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By Allan Pinkerton. 2012
Allan Pinkerton (1819-1884) was the world's first private detective. Emigrating to Chicago from Glasgow, Scotland, he discovered a gang of…
counterfeiters and assisted in their capture. He became deputy sheriff of Kane County, then Cook County, resigning from the police to form the Pinkerton Detective Agency in 1852. The Pinkerton logo, the All-Seeing Eye, inspired the phrase "Private Eye".By Sapper. 2013
Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond, wealthy former officer of the Loamshire Regiment, dashing and strong (but not particularly handsome), places an advertisement…
in The Times expressing his desire for an adventure -- which arrives in the form of a reply from a young woman concerned for her father. Blackmailers, communist conspiracy, and foreign paymasters of the arch-villain Carl Peterson are encountered and lead to more adventure than Drummond ever dreamed of!By Philip K. Dick. 2012
By William Dean Howells. 2012
William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was an American realist author and literary critic. He wrote his first novel, Their Wedding Journey,…
in 1871, but his literary reputation really took off with the realist novel A Modern Instance, published in 1882, which describes the decay of a marriage. His 1885 novel The Rise of Silas Lapham is perhaps his best known, describing the rise and fall of an American entrepreneur in the paint business. His social views were also strongly reflected in the novels Annie Kilburn (1888) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). While known primarily as a novelist, his short story "Editha" (1905) - included in the collection Between the Dark and the Daylight (1907) - appears in many anthologies of American literature. Howells also wrote plays, criticism, and essays about contemporary literary figures such as Ibsen, Zola, Verga, and, especially, Tolstoy, which helped establish their reputations in the United States. He also wrote critically in support of many American writers. It is perhaps in this role that he had his greatest influence.By William Dean Howells. 2012
William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was an American realist author and literary critic. He wrote his first novel, Their Wedding Journey,…
in 1871, but his literary reputation really took off with the realist novel A Modern Instance, published in 1882, which describes the decay of a marriage. His 1885 novel The Rise of Silas Lapham is perhaps his best known, describing the rise and fall of an American entrepreneur in the paint business. His social views were also strongly reflected in the novels Annie Kilburn (1888) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). While known primarily as a novelist, his short story "Editha" (1905) - included in the collection Between the Dark and the Daylight (1907) - appears in many anthologies of American literature. Howells also wrote plays, criticism, and essays about contemporary literary figures such as Ibsen, Zola, Verga, and, especially, Tolstoy, which helped establish their reputations in the United States. He also wrote critically in support of many American writers. It is perhaps in this role that he had his greatest influence.By Lord Dunsany. 2015
There in Pegana lay the gods asleep, and in a corner lay the Power of the gods alone upon the…
floor, a thing wrought of black rock and four words graven upon it, whereof I might not give thee any clue, if even I should find it--four words of which none knoweth. Some say they tell of the opening of a flower towards dawn, and others say they concern earthquakes among hills, and others that they tell of the death of fishes, and others that the words be these: Power, Knowledge, Forgetting, and another word that not the gods themselves may ever guess.By Lord Dunsany. 2015
Then the King spake dolefully in the Hall of Kings, and said: "May I not find at last the gods,…
and must it be that I may not look in Their faces at the last to see whether They be kindly? They that have sent me on my earthward journey I would greet on my returning, if not as a King coming again to his own city, yet as one who having been ordered had obeyed, and obeying had merited something of those for whom he toiled. I would look Them in Their faces, O prophet, and ask Them concerning many things and would know the wherefore of much. I had hoped, O prophet, that those gods that had smiled upon my childhood, Whose voices stirred at evening in gardens when I was young, would hold dominion still when at last I came to seek Them. O prophet, if this is not to be, make you a great dirge for my childhood's gods and fashion silver bells and, setting them mostly a-swing amidst such trees as grew in the garden of my childhood, sing you this dirge in the dusk: and sing it when the low moth flies up and down and the bat first comes peering from her home, sing it when white mists come rising from the river, when smoke is pale and grey, while flowers are yet closing, ere voices are yet hushed, sing it while all things yet lament the day, or ever the great lights of heaven come blazing forth and night with her splendours takes the place of day. For, if the old gods die, let us lament Them or ever new knowledge comes, while all the world still shudders at Their loss."By William Dean Howells. 2012
William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was an American realist author and literary critic. He wrote his first novel, Their Wedding Journey,…
in 1871, but his literary reputation really took off with the realist novel A Modern Instance, published in 1882, which describes the decay of a marriage. His 1885 novel The Rise of Silas Lapham is perhaps his best known, describing the rise and fall of an American entrepreneur in the paint business. His social views were also strongly reflected in the novels Annie Kilburn (1888) and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890). While known primarily as a novelist, his short story "Editha" (1905) - included in the collection Between the Dark and the Daylight (1907) - appears in many anthologies of American literature. Howells also wrote plays, criticism, and essays about contemporary literary figures such as Ibsen, Zola, Verga, and, especially, Tolstoy, which helped establish their reputations in the United States. He also wrote critically in support of many American writers. It is perhaps in this role that he had his greatest influence.By Lord Dunsany. 2015
By Lord Dunsany. 2015
This collection helped make Lord Dunsany a fantasy legend. Poetic prose, magical lands, old gods, atmospheric castles, ghosts, magic, power,…
and majesty fill these pages. "There was once a man who sought a boon of the gods. For peace was over the world and all things savoured of sameness, and the man was weary at heart and sighed for the tents and the warfields. Therefore he sought a boon of the ancient gods. And appearing before them he said to them, "Ancient gods; there is peace in the land where I dwell, and indeed to the uttermost parts, and we are full weary of peace. O ancient gods, grant us war!""By Louis Tracy. 2012
When John Trenholme, artist, accepted a welcome commission from a magazine editor to journey down to a certain old Hertfordshire…
village and make a series of sketches of its imperiled beauties, he looked forward to nothing more exciting than an agreeable, wholly peaceful little expedition. Certainly he did not in the least expect to get mixed up with a murder, and to find himself one of the most important witnesses in "The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley." --New York Times, March 21, 1920By Louis Tracy. 2012
A young American is proclaimed king of a little Balkan Kingdom, and a pretty Parisian art student is the power…
behind the throne. "Adventures and stirring situations follow closely upon one another's heels all through."By Lord Dunsany. 2012
The Sword of Welleran -- The Fall of Bubbulkund -- The Kith of the Elf-Folk -- The Highwayman -- In…
the Twilight -- The Ghosts -- The Whirlpool -- The Hurricane -- The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth -- The Lord of Cities -- The Doom of La Traviata -- On the Dry LandBy Lord Dunsany. 2012
A coming of age story set in the mythical "golden age" of Spain. The titular character is excluded from the…
inheritance of the family castle on the grounds that given his expertise with sword and mandolin he should be able to win his own estate and bride. Setting out to achieve his place in the world, Rodriguez quickly acquires a Sancho Panza-like servant, Morano, and goes on to experience a series of adventures en route to his goal.By Lord Dunsany. 2015
The City of the Sun is a dialogue between "a Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitaller and a Genoese Sea-Captain." The…
book describes a theocratic society where goods, women, and children are held in common. It also resembles the City of Adocentyn in the Picatrix, an Arabic guide to magical town planning. In the final part of the work, Campanella prophesies-- in the veiled language of astrology-- that the Spanish kings, in alliance with the Pope, are destined to be the instruments of a Divine Plan: the final victory of the True Faith and its diffusion in the whole world.By John Munro. 2012
Prof. John Munro (1849-1930) was the author of Heroes of the Telegraph (1891), The Story of Electricity (1896) and A…
Trip to Venus (1897). "In plain English, at 4 a. m., a ray of light had been observed on the disc of the planet Mars in or near the "terminator"; that is to say, the zone of twilight separating day from night. The news was doubly interesting to me, because a singular dream of "Sunrise in the Moon" had quickened my imagination as to the wonders of the universe beyond our little globe, and because of a never-to-be-forgotten experience of mine with an aged astronomer several years ago."By E M Forster. 2013
Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) is a novel by E. M. Forster, originally entitled Monteriano. The title comes from…
a line in Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism: "For fools rush in where angels fear to tread".By Robert Gordon Anderson. 2013
By Honore Balzac. 2013
Depicting the fatal clash between material desires and the liberating power of human passions, Honore de Balzac's "Eugenie Grandet" is…
translated with an introduction by M.A. Crawford in "Penguin Classics". In a gloomy house in provincial Saumur, the miser Grandet lives with his wife and daughter, Eugenie, whose lives are stifled and overshadowed by his obsession with gold. Guarding his piles of glittering treasures and his only child equally closely, he will let no one near them. But when the arrival of her handsome cousin, Charles, awakens Eugenie's own desires, her passion brings her into a violent collision with her father that results in tragedy for all. "Eugenie Grandet" is one of the earliest and finest works in Balzac's Comedie humaine cycle, which portrays a society consumed by the struggle to amass wealth and achieve power. Here Grandet embodies both the passionate pursuit of money, and the human cost of avarice. M. A. Crawford's lucid translation is accompanied by an introduction discussing the irony and psychological insight of Balzac's characterization, the role of fate in the novel, its setting and historical background. Honore De Balzac (1799-1850) failed at being a lawyer, publisher, printer, businessman, critic and politician before, at the age of thirty, turning his hand to writing. His life's work, La Comedie humaine, is a series of ninety novels and short stories which offer a magnificent panorama of nineteenth-century life after the French Revolution. Balzac was an influence on innumerable writers who followed him, including Marcel Proust, Emile Zola, Charles Dickens, and Edgar Allan Poe.By Lord Dunsany. 2015
"They offer you three jokes," said the stranger, "which shall make all who hear them simply die of laughter." I…
think my friend was reluctant then to have anything more to do with it, he wanted to go home; he said he didn't want jokes.