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  Pellucidar

  Edgar Rice Burroughs

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  In this sequel to At the Earth's Core, David Innes vows revenge and returns to the inner world of Pellucidar to rescue the beautiful Dian, who had been torn from his arms by trickery. However, his return trip places him far from the land of his beloved, and he is forced to undertake a desperate journey thousands of miles across the fierce inner earth to reach her.David's epic voyage takes him through the many strange lands of Pellucidar, including the pendant moon and the Land of Awful Shadow. His heart-pounding encounters with primeval beasts and extraordinary peoples makes Pellucidar one of the best adventure stories ever penned by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

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  A Very Black Business

  Ernest Bramah

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  Ernest Bramah (1868-1942) was an English author who wrote twenty-one books and numerous short stories. His humorous works were ranked with Jerome K. Jerome and W.W. Jacobs, his detective stories with Conan Doyle, his politico-science fiction with H.G. Wells and his supernatural stories with Algernon Blackwood."A Very Black Business' is a strange supernatural story about a musician who is driven to the point of suicide by the failure of various coal merchants to deliver a supply of fuel for his stove. But just as he is on the point of taking his own life, there is a knock at the door, and a most amiable and strangely talented coalman is standing on the mat. From this moment the tale takes on a strange twist.

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  Decline and Fall

  Evelyn Waugh

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  Evelyn Waugh's "irresistible" first novel (New York Times) is a brilliant and hilarious satire of English school life in the 1920s.  Sent down from Oxford after a wild, drunken party, Paul Pennyfeather is oddly surprised to find himself qualifying for the position of schoolmaster at a boys' private school in Wales. His colleagues are an assortment of misfits, rascals and fools, including Prendy (plagued by doubts) and Captain Grimes, who is always in the soup (or just plain drunk). Then Sports Day arrives, and with it the delectable Margot Beste-Chetwynde, floating on a scented breeze. As the farce unfolds in Evelyn Waugh's dazzling debut as a novelist, the young run riot and no one is safe, least of all Paul.

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  The Man Who Would Be King

  Rudyard Kipling

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  This short story by Kipling of two British adventurers in British India who become kings of Kafiristan, a remote part of Afghanistan is read by David Philo.

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  Treasure in the Forest The...

  H. G. Wells

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  'The Treasure in the Forest' is the tale of two treasure hunters, Evans and Hooker, who have murdered a Chinese man to steal his map, which locates a buried stash of gold ingots. The Chinese man had boasted that he had ensured the safety of his secret hoard. But what can he have meant by this? When Evans and Hooker arrive at the location of the hoard, the first thing they find is a dead body of another Chinese man. But how did he die? And why did he fail to get away with the gold?

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  The Fall of the Nibelungs

  Margaret Armour

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  The Nibelungenlied (Middle High German: Der Nibelunge liet or Der Nibelunge nôt), translated as The Fall of the Nibelungs, is an epic poem written around 1200 in Middle High German. Its anonymous poet was likely from the region of Passau. The Nibelungenlied is based on an oral tradition of Germanic heroic legend that has some of its origin in historic events and individuals of the 5th and 6th centuries and that spread throughout almost all of Germanic-speaking Europe. Parallels to the German poem from Scandinavia are found especially in the heroic lays of the Poetic Edda and in the Völsunga saga.The poem is split into two parts: in the first part, Siegfried comes to Worms to acquire the hand of the Burgundian princess Kriemhild from her brother King Gunther. Gunther agrees to let Siegfried marry Kriemhild if Siegfried helps Gunther acquire the warrior-queen Brünhild as his wife. Siegfried does this and marries Kriemhild; however Brünhild and Kriemhild become rivals, leading eventually to Siegfried's murder by the Burgundian vassal Hagen with Gunther's involvement. In the second part, the widow Kriemhild is married to Etzel, king of the Huns. She later invites her brother and his court to visit Etzel's kingdom intending to kill Hagen. Her revenge results in the death of all the Burgundians who came to Etzel's court as well as the destruction of Etzel's kingdom and the death of Kriemhild herself.The Nibelungenlied was the first heroic epic put into writing in Germany, helping to found a larger genre of written heroic poetry. The poem's tragedy appears to have bothered its medieval audience, and very early on a sequel was written, the Nibelungenklage, which made the tragedy less final. The poem was forgotten after around 1500, but was rediscovered in 1755. Dubbed the "German Iliad", the Nibelungenlied began a new life as the German national epic. The poem was appropriated for nationalist purposes and was heavily used in anti-democratic, reactionary, and Nazi propaganda before and during the Second World War. Its legacy today is most visible in Richard Wagner's operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, which, however, is mostly based on Old Norse sources. In 2009, the three main manuscripts of the Nibelungenlied were inscribed in UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in recognition of their historical significance. It has been called "one of the most impressive, and certainly the most powerful, of the German epics of the Middle Ages".

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