Genre Other. Page - 374

Description

The Land That Time Forgot opens with the discovery near Greenland of a floating thermos flask containing a manuscript by castaway Tyler Bowen, Jr. The document recounts a series of adventures that starts with a sea battle against a German U-boat and ends on a mysterious island populated by hostile prehistoric animals and people.

The second part of the book, “The People That Time Forgot,” continues the story with the tale of Tom Billings, who has been sent on a mission to rescue Bowen after his manuscript was discovered. He flies solo over the mountainous cliffs that encircle the island and is attacked by a monstrous flying reptile, forcing him to crash-land. Billings then attempts to make his way on foot back to the rest of his party while contending with dangerous inhabitants from different stages of human development.

The final installment of the story, “Out of Time’s Abyss,” reveals what happened to Bradley, a crew member who was sent on a scouting expedition earlier in the story and was never heard from again.

This trilogy of short novels was originally published serially in 1918 in Blue Book Magazine. In 1924 they were published in a single volume by A. C. McClurg. The Burroughs fan community seems to fall into two camps about whether the story comprises three separate novellas, or whether it’s a single novel divided into three parts. This production follows the 1924 edition in combining the three into a single novel.

Description

In the third installment of her Scarlet Pimpernel stories, Baroness Orczy brings back Chauvelin, the French official unable to catch the Pimpernel in the first novel. This time he is more determined, more ruthless, and more devious. He plans to capture both the Pimpernel and his wife, threatening an entire town in the process. He has thought of every possibility, closed every loophole, anticipated every move of his arch-rival. It appears that at last the Pimpernel might have met his match.

Description

The young Vicomte de Marny rashly challenges a French official to a duel, and dies as a result. The Vicomte’s father, the ancient Duc de Marny, insists that his daughter, Juliette, swear an oath before God to seek revenge on the man who killed her brother. Years later, as the French Revolution rages, Juliette insinuates herself into the official’s household, and quickly discovers a way to anonymously accuse him before the National Convention. It will take all of the Scarlet Pimpernel’s ingenuity to rescue his friend from the guillotine.

I Will Repay is the first of the many sequels that Baroness Orczy wrote after the phenomenal success of the book and play versions of The Scarlet Pimpernel. In this first sequel, she leaves him mostly in the background until the denouement, when the Pimpernel once more must use all of his skills in disguise and subterfuge to rescue a friend and his household.

Description

During the unloading of an Insular and Continental Steam Navigation Company ship arrived from Rouen, the Bullfinch, a cask falls, splits, and reveals its unexpected contents. As the dockworkers try to work out what to do, Mr. Léon Felix arrives and claims the cask as his own. His actions set into motion a complicated trail for the detectives of London’s Scotland Yard and Paris’s Sûreté to follow to the end.

Freeman Wills Crofts was one of many authors writing crime fiction in Britain in the 1920s and 30s, and was a contemporary and acquaintance of both Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler. The Cask, his first novel, was written during leave from his job as a railway engineer, but its reception was good enough to set Crofts on the course of a further thirty crime novels over his career as an author.

Description

Progress and Poverty, first published in 1879, was American political economist Henry George’s most popular book. It explores why the economy of the mid-to-late 1800s had seen a simultaneous economic growth and growth in poverty. The book’s appeal was in its balance of moral and economic arguments, challenging the popular notion that the poor, through uncontrolled population growth, were responsible for their own woes. Inspired by his years living in San Francisco and his own experience with privation, George argues instead that poverty had grown due to the increasing speculation and monopolization of land, as landowners had captured the increases in growth, investment, and productivity through the rising cost of rent.

To solve this, George proposes the complete taxation of the unimproved value of land, thus returning the value of land, created through location, to the community. This solution would incentivize individuals to use the land they own productively and remove the tendency to speculate upon land’s increasing value. George’s argument was profoundly liberal, as individuals retain the right to own land and enjoy the profits generated from production upon it.

Progress and Poverty was hugely popular in the 1890s, being outsold only by the Bible. It inspired the Single Tax Movement, and influenced a wide range of intellectuals and policymakers in the early 1900s including Leo Tolstoy, Albert Einstein, and Winston Churchill.

Description

This collection of short “mystery” stories by Oscar Wilde was originally published in 1891 and was his second published collection of stories. This edition follows the 1907 edition, which was published after his death and added “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” a story first published in 1899.

Written around the same time as The Picture of Dorian Gray and before he turned his hand to playwriting, these stories showcase the quintessential Wilde: dark irony combined with an incisive dissection of Victorian society, with just a hint of the supernatural added to amuse and engage his Victorian audience.

Description

In her third novel, Virginia Woolf departs from conventional narrative and explores storytelling through discordant scenes and impressions. Jacob Flander’s life story is told through the perspectives of the people in his life.

In Jacob’s Room, we see Jacob grow from a young boy to an ardent student of Classical culture while the world around him moves closer to an impending war. Jacob is described in flashes by the women around him—his mother and his lovers.

Description

A baby is deposited in the bed of Squire Allworthy, a wealthy widower in Georgian England. The baby is given the name of Tom Jones and given to Allworthy’s live-in sister to raise. She soon marries and has her own son, and the two boys are raised together, with the usual household rivalries and jealousies. As Tom reaches his late teenage years, he discovers the several young ladies that surround, but especially the one that lives next door. Circumstances eventually lead to Tom being thrown out of Allworthy’s house, and the bulk of the novel is about the resulting adventures and pursuit of his beloved Sophia.

Tom Jones is many things: a coming-of-age story, a romance, a picaresque, but it is first and foremost a comedy. It is also one of the earliest English novels, and was hugely popular when it was released, going through four printings in its first year. Fielding used the first chapter of each of its eighteen “books” to weigh in on a wide-range of topics, from critics to religion, and his narrator is as important a character in the novel as Tom himself. Highly regarded and highly popular, it is still in print over three-and-a-half centuries after its initial success.

Description

Edgar Allan Poe is one of the primary figures of American nineteenth-century literature. His writing was heavily influenced by Romanticism ideals of emotion and feeling, and although mostly known for his Gothic-tinged horror, his tales jump between many different genres, including science-fiction, satire, humor, mystery, and even early detective fiction.

Poe mostly wrote short stories and poems, published in magazines and periodicals like the Southern Literary Messenger and Graham’s Magazine, although he also turned his hand to essays and novels (including The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket). He was one of the first American writers to pursue writing as a career, but was better received in France than in his native country. He struggled to make ends meet and resorted to work as a literary critic. His reputation suffered a further blow after his unfortunately early death in 1849 at the age of 40, when a rival not only wrote an extremely unflattering obituary, but bought the rights to his work and published a compilation with a hit piece for an introduction. This undeserved reputation took many decades to fade, but didn’t hinder praise from other notable authors including Arthur Conan Doyle and H. P. Lovecraft.

Collected here are all of Poe’s short fiction stories, in order of their original magazine publication. Notable stories include “The Gold-Bug,” “The Black Cat,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and many more.

Description

Some Do Not … opens at the cusp of World War I. Christopher Tietjens, a government statistician, and his friend Vincent Macmaster, an aspiring literary critic, are visiting the English countryside. Tietjens, preoccupied with his disastrous marriage, meets Valentine Wannop, a suffragette, during a round of golf. As their love story develops, the novel explores the horrors of the war without the narrative ever entering the battlefield.

The characters are complex and nuanced. Tietjens is an old-fashioned man even by the standards of his day; he’s concerned with honor and doing the right thing, but he lives in a society that only pays those values lip service. Yet he himself isn’t free of a thread of hypocrisy: he won’t leave his deeply unhappy marriage because that would be the wrong way to act, but the reader is left wondering if he tolerates his situation simply because he married up in class. He wants to do to the noble and right thing, but does that mean going to war?

The men and women around him each have their individual motivations, and they are often conniving and unlikable in their aspirations even as the propaganda of England at war paints the country as a moral and heroic one. The delicate interplay of each character’s subtleties paints a rich portrait of 1920s English society, as the romantic ideals of right and wrong clash with notions of ambition and practicality.

The prose is unapologetically modernist: unannounced time shifts combine with a stream-of-consciousness style that can often be dense. Yet Ford’s portrayal of shell shock, the politics of women in the 1920s, and the moral greyness of wartime is groundbreaking. The book, and its complete tetralogy—called Parade’s End—has garnered praise from critics and authors alike, with Anthony Burgess calling it “the finest novel about the First World War” and William Carlos Williams stating that the novels “constitute the English prose masterpiece of their time.”