randall Jarrell who wrote that, After you have read Kipling's fifty or seventy-five best stories you realize that few men have written this many stories of this much merit, and that very few have written more and better stories.

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