A whimsical collection of stories about a wandering street urchin, Lazarillo de Tormes is a classic of the Spanish Golden Age, even paid homage in Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Rendered homeless by the arrest of his father and poverty of his mother, the boy Lazarillo has no choice but to go out and find masters to serve. Unfortunately, each of his masters is worse than the one before, and in each case Lazarillo is cast upon his own wits in order to survive. Clever, hungry, and desperate, he always has a sharp eye for lessons on how to outwit the greedy and unscrupulous people who surround him...

JOKES FOR ALL OCCASIONSPREFACEThe ways of telling a story are as many as the tellers themselves. It is impossible to lay down precise rules by which any one may perfect himself in the art, but it is possible to offer suggestions by which to guide practise in narration toward a gratifying success. Broadly distinguished, there are two methods of telling a story. One uses the extreme of brevity, and makes its chief reliance on the point. The other devotes itself in great part to preliminary elaboration in the narrative, making this as amusing as possible, so that the point itself serves to cap a climax...

There's a handsome young man about town in London, whose unusual good looks hint about a scandalous ancestry. On a visit to a tiny East European principality, he decides to take a walk through a dense forest. He falls asleep under a tree and is discovered by the king and his entourage who are out hunting. Both are stunned by their startling resemblance to each other. The king who is days away from his grand coronation invites the Englishman back to his castle and here the visitor becomes embroiled in a sinister plot to overthrow the monarch and usurp the throne...

This is the sequel to ‘The Prisoner of Zenda‘. Five years have passed. The King has become jealous of Rudolf Rassendyll and suspicious of the queen (Flavia)’s feelings towards him. Flavia decides that this must be the last year in which she sends to Rudolf the single red rose that betokens her love, and therefore she also sends via Fritz von Tarlenheim, her letter of good-bye. Count Rupert of Hentzau, banished from Ruritania after the incidents of the earlier book, is plotting his return. In furtherance of his scheme he obtains both letter and rose, and plots to place them before the King. Rudolf, Fritz and Sapt must prevent this at all costs…

Sir Thomas More is a collaborative Elizabethan play by Anthony Munday and others depicting the life and death of Thomas More. It survives only in a single manuscript, now owned by the British Library. The manuscript is notable because three pages of it are considered to be in the hand of William Shakespeare and for the light it sheds on the collaborative nature of Elizabethan drama and the theatrical censorship of the era. The play dramatizes events in More's life, both real and legendary, in an episodic manner in 17 scenes, unified only by the rise and fall of More's fortunes.

The fourth issue of Astounding Stories continues Ray Cummings serial "Brigands of the Moon", along with pulp sci-fi stories by Capt. S. P. Meek, Anthony Pelcher and other authors.