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  The Great Slave

  Zane Grey

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  Pearl Zane Grey was born on 31st January 1872, in Zanesville, Ohio. From an early age, he was intrigued by history, fishing, baseball, and writing. Grey was an avid reader of adventure stories, consuming dime store novels by the dozen.  By age fifteen he had written his first story; ‘Jim of the Cave’.  His father, a difficult man, tore it to shreds and then beat him. 
   
  A keen fisherman and with dreams of playing in the major leagues Grey was spotted by a baseball scout and received offers from colleges. 
   
  He enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania to study dentistry. Naturally arriving on a scholarship really meant you had to be able to play.  And he could, though in the end as a practical career move he resolved that dentistry was the way forward.  
   
  Grey set up his dental practice in New York as Dr. Zane Grey in 1896. But with ambitions to be a writer in a city with so many publishers evenings were set aside for writing. 
   
  His first magazine article, about one of his fishing expeditions was published in 1902. It was not until 1910 that he wrote his first Western, ‘The Heritage of the Desert’. It was a breakthrough title and quickly became a bestseller. His themes of Manifest Destiny, the conquest of the Old West, and men wrestling with elemental conditions were the hallmarks of his career.  
   
  Two years later Grey produced his all-time best-seller ‘The Riders of the Purple Sage’, with its publication he became a household name.   
   
  During the crash and subsequent depression of the 1930s, the publishing industry was hard. Sales fell.  But Grey was astute. He had avoided the Stock Market, he was still writing and popular and continued to earn royalty income.  In all he wrote over 90 books including some on fishing and baseball. He was also selling stories to film companies as Hollywood was eager to exploit popular culture. 
   
  On 23rd October 1939 Zane Grey died of heart failure at his home in Altadena, California. He was 67.

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  The Silver Mountain

  Maurice Baring

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  Maurice Baring (1874-1945) was an English short story writer, children's writer, novelist, travel writer and war correspondent during the First World War. The Silver Mountain is a fairy story about a king who sends his three sons on a quest. They are to search for the silver mountain. Whichever one of them finds it will inherit the kingdom. But they soon discover that everyone out in the world seems to be looking for the silver mountain, and nobody knows where it is.

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  Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

  David Foster Wallace

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  David Foster Wallace made an art of taking readers into places no other writer even gets near. In his exuberantly acclaimed collection, BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN, he combined hilarity and an escalating disquiet in stories that astonish, entertain, and expand our ideas of the pleasures that fiction can afford.

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  Tales of the Out & the Gone -...

  Amiri Baraka

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  Stories spanning over three decades, many previously unpublished, from “a keen observer of the outlandish and outrageous in politics and human behavior” (Booklist). 
   
  Comprising short fiction from the early 1970s to the twenty-first century—most of which has never been published—Tales of the Out & the Gone reflects the astounding evolution of America’s most provocative literary anti-hero. 
   
  The first section of the book, “War Stories,” offers six stories enmeshed in the volatile politics of the 1970s and 1980s. The second section, “Tales of the Out & the Gone,” reveals Amiri Baraka’s increasing literary adventurousness, combining an unpredictable language play with a passion for abstraction and psychological exploration. 
   
  Throughout, Baraka’s unique and constantly changing style will enlighten readers on the evolution of one of America’s most accomplished literary masters of the past four decades.

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  The Female Husband

  Henry Fielding

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  Henry Fielding was born at Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury, in Somerset on April 22nd 1707.  His early years were spent on his parents’ farm in Dorset before being educated at Eton. 
   
  An early romance ended disastrously and with it his removal to London and the beginnings of a glittering literary career; he published his first play, at age 21, in 1728. 
   
  He was prolific, sometimes writing six plays a year, but he did like to poke fun at the authorities. His plays were thought to be the final straw for the authorities in their attempts to bring in a new law. In 1737 The Theatrical Licensing Act was passed.  At a stroke political satire was almost impossible. Fielding was rendered mute.  Any playwright who was viewed with suspicion by the Government now found an audience difficult to find and therefore Theatre owners now toed the Government line. 
   
  Fielding was practical with the circumstances and ironically stopped writing to once again take up his career in the practice of law and became a barrister after studying at Middle Temple.  By this time he had married Charlotte Craddock, his first wife, and they would go on to have five children. Charlotte died in 1744 but was immortalised as the heroine in both Tom Jones and Amelia.   
   
  Fielding was put out by the success of Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded.  His reaction was to spur him into writing a novel.  In 1741 his first novel was published; the successful Shamela, an anonymous parody of Richardson's novel.  
   
  Undoubtedly the masterpiece of Fielding’s career was the novel Tom Jones, published in 1749.  It is a wonderfully and carefully constructed picaresque novel following the convoluted and hilarious tale of how a foundling came into a fortune. 
   
  Fielding was a consistent anti-Jacobite and a keen supporter of the Church of England. This led to him now being richly rewarded with the position of London's Chief Magistrate.  Fielding continued to write and his career both literary and professional continued to climb.   
   
  In 1749 he joined with his younger half-brother John, to help found what was the nascent forerunner to a London police force, the Bow Street Runners. Fielding's ardent commitment to the cause of justice in the 1750s unfortunately coincided with a rapid deterioration in his health.  Such was his decline that in the summer of 1754 he travelled, with Mary and his daughter, to Portugal in search of a cure.  Gout, asthma, dropsy and other afflictions forced him to use crutches. His health continued to fail alarmingly. 
   
  Henry Fielding died in Lisbon two months later on October 8th, 1754.

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  Northanger Abbey

  Jane Austen

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  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.

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