"I am very glad that "The Story of the Seven Who Were Hanged" will be read in English. The misfortune of us all is that we know so little, even nothing, about one another—neither about the soul, nor the life, the sufferings, the habits, the inclinations, the aspirations of one another. Literature, which I have the honor to serve, is dear to me just because the noblest task it sets before itself is that of wiping out boundaries and distances."-- Leonid Andreyev, in a letter to Herman Bernstein

"Satan's Diary", Andreyev's last work, was completed by the great Russian a few days before he died in Finland, in September, 1919. But a few years ago the most popular and successful of Russian writers, Andreyev died almost penniless, a sad, tragic figure, disillusioned, broken-hearted over the tragedy of Russia. In "Satan's Diary", Andreyev summoned up his boundless disillusionment in an absorbing satire on human life. Fearlessly and mercilessly he hurled the falsehoods and hypocrisies in the face of life...

The Dark is a novella about a desperate young man, a “terrorist and nihilist”, trying to avoid arrest by taking refuge in a brothel. The story focuses on his unfolding relationship with a prostitute in the brothel and the internal conflict which torments him. The author, Leonid Andreyev, an acclaimed Russian playwright and writer of short fiction, was noted for the darkness in his work. This book was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. ( Lee Smalley)

The framing story concerns a man who dreams of speaking to Venus about love while she wears furs. The unnamed narrator tells his dreams to a friend, Severin, who tells him how to break him of his fascination with cruel women by reading a manuscript, Memoirs of a Supersensual Man.This manuscript tells of a man, Severin von Kusiemski, so infatuated with a woman, Wanda von Dunajew, that he requests to be treated as her slave, and encourages her to treat him in progressively more degrading ways. At...

"Baseball Joe" Matson's great ambition is to go to boarding school and play on the school team, in this second volume of the Baseball Joe series. Joe is a wide-awake country boy who enjoys playing baseball. We follow his career in the series, and his adventures, as he and hometown chum Tom Davis enroll in Excelsior Hall and join the school nine, are recounted here. When not on the diamond, Joe is saving lives and assisting his father against foes who are once again trying to steal Mr. Matson's machinery patents...

"Baseball Joe" Matson's great ambition is to become a professional baseball pitcher. The Baseball Joe series follows his career as he seeks to attain his goal. In this volume, Joe follows the wishes of his parents and attends college, and seeks to join the Yale University varsity baseball nine. Much to his disappointment, he finds that he cannot immediately do so, due to a Yale rule barring Freshmen from placement on the varsity. We follow his college adventures through his first and second years, with emphasis on his trials in making the team in year two, including the attempts of a rival pitcher to keep him off the team...

"Baseball Joe" Matson's great ambition is to become a professional baseball pitcher. The Baseball Joe series follows his career as he seeks to attain his goal. In this fourth volume, Joe accepts a contract to play baseball professionally, and leaves Yale to play on the Pittston team for the Central League, a "bush league" in the professional baseball hierarchy. Joe's career is helped by "Pop" Dutton, a famous pitcher now down on his luck, and hindered by a rival pitcher on the team, while at home, Joe's father is blinded by a chemical accident, and requires an expensive operation, which, if successful, will regain his sight...

Shifting between Earth and Mars, Badge of Infamy focuses on the gripping tale of a former doctor who becomes a pariah due to being temporarily governed by emotion and compassion, rather than complying with the highly regarded rules established by the Medical Lobby. Furthermore, the novel covers numerous topics including justice, brutality, betrayal, ethics, political control, and lobbying. Set in the year 2100, the novel begins with the introduction of its protagonist, Daniel Feldman, an ethical man, who makes the terrible mistake of going against the fixed medical protocol and performing surgery to save the life of a friend...

Lester del Rey (1915 – 1993) was a Golden Age science fiction author and editor closely connected to John W. Campbell Jr. and Astounding Science Fiction magazine. He also founded Del Rey Books, a popular publishing label he edited with his wife Judy-Lynn. Victory is the story of an undefended Earth in a warring galaxy. It appeared in the August 1955 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.

After dying in a terrible accident at a building site, Dave Hanson finds himself being brought back to life in a world where magic is real, and where the sky is breaking apart and falling. And he is expected to put it back together again. Will he be able to save this strange world, and his own new life?

The old space freighter Wahoo is all Dr. Pietro can afford for his expedition to the rings of Saturn. Although built for a crew of 6 the good doctor crams 19 people into the Wahoo, and after 5 months they are really getting on each other’s nerves. Then someone starts killing people and poisoning the air giving plants in the hydroponics bay. Can our hero Paul Tremaine find the killer before he suffocates? Perhaps you should hold your breath. – Let’em Breathe Space was first published in the July 1953 edition of Space Science Fiction magazine.

Lewis Carroll (1832-1896) is famous for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It is less widely known that he worked as a lecturer for mathematics at Christ Church college, Oxford for 27 years. A tangled tale merges his two talents as storyteller and mathematician. It consists of ten short humorous stories which present one or more mathematical problems. The ten knots as they are called, were first published in The Monthly Packet magazine between April 1880 and March 1885, where readers were invited to solve the problems, and the solution was discussed in a later issue.

The novel has two main plots; one set in the real world at the time the book was published (the Victorian era), the other in the fantasy world of Fairyland. While the latter plot is a fairytale with many nonsense elements and poems, similar to Carroll’s Alice books, the story set in Victorian Britain is a social novel, with its characters discussing various concepts and aspects of religion, society, philosophy and morality. This book is the first of two volumes and the two intertwining stories are brought to a close in the second volume, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded.

Sylvie and Bruno Concluded continues the adventures of the many characters in the previous volume Sylvie and Bruno. The fairy-children Sylvie and Bruno are charming whenever they appear, their fairy companions such as the Professor delight in taking ideas to their logical (and humorous) conclusions, and many nonsense songs are sung. Meanwhile, the mortals (comprised of the unnamed narrator, the gracious Lady Muriel and the sententious Arthur) tend to become the vehicles for Carroll's regular sermons on morality and proper Christian values.

An atomic bomb explodes in the mountains of Montana. But was there really a bomb? And was it really in Montana, or in Tokyo? Are Liz and Elizabeth the same woman, is she married with children, is her husband a spy?

The worst of being a Christmas Child[2] is that you don’t get birthday presents, but only Christmas ones. Old Naylor, who was Father’s coachman, and had a great gruff voice that came from his boots and was rather frightening, used to ask how I expected to grow up without proper birthdays, and I thought I might have to stay little always. When I told Father this he laughed, but a moment later he grew quite grave. “Listen, Chris,” he said. And then he took me on his knee—I was a small chap then—and told me things that made me forget old Naylor, and wish and wish that Mother could have stayed with us...

"The Hemlock Avenue Mystery" is one of a series of mysteries written by Lily Augusta Long using the pseudonym Roman Doubleday. A lawyer is accused of killing a rival lawyer, both having battled in court on numerous occasions. A newspaper reporter following the case is bent on determining the facts behind the murder. As it happens, there are two women also suspected of participating in the crime, and a third who was apparently utterly unconscious of what had occurred. It's up to the reporter turned detective to unravel the clues, few as they are. - Summary by Roger Melin

"'What a fool I was not to go where she beckoned!' mused Caius. 'Where? Anywhere into the heart of the ocean, out of this dull, sordid life into the land of dreams.' For it must all have been a dream—a sweet, fantastic dream, imposed upon his senses by some influence, outward or inward; but it seemed to him that at the hour when he seemed to see the maid it might have been given him to enter the world of dreams, and go on in some existence which was a truer reality than the one in which he now was...

This is a collection of (each in their own way) romantic short stories by Lily Dougall.

"When travelling in Canada, in the region north of Lake Ontario, I came upon traces of the somewhat remarkable life which is the subject of the following sketch. Having applied to the school-master in the town where Bartholomew Toyner lived, I received an account the graphic detail and imaginative insight of which attest the writer's personal affection. This account, with only such condensation as is necessary, I now give to the world. I do not believe that it belongs to the novel to teach theology;...

Eamont was an opium clipper built in Cowes. It was the subject of an 1891 book, A cruise in an opium clipper, by Captain Lindsay Anderson. Eamont was involved in the opening of Japan to foreigners in 1858, serving as a dispatch boat between Nagasaki and Shanghai, and was one of the first vessels to open up a trade with Formosa…. The Eamont was sent on some very dangerous trips. She was one of the first vessels to open up a trade with Formosa, and made the first survey of the port of Taku, which she entered by bumping over the reef in spite of a tremendous surf beating upon it at the time, a most daring performance...

End of the world sci-fi tale borrows heavily from H.G. Wells' WOTW and In The Days of the Comet -- looks like fun !

“Come with me, ladies and gentlemen who are in any wise weary of London: come with me: and those that tire at all of the world we know: for we have new worlds here.” – Lord Dunsany, the preface to “The Book of Wonder”

Lord Dunsany (24 July 1878 – 25 October 1957) was a London-born Anglo-Irish writer and dramatist notable for his work in fantasy. He was influenced by Algernon Swinburne, who wrote the line “Time and the Gods are at strife” in his 1866 poem “Hymn to Proserpine”, as well as by the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. In turn, Dunsany’s influence was felt by H. P. Lovecraft and Ursula K. Le Guin. Arthur C. Clarke corresponded with Dunsany between 1944 and 1956. Those letters are collected in the book Arthur C. Clarke & Lord Dunsany: A Correspondence. Time and the Gods, a series of short stories written in a myth-like style, was first published in 1906.

Very brief, well-crafted stories, many having surprise endings, all steeped in the dye of myth and calling to every reader's neglected imagination.

These are the last four Cantos of his mock epic that Byron completed in the year before his death at the age of 36 in Messolonghi, Greece, where he had gone to fight for the nationalists against the Ottoman Empire. Juan, now in England, is invited to spend the autumn with a hunting party at the ancient country seat of Lord Henry and Lady Adeline Amundeville. There, he meets the most intriguing of the Byronic heroines, Aurora Raby, and is visited by a ghost with ample breasts (!). That is the narrative outline but hardly the focus of the last Cantos...

Tales of Old Japan by Lord Redesdale is a collection of short stories focusing on Japanese life of the Edo period (1603 - 1868). It contains a number of classic Japanese stories, fairy tales, and other folklore; as well as Japanese sermons and non-fiction pieces on special ceremonies in Japanese life, such as marriage and harakiri, as observed by Lord Redesdale. The best know story of these is "The Forty-seven Ronins" a true account of samurai revenge as it happened at the beginning of 18th century Japan...

This is a volume of original fairy tales by Loretta Ellen Brady.

Rabbi Louis Ginzberg was one of the outstanding Talmudists of the twentieth century. He was born on November 28, 1873, in Kovno, Lithuania; he died on November 11, 1953, in New York City. Ginzberg taught at the Jewish Theological seminary from 1903 to 1953. For 50 years, he trained two generations of Conservative Rabbis.The Legends of the Jews is an epic 7-volume compilation of traditional Jewish stories loosely related to the Bible. Volumes 1-4 contain the stories, while volumes 5-7 contain Ginzberg’s notes and commentary...

Maria Chapdelaine is one of the most famous French Canadian novels. It is the love story of Maria Chapdelaine, daughter of a peasant family in the Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean region of Quebec, in the 1900s. It is often seen as an allegory of the French Canadian people, describing simple joys and great tragedies, the bonds of family, the importance of faith, and the strength of body and spirit needed to endure the harshness of life in Canada’s northern wilderness.

The Lone Wolf is the first of eight books in a series featuring the jewel thief turned private detective Michael Lanyard. With his identity betrayed and the police on his heels, he must fly from Paris, which is made much more difficult by his self-imposed duty to take care of the beautiful Lucia, who has a dark secret of her own...A large number of movies have been based on the books.