Short story index reprint series

Contains: Death of Halpin Frayser -- Secret of Macarger's Gulch -- One summer night -- Moonlit road -- Diagnosis of death -- Moxon's master -- Tough tussle -- One of twins -- Haunted valley -- Jug of syrup -- Staley Fleming's hallucination -- Resumed identity -- Baby tramp -- Night-doings at "Deadman's" -- Beyond the wall -- Psychological shipwreck -- Middle toe of the right foot -- John Mortonson's funeral -- Realm of the unreal -- John Bartine's watch -- [Damned Thing]( Haïta the shepherd -- [Inhabitant of Carcosa]( Stranger.

Brief, easy-to-read stories by one of Russia's better-known writers.

A dozen stories of breadwinners, women chiefly, whose bread invariably falls with the buttered side down. The types are chosen from among shop girls principally, and they are portrayed not as duncolored strugglers, pitiful to contemplate, but valiant or depressed, they are romantic human beings, experiencing the emotions which make all the world kin. Humor and crisp dialog abound as in the author’s “Dawn O’Hara.” The stories are The frog and the puddle: The man who came back: What she wore; A bush league hero; The kitchen side of the door; One of the old girls; Maymeys from Cuba; The leading lady; That home-town feeling; The homely heroine; Sun dried; Where the car turns at 18th. – Book Review Digest “Exceedingly slangy, occasionally flippant, amusing and uncommonly real stories of shopgirls, stenographers, actresses and other working women.” – A. L. A. Booklist

309 pages ; 21 cm

305 p. 21 cm

[Comment from Andrew Crumey]: > The term "science fiction" hadn't been invented in 1870, when the American magazine Atlantic Monthly published the first part of Edward Everett Hale's delightfully eccentric novella The Brick Moon. Readers lacked a ready-made pigeonhole for it, confronted by a fantasy about a group of visionaries who decide to make a 200-ft wide sphere of house-bricks, paint it white, and launch it into orbit. > Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon had appeared five years earlier, so Hale's work was not unprecendented, but while Verne chose to send his voyagers aloft using a giant cannon, Hale opts for the equally unfeasible but somehow more pleasing solution of a giant flywheel. > Hale gives technical details and calculations to support the plausibility of the venture. He even works out the total cost of the bricks ($60,000). There is an info-dump about latitude and longitude: the brick moon is designed to orbit from pole to pole so that people anywhere can determine their location by observing it. There are ruminations and speculations – and, to be honest, quite a few longeurs, even in a compass of only 25,000 words. But crucially there is humour. The brick moon gets launched accidentally with some people inside. Those left behind watch through telescopes as the travellers make their own little world, communicating by writing signs in big letters. They grow plants, hold church services, and their brick moon becomes a tiny, charming parody of Earth. > The Brick Moon did not appear in book form until 1899, when Hale was in his 70s, by which time HG Wells had appeared on the scene and Hale was slipping into obscurity. Nowadays he is little more than a footnote, remembered for having been the first to imagine artificial satellites. But what makes The Brick Moon still worth reading is not scientific vision, but sheer joyful quirkiness.

Chivalry, a collection of romantic tales written by the supposed medieval poet Nicolas of Caen, is the fifth installment in James Branch Cabell’s Biography of the Life of Manuel. The stories take place in medieval France and England, and involve royal figures from history. The theme of courtly love, where a knight preserves honor and stays true to his mistress, is common thread throughout. Characters take on the role of troubadour, singing of their love and devotion. The subtitle “Dizain des Reines” refers to a type of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century French poetry featuring ten-line stanzas. Here, it corresponds to the ten stories and their respective queens. Chivalry was written in 1909. Later, Cabell developed the idea of arranging some of his works into a biographical series that traces the life and legacy of the fictional Dom Manuel. He revised Chivalry in 1921 to work Manuel into the storyline and connect it to his other works.

1 volume : 24 cm

The Princess Pourquoi: Angry at not receiving an invitation to the princess's christening, an angry fairy curses the baby with the gift of a mind.

A fifth collection of eight golden-age detective mysteries for H. C. Bailey's eclectic scientific detective Mr. Reginald Fortune. Including a stock market bubble and a sudden death; a wealthy businessman threatened by a mystery man; a mountaineering accident in the shadow of the Jungfrau; a curious archaeological discovery; a series of crimes in a quiet cathedral close; and two very different violent deaths, with an unexpected link.

In truth the mastery of flying was the work of thousands of men - this man a suggestion and that an experiment, until at last only one vigorous intellectual effort was needed to finish the work. But the inexorable injustice of the popular mind has decided that of all these thousands, one man, and that a man who never flew, should be chosen as the discoverer, just as it has chosen to honour Watt as the discoverer of steam and Stephenson of the steam-engine.

What happens when you go home again to a small rural town - after you become famous. Among the folks native to Pope Valley, this story is rumored to be something of a fictionalized "tell all".

Chekhov's pages are peopled with psychopaths, degenerates of genius and virtue and satirically comic characters who succumb in feeble revolt against the baseness and banality of life. They are quite unfit to combat the healthy, rude, but unintelligent forces around them. Kovrin, Likhary6ff and Dr Andréi Yéfimitch, three heroes in this collection, are characteristic of Chekhov's outlook. Andréi Vasilyevitch Kovrin, the chief char- acter in the title story, had worn himself out and unsettled his nerves. His doctor advised him to spend the spring and summer in the country and in the nick of time came a long letter from Tänya Pesötsky asking him to•come and stay with her father at Borisovka. It was a journey which was to lead to marriage, madness and death. With the other stories and characters in this collection we have the best of Chekhov.

In a series of dry fictional sketches, E.F. Benson introduces the reader to some of the more bizarre inhabitants of Mayfair's Edwardian high society - a world he knew intimately. Each is a distinct reprsentative of an anthropological "type".