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By: Lilian Gask | |
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Folk Tales from Many Lands
A collection of poetic folk tales from all over the world. (Kalynda) |
By: Marianne Moore (1887-1972) | |
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Poems
In 1921, American poet H.D. collected and published a selection of previously published poems by Marianne Moore. Although this angered Moore, as it was entirely unauthorized, she later accepted the edition as well made and used it as the basis for her own 1924 publication of Obersvations. Moore’s unique poetry matches the experimentation underway during the American Modernist movement. Much of it incorporates seemingly out-of-place quotations into complex free verse that often uses Nature as a subject matter... |
By: Mack Reynolds (1917-1983) | |
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Mercenary
Every status-quo-caste society in history has left open two roads to rise above your caste: The Priest and The Warrior. But in a society of TV and tranquilizers--the Warrior acquires a strange new meaning... (Introduction from the Gutenberg text) | |
Ultima Thule
Ronny Bronston has dreamed all his life of getting a United Planets job that would take him off-world. He finally gets the opportunity when he is given a provisional assignment with Bureau of Investigation, Section G. But will he be able to complete his assignment and find the elusive Tommy Paine? |
By: Dallas McCord Reynolds (1917-1983) | |
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Status Quo
Larry Woolford is a government agent, tasked with investigating subversive activity. He does everything an ambitious young man should do if he wants to succeed: wear the right clothes, listen to the right music, even drink vodka martinis. Then he stumbles across a conspiracy of Weirds plotting to overthow the entire existing social order. It's a race against time. Can he stop their fiendish plan, and keep America safe for shallow judgements based on status symbols? Status Quo was nominated for the 1962 Hugo Award for short fiction. |
By: LibriVox volunteers | |
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The Yellow Sheet – the NaNoWriMo project 2007
An atomic bomb explodes in the mountains of Montana. But was there really a bomb? And was it really in Montana, or in Tokyo? Are Liz and Elizabeth the same woman, is she married with children, is her husband a spy? |
By: Margaret Warner Morley (1858-1923) | |
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The Insect Folk
Through delightful outings with her students, a teacher introduces her class to the fascinating world of insects. She encourages her students to observe and ask questions. This is a wonderful science text for young children. |
By: Cornelia Mee | |
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Exercises in Knitting
Mrs. Mee, her husband, and her sister ran a yarn and needlework import/warehouse business in Bath, England. Her books primarily contain practical everyday items that knit up quickly with the busy homemaker in mind. At this time, published knitting “receipts” did not contain abbreviations and were laborious to use. They were, however, rich in error! Later in her career, due to circumstances of war and the resulting social stress and poverty, many of her knitting books were printed for ladies’ charitable societies, which used her knitting “receipts” to clothe the poor mill workers who were out of work due to the American Civil War and the embargo of cotton. |
By: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781) | |
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Miss Sara Sampson
G.E. Lessing, widely regarded by students of theater as the world's first dramaturg, was also one of the first proponents of the German bourgeois tragedy. Miss Sara Sampson, in which a young woman runs off with a ne'er-do-well who is still entangled with his former mistress, was a reaction against the Voltarian verse drama popular in the eighteenth century. |
By: Isabella L. Bird | |
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The Englishwoman in America
Isabella Bird travels abroad in Canada and the United States in the 1850s. As an Englishwoman and a lone female, she travels as far as Chicago, Prince Edward Island, and Cincinatti. Her observations on the trials and tribulations of the journeys are astute, if formed by her place and time in history. Adventures with pickpockets, omnibuses, cholera, and rat invested hotels deter her not. (Sibella Denton) |
By: Lao Tzu | |
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Laotzu's Tao and Wu Wei
The classic of the Way and of High Virtue is the Tao Teh Ching. Its author is generally held as a contemporary of Confucius, Lao Tzu, or Laozi. The exact date of the book’s origin is disputed. The book is divided into two parts, the Upper Part and the Lower Part. The Upper Part consists of chapters 1-37, and each chapter begins with the word “Tao,” or the Way. The Lower Part consists of chapters 38-81, and each chapter begins with the words “Shang Teh,” or High Virtue. This 1919 edition names the Lower Part as the Wu Wei, or translated variously as “not doing,” “non-ado,” or “non-assertion... |
By: D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) | |
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Aaron's Rod
Flutist Aaron Sisson is caught up in the aftermath of WWI. A lost soul, he attempts to find himself in the comfort of bar-room talk and alcohol and a woman. Moving on, he spends time with a mining executive's relatives. But he finds the family a stuffy middle-class lot, bored with each other and themselves. He leaves his wife and children and strikes out for the open road. During a playing engagement at an opera performance, he reunites with the mining executive's family. Talk is of love and war, none of it very satisfying to anyone... | |
Lost Girl
"There is no mistake about it, Alvina was a lost girl. She was cut off from everything she belonged to." In this most under-valued of his novels, Lawrence once again presents us with a young woman hemmed in by her middle-class upbringing and (like Ursula Brangwen in The Rainbow) longing for escape. Alvina Houghton's plight, however, is given a rather comic and even picaresque treatment. Losing first her mother, a perpetual invalid, and later her cross-dressing father, a woefully ineffectual small-scale entrepreneur, Alvina feels doomed to merge with the tribe of eternal spinsters who surround her in the dreary mining community of Woodhouse... |
By: Maturin Murray Ballou | |
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The Sea-Witch
Maturin Murray Ballou was the author of dozens of books, chiefly centered around his extensive sea travel. He was deputy navy-agent in the Boston Custom House and circumnavigated in 1882, collecting material for several travel accounts and various nautical romances, amongst which The Sea-Witch can be counted. |
By: George L. Apperson (1857-1937) | |
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The Social History of Smoking
This work tells the history of smoking in England from the social point of view. Thus it does not deal with the history of tobacco growing or tobacco related manufacture, but is rather the story of how smoking has fitted in with the fashions and customs throughout the ages, and the changes in the attitude of society towards smoking. |
By: Pu Songling (1640-1715) | |
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Strange Stories From a Chinese Studio
MANUAL OF SURGERY, OXFORD MEDICAL PUBLICATIONSBY ALEXIS THOMSON, F.R.C.S.Ed.PREFACE TO SIXTH EDITION Much has happened since this Manual was last revised, and many surgical lessons have been learned in the hard school of war. Some may yet have to be unlearned, and others have but little bearing on the problems presented to the civilian surgeon. Save in its broadest principles, the surgery of warfare is a thing apart from the general surgery of civil life, and the exhaustive literature now available on every aspect of it makes it unnecessary that it should receive detailed consideration in a manual for students... |
By: Edward George Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) | |
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Zanoni
Zanoni, a timeless Rosicrucian brother, cannot fall in love without losing his power of immortality; but he does fall in love with Viola Pisani, a promising young opera singer from Naples, the daughter of Pisani, a misunderstood Italian violinist. An English gentleman named Glyndon loves Viola as well, but is indecisive about proposing marriage, and then renounces his love in order to pursue occult study. The story develops in the days of the French Revolution in 1789. Zanoni has lived since the Chaldean civilization... |
By: Edmond Hamilton | |
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The Stars, My Brothers
Edmond Hamilton (1904 – 1977) had a career that began as a regular and frequent contributor to Weird Tales magazine. The first hardcover publication of Science Fiction stories was a Hamilton compilation, and he and E.E. “Doc” Smith are credited with the creation of the Space Opera type of story. He worked for DC Comics authoring many stories for their Superman and Batman characters. Hamilton was also married to fellow author Leigh Brackett. – Published in the May, 1962 issue of Amazing Stories “The Stars, My Brothers” gives us a re-animated astronaut plucked from a century in the past and presented with an alien world where the line between humans and animals is blurred. |
By: St. Ignatius of Antioch | |
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The Epistles of Ignatius
Ignatius of Antioch penned these letters to churches (Ephesians, Magnesians, Trallians, Romans, Philadelphians, and Smyrnaeans) and Polycarp on his way to martyrdom. Ignatius was an apologist for the Episcopal style of church government (as opposed to sole rule by a council of presbyters) which developed in the late first or early second century. Eager to die in imitation of his Savior, it was Ignatius who wrote this to the Roman church: “I am God’s wheat, and I am ground by the teeth of wild beasts that I may be found pure bread [of Christ].” |
By: David Barrows | |
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A History of the Philippines
This book is one of the earliest studies of Philippine history by an American scholar. In preparation for this book, the author conducted ethnological studies of indiginous island tribes after the American war in the Philippines. Since this book was intended for the Philippine reader, the author nicely places the history of the Islands into the broader context of European and American history. |
By: Robert Sheckley (1928-2005) | |
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The Status Civilization
Will Barrent awakes without memories just before being deposited on Omega, a planet for criminals where the average life expectancy is 3 years. He’s listed as a murderer and released into the illicit society as a “peon” the lowest class imaginable. A mysterious girl gives him a weapon that starts him on his path to status, a path that requires constant brutality. But it must be borne if our hero is to discover the reason for his imprisonment; A reason that pits him against himself, and involves the sardonically similar but devoutly different creeds of Omega and Earth... | |
Watchbird
3 Robert Sheckley short stories that demonstrate the breathof his fantastic imagination. In Watchbird, the question "can machines solve human problems?" is answered with a resounding YES! But there may be a few unforeseen glitches. Just a few. Warrior Race drops us into an alien race of warriors who fight in a way you will never be able to imagine until you listen. And Beside Still Waters is a gentle story that shows us a man who really wants to get away from it all ... sitting on a rock in the asteroid belt with only a robot for a friend. No girls allowed! A poignant and unsettling story to say the least. |
By: Ring Lardner (1885-1933) | |
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You Know Me Al
Big, fat, dumb, lazy, vain, headstrong and cheap, Jack Keefe is a journeyman pitcher with the Chicago White Sox in the rowdy days of the Deadball Era, circa 1915, ruled by the likes of Ty Cobb and John McGraw. In You Know Me Al, we follow Jack Keefe’s life on-field and off, via the letters Jack writes to his old chum Al in his home town of Bedford, Indiana.Ring Lardner was a Chicago sportswriter who covered the White Sox, and he brought an insider’s knowledge of clubhouse life together with his biting wit and gift for the vernacular to create a comic gem in You Know Me Al... | |
Bib Ballads
Ring Lardner is a typical parent when his first child is born, full of wonder and the rest of the usual emotions as he watches his little son grow. He wrote a series of 29 short poems on various facets of parenthood. | |
Gullible's Travels, Etc.
Humorous stories of social climbing in America's "classless" society. |
By: Anna Harriette Leonowens | |
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The English Governess at the Siamese Court
1862 Anna Leonowens accepted an offer made by the Siamese consul in Singapore, Tan Kim Ching, to teach the wives and children of Mongkut, king of Siam. The king wished to give his 39 wives and concubines and 82 children a modern Western education on scientific secular lines, which earlier missionaries’ wives had not provided. Leonowens sent her daughter Avis to school in England, and took her son Louis with her to Bangkok. She succeeded Dan Beach Bradley, an American missionary, as teacher to the Siamese court... |
By: Jackson Gregory (1842-1943) | |
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The Bells of San Juan
Rod Norton is a lawman in a land where bandits and criminals make their own rules. Risking his life for justice and a future with the woman he loves, mortal danger awaits. For Norton and those in peril, the Bells of San Juan will chime. |
By: Robert Browning (1812-1889) | |
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Pippa Passes
Pippa Passes was a dramatic piece, as much play as poetry, by Robert Browning published in 1841 as the first volume of his Bells and Pomegranates series. The author described the work as the first of a series of dramatic pieces. His original idea was of a young, innocent girl, moving unblemished through the crime-ridden neighbourhoods of Asolo. The work caused outrage when it was first published, due to the matter-of-fact portrayals of many of the area’s more disreputable characters – notably the adulterous Ottima – and for its frankness on sexual matters... |
By: Eliza P. Donner Houghton (1843-1922) | |
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The Expedition of the Donner Party and Its Tragic Fate
The Donner Party was a group of California-bound American settlers caught up in the “westering fever” of the 1840s. After becoming snowbound in the Sierra Nevada in the winter of 1846–1847, some of the emigrants resorted to cannibalism. Although this aspect of the tragedy has become synonymous with the Donner Party in the popular imagination, it actually was a minor part of the episode. The author was about 4 at the time. The first part of the book accounts the tragic journey and rescue attempts; the last half are reminiscences of the child orphan, passed from family to family while growing up. |
By: Padraic Colum (1881-1972) | |
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The Children of Odin
Master storyteller Padraic Colum's rich, musical voice captures all the magic and majesty of the Norse sagas in his retellings of the adventures of the gods and goddesses who lived in the Northern paradise of Asgard before the dawn of history. Here are the matchless tales of All-Father Odin, who crosses the Rainbow Bridge to walk among men in Midgard and sacrifices his right eye to drink from the Well of Wisdom; of Thor, whose mighty hammer defends Asgard; of Loki, whose mischievous cunning leads him to treachery against the gods; of giants, dragons, dwarfs and Valkyries; and of the terrible last battle that destroyed their world. | |
The Girl Who Sat By The Ashes
"Because she used to herd Goats in the high places and the rocky places, she went by the name of Girl-go-with-the-Goats. But that was not the name that she herself called herself. She called herself Maid-alone..."So begins Padriac Colum's rendition of this classical, well-known tale. He was a master story teller, and in this short book combines vivid characters and a depth of plot with the rough-hewn simplicity the story demands. If you are fond of Cinderella stories, you will enjoy this book. And if you believe you dislike all such, it may yet win you over and change your mind. | |
The Adventures of Odysseus and the Tale of Troy
Also known as “The Children’s Homer,” this is Irish writer Padraic Colum’s retelling of the events of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey for young people. Colum’s rich, evocative prose narrates the travails of Odysseus, King of Ithaca: his experiences fighting the Trojan War, and his ten years’ journey home to his faithful wife Penelope and his son Telemachus. |