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  Jewel of Seven Stars The...

  Bram Stoker

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  The Jewel of Seven Stars is a horror novel by Irish writer Bram Stoker, first published by Heinemann in 1903. The story is a first-person narrative of a young man pulled into an archaeologist's plot to revive Queen Tera, an ancient Egyptian mummy. It explores common fin de siècle themes such as imperialism, the rise of the New Woman and feminism, and societal progress.

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  Richard Bruce - Burglar - Former...

  Edgar Wallace

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  Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace was born on the 1st April 1875 in Greenwich, London.  Leaving school at 12 because of truancy, by the age of fifteen he had experience; selling newspapers, as a worker in a rubber factory, as a shoe shop assistant, as a milk delivery boy and as a ship’s cook.  
   
  By 1894 he was engaged but broke it off to join the Infantry being posted to South Africa. He also changed his name to Edgar Wallace which he took from Lew Wallace, the author of Ben-Hur.  
   
  In Cape Town in 1898 he met Rudyard Kipling and was inspired to begin writing. His first collection of ballads, The Mission that Failed! was enough of a success that in 1899 he paid his way out of the armed forces in order to turn to writing full time.  
   
  By 1904 he had completed his first thriller, The Four Just Men. Since nobody would publish it he resorted to setting up his own publishing company which he called Tallis Press. 
    
  In 1911 his Congolese stories were published in a collection called Sanders of the River, which became a bestseller. He also started his own racing papers, Bibury’s and R. E. Walton’s Weekly, eventually buying his own racehorses and losing thousands gambling.  A life of exceptionally high income was also mirrored with exceptionally large spending and debts.  
   
  Wallace now began to take his career as a fiction writer more seriously, signing with Hodder and Stoughton in 1921. He was marketed as the ‘King of Thrillers’ and they gave him the trademark image of a trilby, a cigarette holder and a yellow Rolls Royce. He was truly prolific, capable not only of producing a 70,000 word novel in three days but of doing three novels in a row in such a manner. It was estimated that by 1928 one in four books being read was written by Wallace, for alongside his famous thrillers he wrote variously in other genres, including science fiction, non-fiction accounts of WWI which amounted to ten volumes and screen plays. Eventually he would reach the remarkable total of 170 novels, 18 stage plays and 957 short stories. 
   
  Wallace became chairman of the Press Club which to this day holds an annual Edgar Wallace Award, rewarding ‘excellence in writing’.  
   
  Diagnosed with diabetes his health deteriorated and he soon entered a coma and died of his condition and double pneumonia on the 7th of February 1932 in North Maple Drive, Beverly Hills. He was buried near his home in England at Chalklands, Bourne End, in Buckinghamshire.

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  Top 10 Short Stories The - The...

  Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy,...

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  Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart.  A few pages can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere. 
   
  In this series we try to offer up tried and trusted ‘Top Tens’ across many different themes and authors. But any anthology will immediately throw up the questions – Why that story? Why that author?  
   
  The theme itself will form the boundaries for our stories which range from well-known classics, newly told, to stories that modern times have overlooked but perfectly exemplify the theme.  Throughout the volume our authors whether of instant recognition or new to you are all leviathans of literature. 
   
  Some you may disagree with but they will get you thinking; about our choices and about those you would have made.  If this volume takes you on a path to discover more of these miniature masterpieces then we have all gained something. 
   
  A decade of exuberance as the world became a plaything of the Western Imperial powers to exploit for their own ends.  Whole cultures were sequestrated and suspended and another overplanted in its place. 
   
  But short story authors created some of literature’s brightest jewels as they explored genres and styles in ambitious claims to be the chronicler of the age. 
   
  01 - The Top 10 - The 1880's - An Introduction 
  02 - A Horseman In The Sky by Ambrose Bierce 
  03 - The Bet by Anton Chekhov 
  04 - The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant 
  05 - The Withered Arm by Thomas Hardy 
  06 - A White Heron by Sarah Orne Jewett 
  07 - The Man Who Would Be King 
  08 - Markheim by Robert Louis Stevenson 
  09 - The Lady, or the Tiger by Frank Stockton 
  10 - How Much Land Does A Man Need by Leo Tolstoy 
  11 - The Nightingale and the Rose by Oscar Wilde

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  Selections from Battle-Pieces...

  Herman Melville

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  Published in 1866, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War is a collection of poems about the Civil War by Herman Melville. Many of the poems are inspired by second- and third-hand accounts from print news sources (especially the Rebellion Record) and from family and friends. A handful of trips Melville took before, during, and after the war provide additional angles of vision into the battles, the personalities, and the moods of war. In an opening note, Melville describes his project not so much as a systematic chronicle (though many of the individual poems refer to specific events) but as a kind of memory piece of national experience. The "aspects" to which he refers in the title are as diverse as "the moods of involuntary meditation—moods variable, and at times widely at variance." Much of the verse is stylistically conventional (more so than modern readers perhaps expect from the author of Moby-Dick), but the shifting subjectivities and unresolved traumas that unfold in the collection merit repeated contemplation. Melville's Battle-Pieces do not offer a neatly versified narrative of the Civil War but rather kaleidescopic glimpses of shifting emotions and ambivalent reflections of post-war America

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  Moth The (Unabridged)

  H. G. Wells

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  'The Moth' is the strange tale of two rivalling entomologists, each determined to demolish the other's life's work. When one of them dies, the other struggles to cope in the absence of his rival. And then he discovers an entirely new species of moth - a moth very reminiscent of his dead rival - and which pursues him wherever he goes.

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  Bitterroot Badlands (Stonecroft...

  B.N. Rundell

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  LUST, HATRED, GREED, AND VENGEANCE ALL COMBINE TO MAKE THIS JOURNEY ONE OF THE MOST DANGEROUS AND DEADLIEST OF THEM ALL. 
  They had rescued a young Nez Percé warrior from the warring Blackfoot and were bound on a journey to take him home to his people. The vast land of the Bitterroot Mountains and the badlands that lay at their feet held more obstacles than they expected. 
  It was to prove to be a treacherous journey, fraught with natural disasters and conflicts with familiar foes. But when confronted with evil of another sort, an evil that sought to destroy their very own, it became kill or be killed, and blood would soon paint the mountains and the plains of the wilderness. 
  Yet even in the most challenging times, friends can be found, and old acquaintances renewed. But it takes more than friendship and new allies to dispel the wickedness that comes from the darkness of malevolence. And when vengeance drives the demented, can there be deliverance? When women warriors prove their mettle, anything can happen, and usually does.

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