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  Heavy Planet

  Hal Clement

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  Discover MESKLIN - Gravity: 3g at the equator, 700g at the poles!Hal Clement is a Grand Master of SF, and the one most associated with the subgenre of hard SF. From his classic stories in Astounding in the 1940s through his novels of the 1950s and on to the recent Half Life, he has made a lasting impression on SF readers, and on writers, too. For many of them, Clement's work is the model of how to write hard SF, and this book contains the reasons why. Here are all the tales of bizarre, unforgettable  Mesklin: the classic novel Mission of Gravity and its sequel, Star Light, as well as the short stories "Under"and "Lecture Demonstration." Also included is "Whirligig World," the famous essay Clement published in Astounding in 1953. It describes the rigorous process he used to create his intriguingly plausible high-gravity planet, with its odd flattened shape, its day less than eighteen minutes long, and its many-limbed, noble natives. Come to Mesklin and learn why The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction called Mission of Gravity  "one of the best loved novels in SF."At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

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  O Henry - A Short Story...

  O Henry

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  William Sydney Porter was born on 11th September 1862 in Greensboro, North Carolina. At age 3 his mother died from tuberculosis. From an early age it was clear Porter had a large appetite for reading as he absorbed the world around him. 
   
  He first attended at a school run by his aunt before enrolling at the Lindsey Street High School and then worked at his uncle’s drugstore and gained a pharmacists’ license in 1881.  
   
  A persistent cough took him to Texas in the hope that a change of climate would help his symptoms. He took on various types of work, initially from ranch hand and cook and then as varied as pharmacist, draftsman, bank teller and journalist. He also began to write, though for now, purely as a hobby. 
   
  He was a member of several singing and dramatic groups when he met 17 year old Athol Estes, daughter of a wealthy Austin family. Despite her mother’s objection owing to Athol’s tuberculosis, they began courting and in July 1887, they eloped and soon married. 
   
  Athol, impressed by his writing, encouraged him to get them published. A job as a draftsman at the Texas General Land Office paid a healthy $100 dollars per month and life was good. 
   
  But then life turned cruel. His son died a few hours after birth although a daughter, Margaret, came the following year.  His job had to be vacated but another was found at the First National Bank of Austin. The bank operated informally and Porter was careless in keeping the books. He lost that job but began writing for the humourous weekly The Rolling Stone and the Houston Post. Some time later the federal Bank auditors went through his former accounts and he was arrested on charges of embezzlement. 
   
  Porter fled the day before his trial to Honduras. Holed up for several months he began to write.  Athol had become too ill to travel to meet him and learning that her health was deteriorating he surrendered to the court in February 1897.  Bail was obtained so that he could stay with Athol during her final days.  
   
  Porter was sentenced to five years at the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus. His pharmacy qualifications got him the job of night druggist.  His sentence also gave him time to write and publish fourteen short stories. In December 1899 in McClure’s Magazine he published a short story as O Henry.  
   
  He was released two years early in July 1901, and reunited with Margaret, now 11, in Pittsburgh.  He now began his most prolific period of writing; a short story per week for the New York World, while also publishing works in other magazines.  Eventually over 600 of his short stories were published. 
   
  Porter was a heavy drinker and in 1908 his health, which had deteriorated for several years, took a dramatic turn for the worse, as did his writing. 
    
  O Henry died of cirrhosis of the liver complicated by diabetes and an enlarged heart on 5th June 1910. 
  1 - O Henry - A Short Story Collection - An Introduction - Volume 1 
  2 - The Gift of the Magi by O Henry 
  3 - A Harlem Tragedy by O Henry 
  4 - According to Their Lights by O Henry 
  5 - After Twenty Years by O Henry 
  6 - Two Thanksgiving Day Gentlemen by O Henry 
  7 - Transients in Arcadia by O Henry 
  8 - The Cop and the Anthem by O Henry 
  9 - The Caballero's Way by O Henry 
  10 - The Count and the Wedding Guest by O Henry 
  11 - The Dream by O Henry 
  12 - The Furnished Room by O Henry

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  The Night the New Jesus Fell to...

  Ron Rash

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  Ten humorous, interconnected short stories following three narrators as they learn lessons about life in the North Carolina foothills. 
   
  The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth was originally released in 1994 and was the first published book from acclaimed writer Ron Rash. This twentieth anniversary edition takes us back to where it all began with ten linked short stories, framed like a novel, introducing us to a trio of memorable narrators—Tracy, Randy, and Vincent—making their way against the hardscrabble backdrop of the North Carolina foothills. With a comedic touch that may surprise readers familiar only with Rash’s later, darker fiction, these earnest tales reveal the hard lessons of good whiskey, bad marriages, weak foundations, familial legacies, questionable religious observances, and the dubious merits of possum breeding, as well as the hard-won reconciliations with self, others, and home that can only be garnered in good time.  
   
  The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth shows us the promising beginnings of a master storyteller honing his craft and contributing from the start to the fine traditions of southern fiction and lore. This Southern Revivals edition includes a new introduction from the author and a contextualizing preface from series editor Robert H. Brinkmeyer, director of the University of South Carolina Institute for Southern Studies. 
   
  “The Night the New Jesus Fell to Earth celebrates storytelling as art and necessity. Like the best Southern writers, Ron Rash gives us funny without cornpone, irony without mockery, charm without sentimentality.” —Marianne Gingher 
   
  “This book of stories, shaped like a novel, is an impressive debut, both humorous and insightful. Ron Rash has the eye and ear of a very fine storyteller.” —Clyde Edgerton 
   
  “He has given us real writing and real stories, the kinds of tales we hear and repeat, and which return to us in our sleeping and waking dreams.” —Max Childers, Creative Loafing 
   
  “A substantial contribution to recent Southern fiction.” —Gil Allen, The Georgia Review 
   
  “Wonderfully crafted entertainment in the finest tradition of today’s Southern writers.” —Southern Book Trade

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  The White Kid Glove

  J.S. Fletcher

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  Joseph Smith Fletcher (1863-1935) was a British journalist and author. He wrote more than 230 books on a wide variety of subjects, both fiction and nonfiction. He was one of the leading writers of detective fiction in the Victorian golden age of the short story.The eminent Doctor Clement Holford has a strange artifact in his study. A glass-fronted wall cabinet containing many rare books about poisons and a hermetically sealed glass box in which is a single white kid glove. The story behind these objects is an uncanny one.

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  The Mystery of the Blue Jar - A...

  Agatha Christie

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  A classic Agatha Christie short story from the collection The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories. 
  Every morning at the same hour on the golf course, Jack Hartington hears mysterious cries for help coming from a cottage. He speaks to the resident and learns that she has unsettling dreams of a woman with a blue Chinese vase. Believing that the cries for help are from the late Mrs. Turner, the former resident of the cottage, Jack hires a psychic investigator to spend a night in the house, a night which proves to have startling results…   
  This classic Agatha Christie short story is perfect for fans of historical mystery and British literature. 
  HarperCollins 2024

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  Impromptu Dance An

  A. J. Alan

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  A. J. Alan was the pseudonym of Leslie Harrison Lambert (1883-1941), an English magician, intelligence officer, short-story writer, and radio broadcaster. He was hugely popular in the '20s and '30s for his radio broadcasts, wherein he performed his own humorous and often macabre short stories, which he always delivered wearing full evening dress.In An Impromptu Dance A. J. Alan is in his pyjamas and bathrobe in an hotel, where he is staying in London, when he inadvertently gets mixed up in a fancy-dress ball which is going on. Nobody realises he isn't in fancy dress, and he ends up dancing and drinking champagne with a delightful, scantily dressed lady. When he does finally get to bed, the adventures continue and get significantly weirder...until eventually he has to flee the city.

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