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  The Black Vampyre - A Legend of...

  Uriah Derick D'Arcy

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  WARNING! Contains moderate bloody violence against slavers and plantation owners!This pioneer vampire tale from 1819 spills revenge-cold blood as its narrator leads us through high gothic terror to radical outrage on the subject of slavery, reaching a blood-soaked conclusion dripping with 'biting' polemic vilifying the bankers who caused the economic recession of that same year.An anti-capitalist horror fable from 200 years ago, The Black Vampyre vilified the worst financial predation the capitalist world would ever see, decades before Karl Marx ― the enslavement of Africans in the New World.One dead man said no! And this is his story.The Black Vampyre; A Legend of St. Domingo tells the affrighting tale of a slave who is resurrected as a vampire after being killed by his owner; the slave seeks revenge by stealing the owner's son and marrying the owner's wife. The anonymous writer D'Arcy sets the story against the conditions that led to the Haitian Revolution.First published in chapbook form in New York in 1819, this emancipatory tale from literary New York in the 1810s arguably dates the birth of horror as know it!This edition features a new introduction as well as extensive notes and a guide to literary allusions.

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  The Token

  May Sinclair

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  May Sinclair was the nom de plume of Mary Amelia St. Clair (1863 – 1946), a popular British writer of novels, short stories and poetry. She was also an active suffragette and spiritualist. Nowadays she is best known for her uncanny and unsettling ghost stories. "The Token" is a ghost story about a wife who died with an important question in her life unanswered. She revisits her husband's study in search for the answer to the mystery she had never solved while alive.

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  Poems: Series One

  Emily Dickinson

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  The collection Poems: Series One presents the first installment of the complete poetic works of Emily Dickinson. It is broken into the four parts Life, Love, Nature, and Time and Eternity and includes 115 poems.Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 - May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Little-known during her life, she has since been regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, into a prominent family with strong ties to its community. After studying at the Amherst Academy for seven years in her youth, she briefly attended the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary before returning to her family's house in Amherst. Evidence suggests that Dickinson lived much of her life in isolation. Considered an eccentric by locals, she developed a penchant for white clothing and was known for her reluctance to greet guests or, later in life, to even leave her bedroom. Dickinson never married, and most friendships between her and others depended entirely upon correspondence. While Dickinson was a prolific writer, her only publications during her lifetime were 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems, and one letter. The poems published then were usually edited significantly to fit conventional poetic rules. Her poems were unique for her era. They contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends, and also explore aesthetics, society, nature and spirituality. Although Dickinson's acquaintances were most likely aware of her writing, it was not until after her death in 1886 - when Lavinia, Dickinson's younger sister, discovered her cache of poems - that her work became public. Her first collection of poetry was published in 1890 by personal acquaintances Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, though both heavily edited the content. A 1998 article in The New York Times revealed that of the many edits made to Dickinson's work, the name Susan was often deliberately removed. At least eleven of Dickinson's poems were dedicated to sister-in-law Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson, though all the dedications were obliterated, presumably by Todd. A complete, and mostly unaltered, collection of her poetry became available for the first time when scholar Thomas H. Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson in 1955.

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  A Daughter of the Snows

  Jack London

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  In Jack London's first novel, he tells the story of Frona Welse, a strong and interesting heroine, "a Stanford graduate and physical Valkyrie," who heads to the Yukon gold fields after creating a stir in her hometown by being strong and forthright and by befriending the town's prostitute. In the course of her adventures, she finds herself at the distaff point of a love triangle. This novel contains very overt racial and gender stereotypes and as such reflects the attitudes growing in society at the time it was written. It is the practice at Librivox to record works as they stand, without judgment.

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  Three Wars

  Émile Zola

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  Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola was born in Paris on 2nd April 1840.  When he was 3 the family moved to Aix-en-Provence in the southeast. At 7 his father died, leaving the family on a meagre pension. In 1858, they returned to Paris. His mother had planned a law career for Émile, but he failed his baccalauréat examination twice. 
   
  He took jobs as a clerk in a shipping firm and then in the sales department for the publisher Hachette. Zola also wrote political, literary and art reviews for newspapers.  
   
  As a writer Zola wrote numerous short stories, essays, plays and novels. When ‘La Confession de Claude’ was published and received the attention of the police Hachette fired him.  He continued to write and after his first major novel, ‘Thérèse Raquin’ (1867), Zola started the series called ‘Les Rougon-Macquart’, a carefully planned twenty-volume history of a single family under the reign of Napoléon III.  
   
  With the publication of ‘L'Assommoir’, Zola became wealthy. His subsequent works, ‘Nana’ and La Débâcle fared even better, increasing both fame and bank balance. He was now a figurehead of the literary bourgeoisie.  However, despite several nominations, he was never elected to the prestigious Académie Française. 
   
  The infamous Dreyfus Affair infuriated Zola who wrote in defence of Alfred Dreyfus.  His plan was to be prosecuted for libel so that the truth would be exposed.  It went badly wrong.  Zola was convicted for criminal libel in February 1898 and removed from the Legion of Honour. The judgment was overturned but a new suit began. Zola fled to England only to return when an Amnesty was granted.  Zola said of the affair, "The truth is on the march, and nothing shall stop it." 
   
  Émile Zola died on 29th September 1902 of carbon monoxide poisoning caused by an improperly ventilated chimney.  
   
  On 4th June 1908 Zola’s remains were transferred to the Panthéon, where he shares a crypt with Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas.

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  Over an Absinthe Bottle

  W. C. Morrow

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  William Chambers Morrow (1854-1923) was an American writer, famous for his short stories of horror and suspense.'Over an Absinthe Bottle' is a peculiar horror story about a young man down and out in San Francisco who is slowly starving to death. Then he happens to meet a peculiar pale stranger who invites him to share a bottle of absinthe with him and then engages him in a terrifying game of dice, where the stakes rise with every throw....The tale takes a very strange turn at the end.

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