Set in Shropshire in the 1800s, it is alive with the many moods of Nature, benevolent and violent and the many moods -- equally benevolent and violent -- of the people making lives there. Prue Sarn is an unlikely heroine, born with a facial disfiguration which the Fates have dictated will deny her love. But Prue has strength far beyond her handicap, and this woman, suspected of witchcraft by her fellow townspeople, rises above them all through an all-encompassing sweetness of spirit. Precious Bane is also the story of Gideon, Prue's doomed brother, equally strong-willed, but with other motives. Determined to defeat the poverty of their farm, he devotes all his energies to making money. His only diversion from this ambition, he abandons her for the stronger drive of his money lust. And finally, it is the story of Kester Woodseaves, whose steady love for all created things leads him to resist people's cruelty toward nature and each other, and whose love for Prue Sarn enables him to discern her natural loveliness beneath her blighted appearance. Rebecca West, a contemporary of Mary Webb, called her, simply, "a genius," and G. K. Chesterton, another contemporary, asserted: "the light in the stories . . . is a light not shining on the things but through them." Critic Hilda Addison summed up Precious Bane: "The book opens with one of those simple sentences which haunt the mind until the curiosity has been satisfied . . . It strikes a note which never fails throughout; it opens with a beauty which is justified to the last sentence." When the book was first published in 1926 in America, the New York Times Book Review predicted: " on some bookshelves, we feel sure, Precious Bane will find almost a hallowed place."

    Their goal is to stay together, and in the process they find a grandfather.

    The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.

    He edited the manuscript just before his death, and these four stories are some of his best known and most powerful work, marking his maturity as a writer. In addition to "First Sorrow," "A Little Woman," and "Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse People" is the title story, "A Hunger Artist," which has been called by the critic Heinz Politzer "a perfection, a fatal fulfillment that expresses Kafka's desire for permanence." The three volumes Twisted Spoon Press has published: Contemplation, A Country Doctor, and A Hunger Artist are the collections of stories that Kafka had published during his lifetime. Though each volume has its own distinctive character, they have most often appeared in English in collected editions. They are presented here as separate editions, in new translations by Kevin Blahut, each with its own illustrator from the Prague community.

    Her stories not only bring to life the urban milieu that was her bailiwick but lay bare the uncertainties and disappointments of ordinary people living ordinary lives.

    Evangeline Knapp is the perfect, compulsive housekeeper, while her husband, Lester, is a poet and a dreamer. Suddenly, through a nearly fatal accident, their roles are reversed: Lester is confined to home in a wheelchair and his wife must work to support the family. The changes that take place between husband and wife and particularly between parents and children are both fascinating and poignant.

    Shatranj Ke Khiladi (शतरंज के खिलाड़ी) is a story of two nawabs of Lucknow who are so deeply immersed into playing chess that they forget to protect their city which falls into the hand of the British.

    Living in a run-down boardinghouse, Baton spends his days searching working-class Paris for the modest comforts of warmth, cheap meals, and friendship, but he finds little. And despite his situation, Baton remains vain and unsympathetic, a Bovian antihero to the fullest. Bove himself called My Friends, published in France in 1923, a "novel of impoverished solitude." The book drew praise from such writers as Rilke, Gide, and, later, Beckett, and is to this day perhaps the author's most celebrated work.

    Left an orphan at 19 years old in the late 1880s, Selina Peake needs to support herself. She leaves the city life she has known to become a teacher in the farming community of High Prairie, IL. Her father had told her that life is an adventure, and one should make the most of it.Selina sees beauty everywhere, including in the fields of cabbages. She has a natural curiosity about farming and oversteps the woman's traditional role by having the audacity to ask the men questions. She soon marries Pervus DeJong, a farmer. Selina eagerly offers suggestions for operational improvements, but Pervus ignores her, preferring to use the unprofitable farming methods employed by his father.Though she suffers many hardships, Selina always remembers the importance of beauty, and she admires those who exercise their creative talents. She tries to instill these views in her son Dirk and fights with her husband over the need for their child to get a full education. Once Dirk finishes college and starts work, will he retain Selina's values?So Big was the first book to have the rare distinction of being the best-selling book of the year and win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

    Wells's fantastic novels. Consummate science fiction, they are convincing and unforgettably real. Included in this omnibus edition are his four greatest works of fiction:In The Time Machine, a time traveler steps out of his vehicle to find himself in the year 802,701 A.D. He encounters creatures that live in perfect harmony. Or so he thinks, until he witnesses a morbid ritual and discovers that his only means of escape - his time machine - has been stolen.A lonely island in the Pacific... the scientist who rules it... the strange beings that live there under his control. This is the backdrop for the haunting The Island of Dr. Moreau. In this novel, Wells's dark vision serves as a reminder of the horrors that reckless experimentation with nature can produce.The Invisible Man is a dazzling display of imagination and psychological insight. It is the classic tale of a young scientist who, by experimenting on himself, becomes both invisible and criminally insane. Considered by many to be Wells's masterwork, the novel powerfully depicts the horror of a man trapped within a terror of his own creation.War of the Worlds is a compelling and horrifying novel that describes the invasion of Earth by Martians. Using fiery rays and crushing strength, these heartless aliens have the capacity to conquer the world. Will they succeed? Is this the end of mankind?

    Lovecraft. Written in August–September 1923, it was first published in Weird Tales, March 1924.The story is narrated by the scion of the Delapore family, who has moved from Massachusetts to his ancestral estate in England, known as Exham Priory. On several occasions, the protagonist and his cats hear the sounds of rats scurrying behind the walls. Upon investigating further, he finds that his family maintained an underground city for centuries and that the inhabitants of the city fed on human flesh, even going so far as to raise generations of human cattle, who eventually began to de-evolve due to their sub-human living conditions.

    Scott Fitzgerald, the flapper’s historian and poet laureate of the Jazz Age, wrote the ten stories that appear in this unique collection. Exploring characters and themes that would appear in his later works, such as The Beautiful and Damned and The Great Gatsby, these early selections are among the very best of Fitzgerald’s many short stories. This Modern Library Paperback Classic includes notes, an appendix of nonfiction essays by Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and their contemporaries, and vintage magazine illustrations.

    Shreffler, long-time member of the famous Sherlock Holmes society known as 'The Baker Street Irregulars'

    Originally published in 1924 and long out of print, these tales are vintage Wharton, dealing boldly with such themes as infidelity, illegitimacy, jealousy, the class system, and the condition of women in society Included in this remarkable quartet are False Dawn, The Old Maid, The Spark, and New Year's Day.

    Who could have done it? A flashback unravels the mystery of the three English Geste brothers. A classic, rip-roaring tale of adventure.

    The sweep of his writings- encompassing ferocious social satire, agonized reflection, and formal experimentation-is represented in this comprehensive edition. Here are Melville's masterpieces: Moby-Dick in its entirety; Billy Budd; "Bartleby, The Scrivener"; "The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles"; the essay "Hawthorne and His Mosses"; and 21 poems, including "The House-top", an anguished response to the New York draft riots.

    The scene is set in a fantastic land ruled by three greedy fat men who are engrossed in eating and making merry in their palace. Meanwhile, curious things are happening outside the high palace walls.You will learn all about this and much more when you read this wise, merry tale that is so like the truth. The Three Fat Men, a favorite with all Soviet children, has run to over 30 printings, it was made into a film, and performed at many theaters in Russia."Yuri Olesha (1899-1960), a Soviet prose writer and playwright, is immensely popular with readers for his novel Envy, his short stories, plays and the famous book for children The Three Fat Men, which is really one of his masterpieces.""Yuri Olesha's book The Three Fat Men is fantastic, fabulous, abounding in extraordinary transformation and fascinating happenings." -Literaturnaya Gazeta-"There was something Beethovenian in Yuri Olesha, even in his voice. His eyes discovered many marvelous, impressive things around him, and he wrote about them briefly, precisely and excellently. -Konstantin Paustovsky-

    The 'subject' was the world as it culminated in the war." Published in four parts between 1924 and 1928, his extraordinary novel centers on Christopher Tietjens, an officer and a gentleman -- "the last English Tory"--and follows him from the secure, orderly world of Edwardian England into the chaotic madness of the First World War. Against the backdrop of a world at war, Ford recounts the complex sexual warfare between Tietjens and his faithless wife, Sylvia. A work of truly amazing subtlety and profundity, Parade's End affirms Graham Greene's prediction: "There is no novelist of this century more likely to live than Ford Madox Ford."

    Good boy reading, especially.

    Molly Mason, fifty-two, is the devoted wife of the bank president, mother of four fun-loving Masons, and a reliable standby for the library board, missionary society, and the women's clubs. She has a hand in everything that happens in her midwestern town. In fact, Mother Mason never has any time to do just as she likes. Then one day she makes a headlong dash for liberty—and look out! Bess Streeter Aldrich published stories about the Masons in American magazine during World War I. Homesick American soldiers asked for more, and in 1925 the same family became the subject of Mother Mason.

    

    He was right to be wary. Into his hotel room an assassin crept, hired by the man he had embarrassed at the table. And Tom was ready.What he was not ready for were the screams for help and the charge of attempted murder that the intruder lodged with the police.Corcoran, the intended victim, was now Corcoran the accused --- and he was about to learn that in San Pablo a gambler can win once too often!

    Although it has been ignored for nearly a hundred years, it is an important, and extremely readable, book. Edith Zangwill (1874–1945) - her husband was the writer Israel Zangwill - bases the detailed descriptions of Ursula’s working life on the life of Edith Zangwill’s stepmother, Hertha Ayrton (1854–1923), a physicist who became an expert on the electric arc. Yet, as Elizabeth Day writes: ‘The Call gives a rare insight into a woman’s domestic life in the first two decades of the 20th century ... domestic details about running a house are, most unusually, given their due alongside Ursula’s political actions, elegantly making the point that a woman’s work behind closed doors is just as worthy of our attention as what goes on in the wider world.’ By making political points in the guise of a ‘woman’s novel’, the author stunningly reveals her commitment to feminism.’

    She was left in the care of her father's elderly step-sister and her scholar husband, who needed absolute quite in order to work, but all that changed when the husband became ill and needed a six-week rest cure. (http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/s/j...)

    Contents Include: The Hostages Vercingetorix and the Others: Cottia went to Bibtacte The Man from Alesia Got to put up with it Now The Triumph of Faith When the Bough Breaks A Note on some Books

    Melville’s source materials were his own adventures as a sailor, and the sights he witnessed firsthand on his voyages to the South Seas. He universalized these personal experiences, mixing them with lore and legendry and lacing his everyday accounts of the sailing life with provocative metaphysical and philosophical insights.This omnibus collects all of Melville’s seafaring novels, including Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, White-Jacket, and Moby-Dick, a landmark of American literature that D.H. Lawrence praised as “a surpassingly beautiful book.” In addition, it includes the short novel Billy Budd, Sailor first published thirty-three years after Melville’s death. Herman Melville: Seven Novels is part of Barnes & Noble’s Library of Essential Writers. Each title in the series presents the finest works—complete and unabridged—from one of the greatest writers in literature in magnificent, elegantly designed hardback editions. Every volume also includes an original introduction that provides the reader with enlightening information on the writer’s life and works.

    Pearse. Political writings and speeches (1922). This book, "Collected works of Padraic H. Pearse Political writings and speeches," by Padraic Pearse, is a replication of a book originally published before 1922. It has been restored by human beings, page by page, so that you may enjoy it in a form as close to the original as possible.

    According to Wikipedia: "Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 - September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist and poet. His first two books gained much attention, though they were not bestsellers, and his popularity declined precipitously after only a few years. By the time of his death he had been almost completely forgotten, but his longest novel, Moby-Dick - largely considered a failure during his lifetime, and most responsible for Melville's fall from favor with the reading public - was recognized in the 20th century as one of the chief literary masterpieces of both American and world literature..."

    Like the others, Satan's Bushel is a splendid book, not just from the point of view of economics but also as a piece of literature. What is Satan's Bushel? It is the last bushel that the farmer puts on the market that "breaks the price" – that is reduces it to the point that wheat farming is no longer profitable. The puzzle that afflicts the wheat farmers is that they sell their goods when the price is low and have no goods to sell when the price is high. Withholding goods from the market is one answer but why should any farmer do that? What is the answer to this problem? Working from this premise, then, as implausible as it may sound, but the central figure in this book is the price of wheat. It is the main source of drama. The settings are the wheat pit at the Chicago exchange (circa. 1915) and the Kansas wheat fields. Linking those two radically different universes is the mission of this book.

    Yet a little apart from its changed world the stately old mansion of Honeywood still stands among its ancient tree groves.

    Historical novel about the immigration of Mennonites from Pennsylvania to Waterloo County, Ontario.

    'The writer has an extraordinary sense of atmosphere. Stories told convincingly and well, with a keen perception for natural beauty.' [Times Literary Supplement.]

    A novel of love and adventure in a French-Canadian pioneer village on Lake Superior in the 1890s.

    Their trek takes them to homesteads in North Dakota, where they find that breaking the sod and surviving blizzards are easier than feeling at home in this new land.

    With wit and subtlety a happy picture is drawn of family life, house parties in the country and a leisured existence clouded only by the rumblings of the Boer War. Against this spectacle Caryl Bramsley (the C of the title) is presented - a young man of terrific promise but scant achievement, whose tragic-comic tale offsets the privileged milieu.

    By 1924 George H. Doran Company had published three books by Stewart. In the spring of 1924 he went to Paris and resided at the Hotel Montparnasse on the Left Bank. There his thoughts turned to another book, something on the theme of Alice in Wonder­land or even the antics of the Marx Brothers, he thought. There emerged Mr. and Mrs. Haddock and their daughter Mildred.fect parody.

    

    

    For a few years things went well with the Strongs and a thriving town grew up on the hillside. Then the main vein “petered” out, and, rather than sell out, Strong closed down the mine and became a mine-examiner for other people. As Helen grew up she became her father’s assistant, and they planned to save money and open up the Bellehelen again. Then Jim Strong was killed in an accident and Helen was left to carry out their plans alone. She found immediate friends in Doctor Dave and his wife and quickly assembled her crew from among her father’s old miners. But she also met active opposition to her undertaking from a rival company called the Western Consolidated, which was determined to make her sell out. Helen was stubborn and thereby hangs the tale of the Bellehelen mine.