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  Life Triumphant The: Mastering...

  James Allen

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  Offering his patented brand of spiritual advice that relied as much on self-empowerment as inspiration, James Allen-one of the most popular writers in the field at the turn of the 20th century-sets out to show the elements of character and conduct that go towards building a "life of calm strength and superlative victory." In helping the reader achieve "victory over all the dark things of life," Allen has written a self-help book for anyone "eager to learn, and earnest to achieve." This is another inspirational landmark from the bestselling author of As a Man Thinketh. British author and pop philosopher JAMES ALLEN (1864-1912) retired from the business world to pursue a life of writing and contemplation. He authored many books about the power of thought including The Way of Peace, The Mastery of Destiny, and Entering the Kingdom

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  Beyond the Wall of Sleep...

  H.P. Lovecraft

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  In "Beyond the Wall of Sleep", an intern in a mental hospital relates his experiences with Joe Slater, a backward Catskills mountain man and now inmate at a hospital for the criminally insane. The inmate was having very strange and vivid dreams which he described in a way seemingly impossible for a man of his limited intellect. The intern decides to use a device he built but never tested, a device that could be used for two-way telepathic communication to monitor the man's dreams. What he discovers is both astonishing and frightening.

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  British Short Story The - Volume...

  Anthony Trollope, George Eliot,...

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  These British Isles, moored across from mainland Europe, are more often seen as a world unto themselves.  Restless and creative, they often warred amongst themselves until they began a global push to forge a World Empire of territory, of trade and of language. 
   
  Here our ambitions are only of the literary kind.  These shores have mustered many masters of literature. So this anthology’s boundaries includes only those authors who were born in the British Isles - which as a geographical definition is the UK mainland and the island of Ireland - and wrote in a familiar form of English. 
   
  Whilst Daniel Defoe is the normal starting point we begin a little earlier with Aphra Behn, an equally colourful character as well as an astonishing playwright and poet.  And this is how we begin to differentiate our offering; both in scope, in breadth and in depth.  These islands have raised and nurtured female authors of the highest order and rank and more often than not they have been sidelined or ignored in favour of that other gender which usually gets the plaudits and the royalties. 
   
  Way back when it was almost immoral that a woman should write.  A few pages of verse might be tolerated but anything else brought ridicule and shame.  That seems unfathomable now but centuries ago women really were chattel, with marriage being, as the Victorian author Charlotte Smith boldly stated ‘legal prostitution’.  Some of course did find a way through - Jane Austen, the Brontes and Virginia Woolf but for many others only by changing their names to that of men was it possible to get their book to publication and into a readers hands.  Here we include George Eliot and other examples. 
   
  We add further depth with many stories by authors who were famed and fawned over in their day.  Some wrote only a hidden gem or two before succumbing to poverty and death. There was no second career as a game show guest, reality TV contestant or youtuber. They remain almost forgotten outposts of talent who never prospered despite devoted hours of pen and brain. 
   
  Keeping to a chronological order helps us to highlight how authors through the ages played around with characters and narrative to achieve distinctive results across many scenarios, many styles and many genres. The short story became a sort of literary laboratory, an early disruptor, of how to present and how to appeal to a growing audience as a reflection of social and societal changes.  Was this bound to happen or did a growing population that could read begin to influence rather than just accept? 
   
  Moving through the centuries we gather a groundswell of authors as we hit the Victorian Age - an age of physical mass communication albeit only on an actual printed page.  An audience was offered a multitude of forms: novels (both whole and in serialised form) essays, short stories, poems all in weekly, monthly and quarterly form.  Many of these periodicals were founded or edited by literary behemoths from Dickens and Thackeray through to Jerome K Jerome and, even some female editors including Ethel Colburn Mayne, Alice Meynell and Ella D’Arcy. 
   
  Now authors began to offer a wider, more diverse choice from social activism and justice – and injustice to cutting stories of manners and principles.  From many forms of comedy to mental meltdowns, from science fiction to unrequited heartache.  If you can imagine it an author probably wrote it.  
   
  At the end of the 19th Century bestseller lists and then prizes, such as the Nobel and Pulitzer, helped focus an audience’s attention to a books literary merit and sales worth. Previously coffeehouses, Imperial trade, unscrupulous overseas printers ignoring copyright restrictions, publishers with their book lists as an appendix and the gossip and interchange of polite society had been the main avenues to secure sales and profits.

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  Conan the Barbarian: The...

  Robert E. Howard

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  This Audiobook contains - Gods of the North - Shadows in the Moonlight - Queen of the Black Coast - The Devil in Iron - The People of the Black Circle - A Witch Shall Be Born - Jewels of Gwahlur - Beyond the Black River - Shadows in Zamboula - Red Nails - The Hour of the Dragon

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  The Empty Drum

  Leo Tolstoy

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  Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) began writing when he was stationed in the Caucasus in the Russian army. After fighting in the Crimean war, he settled in St. Petersburg, where he wrote a number of stories which reveal an increasing disillusionment with society and the military. "The Empty Drum" is an antiwar story adapted from a Russian folk tale.

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  People of the Abyss The...

  Jack London

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  The People of the Abyss (1903) is a book by Jack London about life in the East End of London in 1902. He wrote this first-hand account after living in the East End (including the Whitechapel District) for several weeks, sometimes staying in workhouses or sleeping on the streets. In his attempt to understand the working-class of this deprived area of London the author stayed as a lodger with a poor family. The conditions he experienced and wrote about were the same as those endured by an estimated 500,000 of the contemporary London poor. London also used the expression "the people of the abyss" in his later dystopian novel The Iron Heel (1907).

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