Do remember reading a panic-mongering news story a while back about genetically engineered “Frankengrass” “escaping” from the golf course where it had been planted? That news story was foreshadowed decades previously in the form of prophetic fiction wherein a pushy salesman, a cash-strapped scientist, and a clump of crabgrass accidentally merge forces with apocalyptic consequences. A triple-genre combo of science fiction, horror, and satire, Greener Than You Think is a forgotten classic that resonates beautifully with modern times. This is a faithful reading of a 1947 first edition text.

Harrington Strong was a pseudonym used by author Johnston McCulley, creator of the character Zorro and many others. The Brand of Silence – A Detective Story finds Sidney Prale returning to New York after ten years during which he sought his fortune. But he finds New York a very changed place, and even more distressing, he finds that his old friends are now turning their backs on him, his old haunts no longer welcome him, and there seems to be a conspiracy against him.Why can’t he receive service...

The most careless reader can hardly fail to see that many of the Tales in this volume have the same groundwork as those with which he has been familiar from his earliest youth. They are Nursery Tales, in fact, of the days when there were tales in nurseries–old wives’ fables, which have faded away before the light of gas and the power of steam. (Excerpt from Popular Tales from the Norse.)

The Lady of the Camellias (French: La Dame aux camélias) is a novel by Alexandre Dumas, fils, first published in 1848, that was subsequently adapted for the stage. The Lady of the Camellias premiered at the Theatre de Vaudeville in Paris, France on February 2, 1852. An instant success, Giuseppe Verdi immediately set about to put the story to music. His work became the 1853 opera La Traviata with the female protagonist “Marguerite Gautier” renamed “Violetta Valéry”.

Originally published in the May, 1960 issue of Amazing Science Fiction Stories. Jack Odin has returned to the world of Opal, the world inside our own world, only to find it in ruins. Many of his friends are gone, the world is flooded, and the woman he swore to protect has been taken by Grim Hagen to the stars. Jack must save her, but the difficulties are great and his allies are few.

Among the great wars of history there are few, if any, instances of so long and successfully sustained a struggle, against enormous odds, as that of the Seven Years' War, maintained by Prussia--then a small and comparatively insignificant kingdom--against Russia, Austria, and France simultaneously, who were aided also by the forces of most of the minor principalities of Germany. The population of Prussia was not more than five millions, while that of the Allies considerably exceeded a hundred millions...

With Clive in India gives a vivid picture of the wonderful events of the ten years, which at their commencement saw Madras in the hands of the French--Calcutta at the mercy of the Nabob of Bengal--and English influence apparently at the point of extinction in India--and which ended in the final triumph of the English, both in Bengal and Madras. There were yet great battles to be fought, great efforts to be made, before the vast Empire of India fell altogether into British hands; but these were but the sequel of the events described.

Typically, Henty's heroes are boys of pluck in troubled times, and this is no different. Detailed research is embellished with a vivid imagination, especially in this novel set in the Punic wars, about which knowledge is limited: "...certainly we had but a hazy idea as to the merits of the struggle and knew but little of its events, for the Latin and Greek authors, which serve as the ordinary textbooks in schools, do not treat of the Punic wars. That it was a struggle for empire at first, and latterly...

Vincent Wingfield is the son of a wealthy Virginian planter. When the country goes to war, he enlists in the cavalry, and sees action under the various generals commanding the army in and near Virginia. He has several private adventures as well, including a personal enemy, prison escape, rescue of a young lady, spying expedition, and recovery of a stolen slave. He rises in rank in the Confederate army, and after the war is over, he marries and returns home to manage his mother's plantation. Henty in this book gives an overview of the causes of the Civil War, and follows the battles and movements of the army in Virginia and the surrounding area...

An exciting tale set on the high seas, in a period ruled by exploration, with the ever-present dangers of nature and the weather, together with pirates of the famed Spanish Main.

This is a tale of the son of a Scottish officer, who gets arrested for helping a Jacobite agent. Set during the Jacobite rebellion in Scotland in 1755, the boy escapes and makes it to France and shares some adventures with Prince Charlie.

Intrigue, murder, highwaymen... A British soldier serving in India has stolen a diamond bracelet from a Hindu idol. The bracelet comes into the possession of Colonel Thorndyke, who is subsequently sent home to England, where he dies of wounds received and bequeaths the bracelet to his relatives, having told his brother about it, but not its location. Meanwhile, the theft has caused a stir in India, and the Hindu faithful regard it as their religious duty to reclaim the jewel at any cost. Also published under the title: "The Brahmin's Treasure".

When young Frank is falsely accused of a crime, he leaves England to seek adventure in America. He joins a wagon train heading west to the California gold fields, but as he is soon to find out, the West is more than just adventure! Braving Indians, wolves, and other dangers, Frank is determined to strike it rich - and perhaps someday clear his name and return home.

Barbara, an English girl and the eldest of her family, spends most days helping her widowed mother care for her younger siblings. Then disaster strikes – or so the children believe! Barbara is taken to France to see Paris by her father’s formidable sister, Aunt Anne. She stays on in Brittany to perfect her French. In this series of funny stories about her adventures in France, we meet a cast of recurring characters – and both Barbara and Aunt Anne find love! (Summary by Sibella Denton)

John Endlich needed to clean up his act. Gambling, drinking, a hot temper and wanderlust were the last things Rose and the kids needed. So he went to the Homesteaders Office and signed up to terraform Vesta, a chunk of a once thriving alien planet that had exploded from within; a flat lump of crust which was now the remains of a farm on one side and a mining operation on the other. The miners hated Endlich and sabotaged his plans at every opportunity. They were going to kill him and his family if he didn’t find a way to stop them. - Asteroid of Fear was first published in the March, 1951 edition of Planet Stories magazine.

The Planet Strappers started out as The Bunch, a group of student-astronauts in the back room of a store in Jarviston, Minnesota. They wanted off Earth, and they begged, borrowed and built what they needed to make it. They got what they wanted--a start on the road to the stars--but no one brought up on Earth could have imagined what was waiting for them Out There!

When an alien spacecraft crashes in Missouri a team of army investigators is dispatched. Among the debris they find a Martian infant and decide to raise him in their lab. Is he too strange to form a relationship with humans? Maybe, but he does have cute eye-stalks. – Stamped Caution was first published in the August 1953 issue of Galaxy magazine.

A collection of Arthurian tales retold for children.

The Trail of the Lonesome Pine is a 1908 romance novel/western novel written by John Fox, Jr. The novel became Fox’s most successful, and was included among the top ten list of bestselling novels for 1908 and 1909. Set in the Appalachian Mountains at the turn of the twentieth century, a feud has been boiling for over thirty years between two influential mountain families: the Tollivers and the Falins. The outside world and industrialization, however, is beginning to enter the area. Coal mining begins to exert its influence on the area, despite of the two families feuds...

Arthur Ransome is best known for his ‘Swallows and Amazons’ series of children’s books. This is the only example of his fiction in the public domain. These stories are all from Russian folklore, some comparatively well-known, others less so. Ransome spent some years in Russia as a newspaper correspondent fir the ‘Daily News’ and the ‘Manchester Guardian’ and was peripherally involved in the revolution. In the late twenties he married Evgenia Shvelpina, Trotsky’s secretary, retired from newspapers and started writing his children’s books.

Raffles, Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman (also published as The Black Mask) is the second collection of stories in the Raffles series. After the dark turn of events at the end of The Gift of the Emperor, Bunny’s done his time and, his life not being quite what it was before, now finds himself longing for the companionship of his Raffles.

Rachel Minchin stands in the dock, accused of murdering the dissolute husband she was preparing to leave. The trial is sensational, and public opinion vehemently and almost universally against her. When the jury astonishes and outrages the world with a vedict of Not Guilty, Rachel quickly finds herself in need of protection. It comes in the form of a surprising offer of marriage from a mysterious stranger who has sat through every day of her trial. The marriage to this intriguing stranger, Mr. Steel, is by mutual agreement to be a platonic one, the only condition of which is that neither is ever to question the other about the past...

“I have promised to introduce you today to the fairy-land of science — a somewhat bold promise, seeing that most of you probably look upon science as a bundle of dry facts, while fairy-land is all that is beautiful, and full of poetry and imagination. But I thoroughly believe myself, and hope to prove to you, that science is full of beautiful pictures, of real poetry, and of wonder-working fairies…” (From the Introduction to The Fairyland of Science)

Tom Brown’s Schooldays is a novel by Thomas Hughes first published in 1857. The story is set at Rugby School, a public school for boys, in the 1830s. Hughes attended Rugby School from 1834 to 1842. The novel was originally published as being “by an Old Boy of Rugby”, and much of it is based on the author’s experiences. Tom Brown is largely based on the author’s brother, George Hughes; and George Arthur, another of the book’s main characters, is based on Arthur Penrhyn Stanley. The fictional Tom’s life also resembles the author’s in that the culminating event of his school career was a cricket match...

The Money Moon is a light-hearted romance. Jilted in love, our American millionaire hero, George Bellow, takes a walking tour of the Kent countryside to overcome the “Haunting Spectre of the Might Have Been”. Along the way he makes friends with a young boy out to discover a fortune to save his Aunt Anthea from having to sell the family estate and George discovers his ideal “Arcadia” and true love.

Stanley G. Weinbaum is best known for his short story “A Martian Odyssey” which has been influencing Science Fiction since it was first published in 1934. Weinbaum is considered the first writer to contrive an alien who thought as well as a human, but not like a human. A Martian Odyssey and its sequel are presented here as well as other Weinbaum gems including 3 stories featuring the egomaniacal physicist Haskel van Manderpootz and his former student, playboy Dixon Wells.

A Journey in Other Worlds: A Romance of the Future is a science fiction novel by John Jacob Astor IV, published in 1894. The book offers a fictional account of life in the year 2000. It contains abundant speculation about technological invention, including descriptions of a world-wide telephone network, solar power, air travel, space travel to the planets Saturn and Jupiter, and terraforming engineering projects — damming the Arctic Ocean, and adjusting the Earth’s axial tilt (by the Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company)...

Dark Kensington had been dead for twenty-five years. It was a fact; everyone knew it. Then suddenly he reappeared, youthful, brilliant, ready to take over the Phoenix, the rebel group that worked to overthrow the tyranny that gripped the settlers on Mars.The Phoenix had been destroyed not once, not twice, but three times! But this time the resurrected Dark had new plans, plans which involved dangerous experiments in mutation and psionics.And now the rebels realized they were in double jeopardy....

The soul of Irish wit is captured in this unique tale of a barstool philosopher, the concluding story from 'Here Are Ladies' by James Stephens. (Introduction by iremonger)

This delightful book tells about a group of smart youths who get up to some wonderful adventures together – and save one another from troubles. The unofficial leader of the group is Grace Harlowe, the title character. When Anne Pierson comes to the class at the beginning of the year, they decide to take her under their wing. Anne has a lot of troubles at home, but will true friends make her happy?

Set after the Grace Harlowe High School series, Grace and her friends Miriam and Anne start a new chapter of their lives as Freshmen at Overton College. After various trials and tribulations they earn the respect of the elder classes and become valued members of the school. (Introduction by BumbleVee)

Being a good and loyal friend is not easy, and Grace learns it the hard way. But, as in all children's books, good triumphs over evil.