Publisher: Sheba Blake Publishing
The "Aunt Jane's Nieces" series was a wildly popular juvenile fiction collection written by L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, using the feminine pen name "Edith Van Dyne." This book, the last in the series, has the girls tending to wounded soldiers in the early battles of World War I.
The Shadow Over Innsmouth and The Whisperer in Darkness are counted amongst H.P. Lovecraft’s most popular stories. In the first we are transported to the decrepit coastal town of Innsmouth, whose amphibian-like citizens betray a dark and sinister secret. The second takes us to Vermont, where a university professor becomes embroiled in a mind- bending, celestial mystery after strange things are seen floating in the rivers. Dark, brooding and suspenseful, this is Lovecraft at his very best.Show book
Cranford, Elizabeth Gaskell's best-known work, is a humorous account of a nineteenth-century English village dominated by a group of genteel but modestly circumstanced women. This is a community that runs on cooperation and gossip, at the very heart of which are the daughters of the former rector: Miss Deborah Jenkyns and her sister, Miss Matty. But domestic peace is constantly threatened in the form of financial disaster, imagined burglaries, tragic accidents, and the reappearance of long-lost relatives.By eschewing the conventional marriage plot with its nubile heroines and focusing instead on a group of middle-aged and elderly spinsters, Gaskell does something highly unusual within the novel genre. Through her masterful management of the novel's tone, she underscores the value and dignity of single women's lives even as she causes us to laugh at her characters' foibles. Charles Dickens was the first of many readers to extol its wit and charm, and it has consistently been Gaskell's most popular work.Show book
The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade was the last major novel by Herman Melville, the American writer and author of Moby-Dick. Published on April 1, 1857 (presumably the exact day of the novel's setting), The Confidence-Man was Melville's tenth major work in eleven years. The novel portrays a Canterbury Tales-style group of steamboat passengers whose interlocking stories are told as they travel down the Mississippi River toward New Orleans. The novel is written as cultural satire, allegory, and metaphysical treatise, dealing with themes of sincerity, identity, morality, religiosity, economic materialism, irony, and cynicism. Many critics have placed The Confidence-Man alongside Melville's Moby-Dick and "Bartleby the Scrivener" as a precursor to 20th-century literary preoccupations with nihilism, existentialism, and absurdism.Show book
A Blaze is a short story by Katherine Mansfield: "Max, you silly devil, you'll break your neck if you go careering down the slide that way. Drop it, and come to the Club House with me and get some coffee." - "I've had enough for to-day. I'm damp all through. There, give us a cigarette, Victor, old man. When are you going home?"Show book
Jane Austen's first novel-published posthumously in 1818-tells the story of Catherine Morland and her dangerously sweet nature, innocence, and sometime self-delusion. Though Austen's fallible heroine is repeatedly drawn into scrapes while vacationing at Bath and during her subsequent visit to Northanger Abbey, Catherine eventually triumphs, blossoming into a discerning woman who learns truths about love, life, and the heady power of literature. The satirical novel pokes fun at the gothic novel while earnestly emphasizing caution to the female sex.Show book
The Emerald City is built all of beautiful marbles in which are set a profusion of emeralds, every one exquisitely cut and of very great size. There are other jewels used in the decorations inside the houses and palaces, such as rubies, diamonds, sapphires, amethysts and turquoises. But in the streets and upon the outside of the buildings only emeralds appear, from which circumstance the place is named the Emerald City of Oz.Show book
